There is only ever one issue in the philosophy of politics: who will decide what will not be allowed?
The organic law of the US creates a framework for deciding who will decide what will be prohibited and how those prohibitions will be administered and interpreted. There is very little law in the Constitution, although some of the Amendments list some things that We, the People have decided may not be prohibited by those to whom the power to prohibit things is otherwise delegated. Notably, speech is among those things.
The specific charge of “illiberal” liberalism relates to speech. No matter how comprehensive Leviathan seeks to be, the problem remains as to who will run it, and that decision, in a liberal world, requires communication among those who would enter into the social contract. Claims about how speech can “harm” are wholly beside the point. Speech is specially privileged under liberalism, because speech is how liberalism reaches its contracts. And as every lawyer knows, when it comes to applying the law, the specific controls the general.
Just as the US Constitution places most speech outside the realm of harm that the government can outlaw, liberalism, as a philosophy, at arguably places speech — conversation — outside the realm of “harm” that liberalism condemns. Liberal political philosophy does not stand on turtles all the way down. Its base is the people, deciding by communicating. If we could succeed in squelching all the bad speech, the result would be a underestimation of the bad thoughts abroad in the land. That outcome would be, not to put too fine a point on it, sub-optimal.
By treating suppression of speech as the endgame of liberalism, Mr. Krause appears to make liberalism disappear up its own butt. The word “illiberal” has a nice ironic feel, but it is not really the right word for liberals who would suppress speech. They are not guilty so much of hypocrisy as of meta-ignorance. They think that speech is just another activity that government can regulate. It isn’t. Speech is how government gets to be government. Their attitude is not so much illiberal as misguided.