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There's a constructive way for liberals to oppose illiberalism, and then there's the approach the comedian took.

Bill Maher and Sam Harris describe Islam as "the mother lode of bad ideas." (YouTube)

Bill Maher, meet Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Last Friday, the cranky comedian, aided by atheist author Sam Harris, enraged actor Ben Affleck by calling Islam, in Harriss words, the mother lode of bad ideas. Then on Monday, Maher condemned liberals for being so afraid of being called Islamophobes that they wont denounce brutality committed in Islams name. Were liberals! Maher declared about himself and Harris. Were liberals were trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism! And so, yknow, I think were just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group that] people perceive as a minority.

Schlesinger would have been able to relate. In his 1949 manifesto, The Vital Center, the Harvard historian and future Kennedy administration aide attacked what he called doughface liberals. Borrowing a term for pre-Civil War northerners who had refused to denounce slavery, Schlesinger deployed it against liberals who refused to denounce Soviet communism. The infiltration of contemporary progressivism by Communism, he wrote, has led to the same self-flagellation [that prevented doughfaces from denouncing slavery], the same refusal to take precautions against tyranny.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "On the Writing of Contemporary History"

Schlesingers point then, and Mahers now, is that the enemies of liberals do not reside only on the right. In the 1930s and 1940s, some liberals grew so focused on the struggles against fascism and racismstruggles in which communists proved staunch alliesthat they refused to acknowledge Joseph Stalins crimes. Today, some liberals are so focused on the struggle against American militarism and Islamophobia that they cant muster much outrage against ISIS. According to Schlesinger, occupying the Vital Center means opposing totalitarianism wherever you find it, regardless of whether it claims the mantle of progressivism, as the Soviet Union did during his time, or anti-imperialism, as jihadists do now.

So far, so good. Where Maher goes wrong is in forgetting two other lessons of the liberal anti-totalitarian tradition. The first is to be precise about what youre opposing. The second, to not get so carried away with your own virtue that you end up justifying terrible crimes.

Lets start with the point about precision. At their best, the liberals of the early Cold War trained their fire on Stalin, a particular ruler in a particular country at a particular moment in time. When they began making sweeping generalizations about communism per seforgetting that communist regimes and movements varied depending on their time and placethey got in trouble. In the 1940s and 1950s, the myth of a monolithic communist movement blinded some liberals to the fact that European socialists and communistsmany of whom had their own national loyaltiescould prove effective allies against Soviet power. A recalcitrant Communist Yugoslavia, in George Kennans words, proved more resistant to Soviet Communist pressures than any non-Communist regime would have been likely to do.

Even more tragically, in the 1960s, some Cold War liberals could not distinguish between the communism of Joseph Stalin and the communism of Ho Chi Minh. By seeing Ho only as a communist, they overlooked the fact that many Vietnamese saw him primarily as an anti-colonialist. And by pretending that the ideological distinctions between North and South Vietnam resembled the ideological distinctions between East and West Germany, pro-war liberals ignored the reality that in Indochina, Americas allies were no more democratic than its communist foes.

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Bill Maher's Dangerous Critique of Islam