Don't Just Defend Liberalism. Upgrade It.

Jonathan Rauch has written a stirring defense of liberalism and goes on the offense against its ideological rivals. Now we have to build on it.

Branding is a b*tch. It doesn’t help that American progressives purloined the term liberal in the twentieth century. A liberal, after all, is someone committed to human freedom. Progressives lack such commitments, preferring egalitarian technocracy. Conservatives want to conserve what’s expedient in our institutions to preserve their preferred traditions.

But in the binary dynamics of electoral politics, illiberal partisans raid the fragments of true liberalism like rival carrion birds picking at the Republic’s carcass. At the extremes, we get tiki torches and Molotov cocktails.

Jonathan Rauch understands this.

In his recent essay, “Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism” for

Persuasion

he sets out a stirring defense of our doctrine. Like other defenders, Rauch has first to explain liberalism—a built-in headwind if you’re talking to anyone beyond a handful of intellectuals. But Rauch does so recognizing that illiberal enemies have not only become more emboldened but have also made our weakened liberalism into a scapegoat.

Rauch is in italics:

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.

Behind such critiques is someone bent on shoving their One True Way down your throat. Today’s timid liberal sticks his white flag up and says: There’s no need to do that because, in peace and freedom, we can self-organized into niches based on our different conceptions of the good. So the liberal gets attacked first and hardest as a pluralist is the first enemy of a monomaniac.

But is liberalism passé, or worse—dying?

Rauch quotes sociologist James Davison Hunter who thinks:

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.

Rauch goes on to argue Francis Fukuyama was largely correct and that in the intervening years since The End of History’s publication, it has been clear that,

[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.

Therefore, Rauch thinks liberals should be far more self-confident.

He’s right. Liberalism has been wildly successful. And the extent to which it has not been wildly successful is the extent to which our system has become infected by illiberalism. Recall four major illiberal waves in America:

Wave One—Wilsonian technocracy, the Federal Reserve, income taxes; and
Wave Two—FDR’s corporatism, the New Deal, the military-industrial complex
Wave Three—Kennedy assassination, Great Society, Nixon resignation, Cold War
Wave Four—GWOT, financial interventionism, and censorship-industrial complex

In the second half of the twentieth century, fusionism effectively prevented the worst excesses of theocratic conservatism and populism. That changed as the two camps played footsie since Trump. With that, many Beltway liberals lost it—both in abandoning fusionism and deriding populism. Because all that remains are crumbling liberal institutions and a tiny, disunified remnant dedicated to ideological purity and infighting, liberalism has entered a navel-gazing phase. Liberals are, therefore, scattered, disorganized, and clinging to life rafts.

But Rauch wants to rouse us to a liberal renaissance by reminding us that liberalism delivers results, while its competitors can’t hold a candle to it. I agree, of course, and that would be dandy if people cared more about neurodivergent consequentialism.

Then Rauch, perhaps unwittingly, reminds us again that branding is a b*tch. In other words—again—what do we mean by liberalism?

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.

While I agree with nearly every word, this sort of bloodless laundry list has all the inspiration of an Ikea furniture schematic. For now, I’ll pass over the niggling problem of “open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.” Underthrow readers know I’m not wild about crying my teardrop into the ocean and expecting the tide to turn. My point is that protocols and processes—much less GDP numbers—don’t prompt people to consider what they are willing to die for, as Paine or Jefferson did.

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.

The foregoing represents my first important quibble with Rauch.

Liberal democracy, as the primary means of making political choices, is a dead letter. It’s not enough that constitutionalists shake their fists while hollering that the US is a republic and not a democracy. It is also that *democracy* has long had its foot in the door and is one of the many forces that corrupt a liberal order.

In my two-part critique of Ed Feser’s theocratic paternalism, I grudgingly admitted that Feser is right in that liberalism—in particular the more *democratic* variants—invites all the illiberal voters, favor seekers, power brokers, and bureaucrats in for tea and cucumber sandwiches. Whether we’re referring to old progressives, new progressives, social justice fundamentalists, theocrats, technocrats, commies, neocons, or any other authoritarian, they’re all gaming the liberal order to take it over. As yet, none has won total domination. But all are planning it. So they’ve freighted our system almost to a breaking point. More statutes. More functionaries. More inconsistencies. More illiberal activists.

The system buckles as it centralizes.

If there is to be a liberal renaissance, it must be both inspiring and muscular. And it will have to shed “liberal democracy,” at least in most of its current instantiations. Setting aside the current system of making political choices, what’s so interesting about liberalism? Rauch argues,

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.

And with that, I will argue something stranger still: that liberalism is neither radical nor traditional enough.

Liberalism is insufficiently radical in that its adherents settle for the democratic republic. Yet this is not the end of history. It is perhaps the weakest instantiation of a superior doctrine. Indeed, when Rauch describes a liberal system as one in which “everyone can participate but no one is in charge,” we find no such system on the planet today. More ideal instantiations lie before us. Instead, we still live under DOS (Democratic Operating System), which allows us to choose between two apps—Red or Blue—which always benefits politicians, favor seekers, and the managerial state. With our electoral spectacles, we soothe ourselves with self-deception. The people are in control. But that illusion got blown to bits on a Dallas street in 1963. All that remains is Kabuki Theater for partisan dipshits and those inspired to vote by Tiktok memes. The play is put on by the powerful. So while we might sympathize with conservatives’ worries about Chesterton’s fence, it’s long been time to use those rotting posts as vampire stakes.

Liberalism is insufficiently traditional in that it’s insufficiently rooted in morality, culture, and timeless wisdom. Rauch suggests later on that this is a feature, not a bug. Sort of. Liberalism doesn’t prescribe anything but itself, and its beauty and elegance lie in its function as a metasystem that makes room for diverse conceptions of the good (pluralism). But it can’t live on if it doesn’t have the intuitive strength of the Golden Rule or ahimsa. Indeed, does liberalism routinely prompt us to ask something like:

מה נשתנה הלילה הזה מכל הלילות
Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?

Jews have uttered these words over the Seder table for thousands of years. Yet liberalism lacks a liberation story. Liberalism’s culture in America today is hotdogs, twelve packs, and fireworks. And it’s practically dead in its origin country, where unassimilated immigrants and YOBs riot for the future of a surveillance and censorship society that once boasted the likes of Smith and Mill.

Instead of children pledging allegiance to a flag, we must teach them to form an allegiance to an idea:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Then they must be reminded that saying prayers in the voting booth is nothing like consent. Even a rabid atheist must accept that there is something special about making “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” foundational, even if he can’t be persuaded that these rights are “granted by Our Creator.”

More importantly, we have to figure out how liberalism can be upgraded along multiple dimensions. Rauch seems to appreciate this when he writes:

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.

Despite its imperfection, liberalism has, indeed, transformed our species for the better. That’s why it’s time for our species to transform liberalism.

Read Jonathan Rauch’s original piece here and stay tuned for my second installment.