Persuasion | August 6, 2024
IF it is true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, that only a first-rate intelligence can function while holding two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, then only a genius can assess the future of liberalism—such is the paradox that confronts liberals right now.
On the one hand, critics are coming out of the woodwork. Never in my lifetime have critiques of Locke, Smith, Mill, the British Enlightenment, and the American founding emanated from so many different quarters, attacked from so many directions, and sounded so scathing and confident. The liberal tradition has been undone by its amorality (says the right) and its injustice (says the left); it has, they charge, made society unfair, politics narcissistic, and truth meaningless.
Above all, they charge, liberalism has lost the confidence of the public—and of liberals. “Well, I think it’s very simple,” Steve Bannon, the ideologue of the MAGA movement, told David Brooks of The New York Times recently, explaining why his brand of populism will win: “the ruling elites of the West lost confidence in themselves. The elites have lost their faith in their countries. They’ve lost faith in the Westphalian system, the nation-state. They are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.”
Even friends of the liberal project suggest its heyday may be over. In a June podcast interview with American Purpose, the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter—the author of the new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis—said: “We are now certainly in a post-Christian but also a post-Enlightenment world. Democracy depended upon the cultural sources of the Enlightenment. Those evolved, changed, have been transformed, and now they’re no longer plausible. In fact, you’ll hear political actors, especially on the left, but also very much on the right, say that the Enlightenment is actually the problem. So the fundamental question ... is, How does an Enlightenment-era institution survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? We can’t even decide what the foundations of democratic authority are.”
It all sounds terrible. And yet, on the other hand... Francis Fukuyama was right.
Fukuyama is the professor, writer, and former State Department official who famously predicted the “end of history” in a 1989 article and then a 1992 book of that name. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident ... in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism,” he wrote in 1989. He was careful to stipulate that conflict and competition would not end in the “real or material world.” But monarchy, feudalism, theocracy, autarchy, fascism, communism, and the other challengers to liberalism had all failed as governing systems and intellectual frameworks. Only Western-style liberalism had proven it can work on a large scale, in many places, and over time. “There are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run” (Fukuyama’s italics).
While Fukuyama’s thesis had a hermetic aspect (its many qualifications made it difficult to refute), the intervening years have confirmed its fundamental tenet: no viable system has emerged that can come close to replicating liberalism’s capacity to produce knowledge, prosperity, freedom, and peace. In fact, both on its own terms and compared with all the historic alternatives, liberalism has delivered spectacular results. It is the greatest social technology ever invented, and well ahead of whatever comes second.
This paradoxical situation has me scratching my head, and I’m not alone. Why is liberalism so widely challenged and attacked, and so defensive and self-doubting, when it has so much to brag about? Increasingly, I have come to think we must look for an answer not just in liberalism’s failures—though there certainly are some—but in liberals’ failure of nerve.
Begin, then, with a basic question: what do we (or at least I) mean by liberalism?
Not progressivism or moderate leftism, as the term came to mean in postwar U.S. discourse. Rather, liberalism in the tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders. It is not one idea but a family of ideas with many variants. Its central philosophy is that all persons are born free and equal. Its operational principles include the rule of law, pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority, limited government, and (subject to the other requirements) democratic decision-making. Its distinctive method of social organization is to rely on impersonal rules and open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.
Embodying those notions are three interlinked social systems: liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices (that is, decisions about truth and knowledge). By transcending tribe, renouncing authoritarianism, substituting rules for rulers, and treating persons as interchangeable, liberalism achieves what no other social system can offer, at least on a large scale: coordination without control. In a liberal system, everyone can participate but no one is in charge.
In the context of human history, everything about liberalism is radical: its rejection of personal and tribal authority, its insistence on treating persons as interchangeable, its demand that dissent be tolerated and minorities protected, its embrace of change and uncertainty. All of its premises run counter to hardwired human instincts. Liberalism is the strangest and most counterintuitive social idea ever conceived, a disadvantage offset only by the fact that it is also the most successful social idea ever conceived.
In the context of human history, everything about liberalism is radical: its rejection of personal and tribal authority, its insistence on treating persons as interchangeable, its demand that dissent be tolerated and minorities protected, its embrace of change and uncertainty. All of its premises run counter to hardwired human instincts. Liberalism is the strangest and most counterintuitive social idea ever conceived, a disadvantage offset only by the fact that it is also the most successful social idea ever conceived.
Of course, it is imperfect. It does not solve every old problem and new problems always crop up. But all of the big social problems, from poverty and inequality to environmental degradation, war, and disease, are demonstrably better handled by liberal than non-liberal societies. It is no exaggeration to say that this strangely successful social technology has allowed Homo sapiens to form global networks of positive-sum cooperation that have elevated human achievement orders of magnitude above our designed capacity. Liberalism has literally transformed our species.
Material well-being? In 1820, writes Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution in his 2023 book The Rise of the Global Middle Class, fewer than 1 percent of the world’s people could be considered middle class or rich; of the rest, 90 percent lived in extreme poverty. “In 2023,” he notes, “even though the middle class is under stress in Europe and in the United States, it is expanding faster on a global scale than it has ever done before. ... The world has already passed a tipping point wherein half the population—four billion people—is middle class or wealthier.” By 2030, he reckons, the five billionth person will join the middle class. Recent research by four economists (Maxim Pinkovskiy and Kasey Chatterji-Len of the New York Fed and Xavier Sala-i-Martin and William H. Nober of Columbia University) finds that “poverty, even as it is understood in solidly middle-income countries rather than the extreme deprivation of people on the margins of subsistence, is rapidly becoming a relic of the past.” If that is not a staggering accomplishment, it is hard to imagine what would be.
Peace? Liberal democracies have effectively eliminated warfare as a method of settling their disputes among themselves, a development which would amaze all prior generations. Freedom? Liberalism literally invented the idea that all people are entitled to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Justice? Liberalism brought an end to slavery, historically among the most ubiquitous of human institutions; it brought liberation to women, African-Americans, and sexual minorities—and it is not finished yet. Of course, there is more work to be done, but that is just the point: liberal politics is morally directional, something which is true of no other system. If you run a tape of a liberal society’s moral development, you can always tell which way the tape is running: toward more freedom, equality, and inclusion. With other societies, it’s a random walk as rulers and regimes come and go.
What I’ve called liberal science—meaning not just the hard sciences but the whole system of critical inquiry based on evidence and rational argument—is the most impressive liberal system of all. To reach Galileo took humans 200,000 years—and then to reach artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and CRISPR took less than 400. Liberal science mapped the genetic structure of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus over one weekend and designed a vaccine over another weekend.
If that is failure, it is hard to imagine what success would look like.
AND what alternatives are on offer in 2024? There’s no shortage. Whereas liberals in earlier periods of modern history have usually faced one or two prevalent alternatives (monarchy, empire, theocracy, fascism, Marxism-Leninism), today they confront a veritable bestiary of post-liberal pretenders.
Arising from the religious world, Catholic integralism, so-called common-good conservatism, and Christian nationalism seek to merge church and state and cast aside liberalism’s commitments to secularism and religious neutrality, which post-liberals argue undermine society’s foundations of faith, family, and community. Political Islam, sometimes called Islamism, makes even stronger claims to religious rule and rejects the concept of religious toleration. Nationalism is not inherently inconsistent with liberalism (nations have been the seedbeds and protectors of liberalism), but national conservatism, its sharper variant, claims that liberal cosmopolitanism and universalism undermine the very possibility of a nation-state with a common culture.
Communism may be past its prime, but it governs almost a fifth of the world’s population and has found a vigorous proponent in China. Imperialism, which only recently seemed archaic, has made a brutal comeback under Russian president Vladimir Putin. Authoritarian populism has surged in countries where liberalism had seemed firmly entrenched—including the United States. Finally, an illiberal mashup of left-wing ideologies often called wokeness (or critical social justice, cultural Marxism, or the identity synthesis) has achieved startling currency in academic and cultural institutions, especially in the Anglosphere.
Analyzing each of those challengers to liberalism would easily fill a book, or a library. Instead, it might suffice to make some observations that apply to handfuls of them.
First: the challengers are either proven failures or vaporware. The proven failure category includes Christian rule, which led to stultification and bloodbaths across Europe; Islamism, which is internally oppressive and outwardly aggressive; imperialism, a zero-sum quest for domination which relies on war and coercion; authoritarian populism, which begins with false promises and ends in corruption and anti-democratic machinations; and communism, the most blood-soaked form of government in all of history. The vaporware category includes “common good” conservatism, Christian nationalism, and Catholic integralism, which have yet to explain how a rump of Christian conservatives could rule a diverse and largely secular country like the United States; and wokeness, which has never governed anything and only knows what it is against (practically everything).
Second: the challengers are enemies of equality. Christianism and Islamism explicitly privilege their own faiths, forswearing equality from the get-go. Imperialism explicitly asserts its right to dominate whomever it can. Populism may claim to speak for “the people,” but its defining characteristic is to privilege the real people—meaning its own clients—over everyone else. Communism is doctrinally egalitarian, but it invariably privileges a corrupt nomenklatura. While wokeness does not have much of a governing record, it, too, belies its egalitarian claims, stereotyping and demonizing alleged oppressors and bullying and silencing opponents.
Third: the challengers can’t self-correct. Instead, they always compound their errors. Liberal democracies, liberal markets, and liberal science all make mistakes, because they are human; but they have built-in mechanisms for identifying and rectifying them. Liberal democracy provides for political competition and rotation in power; markets let firms and entrepreneurs fail and be replaced; liberal science connects millions of investigators in a collective search for error. By contrast, faith-based regimes claim godly infallibility; communism and imperialism claim historical inevitability; authoritarian populists don’t believe they ever really lose an election or make a mistake; social justice warriors live in what Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott call a “perfect rhetorical fortress,” impervious to evidence and hostile to dissent.
Finally: the challengers are authoritarian. Liberalism is the only method of large-scale social decision-making that is inherently decentralized, depersonalized, consensual, and self-correcting. It understands that humans can be ambitious, biased, and greedy, but it protects us from our worst selves by using checks and balances to restrain ambition, experiment and criticism to identify bias, and the profit motive to domesticate greed. By contrast, while the illiberal and post-liberal contenders come in many varieties, they all, at the end of the day, require the elevation of a person or party to godlike status. In the end, they serve whomever is most ambitious, most biased, and most greedy.
Having said all that, one must reckon with what may appear to be an important counterexample. Whatever else Chinese communism might be, it is not a proven failure. By combining rapid economic growth with single-party rule and totalitarian surveillance, it has seemingly done what liberal theorists speculated might be impossible. As The Economist reports, China’s aggressive mercantilism, party-led investment, manipulated currency and interest rates, and controls on capital defy liberal economic theory, yet are being imitated by other countries seeking “reassurance [that] they do not need to become more democratic in order to grow.”
Is this at last the new model that will disprove Francis Fukuyama? The honest answer, to slightly misquote Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution, is that it’s too early to tell. But, advanced technology aside, the Chinese communist model is not really new, and we have plenty of reason to doubt its superiority. China achieved its rapid economic growth by playing technological catch-up and manipulating its markets—strategies which are self-limiting as China reaches technological parity and other countries act in economic self-defense. Its growing militarism alarms other countries and leads them to balance against it. Its political system is in thrall to a single person who may make catastrophic errors (such as a war against Taiwan). Its demographics are crashing and its society is unattractive to immigrants. Its ideology assumes that its now well-educated, mostly middle-class population can be subjugated forever, probably a bad bet. If I were a Chinese leader, I would be more frightened than smug.
While discontent, alienation, and ennui in liberal societies are worrisome, they are not new. Tocqueville remarked on the flattening mediocrity of democratic culture; Nietzsche claimed that modernity saps vigor, creativity, and ambition. One need not reach back that far. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter warned the nation of “a crisis of confidence ... that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” In 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton, newly installed as First Lady, spoke of an “undercurrent of discontent” and a “crisis of meaning.” “We realize,” she said, “that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy, and freedom are not enough—that we lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively; we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another. ... [T]he signs of alienation and despair and hopelessness … are all too common and cannot be ignored.”
It is unfortunately a fact, and not a new fact, that liberalism does not adequately provide for people’s moral and spiritual needs. Many people feel left behind economically, marginalized culturally, ignored politically, disconnected socially, and hungry spiritually. Hillary Clinton, who was mocked at the time for her speech, deserves an apology. She was right; there was a crisis of meaning, and there still is.
But is that liberalism’s fault? After all, liberalism was designed not to provide for our moral and spiritual needs. It deliberately leaves the transcendent questions open. From the beginning, liberal theorists emphasized that liberalism can provide space for individuals, families, communities, and faiths to make meaning in their own ways, but it cannot, does not, and should not do that work itself. Liberalism promises the pursuit of happiness, not the actual thing.
Moreover, the American project and its foreign cousins do not merely allow civil society to construct meaning and provide connection and purpose; they depend upon it to do so. John Adams said: “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.” James Madison echoed: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” A liberal republic, they warned, requires virtue but does not necessarily furnish its own supply. The Founders told anyone who would listen that our constitutional system can—up to a point—protect us from our worst selves, but it cannot make us our best selves. Our families, schools, churches, communities, and culture must form us as citizens and fill our souls.
On that reckoning, the current crisis—and the crisis observed by Tocqueville and Nietzsche and Carter and Clinton—is not so much a failure of liberalism as it is a failure of the institutions around liberalism. For all kinds of reasons beyond the scope of this article, society’s meaning-making institutions have not stepped up. In particular, the secularization and politicization of American Protestantism—perhaps still, despite its travails, America’s spiritual taproot—has proved catastrophic. (That’s the subject of my next book, so I won’t elaborate here.) But more generally, if churches preach politics, if schools neglect citizenship, if businesses are mercenary, if politics becomes performative, if voters become cynical, if media becomes propagandistic, if communities crumble, and if families fragment—well, in that case, liberalism will not save us.
When we are lectured that liberalism dissolves faith, tradition, community, and family, we should respond that no other social arrangement offers remotely as much room to freely—and thus virtuously—practice our faiths, sustain our traditions, and build our communities and families. When we are lectured about the hollowness of modern consumeristic life and the absence of meaning, we should ask our critics to look in the mirror and see if they are doing what they might to create meaning for themselves and others. When post-liberals and anti-liberals attack liberalism to deflect attention from their own moral and political deformities, we should not hesitate to call them out. (I’m looking at you, MAGA Christians and woke bullies.)
And, at the same time, we should not cop to the charge that liberalism is morally vacuous. While it is true that liberal values place emphasis on impersonal rules and procedural safeguards, theorists from John Locke to William Galston have pointed out that liberalism is not merely neutral; to the contrary, it is a value-rich environment. It elevates and requires virtues such as truthfulness, lawfulness, forbearance, civility, reciprocity, generosity, and respect for the intrinsic worth of every individual.
Making this point in his new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, the scholar Alexandre Lefebvre comes out swinging. Yes, he says, liberalism promotes values—and they are awesome values! It teaches freedom, fairness, and reciprocity, which are among the best values out there. Yet liberalism is a victim of its own success: so pervasively does it shape our moral lives that we take it for granted and become like the proverbial fish that says, “What’s water?” As a result, said Lefebvre in a recent interview with the podcaster Andrew Keen, “Liberals suck at defending themselves. Liberals are truly awful at it.” Instead, he said, “What liberalism needs to do is recognize and forcefully assert that at the heart of our doctrine are real and meaningful human goods that can lead not just to good policy but to good lives.”
If you don’t think liberalism propounds life-enhancing, freedom-giving, justice-advancing values, ask a homosexual who was born at a time when homosexuality was a crime, a sin, and a mental disease. Ask an atheist who was born at a time when atheists faced widespread discrimination and were unelectable to high public office. Ask a Jew who was born at all because his Polish grandparents found welcome in our liberal republic. And don’t try to tell that person—me, as it happens—that liberalism is hollow, value-free, or without courage, meaning, and hope.
Liberalism is not sufficient to make you happy or fulfilled. But it is necessary. It gives you much, much more to work with than any of its presumptive competitors. We liberals have a great story to tell. We need to work harder to evangelize others—and to renew our faith in ourselves.