Liberalism is often succinctly defined as "live and let live." However, there is another perhaps more developed perspective, an idea from the thinker Scott Alexander, which suggests that liberalism is a social framework designed to avoid civil war and to prevent large scale social confrontation.
Why is this? It is because within a society we find millions of people with distinct individual identities. In other words, a society is a pluralistic environment where millions of different people coexist side by side, holding worldviews that are sometimes at odds and often irreconcilably opposed. This means it is impossible for one to eventually absorb the other because one represents the absolute negation of the other.
This concept is very easy to understand in the context of religious plurality. If a religion is true, it maintains that others are false and therefore lead to damnation or at least the failure to save souls. This can generate a natural impulse, even in well intentioned people, to seek the forced conversion of others because they believe they are saving them.
The question then is: what legal and political framework allows these pluralistic, heterogeneous, and potentially clashing worldviews to coexist without killing one another?
Liberalism argues that even if you believe someone else is radically and fundamentally wrong, as long as they live their life and exercise their freedom within their own sphere of autonomy without attacking or coercing others, it is legitimate for them to pursue those activities. Since others also have their own identities and life projects they wish to develop without being trampled or suppressed, this mutual respect is essential. If you are wrong in this world or the next, that will be a matter that affects you personally, a consequence of the responsibility tied to the freedom of the actions you have freely chosen.
Therefore, by advocating for a structure of ultra minimal individual rights, such as personal liberty and private property, liberalism creates a space where one can act without others interfering with the means used to complete their projects. It also promotes free contractual autonomy so that relationships between people are always consensual. By providing this ultra minimal legal and political framework, liberalism establishes the foundations for individual autonomy to coexist with the autonomy of others, enabling peaceful coexistence and making it possible to avoid civil war. Respect me and do not trample me in exchange for me respecting you and not trampling you.
Of course, if we begin to expand the definition of individual rights, we end up interfering with the sphere of action of others. However, the fundamental base of this social contract, its most indispensable pillar, is the freedom to express in public what one thinks or defends. Liberalism clearly maintains that speech is not aggression and that words are not coercion. Coercion is using your own actions to nullify, trample, attack, reduce, or murder another person.
Speech is persuasion. It is persuasion that may succeed or fail, but it remains a legitimate tool of interaction within that society. At most, we can ask another person not to speak to us, but we cannot demand that they not speak to others who do wish to listen. In that voluntary dialogue between people, we find the core of the liberal structure: consensual cooperation. Furthermore, we find the basis for self critical reflection within that political society, because a political society must constantly rethink itself. No political and philosophical system is given to us by revelation. Every system must be subjected to criticism and evolutionary critique. A political system might be valid in a specific historical context and might cease to be so in another as social and economic forms progress. That is the ultimate thesis of Marxist thought.
Consequently, the political system must be open to radical critical reflection. Radical critical reflection means not only criticizing it internally but also being able to disseminate and debate the criticisms we might have of the status quo. The strength of a political system, which depends on the implicit consensus of the people living within it, must be refreshed and renewed. This happens through its continued defense over time against erroneous criticisms and through the incorporation of the valid criticisms to which it has been subjected.
Again, this is only possible through freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and the free expression of critical thought regarding the existing political system.
Charlie Kirk This principle is especially relevant in one specific institution: the university. The university is an academic forum specifically for developing and debating ideas. Therefore, the open debate of any type of idea must have a place in the university, no matter how abhorrent, extravagant, or antisocial it may seem to us. If there is a place for Marxism, which advocates for the killing of capitalist savers for the sake of the Social Revolution, then other ideas must certainly have a place too.
That is precisely the point. At first glance, some ideas may seem crazy, foolish, or even dangerous for social harmony, but we could be completely wrong in our assessment of those ideas, a concept often linked to the Overton window. Only through freedom of expression and debate can we be sure if our ideas are correct and others are wrong, or if we need to rethink our own positions.
Charlie Kirk had the right to say what he said, to think what he thought, and to defend what he defended in the way and the place that he did. Charlie Kirk was a person who defended and debated his ideas in the university with students, acting precisely from a basis of mutual respect and the recognition of the inalienable rights of each party. In other words, he practiced politics the way it should be practiced, through public debate and the public contrast of ideas. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was killed.
But the political significance of that murder goes much further. There are always criminal elements who can be deeply intolerant and who view words as violence, choosing to respond to what they characterize as violence with legitimizing violence to escalate and murder a person. The most dramatic part of the matter, at least from a social and political perspective, is the wave of justifications we have heard regarding that murder.
Ultimately, every time the murder of Charlie Kirk was legitimized, what people were saying is that those who think like him or share similar views have no right to live because their ideas are inherently aggressive or violent. They were arguing that society has the right to defend itself against the intellectual aggression of thinking a certain way and defending those thoughts in public.
This type of justification for ideological violence leads us toward civil war. If liberalism is a basic framework of coexistence to avoid civil war, where I let you think as you think in exchange for you letting me think as I think, then having a growing part of society willing to deny others the right to live while thinking as they wish obviously breaks that basic social contract and leads to violence.
Those who wish to express themselves in ways that are not allowed will tend to attack others or at least attack them preemptively. If I know that I might be attacked for saying what I say or thinking what I think, I will obviously try to control you if only to survive. Others may end up thinking the same thing, creating a feedback loop of mimesis where the seeds of civil war are found.