The Left’s Forgotten Virtue: Humility

◳ In the struggle to protect rights and justice, progressives too often mistake certainty for strength. But democracy is built on fallibility, restraint, and compromise. Without humility, noble causes collapse into dogma and erode the pluralism they aim to secure.

On the evening of March 9, 2023, Stanford Law School hosted a lecture by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The event, organized by the student Federalist Society chapter, never really began. A throng of protesters shouted the judge down with chants and jeers, holding signs accusing him of hostility toward certain rights-related issues. When the heckling threatened to derail the event entirely, the law school’s associate dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, stepped in.

But rather than restoring order, Steinbach delivered her own speech to the room. She told Duncan his presence was “painful” to many students and questioned whether the “juice” of allowing him to speak was “worth the squeeze” for the community. The judge eventually left, furious. Days later, Stanford’s president and law school dean issued a formal apology, admitting that the university had failed to uphold its own policies on free expression.

This episode quickly became a national story—not because of the identities of the speaker or the protesters, but because of what it revealed about the culture of part of the American Left. Here were students, trained to become the future guardians of the rule of law, unwilling to tolerate even the presence of a judge whose views they opposed. Here was a university administrator, charged with fostering dialogue, reinforcing disruption instead. It was a display of moral conviction, a kind of democratic zeal that had forgotten democracy’s most basic ethic.

Democracy, as both practice and ideal, rests on humility: the acknowledgment that our convictions, however deeply felt, may be partial, mistaken, or in need of correction. Without this, pluralism—the coexistence of competing values—cannot endure.

The Left has often been democracy’s great champion. From the abolitionists and suffragists to the civil rights movement, it fought to expand democracy’s promise. But today, parts of the Left have grown inhospitable to humility.

The Left has often been democracy’s great champion. From the abolitionists and suffragists to the civil rights movement, it fought to expand democracy’s promise. But today, parts of the Left have grown inhospitable to humility. Convinced of their own moral rectitude, many progressives treat dissent not as disagreement but as offense; opposition not as dialogue but as harm. The result is a paradox: in defending justice, they risk undermining the pluralistic ground on which justice depends.

Three thinkers—Isaiah Berlin, John Keane, and Michele Moody-Adams—help us see what is missing. Their insights converge on a simple truth: democracy is sustained not by certainty, but by the virtue of humility.

Isaiah Berlin knew the dangers of moral certainty firsthand. Born in Riga in 1909, he lived through revolution, exile, and the ideological convulsions of the twentieth century. His great contribution to political thought was the doctrine of value pluralism: the conviction that human values are many, genuine, and often irreconcilable.

“The ends of men are many, and not all of them are compatible.” —Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

Liberty and equality, justice and mercy, truth and love—these are all real goods. Yet pursuing one often means sacrificing another. No utopia can reconcile them perfectly. Attempts to enthrone a single supreme value, Berlin warned, lead to coercion. Democratic humility flows directly from this. If values conflict irreducibly, no faction can claim a monopoly on truth. Every political choice involves trade-offs, tragic losses as well as gains. For Berlin, the democratic temperament must be “fox-like”—alert to complexity, willing to compromise, and skeptical of grand solutions.

Progressives animated by justice and equality would do well to heed Berlin. Their values are noble. But when pursued with an air of infallibility, they risk becoming the very monism Berlin abhorred: a worldview that denies the legitimacy of dissent and seeks to silence competing goods.

Political theorist John Keane sharpens Berlin’s warning into a direct democratic ethic. In The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Keane insists that humility is democracy’s defining virtue.

“Democracy seeks to humble. It favours the equalisation of power and stands opposed everywhere to manipulation, bossing and violent rule—not because democracy is True and Right, but because democracy is the opponent of those who claim that it is.” —Keane

Unlike dogmatic systems, democracy has no sacred truth beyond its refusal to enthrone absolutes. Its institutions—checks, balances, elections, and debate—exist because humans are fallible. The moment a movement proclaims infallibility, it begins to betray democracy itself. For the contemporary Left, Keane’s warning is heavy. When activists insist that their cause is beyond question, when they shut down debate in the name of justice, they are not embodying democracy but abandoning it. True egalitarianism is not only social or economic—it is epistemic. It requires treating others’ beliefs with respect, even when they clash with one’s own.

True egalitarianism is not only social or economic—it is epistemic.

Columbia University philosopher Michele Moody-Adams insists that democratic humility must be lived out in practice through compromise.

“Because we are all fallible, compromise is not capitulation but an expression of mutual respect. To compromise is to acknowledge the legitimacy of others’ claims to justice, even when we do not fully share them.” —Moody-Adams, Making Space for Justice (2022)

For Moody-Adams, principled compromise reflects the core insight that no individual or faction possesses the whole truth. To compromise is not to betray one’s ideals but to preserve the possibility of common life in a pluralistic society. It means treating adversaries as fellow citizens. This is the habit that keeps democracy from fracture. A humble Left would recognize that partial victories are still progress, that imperfect allies are still allies, and that opponents may hold insights worth hearing.

The Left’s historic commitment to free inquiry and self-reflection has, in recent years, been eclipsed by a new dogmatism—an insistence on ideological purity that undermines the very pluralism it once championed.

Cancel Culture’s Chilling Effect: In 2022, the New York Times editorial board warned of “an uncompromising strain of progressivism” that threatens free speech. A 2021 Pew survey found that 44% of Americans were familiar with the term “cancel culture,” and 28% of liberals admitted ending friendships over political disagreements, compared with only 10% of conservatives (Pew, 2021). The broader result is widespread self-censorship: a Cato Institute survey reported that 62% of Americans feel unable to express their political views openly, fearing social or professional reprisal (Cato, 2020).

Campus Intolerance: Universities, once the vanguard of open inquiry, have become flashpoints for ideological rigidity. In 2017, Middlebury College students violently disrupted a lecture by Charles Murray, injuring a professor in the process. In 2021, Yale students berated and harassed a lecturer over an email on Halloween costumes, eventually forcing her resignation. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), there have been more than 1,350 attempts to sanction scholars since 2000, with a sharp spike in the early 2020s driven largely by progressive activism (FIRE, 2024).

Media Orthodoxy: The same pattern has emerged in cultural and media institutions. In 2020, New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned after publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for military intervention during protests. Bennet later recalled a newsroom “impulse to shut debate down altogether,” showing how liberal institutions can lapse into illiberal habits. Similarly, in 2019, comedian Sarah Silverman was dropped from a film project over a 2007 blackface sketch—intended as satire against racism—illustrating how context and intent are often ignored in favor of ideological purity.

Policy Dogmatism
The “Defund the Police” slogan epitomized the Left’s rigidity. Though it mobilized activists in 2020, evidence quickly showed its alienating effect: Representative James Clyburn and others argued it cost Democrats seats in competitive districts, yet criticism was dismissed as betrayal. A 2021 Gallup poll found 52% of Americans wanted police presence in their neighborhoods to remain the same or increase, while only 18% supported reducing funding (Gallup, 2021).

A Drift Toward Illiberalism
Taken together—cancel culture, campus intolerance, media orthodoxy, and policy dogmatism—these episodes reveal a Left increasingly prone to seeing dissent as intolerable, compromise as betrayal, and correction as weakness. The Atlantic observed in 2024 that this illiberal turn crested in the early 2020s, only to recede when electoral backlash forced reassessment. Yet the cultural damage endures: fear of progressive sanction continues to chill discourse across American life.

The irony is stark. The Left’s ideals—equity, justice, inclusion—are laudable. But their pursuit requires humility: the recognition of fallibility, the discipline of compromise, and the tolerance of disagreement. Without humility, noble ends decay into coercive means. As John Stuart Mill warned in On Liberty (1859), “social tyranny” can be as oppressive as political tyranny—stifling the very freedoms progressives claim to defend.

The Left has not always been captive to dogmatism. Its greatest triumphs came when moral urgency was tempered by humility—when persuasion, not silencing, was the means of reform. The civil rights movement stands as the clearest example. This imperative for humility is echoed in political philosophy. Isaiah Berlin warned against monism—the illusion of a single, totalizing truth that must crush all rivals. John Keane reminded us that democracy’s essence is humility, its refusal to enthrone absolutes. Michele Moody-Adams adds that humility becomes real in compromise—the practice of treating adversaries as fellow citizens rather than enemies. Their combined wisdom offers a path back to democratic health.

“We must weigh and measure, bargain, [and] prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals.” —Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), in Four Essays on Liberty (1969)

The Left’s passion for justice remains indispensable to American democracy. To sustain pluralism, progressives must recover the self-knowledge that they, too, are fallible—that no cause, however noble, grants a monopoly on truth. In cultivating humility, they will not weaken their cause; they will renew the very democratic spirit that gives it meaning. ◳

The Left’s passion for justice remains indispensable to American democracy. To sustain pluralism, progressives must recover the self-knowledge that they, too, are fallible—that no cause, however noble, grants a monopoly on truth.