Why You Should Worry About Liberalism

Why Post-Liberal Ideas Are in Ascendence and the Crisis of Legitimacy for Enlightenment Liberal Democracy.

Jonathan Rauch just wrote an article in Persuasion about Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism. His pushback to post-liberalism received a lot of positive attention and you definitely should read it. It’s a good piece. It also left me uneasy.

Let me be explicit about my ideological loyalties: I’m with the Enlightenment. I believe in the liberal democratic market republic. I agree with Rauch about why Enlightenment liberalism is the most important invention in human history. I adore the philosophers and movements he sees as critical to the project like Locke, Smith, Mill, the rest of the British Enlightenment, and America’s Founders. I agree with the three touchstones defining liberalism he sets out:

[T]hree 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).

Enlightenment societies have been the greatest drivers of human flourishing in history. In fact, the first article I wrote here at Renew the Republic just a few weeks back says exactly this.

And yet.

While I always keep one foot planted firmly in the soil of liberalism, I have carefully dipped my other foot’s toes into the post-liberal critique. I find many post-liberal complaints about modern liberalism compelling and factually correct. Too many committed liberals have difficulty accepting this, but post-liberal ideas didn’t just suddenly sweep over the Western world because everybody who believes them is irrational and dumb. They swept across the West because they had a point.

Liberalism right now has a problem. It’s not just a problem of branding, and it’s not just one of charlatans spreading lies. It’s a more dangerous problem of liberal failure. Celebratory defenses of liberalism like Rauch’s feel good to fellow liberals and raise morale, but they’re unhelpful if they become excuses to bury our heads in sand. If liberalism doesn’t grapple with, incorporate, and adjust in light of the post-liberal critique, liberalism will lose.

I very much don’t want the Enlightenment to lose.

THE ARGUMENT FOR LIBERAL TRIUMPHALISM

Rauch makes a common argument for liberalism, one I happen to agree with. Enlightenment liberalism has delivered prosperity, peace, and human flourishing. Given the realities of human nature, it works.

Enlightenment liberalism without doubt has delivered the world unprecedented benefits—according to Rauch material prosperity, peace, freedom, justice and scientific progress. It’s inarguable. Liberal democracies are absurdly prosperous compared to any other societies anywhere in history. Enlightenment ideas and institutions have uplifted billions of souls from poverty and misery into unprecedented comfort and security and they outperform all contemporary competitors. One can argue how much this is attributable to technological change from the industrial revolution and how much to liberal institutions and beliefs, but the difference doesn’t really matter. The industrial revolution itself is mainly a product of Enlightenment liberal ideas.

Liberal democracies are clearly peaceful compared to most other governments—although that can be overstated, since democracies still at times use violence to clash with rivals or settle disputes. Liberal democracies allow citizens more liberty than other systems—although they haven’t always lived fully up to those ideals and may be backsliding again. Liberal democracies are more just and fair than most societies—although “more just” isn’t the same thing as “just.” The scientific progress and innovation of Enlightenment societies is unmistakable—although authoritarian systems like the Soviets and today’s China push forward science too when it’s in their interest to do so.

Some of the details are thus contested, but overall it’s hard to disagree. For most people, Enlightenment liberal market democracies are richer, fairer, better places to live.

Post-liberal alternatives have so far failed to demonstrate they can do better. Many post-liberal models are in development, some left, some right, from religious nationalism, to post-capitalist socialism, to what Rauch calls wokeism. As Rauch explains, there’s no compelling evidence any of them will produce stable and prosperous societies. They also, as Rauch notes, are almost always authoritarian and lack the means to self-correct. To proponents of post-liberal ideas, of course, those aren’t downsides but key features. They hope to enforce some conception of the good, so liberal mechanisms to dissent and correct onto other paths aren’t benefits but impediments they hope to overcome.

On one side, Enlightenment liberalism has led to the richest, most stable, most fair societies in human history that push scientific progress. On the other side, post-liberal ideas have no track record, are unlikely to produce similar results, and are authoritarian. To Rauch, the argument is over.

He’s wrong. This isn’t good enough. If all we have is prosperity and progress, the liberals are going to lose this fight.

PROSPERITY AND PROGRESS ISN’T ENOUGH WITHOUT LEGITIMACY

The reason Enlightenment ideas and liberal democratic market republics have proven stable and successful isn’t because they deliver the most prosperity and progress. Those are wonderful results and good reasons to like these societies. Such arguments naturally appeal to philosophers and social engineers looking to construct the best society for humanity as a whole. They’re ones academics, educated professionals, and people at the top of the social food chain respond to and like.

The true reason Enlightenment ideas and liberal democratic market republics are stable and successful is because they provide the best mechanism for legitimacy. They’re the most legitimate societies humans have yet constructed.

Every society needs a basis for legitimacy to survive. You can’t get hundreds of millions of people to cooperate and obey through violence alone. You need them to buy into the system. People won’t go along with other people making decisions that don’t benefit them for long just because you force them. There are too many of them and too few of you. As many failed dictators have learned, there’s no amount of tanks or guns that can keep you in power when the people truly want you gone.

The only way to keep a society going for decades, if not centuries, is because people want to. A critical mass must agree to let you make their decisions. They must agree to go along with things that don’t always benefit them. They must accept they won’t always come out on top—that someone else might be richer or have more status than they do. They must accept that someone is going to tell them what to do. This is legitimacy.

Through threat and force, you might be able to get people not to actively rebel. You can probably force them to do the bare minimum while you’re watching them. You can’t get them to work hard for you. You can’t get them to volunteer for your armed forces. You can’t get them to participate in your systems. You can’t get them to self-police your norms. You can’t get them to do the right thing when nobody is there to catch them. They’re only going to do that if they buy in.

Different systems of government have different myths and beliefs to get people to buy in. A warlord promises he’s the strongest and can keep you safe. This is why warlords don’t last long, because this bubble tends to quickly pop. Medieval aristocrats promised they were anointed by God to rule, thereby promising stability and order, preventing the scourge of civil wars, and agreeing to protect property and the system so everyone can flourish within their station. These systems lasted longer, so long as bad luck or inept rulership didn’t cause those promises to fail, leading the king to be overthrown. Communists promise equality and rule by workers, which is why communist systems tend to collapse within a few generations when those promises inevitably aren’t fulfilled.

Enlightenment liberal democracies promise self-government and consent. They promise that citizens will have control over those wielding power over them. They claim the people won’t be mere subjects but citizens engaged in a common project of self-government. Citizens won’t always get their way, but they’ll have a seat at the table and the means to fight back against those making decisions affecting their lives. That’s the magic of Enlightenment democracy.

Consent comes with two important subsidiary requirements. The first is mobility. Self-government and consent only work if anyone can move into any role in society. Without mobility, consent turns into just a veto of subjects against their rulers. The second is freedom to act without permission. Those in power can’t end-run the system by creating impediments to challenging and replacing them. For the system to work, people need to be able to speak, organize, build, and act without the prior permission of those currently in charge.

All the benefits Rauch recognizes of Enlightenment democracy are just downstream effects of these promises. Democracy is an outgrowth of consent. Prosperity and equality are effects of social mobility. Markets, freedom of speech, and Western science are downstream effects of the freedom to act without permission. The benefits of Enlightenment democracy are the result of creating a society that promises consent along with its necessary companions of mobility and freedom to act.

The societies these promises have created have unlocked human flourishing beyond anyone’s imagination. They give people a reason to push themselves to become their best selves. They give people a reason to work hard even when they’re at the bottom. They give people the means to build and invent things that will disrupt the system. They give people a reason to sacrifice to defend a system they’re not currently winning. They give people a reason to cooperate with decisions they don’t like and that even hurt them. They give people a reason to fight to maintain the system no matter their current circumstance, and a reason to work hard, build, and innovate instead of just doing enough to get by. This is why Enlightenment democracy has unleashed more human potential than any other system in history.

WHY THE POST-LIBERAL CRITIQUE IS DEVASTATING TO LIBERALISM

Post-liberal critiques of Enlightenment liberalism don’t claim their post-liberal alternatives will provide more peace and prosperity. They don’t have to. They claim liberalism’s promises are lies. They claim in practice liberalism is no longer what it claims, if it ever was. They claim you’re not really a self-governing citizen, just a subject who can vote. They claim there’s no longer real mobility. They claim you’re no longer free to act without permission. They claim you can’t really influence power, and those with power over you don’t have your best interests in mind. They claim liberalism is illegitimate because it’s not what it claims to be.

It's a powerful critique because in more way than we like it’s true.

Over the last few decades, for a host of reasons, liberal societies have breached these promises in substantial ways. It’s impossible to discuss all the reasons here—they’ll be the subject of many future essays—but a combination of changes in technology, economics, and culture have conspired to limit the control liberal citizens have over their own lives. Whether it’s through government, private power, organized influence, an employer’s HR bureaucracy, or other kinds of power, Americans increasingly fear others have unaccountable power over them they can’t influence or alter.

Americans also fear mobility is faltering. Those who reached the top pulled the ladders up, hoarding resources before others could rise. People see the system as no longer fair or transparent, with status and rewards won on unlevel playing fields. Americans also believe—again with reason—they’re no longer free to act without permission. They fear the usual methods to get around those in power no longer work. They feel they can no longer challenge the consensus. They can’t organize against power. They can’t go off on their own and build something better to challenge incumbents. They can’t say, think, or experiment to change things those in charge don’t want to change.

These fears are real, and they’re fatal to liberalism. No amount of peace, prosperity, or innovation can ever be enough to make up the difference. The core promise of liberalism isn’t mass prosperity but self-governance and consent. You’re a free self-governing citizen, not a subject. Nobody rules you, and you can push back mightily against anyone seeking to command you. When consent, mobility, and freedom to act become illusory, the system is primed to collapse no matter how nice the gifts rulers offer because, by liberalism’s own terms, such rulers are illegitimate. You’re a citizen who was promised control and consent, not a subject to be cared for like a house pet.

That’s the core challenge to liberalism—its basis for legitimacy is collapsing. Post-liberals don’t need to offer anything better to thrive. They don’t need to promise more prosperity, fairness, or innovation. They just need to offer a vision of a society built around core promises that sound in some way good enough to you—more religious, more moral, more safe, more stable, more equal, or more just. This society might be worse for humanity as a whole, but if liberalism’s promises are a lie it’s good enough. They just need to be a little bit more legitimate.

Unless we take this seriously and shore up modern liberal market democracy, liberalism will lose.

A PATH BETWEEN POST-LIBERALISM AND COMPLACENCY

On one side is Enlightenment liberalism, which has grown complacent. On the other side is a post-liberalism poking fingers into places real holes exist but offering solutions that will never work. How about a third path between post-liberal utopianism and liberal complacency? That third path is reform.

The post-liberals correctly diagnose the problem—the promises of liberalism are no longer being kept in practice. People knew this in their bones, and now post-liberals give them something solid to latch onto. Liberalism, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge these core promises holding up their enterprise are no longer being kept. They can’t imagine people would dare cast off the best engine for human flourishing for what they see as petty grievances. So liberals offer arguments saying everything is fine.

Liberals say liberalism has a great track record. They talk about ideas and innovation and mass prosperity. All of this is true, which is why I’m still an Enlightenment liberal. None of these arguments have any chance of carrying the day because none address the gaping hole —the perception liberalism is now illegitimate. Instead of trying to convince everyone liberalism is fine, how about we take the criticism seriously? Instead of viewing the battle as between casting off liberalism for half-considered pipe dreams or doing nothing, we take the third course of actually fixing the problem.

The only way you negate the anti-liberal moment is by incorporating this critique, rolling up your sleeves, fixing the problems raised, and meeting the post-liberals on the field. Create a better version of liberalism built for our current age that fully delivers on the core promises of consent, mobility, and freedom to act. The last time Enlightenment liberalism was under assault, during the Great Depression, this is a lot like what America did to save it. In the wake of that catastrophe, liberalism and Enlightenment ideas were collapsing because they had allowed and then failed to end the economic crisis. People unsurprisingly started drifting into the arms of “more modern” ideas like communism and fascism, and in large parts of the West those ideas triumphed. The only way to restore stability and democratic legitimacy was serious reform to address these claims and prove once more that liberalism could work. That’s what the New Deal Revolution was about.

Liberal triumphalism feels nice but isn’t helpful. The Enlightenment will never win by ticking off past victories. What people want is a reckoning with the ways liberals failed liberalism. They want to acknowledge the abandoned promises and ensure future promises will be kept. They’re demanding real reforms that ensure the core promises of liberalism will be fully enforced in practice. If we do this, the next century will be another liberal century of the Enlightenment. We’ll make good on our mistakes, repair our broken systems, and unlock even more human flourishing than before.

Alternatively, we can sit back proclaiming that we’re better while we do nothing. In that case, we’ll face a post-liberal century and the Enlightenment will lose.

What do you think of the post-liberal challenge to Enlightenment liberalism? Talk with the community in the comments.