The Populism of Intellectual Freedom

One thing I’m tracing in my dissertation is the way in which Intellectual Freedom in the current conjuncture participates in the “authoritarian populism” of the late-neoliberal period. (There is a growing consensus among political scholars, at least on the left, that between the global financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic we have moved out neoliberalism and are entering a new conjuncture). And it occurred to me that with the anti-weeding discourse that made the round (yet again!) yesterday it might be interesting to trace the connections between IF-absolutism - the hegemonic form of IF - collection development and populism.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the hegemonic IF of the CFLA Intellectual Freedom committee basically rejects the idea of professional skill and expertise in collections development, because it sees any principle of selection as a violation of the right to access information (on the user’s side) and - by a very twisted logic - constituting an illegal prior restraint on free speech (on the author’s side). (This of course plays into that other main plank of contemporary populism: the distrust and rejection of any kind of expertise and authority). Since the content of the work is immaterial to this logic - any work should not be excluded for any reason - IF-absolutism is not only anti-weeding, it rejects the professional responsibility of librarians to manage and develop collections at all.

This would be bad enough, but I see this not only as a rejection of one aspect of professional activity in favour of another (supporting the point critics of hegemonic IF make that IF ends up trumping all other professional values), but as populist in a way that has become ubiquitous since at least the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s “very short introduction” to Populism (2017), they make the point that populism is a heavily contested concept, but one of the alternatives they describe resonates heavily in the post-2016 political landscape of “strongman” leaders:

A more recent approach considers populism, first and foremost, as a political strategy employed by a specific type of leader who seeks to govern based on direct and unmediated support from their followers. […] This approach emphasizes that populism implies the emergence of a strong and charismatic figure, who concentrates power and maintains a direct connection to the masses. (4)

In this sense, populism requires a particular kind of ideology, an ideology constructed to perfection by Margaret Thatcher’s conservative party in the 1970s and which became the hallmark of neoliberal politics since then (for example, New Labour learned the Thatcherite lesson in the 1990s). Hall describes this process in “The Great Moving Right Show” and elsewhere. What I want to argue is that Canadian libraries (really, Canadian library leaders) use Intellectual Freedom as a way to build direct populist consent by bypassing library workers entirely. By extension, this builds ideological consent for the larger state structures in which libraries are included (which also means the police). Intellectual Freedom in this way becomes a shibboleth by which the ideological support for Canadian state institutions is constructed and maintained.

We have to bear in mind, however, Hall’s distinction between “populist” and genuinely “popular” politics. In “Popular Democratic vs. Authoritarian Populism”, Hall describes three aspects of the crisis (he is referring to the 1970s social, political, and economic crisis, but it applies to the current crisis conjuncture as well) that led to the rise of populist politics. First, because dealing with financial and pandemic crises requires strong state intervention (banking regulation in 2008, CERB and other programs in 2020), the right can exploit an “anti-state” narrative in order to foster fear of state power over individual rights and freedoms. We have seen this in the US and in right-wing Canadian provinces, notably Alberta, where a libertarian voter base is endlessly catered to.

Fear of state overreach leads, paradoxically, to calls for more state intervention and power (since ideologically state power is the only possible response to social problems, as opposed to other non-state possibilities like anarchism or communism). Hall writes that “as social conflicts have sharpened, and the militant defence of living standards has intensified, so the state has come to rely increasingly on its coercive side, and on the educative and disciplining impact of the legal apparatuses”. We have seen this in the RCMP deployments against Indigenous land defenders, the police occupation of a TPL branch in the face of peaceful protest against transmisic speakers, the implementation of draconian security at WPL, and the violent clearances of houseless people from city parks by Toronto police. Not to mention the deployment of militarized police against BlackLivesMatter protesters in the US last summer.

This kind of upheaval and the increased use of state coercion - in the name of the small state and individual freedoms! - leads, in Hall’s view, to “the awakening of popular support for a restoration of law and order through imposition”:

The key to this aspect of the crisis… is the power which popular moral ideologies and discourses have in touching real experiences and material conditions, while at the same time articulating them as a “cry for discipline” from below, which favours the imposition of a regime of moral authoritarianism “in the name of the people”.

Anti-censorship/Intellectual Freedom is one such “popular moral ideology” which acts out a contradiction between a populist insistence on individual rights and freedoms and an authoritarian reliance on coercion to discipline Indigenous and trans people. This discipline - aimed at the socially disruptive “enemies within” - build popular support among the straight/white/settler majority, allowing Canadian political life to continue on as usual. This process is at odds with many of the values of library workers - especially younger ones - and even since the advent of Social Responsibility in the late 1960s, librarians can no longer be entirely trusted to uphold this authoritarian populist stance. (In reality, most librarians have no difficulty with this, but there are always a few - we can think of the Library Freedom Project’s protest at CIA recruitment at ALA a few years ago - who jeopardize or at least make explicit this hegemonic project).

Where the current conjuncture is different, is that unlike Thatcherism, IF-absolutism cannot rely on traditional moralizing in order to make its point. Rather, true to the late-neoliberal conjuncture, it relies on a value- and content-free proceduralism. This proceduralism requires that processes be followed without thinking about content: censorship is censorship no matter what content is being censored. In this view, there would be just as little reason to exclude a transmisic book as a book with dangerously outdated medical information.

But in reality, IF’s proceduralism is not completely formal. Since 2017, the CFLA IF committee - under the auspices of the CFLA board - has only made statements in support of transmisic speakers/material. This is not only because the ideology of the Canadian state must construct a demonized Other which it is safe to exclude, but also because trans people are seen as disruptive to various common sense views of the world, and it is this - the maintenance and reproduction of a common-sense social order - that populism is all about. Populist politics are themselves disruptive of this social order, but they rely on scapegoating someone else and appealing to popular support for common sense views of the world.

That is why Law and Order theme [e.g. the Criminal Code and the Charter of Rights] is not a mere side issue, not a question relating essentially to the control of crime and the system of criminal justice exclusively: why it has become a vibrant general social theme in the discourses of Thatcherism [and Intellectual Freedom]: and why it has served so effectively in generalizing amongst the silent majorities a sense of the need for ‘ordinary folk’ to stand up in defence of the social order.

Populism - as opposed to truly popular - ideologies are insidious and dangerous. Intellectual Freedom at this particular moment is participating in this kind of populism in the same anti-state, anti-authority terms as Thatcher did. At the same time, it relies - as we have seen - on the coercive aspect of state power through its close relations with the police. In this, Intellectual Freedom maps neatly to Gramsci’s image of the centaur as symbol of state power: combining consent and coercion in a single unified sign.