Liberalism Is Worth Saving. Here’s How.

Liberalism started strong. It managed to put its ideals into practice—first indirectly as others reacted to liberal aspi­rations, and then directly by building liberal democratic institutions once in power. And it produced results to show for it. Then it became the estab­lishment, embraced by most politicians, bureaucrats, and activists. Estab­lishment liberalism did not adjust to new realities. Worse, liberals lost the plot and some of liberalism’s values together with it.

Liberalism’s derailment was the result of several concurrent trends. For one, the postindustrial economy made it much harder for liberal democracy to deliver on its promises. Liberalism changed as the college-educated seg­ment of society became more dominant, and this made liberal democracies less likely to seek solutions to the postindustrial challenges that heavily afflicted the less educated. This was a sin of omission.

The sin of commission was that the postindustrial educated elite abandoned many of the key precepts of liberalism, including the commitment to self-­government, community, and shared prosperity, which were critical for liberal democracy’s past success. While both sins may have started with liberalism as a political movement, they also affected liberal democratic institutions and liberal philosophies.

Postindustrial society undermined liberalism. Automation eroded the natural pathways to shared prosperity and solidarity. Regulation drifted away from those it was meant to protect. Social engineering became more intense and turned its back on some of the foundational liberal values, building up a powerful backlash. These were all children of post-industrialism and liberalism’s sins of omission and commission.

With these sins, perhaps liberalism has run its course and we should turn to postliberal philosophies for guidance. Maybe liberal democracy is no longer the right framework for society to come together around inspiring objectives. I disagree. Liberalism is worth saving and remaking.

In my book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? I offer a new theory of liberalism fusing protection of individual rights with community and centering on the quest for shared prosperity. (By “liberalism” I refer to the left-­leaning version of liberalism—as a political philosophy and a set of ideas—as it came to be developed and practiced.)

My theory leads to a number of conclusions about how we should organize society; new pillars for liberal institutions and liberal democracy as I am envisioning them. These are, 1) the vitality of experimentation, or how we should encourage people to try new things so that society can build technical and social knowledge, 2) nondomination and self-­government, or how power and institutions should be organized in a liberal society, 3) economic growth, or how improving our material conditions and sharing this improvement is central to the liberal agenda, and, 4) soft communitarianism, or how to make community an integral part of a liberal democracy while balancing its potential negative effects on freedom.

By “experimentation,” I mean the practice of actively trying new ideas and practices, both for a better scientific or technical understanding of the world around us and for better adaptation to our evolving social conditions. In my emphasis on experimentation, I’m following John Stuart Mill’s call for “experiments of living,” for example when he writes: “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living.”

Classical liberalism defines freedom as noninterference, especially by state institutions and actors. In essence, I am free if the state or bureaucrats cannot tell me what to think, what not to think, what to do, and what not to do. Noninterference is an excellent starting point and clarifies why coercion is inimical to experimentation. Yet it isn’t sufficient for the freedoms that should be the foundation of experimentation.

The concept of “nondomination” is much more appropriate. Nondomination is an argument against social engineering—that is, top­down efforts to change and police people’s beliefs and practices. Social engineering can come from the state, from norms, or from elites. No matter its provenance, intense social engineering will extinguish experimentation.<

Economic growth is essential for the betterment of our material conditions and is intertwined with the accumulation and use of collective knowledge. It is also self-reinforcing with experimentation: Experimenting with entrepreneurial endeavors, new production techniques, and new goods and services drives economic growth, and economic growth expands opportunities for experimentation. Simultaneously, economic growth is critical for nondomination. The more resources society has—particularly if they are distributed equitably—the greater are the options for people to make decisions without being dependent on others or on the state.

Experiments are nearly useless without social learning—if nobody other than the experimenter learns from them and changes their beliefs and practices, there will be little contribution to collective knowledge and to the achievement of society’s objectives. Since communication and trust are critical for social learning, we must recognize the essential role that communities play. Moreover, experimentation by communities themselves is vital for producing social knowledge. Finally, self-government must start at the local level, with communities.

In sum, (my version of) liberalism calls for giving individuals and communities maximal room and resources to experiment. Nondomination and self-­government are about providing the resources for such experimentation and also enabling self-­governing communities to try new arrangements. Economic growth and soft communitarianism are about sharing the knowledge generated by experimentation and turning collective knowledge into material and social betterment. Nondomination requires that nobody, not the state, not another individual, not a group armed with customs, has the arbitrary ability to restrict one’s choices—of course, subject to the same constraints that noninterference maintains against behaviors that are directly harmful to others.

Nondomination also assures some basic social and economic security so that people have the resources to try new things. For example, an individual who fears that they or their family will die of hunger if they are fired by their employer is in a situation of domination and could not be expected to experiment freely. Therefore, nondomination calls for some amount of redistribution and the provision of public services such as healthcare and infrastructure to ensure a level playing field in the economy.

Even more important, nondomination links up with soft communitarianism; it is impossible if people do not govern themselves. Laws, institutions, and norms always have power over people, and if you have no input into what is banned and what is punished, you would be in a situation of dominance. Self-­government—the idea that individuals and communities should be involved in governing themselves—is central to ensuring that people are bound by laws and norms that they themselves have a say in. Self-­government is also the best bulwark against concentration of power, which is inimical to nondomination, and is vital for social learning, since it enables communities to engage in their own institutional and normative experiments.

Community, self-­government, economic security, and other concerns relevant to the working class are thus central to the kind of liberal democracy I am advocating. These notions capture the essence of what the famous English poet and republican thinker John Milton had in mind when he wrote: “[T]hey who are greatest … are not elevated above their brethren; live soberly in their families, walk the streets as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration.”

My hope is not only to breathe new life into liberalism as a political philosophy but also to influence liberalism in practice, as a political movement. I call the practical implementation of my version of liberalism in the present “working-class liberalism.”

I’m not proposing working-­class liberalism as a concession that liberal democracy has to make in order to avoid backlash or generate buy‑in. Rather, my emphasis on the working class is rooted in the fact that liberalism’s current failures are related to its abandonment of the working class and its priorities. Working-­class liberalism has strong communal roots, eschews social engineering, and prioritizes shared prosperity, jobs, and public services.

Liberalism will be stronger and truer to its core justifications when it takes on this working-­class character. Likewise, prioritizing working-­class and communitarian sensibilities without liberalism wouldn’t be an equally attractive philosophy. This is because there is a delicate relationship between community and freedom. Community is a natural seat of self-­government and sharing of information, but it can also prevent the freedom of its members and abridge their ability to govern their own lives.

The virtue of working-­class liberalism is to fuse basic liberal values with working-class priorities, so that communities do not become stultifying cages that are detrimental to (some of) their members, and do not ultimately end up supporting political projects that are inimical to working-­class interests.

When liberalism fails, illiberal rivals rush in. We are witnessing increasingly bold attacks from illiberal movements against the liberal establishment and against the soft underbelly of liberal democracy. In many countries, including the United States, these attacks have succeeded, at least to a certain extent, and anti-liberal forces are ascendant and are clamping down on speech, trampling on the rule of law, dismantling safeguards against abuse of power, and reintroducing myriad hierarchies and inequities. The threat of—or, in fact, actual—violence against liberals, minorities, and the disempowered may be just around the corner.

I focus on the crisis of liberalism—rather than the sordid ideas and strategies of anti-liberal forces—because I believe that these noxious currents are alive only as a result of liberalism’s crisis and weakness. It isn’t enough to criticize anti-liberal alternatives. We have to focus on liberalism’s failures, even when alternatives are much worse, so that we can remake liberalism as a political philosophy and as a set of institutions and practices encapsulating that philosophy.

The path ahead is not easy. Forging working-­class liberalism is a tall order in the best of times and much more challenging in today’s polarized environment with little trust in institutions and elites. Still, we have no alternative but to try. If liberalism does not remake itself, it will be anti-liberal, anti-democratic alternatives—such as new oligarchies, authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, deep-­rooted hierarchy, or renewed extreme progressive movements—that will win out.