“Under both Republican and Democratic control of government, we need to constrain exploding government spending, address the growing national debt, and tackle the even bigger “unfunded liabilities” of Social Security and Medicare. We need to stop punishing work and creation through our complicated and punitive tax system. But economic reality doesn’t generally appeal to either left or right these days.
The lesson of the last three centuries is that liberalism works — it gives more people freedom and autonomy and opportunity, it dramatically increases standards of living, and it reduces both domestic and international conflicts.
And yet there are people who want to make the U.S. more like what Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán calls his “illiberal democracy,” in which government controls society in the name of national greatness. In such an environment, liberals of all sorts — including Reaganite conservatives, free‐speech liberals, people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and libertarians — need to see each other as allies in a broad liberal center and push back against organized attacks from those who would tear up and discard the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” — David Boaz of the Cato Institute exhorts in a recent blog post, “Now More Than Ever Americans Should Defend Liberalism.” Keep in mind that Boaz defines here what liberalism actually is. It may provide a useful point of reference as we get a taste of what liberalism is not below…
Last week I read—stumbled on rather— a really irritating op-ed “Can Liberalism Save Itself?” in the New York Times. I was lying in bed around 11 at night, drifting in and out of consciousness as I skimmed the headlines of various newspapers cramming in perhaps multiple indiscriminate op-eds before crashing— when I came across one guest opinion on “Cold War liberalism” from a Samuel Moyn. Half expecting, or half hoping maybe, to read an article about why we need it or how we can revive it, I had to brace myself suddenly for a reinvigorated attack on my own creed and ideals. Then I was wide awake.
I’m used to my enemies disparagingly using words they don’t even understand like “neoliberalism” or “globalism” to try and caricature my unconcern with disadvantaged “workers” or the “planet.” Or, they try to demonize my evidence-based assumption that markets in general allocate resources much more efficiently between suppliers and producers than governments as “free market fundamentalism.” But this column from Yale professor Samuel Moyn was an attack this time on “Cold War liberalism.” Here we go.
Samuel Moyn argues that “liberalism is under siege.” Tell me something I don’t know. But for what reason? He says absurdly, because of the Cold War.
Why do liberals find themselves in this position so routinely? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind.
He documents correctly but argues fallaciously that during the Cold War,
… liberals reinvented their ideology, which traces its roots to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — and reinvented it for the worse. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied by the continuity of liberal government and the management of threats that might disrupt it, the same preoccupations liberals have today. To save themselves, they need to undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their creed.
And he says wrongly that before World War II, under FDR, was true liberalism’s last breath,
Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His administration capped more than a century in which liberalism had been promising to unshackle humanity after millenniums of hierarchy — dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and breaking down barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all of these achievements were haunted by racial disparities. At its most visionary, liberalism implied that government’s duty was to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.
This is simply untrue. FDR was not a liberal, or not in any genuine sense. FDR was actually one of the most radical progressives in American history who went the furthest of any of his predecessors, such as Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt, to expand the powers of the federal government with blatant disregard for the constitution and the liberal values our founding documents enshrine. And I would argue, despite Trump’s patent authoritarian impulses, it was nevertheless under FDR that it was the closest we ever came in America by far to a fundamentally unfree totalitarian socialist regime.
In fact, FDR deliberately sought to redefine the word liberal and the philosophy of liberalism precisely in order to enact his socialist “New Deal,” essentially illiberal policies that he knew were illiberal and unAmerican. Such that until recently (because these terms are becoming a little obfuscated by populism) in America for generations, we have understood liberal to mean pro-government, and conservative to mean anti-government. To this day FDR polarizes the country over the proper role of government, and it began with a cunning bait-and-switch tactic.
Before the New Deal, the word liberal was understood to mean what the word conservative came to mean when Barry Goldwater came around, reaching its apogee with Ronald Reagan. This is is why whenever, for example, I refer to myself or my philosophy using the word liberal or liberalism, or neoliberal or classical liberal, I am referring to nineteenth century liberalism, decidedly not to progressivism, with which liberalism came unfortunately to be synonymous; to be sure, to refute people on the right today who would argue that liberalism was always inherently a socialist doctrine, it was not for any inevitable reason that liberalism became associated with progressivism, but history shows, it was all and only because of the self-dealing FDR, a socialist (because progressives are socialists), upon whose misconstrued bowdlerization of liberalism his antecedents have sought to expand on ever since the New Deal era, such as Lyndon Johnson, JFK, Barack Obama, and now Biden, all to better impose their own European top-down, administrative reforms on society and expand the scope of the welfare state without limit. Thus if Moyn considers liberalism in any way a utopian project, he’s only a dupe of about a hundred years of progressive deception. Indeed any progressive who would naively self-identify as a liberal is falling for that deception. This is why I appreciate it when people like AOC or Bernie Sanders call themselves socialists, besides the absurd “democratic” qualifier. At least they’re not trying to hoodwink the public. When Obama or Biden, however, try to defend themselves from GOP attacks in announcing that they’re not socialists, they are lying.
In conservative Washington Post columnist George Will’s book, The Conservative Sensibility, in Chapter 3 on the progressive’s usurpation of liberalism, with his dry humor he explains,
American politics can be considered a tale of three liberalisms, the first of which classical liberalism, teaches that the creative arena of human affairs is society, as distinct from government. Government’s proper function is to protect the conditions of life and liberty, primarily for the individual’s private pursuit of happiness. This is now called conservatism. Until the New Deal, however, it was the Jeffersonian spirit of the Democratic party. FDR’s New Deal liberalism was significantly more ambitious. He said that until the emergence of the modern industrial economy, “government had merely been called upon to produce the conditions within which people could live happily, labor peacefully and rest secure.” Now it would be called upon to play a grander role. It would not just provide conditions in which happiness, understood as material well-being could be pursued. Rather it would become a deliverer of happiness itself. Government, FDR said, has “final responsibility” for it. This middle liberalism of the New Deal supplemented political rights with economic rights. The New Deal, the modern state it created, and the class of people for whom it provided employment led to the third liberalism that of the 1960s and beyond. This managerial liberalism celebrates the role of intellectuals and other policy elites in rationalizing society from above, wielding the federal government and the science of public administration, meaning bureaucracy. This liberalism promises that government’s mastery of economic management will end business cycles thereby guaranteeing a steady flow of revenues for building more than a merely good society, but a Great Society.”
Although progressives are socialists they would not admit to it, and I’m not even sure they’re aware they’re socialists. So thoroughly has FDR’s progressive reinvention (or bowdlerization) of liberalism become entrenched, Johnson, Obama and Biden delude themselves perversely that what is socialism in practice is liberty in principle. Such that these utter charlatans delude the country that only by perpetually making the scope of government bigger and making the role of the individual smaller consequently, and infringing on liberty, they are paradoxically liberating individuals to live their own lives in a liberal sense— through collective action, in all events bending the rights of the individual to the dumb will of the collective, i.e. with redistributive income, the progressive income tax, the minimum wage, affirmative action, housing subsidies, affordable healthcare, free college, etc. And the most prominent philosopher in history to propagate this conceit, that government aids progress rather than freezes it, notably was Karl Marx. Moreover the welfare state is not an American but a European, specifically a German, idea. Marx’s mentor was the German philosopher GWF Hegel (one of the worst philosophers who ever lived in my opinion besides Rousseau), who theorized that individuals could be boiled down to the relative supremacy or inferiority of their national historical background, therefore the more powerful the nation, the more innately superior the individual and vice versa.
Before FDR this European idea had no place in the American tradition of liberalism—it still doesn’t—whose roots in point of fact, are in a culture of individualism or English liberty, received as it were from our British ancestors and philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume. Far from being synonymous with the capricious employment of state power to achieve arbitrary ends decided by bureaucrats, liberalism originally was a doctrine of private liberty which stated that the supposedly God-given innate rights of the individual came first, whatever else was desired by central authority, whether the church or the state. That is, the individual and the family, against the illiberal passions of the herd, alone was the pre-eminent and the only rightful locus of moral authority in a self-governing polity. It was the basic dignity of free individuals before the law, which applies equally to all citizens, that was what Western liberalism’s founding documents supported, and supported alone— not the vaulting ambitions of the modern administrative state. Not the “New Deal” or The “Great Society.” America’s original liberals, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison, would have had grave doubts about this stuff.
In France the Declaration of the “Rights of Man and Citizen” extolled “liberty equality and fraternity,” and in America the “Declaration of Independence” exalted the individual’s natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus liberalism proper is no revolutionary Marxist socialist creed, supposed “at its most visionary” to emancipate us or raise us up from the lower strata of “oppression” in Moyn’s phrasing. Instead liberalism as a framework of prescriptive ethical norms was conceived to secure one’s individual freedom and guard it against the tyranny of the powerful state, or at least in neoliberal phraseology, liberalism was the freedom of the individual to choose rather than the pressure of the state to coerce one to choose what they would not otherwise choose in the absence of that pressure. And there is nothing “visionary” about this understanding of liberalism at all. But Moyn is less interested in pinpointing what liberalism is. In keeping with other progressives and socialists, having these kinds of discursive discussions is assuredly only a hindrance to imposing an agenda on us. After telling us that FDR was the last dying breath of his visionary utopian liberalism in the West, Moyn proceeds to argue the opposite of the truth.
In his tale it was in the shadow of the global rise of communism after World War II, that “Cold War liberals” such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper (a couple thinkers by the way who were major influences on your correspondent) became discouraged by the New Deal There-is-Nothing-to-Fear-but-Fear-Itself optimism that government could and should plan a more radiant future. Think of Churchill, perhaps the earliest Cold War liberal and his evocative phrase that an iron curtain has descended over Europe. Ever since then, in Moyn’s narrative, because of figures like Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, liberalism has been withered by an incapacitating fear of communism. Then perhaps predictably he says this,
The Cold War transformation of liberalism wouldn’t matter so profoundly now if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their creed in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to disregard their own mistakes, in spite of the long-run consequences in our time. Instead, liberals doubled down. After several decades of endless wars against successor enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals have been shocked by blowback. History didn’t end; in fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in backsliding new democracies and in the United States now find it wanting.
He’s not wrong about this. Moyn is correct that the right particularly—absurdly— desires something more from politics than individual liberty, economic opportunity, and property rights. The likes of right wing intellectuals and Catholic integralists like Patrick Deneen, and nationalists like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron Desantis (you might also lump in JD Vance and Josh Hawley) represent a kind of citizen who is fed up with the traditional system of ordered liberty. Neither do these rightwingers desire the paternalistic managerialism of the woke left, understandably. Nor do they have any love left for Reagan’s and William F. Buckley’s conservatism sadly, and much, much less understandably.
I don’t know what the hell these people want. I don’t even think they know what they want. Not in the long term. But in the short term, one thing is clear. These damn whiny babies are suffering a crisis of meaning—if as Ramaswamy says it’s a crisis of identity, it’s also a crisis of meaning—and rather abhorrently they think that now in the twenty-first century it’s the government’s duty to make American life more meaningful. That is, the bloated government shelling out outrageous trillion dollar deficits, lately earning itself a new credit downgrade from a ratings agency, has become an object of saccharine personal fulfillment to the Trump GOP.
For anyone who subscribes to this Substack, it needs no explaining how utterly ridiculous and contemptible that is. It’s not the government’s fault if your life is empty, hollow, devoid of meaning, you’re unfulfilled, or lacking purpose. Anyone who understands what the blessing of liberalism actually is, too, should be filled with joy that it is the government’s duty only to get out of the way and leave you the hell alone to pursue happiness as you define it. Or not to pursue it.
Who in God’s name wants politics to dictate to them what to worship?
A lonely, empty, unfulfilled, sad, perhaps but profoundly illiberal person.
— Jay
Lastly what do you think about AOC's views in deregulation sunscreen sales that have been getting to much attention.
Two points of contradiction.
The progressive income tax existed in England and other European countries long before it was introduced in the US(going back to the time of Pitt the Younger and Sir Robert Peel). In fact one might say the progressive income tax led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in the UK.
Second there were many 19th century liberals like John Stuart Mill who called for the nationalization of basic utilities(such as in there time gas). One might say this led directly to FDR's TVA and other post-war state owned utilities such as EDF in France and CEGB in the UK.