It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week's post to talk about the United States or more correctly this week about the political philosophy the United States was founded on: liberalism. Now an immediate clarification is necessary, because in the United States especially, the word 'liberalism' has come to mean more broadly the left half of the political spectrum and (with no small amount of irony) 'big government' solutions to problems. That is not what I mean here.
Instead, what I mean when I say liberalism is its original (and broadly international) meaning: the political philosophy which first emerged fully in the early modern period and which places individual freedoms - liberty - as its central, defining value. This is the ideology of the Declaration of Independence and the political theory upon which - however imperfectly - the United States was predicated. You may fairly ask why I am using a term that is going to be confusing to some folks and the answer is: there really isn't a better one ('libertarian,' as we'll see, means something related but different). Though at the same time, American political vocabulary seems to be undergoing a shift where the The Left is more comfortable claiming 'progressive' or 'socialist' as a label, while at least some factions on the right are more comfortable openly aligning as anti-liberal (or illiberal), which is leading the term 'liberal' to shift back to its original meaning. I don't want to get too sidetracked by political terminology for the American political system, so I'll put my own preferred terminology in a footnote.
So let's talk about it: what is liberalism, this political philosophy upon which the United States was founded? And perhaps equally to the point, why do I think that liberal principles remain crucial to organizing human affairs? Now I have kept trying to reorganize my thoughts here in a way that I like and I have not yet succeeded, so this may be a bit more of a ramble than usual - we're going to have to walk through a bit of pre-modern societies, a bit of Greece, a bit of Rome, and also a bit of early modern Europe before we get to what I think the core of this idea is, which is the value of liberalism today, particularly with reference to the United States.
But I promise we are getting to that part!
Defining Liberalism
Liberalism often gets defined as a collection of commitments to various principles: free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, free markets and so on, while liberal societies are those which institute those principles as policies. And certainly, liberals - again, in the old, international sense - do tend to support all of those things, but this sort of policy-bricolage often obscures the key first principles from which all of the policy positions derive (further obscured by the fact that 'freedom' is a word with a fairly plastic meaning). So I think we should start by drilling down to the root idea of liberalism.
Etymologically, of course, liberalism is the philosophy of liberty, of a certain form of freedom - but of course that just raises the question of what sort of freedom. The root here is the Latin word liber, which was a free person (technically a free man, a free woman was libera; cf. libertus/liberta, a freedman or woman), from which derived both libertas, 'liberty' and liberalis, 'of or relating to a free person.' It is that latter word, liberalis which gives us 'liberalism' and of course libertas that gives us the abstract idea of 'liberty' so in a real sense, liberalism is 'liberty-ism.' Liberalis implies more than just a freedom from slavery, I should note: the word in Latin includes a certain sort of dignity and indeed, generosity. Liberty is, as we'll see, more than just 'not being a slave,' though it is also certainly that. Crucially, libertas is something possessed individually as much as, if not more than, by the state. For the res publica to be liberalis, the people in it must possess libertas, not merely the state (we may contrast Greek eleutheria; put a pin in that, we'll come back to it).
And it is that distinction that brings us usefully to the particular kind of freedom: liberalism is a political philosophy which recognizes, indeed which chiefly values, individual freedom from communal constraints.
We are often so used to liberal societies - or illiberal ones that use liberalism's language as a mask - that we miss the radicalism of that vision. As Patricia Crone notes, traditional pre-modern societies, by and large, have little space for the individual:
If society was a body and the functional orders its limbs, individuals were simply cells...like cells, they were programmed for performance of pre-determined roles and derived their value from performing as expected, not from refusing to conform. Individual interests were subordinated to and defined by collective ones...the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.
Of course it isn't particularly hard to see how this sort of ideology might be quite attractive to the ruling elite and indeed elites of various kinds who chose what the "overall group" valued and did. But in as much as we can see the thinking of the common folk of these societies, they tend to share the same assumptions, with the individual existing to fill certain roles in a society and being valued in so much as they did so in accordance with traditional notions.
By contrast, liberalism as an ideology recognizes limits on the social or communal claim on the individual. The individual is not merely a cog in the machine designed to produce communal ends, but rather has certain rights they may press against society, certain zones in which they have a freedom on to which their neighbors and the broader community cannot intrude.
That in turn leads to all of the other principles. Free speech is the rejection of a communal claim on individual speech and expression - you can't tell me what to say. Free markets are a rejection of a communal claim to resources and labor - you can't tell me what to make, buy or sell. Freedom of association and an associated freedom of movement is a rejection both of a communal claim on where one can live but also on how they set up their social life - you can't tell me where I live, who my friends are, who I can marry or what clubs, parties and associations I can create and join. All of these key decisions under liberal thinking are reserved to the individual, who may well have certain moral imperatives to act in the interest of the community, but it is bound to do so by force or law.
In that vision, the purpose of government becomes protecting those rights, those spheres of freedom, from outside interference (for instance by other individuals or other governments), which is itself a radical reformulation of what the state does and how it is constituted. Whereas the earliest states almost invariably represented themselves as possessing authority from a divine mandate and deep tradition, here the authority of the state arises from its function: protecting individual liberties. It is a short leap to democratic forms of government - if the legitimacy of the state arises from individuals, why shouldn't its policy do so as well? The idea of using written law to constrain the actions of magistrates and judges is an ancient one - absent a traditional governing framework, the jump to (written) constitutionalism is not a long one. The focus on the rule of law as a key component in protecting liberties from the exercise of arbitrary power is thus an outgrowth of the initial focus on liberties.
At the same time, democracy - 'liberal democracy' - is a fit for liberalism because no other form of government could be trusted to protect those key liberties. As we'll see, the track record of 'enlightened despotism' at actually delivering freedom, stability and prosperity for the people is far worse than the record of liberal democracy in doing so. And it should be little surprise: the despot or oligarchy has every incentive to infringe on the liberties of any people not represented in the political system. Only a democracy, in which everyone has a political voice, can be trusted to protect the liberties of everyone and even then only when the will of the majority is constrained by the rights of the minority.
But there is an important thing to note in this: liberalism does not begin with the governing side of this equation (the democracy, constitutionalism and rule of law). It begins with individual rights rooted in natural law and reasons back to find a governing order best equipped to protect those rights. That's important for two reasons: first, because democracies need not necessarily be liberal but more importantly because liberalism was designed to solve problems.
The Problems Liberalism Was Made to Solve
Liberalism emerged as a political philosophy at a particular historical moment. The temptation here is to conflate liberalism with democracy, rolling both ideas together as some sort of generic 'freedom' and attribute them to a 'western tradition' that stretches back to antiquity. Instead, while 17th and 18th century liberals - most importantly John Locke - reach back to classical ideas and language to frame their ideas (which also owe something to North European political customs stretching back into the Middle Ages), liberalism was very much a product of their early modern context.
In general, I think the key context here is actually the emergence of the modern administrative state in Europe combined with the religious fragmentation brought on by the Protestant Reformation. In the broader Mediterranean world (including Europe), prior to this period, you might have intensively governed states where the community (acting through the state) intervened a lot, but these tended, due to difficulties in communication and coordination to be small. The Greek polis actually makes a good example: individual citizens (politai) had few if any rights the community as a whole was bound to respect. The polis was free, in the sense that it was self-governing and the citizens were free in the sense they were not slaves, but they didn't have liberties in the way we understand. The Athenian demos - the people - could, famously, temporarily exile a politician for being unpopular (or too powerful) despite breaking no law, execute generals for losing battles (or even winning them) and philosophers for asking the wrong questions and being generally irritating. Likewise, property rights could be curtailed, as Greek poleis often compelled individual citizens (typically the rich) to provide state services at personal expense (called a liturgy), rather than a uniform system of taxation (such as Rome's land tax, the tributum). Athens was democratic, but not liberal.
Alternately, you might have very large states, which tended to delegate quite a lot of daily governance to local authorities and so rules and laws might differ quite a bit from one place to another. The Achaemenid Empire functioned this way, as did the early Roman Empire. It is, of course, striking that when later Roman Emperors tried to enforce a greater degree of unity on the empire, the result was actually fragmentation. But mass literacy, the printing press and bureaucracy made a new sort of government for this part of the world possible: a government that intensively governed a lot of people over a wide area. The result was the exposure of a much wider range of people to a lot more state power from a state that might differ quite a lot more from them. Absent local autonomy, the question of who ruled suddenly became extremely high stakes as rulers were in a position to try - and in the end, fail violently - to enforce their own uniformity.
On the continent, this produced the Wars of Religion (1522-c. 1700), reaching their bloody climax with the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). It is a struggle to communicate just how devastating these wars were. For many places in Europe, the Wars of Religion were, on a per-capita basis, more destructive than the World Wars (the Thirty Years War, for instance, killed about a third of the population of the Holy Roman Empire). And yet no one won. By 1650, it was clear no one had or could have the military power necessary to actually enforce religious unity in any one country, let alone all of them.
Meanwhile, England was going through the English Civil War (1642-1651, in three phases), the causes of which I think may be fairly described as complex, but which included the effort to enforce uniformity on the church in Britain (which provoked a revolt in Scotland) as well as the balance of power between the king and parliament. One thing which could not escape anyone at the time was how the winner-take-all nature of the struggle intensified its lurch to violence as both royalists and parliamentarians regarded disagreement as criminal (e.g. John Eliot's imprisonment in 1624, the Bill of Attainder against the Earl of Stafford in 1641 and then the effort to arrest the 'Five Members' in 1642). The Glorious Revolution (1688) was in turn explicitly about religious tensions and the supremacy of parliament, though of course it was far less violent than the Civil War that had proceeded it. I am, of course, greatly simplifying both of these, the point here is that questions of how to resolve the tension between increasingly strong states and the religious and political differences of the people they governed were very prominent in the 17th century.
Liberalism is designed to solve these problems by taking some of the key questions out of the realm of politics and instead placing them in what we may call the 'realm of liberty' - that is, of individual freedom. It is not an accident that some of John Locke's (1632-1704) first major works are on religious toleration and one of his key arguments is that trying to enforce religious uniformity causes more problems that it solves, a point that he could have observed in action through much of his early life. Locke goes further in the Second Treatise, taking it as a component of natural law that people have an individual right to life, liberty and property.
Via
Wikipedia, John Locke in 1697, the father of modern liberalism, though hardly the only liberal political thinker.
Now, Locke explains this notion by supposing that in a state of nature - that is, absent all of the complex social structures we've developed - this natural law (a concept we'll get back to in just a second) held sway and that states were only formed as a social contract by the ruled with the ruler, such that the state existed to protect those natural rights, with the subjects ceding a small portion of liberty (taxation, conscription, basic laws, etc.) in exchange for the protection of the lion's share of their natural rights. Now, as we've already noted, Locke is quite wrong about what humans are like in a state of nature and how early states formed. In early states and indeed even in complex non-state societies, the commons were generally reduced to fairly extreme subjugation with a sense, so far as we can tell, not that this was in exchange for some protection of rights, but because the aristocracy had some inherent right to do so on their own. Early states formed not to protect rights, but as 'violence machines' designed to buttress internal repression and external conquest.
That said, Locke is reaching for something ancient and that is the notion of natural law itself, a concept that in antiquity reached perhaps its fullest expression among the Romans (particularly Cicero), although it had antecedents in Greek philosophy. Natural law is the idea that there is a fundamental set of rules and rights which apply to all humans, in all places, at all times - a code against which human action may be judged with universal application. This is often justified on religious grounds as a code of conduct set down by God (or the gods), but it need not be: Cicero, while fully admitting the existence of divinities, argues that natural law instead is a product of the existence of reason and not a creation of the gods. Indeed, Cicero goes so far as to argue that natural law binds the gods too.
This is actually quite important because of its universalizing nature. Many ancient religions represented laws as handed down by the gods, but for polytheistic faiths where the gods were local and particular to a people or a place, those laws were particular to peoples and places too. A king, too, might make laws, but these bound only his subjects. In both cases, a people over the hill might well have different laws and crucially need not merit the protection of your laws. By contrast, Cicero imagines the ius naturale as applying to everyone; this even had expression in Roman law in the form of the ius gentium, a baseline law code that applied to all free persons. That said, as I discussed in the post on Cicero and natural law, his conception of it has limits and failings. On the limits, he imagines natural law primarily as a code that binds, rather than a set of rights that protect. And of course Cicero himself never fully absorbs the implications of his philosophy: a wealthy Roman slave-holder, it never occurs to Cicero that perhaps he daily violates the natural law by keeping people in bondage.
The other influence here that has to be noted is a tradition of independence and rights among the English and Scottish elite - mostly the nobility - going back to Magna Carta and even further to older ideas of the inherent dignity and independence of Big Men in non-state or early-state societies in North Europe. This also has a classical parallel, the Roman concept of libertas, which has two conjoined meanings: libertas is the absence of being enslaved, the state of being politically free (or freed) but also individual free from interference, by right rather than the indulgence of some well-meaning master. Libertas in this sense is invoked against the use of arbitrary state power (typically actions by magistrates) against individual citizens. In short, then there were things that the agents of the state could not do to a Roman citizen. The checks on state action - most of them associated with the tribunes (provocatio, auxilium and so on) - were in turn the institutions which created and guarded this sort of libertas. In that sense it matched up with the older North European sense of a right of the Big Men to be free from certain sorts of interference from a king.
I should note that both this North European 'freedom for Big Men' concept as well as Roman libertas are aristocratic rights, albeit the former more than the latter. Regular Roman citizens certainly could invoke libertas and sometimes do so, but the word was more often a rallying cry for the elite and the tyranny they invoked it against was the arbitrary rule of an individual over the Senate (a body of aristocrats) rather than over the Roman popular assemblies. In both cases, by tying the question to natural law, Locke is taking something that was a privilege of a few - of aristocrats or citizens - and broadening it out to everyone (though, of course, 'everyone' here will be read more narrowly than we do today).
That universalizing nature brought in through natural law brings in a value in liberalism that may have been, until now, conspicuous by its absence: equality. If everyone is equally subject to natural law (and that's what it means for something to be natural law) and that establishes rules and rights, then it becomes difficult to justify rigid classes and orders of people, hereditary nobles or established clergy with special privileges that mark them as better. Instead, liberals will insist, "all men are created equal," in the very particular sense that they share equally in the rights granted by natural law (and for the religious, thus created and sanctioned by "nature's God").
But notice how equality is a secondary value of this system, a derived value - a corollary, rather than a first principle. Liberalism, as an ideology, insists first on rights and second on the fundamental, universal natural state of those rights and only then as an unavoidable consequence, the fundamental equality of the people who have those rights. Which is to say, liberalism values equality in so much as it is necessary for liberty, but not as a value in and of itself in all of its forms, which is why liberalism is relatively tolerant of economic inequality.
Indeed, at some extreme point, the ends of liberty and equality must conflict: to produce perfect equality, a society would need to trample a lot of liberalism's core rights, not merely to property, but to speech, religion and expression too. We should not overstretch this idea: the point of outright conflict between those values is only at the extremes and just as no liberal democracy practices truly "unfettered capitalism" in today's world, so too no state is even seriously attempting to enforce true "equality of outcomes," so to speak. Equality and liberty are not opposites (indeed, most who hold to one value also value the other quite highly), but they exist in a sort of tension. In a quite real sense, social democracy, as practiced (for instance, by some European countries) is an effort to resolve this tension or at least to find a balancing point, as it turns out that a society can 'buy' quite a lot of equality before infringing seriously on liberalism's many liberties; pretty much all modern liberal democracies, including the United States, aim to strike some kind of balance in this regard.
In all of this we should understand Locke as looking to solve a problem created by modernity and reaching back to cultural values and ancient ideas (natural law and liberty) to do so and then positing (incorrectly) an idealized past in which this principle held sway for all, imagining that he was rediscovering when he and other liberal thinkers like him were, in fact, inventing it. Now of course England and Scotland, shortly to become Great Britain (to become the United Kingdom) have their own journey along the path of liberalism - in a few important ways, a swifter one than the United States - but this is a post about the United States for the Fourth of July, so we will now leave our British friends (but take their ideas) and bring them to North America.
Liberalism and the United States
All of this background - the classical precursors and influence, the early modern context, the 17th century thinkers - matters for the United States a great deal because this was the political philosophy 'on the shelf' when it came time to create a new country with a new form of government.
It is, I think, all too easy once again to miss the radicalism of this moment. In 1776 there were no governments founded on liberal ideas. There were a handful of European republics (the Old Swiss Confederacy and the Dutch Republic, most notably) which were pre-liberal in their structure and ideology; both continued to have a nobility in this period, for instance. But liberalism was still a new idea, slowly transforming Britain - a process very incomplete in 1776. The idea of founding a new country on the liberal notions that, "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" was radical in 1776 - indeed, so radical the men who wrote those words, signed their names, and pledged their "Lives [...] Fortunes and [...] sacred Honor" fell far, far short of putting their explosive ideas into full practice. Like most ideals, liberalism was only attained in halting, half-steps.
It was, among other things, a radical enough document to have its publication suppressed by various European monarchies for decades; the text of the thing was banned in Russia for eight decades and in Spain for nine. In asserting the fundamental equality of mankind, in denying the divine right of kings - who only, in the document, derive their just authority from the consent of the governed - the Declaration presented an explosive set of ideas. Indeed, a set of ideas that would explode in France not too many years later.
But these ideas were also going to be an important part of holding the new country together. The Thirteen Colonies preparing to fight for their newly independent lives against the British Empire were hardly homogeneous. After all, the territory of the colonies had been subject to not just British, but also French and Dutch colonial settlement, along with waves of immigrants from the German states and other parts of Europe. The southern states were mostly Anglican, in many cases with an established Church of England, but other protestant and reformed denominations had strong presences: Dutch Reformed (particularly around New York), Lutheranism in areas with German settlement, along with Quakers and Menonites in Pennsylvania, along with growing numbers of Baptists and Methodists. There were smaller but still significant numbers of Jewish and Catholic Americans too. Attempting to enforce cultural, religious or linguistic uniformity would have only led to the same kind of shattering wars Europe had experienced a century prior.
Liberalism was the answer: take all of those explosive issues and move them from the realm of politics to the realm of liberty to avoid ripping the new country apart in one sectarian war after another. This became an even more pressing issue, of course when it came time to contemplate moving from the weak and loose Articles of Confederation to a much stronger government under the Constitution.
Now it is common to point out that after its issuance, the Declaration of Independence and its opening statement of liberal values didn't really assume its current status as a nearly co-equal founding document with the Constitution until the Civil War, which is, so far as I can tell, true enough but misses the point. While the Constitution lacks overt statements of liberal principles, the Bill of Rights in particular stands as an effort to implement core liberal principles into the bedrock of American governance. They establish a series of what we might call 'realms of liberty' over certain aspects of life, removing certain things from either the exercise of arbitrary power or in some cases from politics (initially just at the Federal level, later from all politics) entirely.
I've commented before that the First Amendment's first two clauses are effectively the 'don't have a Thirty Years War' proviso of the Constitution, by assigning religion completely to the realm of liberty. The next four clauses neatly remove some of the key flashpoints in the lead up to the English Civil Wars: no arresting people for political opinions, speech statements or efforts to bring up grievances. Some key property rights - which remember, are at their foundation a limitation of communal claims to resources and labor - get protected in the Second (arms), Third (quartering), Fourth (searches and seizures) and Fifth (takings clause) Amendments. The Fifth Amendment effectively blocks something like Athenian liturgies or the expropriation of the property of political enemies. Indeed, so concerned is the Bill of Rights to create that large 'zone of liberty' that it explicitly clarifies that anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly say the federal government can do, it cannot do (Ninth and Tenth Amendments). Liberalism's system of liberties was designed to solve problems and solve problems they do!
Property rights are understandably a sticking point for many left-leaning folks, but they are core to the success of liberalism, because sharply limiting the communal claim on private property lowers the stakes of politics: losing an election cannot directly cost you your home and everything you own, for instance. Yes, policy can have indirect effects that make it easier or harder to, say, own a house (we should make it easier), but that's a far cry from a Bill of Attainder or a law restricting land ownership to a certain class. And absolutely, politics has not always been so 'low stakes' for all Americans - but that is, to be frank, because they were excluded from the benefits of liberalism, discriminated against by laws that were insufficiently liberal. If I want everyone to be secure in their person and possessions, the solution is not to abolish property rights, but to make sure they extend to everyone equally. As we'll see, the alternative to private ownership is typically not 'no one owns things' but rather the state owns things and you do not.
Of course both the Constitution and the Declaration, as documents of liberalism, contain in them serious defects, the most obvious being the institution of slavery and the exclusion of women. Both of these were clear breaks with the ideals of liberalism and recognized as such at the time (the former more than the latter, but note, for instance, Abigail Adams suggesting in 1776 that women too, ought not to be subject to laws they have no voice in). This is not shocking: few political ideologies are realized in their completeness at the outset and the journey to freer and more just social structures has been a long one. Notably, slavery and misogyny were not defects particular to the United States in 1789: most countries had some form of slavery and no state admitted women to pull political participation at that point. What was particular was that they represented betrayals of the principles that otherwise document: the crime was common, the hypocrisy was special. That is not an exoneration, but it is an important observation.
The American Civil War thus became a fundamentally liberal war, particularly by 1863, against a fundamentally illiberal movement. Indeed, liberal thinkers abroad (e.g. John Stuart Mill) recognized this fact. One thing that comes out quite strikingly in the letters, diaries and memoirs of the Civil War is the steadily growing commitment of the United States' cause not merely to the Union itself but to the fundamentally liberal goal of abolition - what begins as a whisper ends the war as a battle cry. One thing, I will note, that is very striking is how marked the impact of African American soldiers was on that attitude. Howell Cobb, one of the founders of the Confederacy, famously remarked that, "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Cobb couldn't conceive of slavery being wrong, but United States soldiers watched African Americans make very good soldiers and it very clearly accelerated their conclusion that, indeed, the whole theory of slavery was wrong. Lincoln added what was, in effect, a liberal war goal in September, 1862, but it was his address on the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg which transformed the war into a liberal crusade, one that, like the nation it fought to preserve was, "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
However, if it took the United States time to realize it was in a war for liberalism, it took the confederates no time at all to commit to a war to reject liberalism. Here, quite famously, is Alexander H. Stephens, Confederate Vice President, describing the constitution of his new country:
Those ideas [of the United States Constitution], however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
The Confederacy was thus not just a revolt against the United States but a revolt against liberalism. Indeed, it is hard in the ideology expressed here not to see a grim precursor of Nazi ideology.
Fortunately - and this will shortly become a theme - the economic dynamism of a liberal society gave the United States quite a few important advantages against the illiberal Confederacy, both in economic production and also in manpower. At the same time, the very "self-evident" nature of the liberal cause of the United States made it difficult - impossible, in the event - for the Confederacy to secure meaningful foreign support.
That was, of course, hardly the end of the United States' struggle to more realize the liberal values of its founding documents. The end of Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow was a setback for liberalism; the success of the Civil Rights movement was a success for it. The campaign for Women's Suffrage was, too, a fundamentally liberal one. I would argue likewise the campaign to extend legal protections and marriage rights to LGBT folks was a fundamentally liberal one: you may hold whatever moral views you like and say whatever you may about them (because those too, are essential liberties, particularly religious liberties), but the question of who can marry who (among consenting adults) was shifted from the realm of politics to the realm of liberty.
And this is the great success of liberalism as a governing ideology: by taking so much of life and moving it from the realm of politics to the realm of liberty, it makes it possible for a big, pluralistic, diverse, dynamic country like the United States (or indeed, almost any large democracy) to function effectively. The fact is we will all never see eye to eye on everything, but we don't have to so long as we respect each other's liberties. Which isn't the same as saying one has to give up on their morals: persuasion and evangelism remain open options in a liberal society, indeed more open than in any other. And in a sense, the good morals and character of the people, their values, matter in a liberal society more than any other as well; liberalism need not be libertine unless we make it so. So often illiberal movements spring from a sort of moral cowardice, a failure of confidence that one's ideas could win the contest of persuasion on a fair playing field, so one must resort to force or violence.
Which brings us neatly to:
Liberalism At War
The First World War marks a key turning point in this narrative. While liberalism had advanced (in fits and starts) in Europe and the Americas prior to 1914, most of the great powers remained decidedly traditional regimes. They had survived the great liberal surge of 1848 and continued to predicate their legitimacy on the old ruling authorities of tradition, church and crown. The First World War not only broke all of the true ruling monarchies of the European Great Powers, it also discredited them, demonstrating that these traditional forms of government were not up to the task of modern war, while the liberal governments of Europe were. That is a sharper blow than you might at first guess, because the legitimacy of kings and aristocrats was predicted, often explicitly, on the ability to prevail in war and provide political stability. They had proven able to do neither, while the supposedly weak and decadent liberal powers stood triumphant. The blow was fatal.
Via
Wikipedia, a War Bonds poster from the First World War, "Weapons for Liberty," featuring Columbia as the personification of the United States (rather than Uncle Sam, who comes to predominate a bit later).
Of course as a result, the 20th century was in many ways defined by a (messy, confused and morally compromised) struggle between liberalism - itself once a radical idea but now associated with the status quo - and new radical alternatives to both liberal and traditional government, most notably fascism and communism.
And I want to push back, for a moment, on some of Left-mythology about the early stages of this conflict, where one often hears it asserted as self-evident truth that the liberals failed to resist the fascists, leaving the conflict to the Soviet Union. Such a position was ideologically necessary for the USSR because the state ideology insisted that fascism was the logical end-state of capitalism (and thus liberalism), but ideological necessity does not make truth. Part of the issue with his line in the United States is a conflation with the traditional American center-right (free-market liberals) with the Weimar right-wing - figures like Franz von Papen - who were, in fact, monarchist anti-liberals, so when someone says "Hitler used an alliance with the conservatives to seize power" they are leaving out that Weimar's conservatives were ideology very different from the traditional GOP or Tories. Weimar Germany simply lacked a strong enough liberal political movement to do much either way, while Moscow famously directed the Communist Party in Germany to focus on destroying the Social Democrats, rather than the Nazis in the run-up to Hitler's seizure of power.
In practice, of course, it was the liberal states of Europe which went to war to attempt to stop Hitler's conquest of Poland, while the USSR joined WWII as an ally of Nazi Germany. And, indeed, from 1939 right up to the day before Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union supplied Hitler's war machine with the raw materials it desperately needed to prosecute its war against democratic Europe. That does not, of course, change the fact that once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it was Soviet troops that did most of the fighting and dying in Europe; this is certainly true. But depicting the liberal democracies as haplessly standing by is a distortion. Before it was directly attacked, the United States embarked on an increasingly ambitious program of supplying and eventually effectively funding the effort of just about anyone who would fight the Axis, at the very time the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany's most important trade partner. Britain was still fighting their lonely war all against Nazism when Stalin was Hitler's best supplier. When the time came to fight, the liberals fought.
Via
Wikipedia, a U.S. war poster from the Second World War, extolling the English (and British more broadly) as partners in a fight for freedom.
For the United States, World War II became itself a war for liberal principles. Frank Capra's Why We Fight (1942-1945), America's answer to the Nazi Triumph des Willens (1935) explicitly adopts this framing, presenting the war as an effort to defend the 'free world' from a 'slave world' defined by Nazi, fascist and imperial Japanese tyranny. Eisenhower's D-Day speech echoes the same ideas, that "The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you...you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world." Of course there was hypocrisy in this: Britain was a colonial empire, the United States certainly had some colonies of its own and Jim Crow and other forms of racial discrimination still cruelly restricted the liberties of many Americans. But the United States had nothing like the extermination and slave labor camps of Nazi Germany (or, for that matter, the slave labor camps of the Soviet Union). Perhaps even more importantly, the western allies at least committed to the ideals of liberalism - however imperfectly realized - whereas the Axis actively opposed them (as did the USSR).
It is an easy and careless mistake to assume that the incomplete realization of the principles of liberal societies makes them the same as anti-liberal societies rejecting those principles entirely. Like the American Civil War, World War II was a liberal war, a war for liberalism against anti-liberal regimes and ideologies.
Of course the Second World War's ideological contest was follows by the Cold War's ideological contest, between governments founded on liberal ideals (even though they often fell short of them) and governments founded on Marxist ideals (which, I think it is worth noting, they fell short of too). In the end, the triumph of liberalism in that contest was unmistakable. Even still putatively communist regimes like the People's Republic of China tried to reform their economies along more liberal lines (while not reforming their political systems), a point we'll come back to in a moment, but also an obvious admission of defeat.
Liberalism and Its Discontents
This makes a good moment to assess the track record of liberalism from the emergence of the first liberal state (arguably in 1789) to the present. Liberalism, after all, was supposed to solve problems. Did it?
And compared to other political systems liberalism has been fantastically successful. Gauging national success is always a bit tricky, because there are many metrics across which it can be measured. In terms of the overall quality of life, something like the Human Development Index provides a cross-section of life expectancy, education and access to economic resources. Here the performance of liberal governments is astounding. Keep in mind, liberal democracies have never made up even half of the world's countries by either by number of states or population. Yet of the top 30 states and territories by HDI, 26 of them are clearly liberal democracies - the exceptions being a tiny city-state (Singapore), a city-territory (Hong Kong), a small petro-state (the UAE) and then the giant snarl of a question that is Israel, which we needn't and won't get into here (or in the comments).
One may, of course, argue causation - that it is rich countries which are liberal, rather than liberalism that makes a country rich (or alternately that rich liberal countries are only so because they held large illiberal empires), but here we have some interesting case experiments. Germany and Japan were both shorn of the empires and bombed into ruin before having liberal governments effectively imposed upon them; they are now the third and fourth largest economies. And of course the German example is even more instructive because after the ruin, the country was split in half, with one half getting a liberal government and the other half an anti-liberal communist one and the difference in economic performance was so vast that decades of narrowing under a united, liberal and democratic Germany have still left East Germany somewhat behind. Likewise, while the roots of rapid economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan date before they adopted truly liberal and democratic political systems, it is after that political shift (in c. 1987 for both) that their economic growth takes off.
Liberalism has proven a better system for providing a high standard of living to the people than any other thus far, particularly given that in nearly all liberal democracies, the free markets of liberalism are paired with social programs for the poorest, funded out of the vast economic productivity of the dynamic sort of economies liberalism creates.
Liberal governments are also generally extremely stable, though the messiness of their day-to-day politics often obscures this. The United States has been ticking along under a single constitution for 235 years, slowly moving closer and closer to realizing the liberal ideals of its foundation. The United Kingdom is more stable than this. Indeed, liberal democracies are so stable it remains unclear if a 'consolidated' liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated absent external conquest, as every clear example of internal 'democratic backsliding' has occurred in young and incomplete liberal democracies. One of the great lies of authoritarian states is that the strongman-ruler is necessary to deliver stability as compared to the messiness of democracy, but as demonstrated in WWI and ever since, the liberal democracies are actually more stable under pressure.
Liberal governments are also generally quite good at providing security for their people. Their highly productive economies tends to mean that even relatively small liberal states have the potential to be militarily formidable, while the confluence of interests tends to naturally push liberal democracies into a powerful coalition of rich-and-free countries that provides tremendous mutual security. Liberal democracies tend to win their wars, especially defensive ones; the wars they lose tend to be smaller wars of distant foreign intervention, for which their voters have less tolerance precisely because the security risk in such wars is much lower. There is an irony that precisely because liberal democracies tend to have a lot of internal strength, they don't feel the need to engage in a lot of the legitimacy-building showing off that autocratic regimes do.
At the same time, over the last two centuries and change, one autocratic regime after another has assumed that liberal 'nations of shopkeepers' with their diverse 'mongrel' populations would prove weak in war because they did not conform to the autocratic vision of false strength. Go look for them now.
In short: liberalism works.
Which doesn't mean that liberalism doesn't have its challenges and discontents. Indeed, the tide of liberal expansion that began in the 1980s as the USSR shuddered and then collapsed has begun to flow out again. Most liberal democracies now have openly anti-liberal parties or political movements, often with distressing strength.
I don't think this should necessarily surprise us. After all, contrary to John Locke, liberalism is not some innate impulse that we have - our natural rights may be inherent in our being, but the ideology of extending those rights to all is not. For most of our existence, humans lived in relatively small, close-knit communities that were effectively totalitarian; the lives they lived may have been brightened by the community, but they were also poor, short and full of misery. By contrast, the dynamic and pluralistic nature of liberal societies can be alienating (even as it enables us to live rich, full lives), as it is in a sense, alien to us. But of course education, reading, medicine, and technology are all equally alien to our primitive natures, things we must learn rather than grasping inherently. Alien here does not mean bad.
In our current world, we also see illiberal regimes attempting to present an ideological challenge to liberalism and some people from liberal societies are wont to fall prey to these visions, usually because these new authoritarians profess to hate the people they hate. But the actual performance of these new authoritarian regimes is unimpressive and their promises are lies. After years of repression and military investment, Russia's personalist authoritarian model cannot move faster than a snail's pace across Ukraine, a country with a fourth of its population and a tenth of its GDP. Hungary's self-proclaimed 'illiberal democracy' is one of the worst-performing economies in Europe.
For a time, the economic growth of the People's Republic of China, bolstered by its massive population and substantial resources, was the counter to this narrative leading to talk of a 'Chinese model' of authoritarian economic success. However the Chinese economy has begun to struggle precisely because the lack of liberalism in the political sector has created a government unwilling or incapable of adapting to changes in the global economy and China's new place in them. Instead, China appears in danger of stalling out as a middle-income country, with a purchasing-power adjusted per-capita GDP today of just $25,000, a middle-of-the-pack figure that would be embarrassing for almost any major liberal democracy, plus a looming demographic crisis causes in part by China's illiberal policies (and of course, which China cannot even partially ameliorate with immigration because of, wait for it, illiberal policies). Instead, much of China's vast talent remains trapped behind a stifling hukou household registration system and an increasingly closed oligarchy walling itself off behind state-controlled schools tied to those registrations.
So while there are many people in today's liberal democracies who are tempted by this or that form of illiberalism, liberalism today doesn't so much face challenges as it faces cautionary tales, sometimes shrouded in just enough lies and propaganda to seem appealing at first glance. Instead, the greatest political strain on most liberal democracies is the same one: vast hosts of hopeful people clamoring desperately to get out of their illiberal home countries into liberal societies where they know they can be free, prosperous and secure.
Of course all of this comes back to the United States. As imperfect as it was, the United States was founded as the world's first liberal country and - with some notable exceptions - for most of its history, American politics has consisted of debates within liberalism (so much so that the definition of the word could drift precisely because defining an American politician as 'liberal' in the old meaning didn't much matter). Indeed, in this sense we're using here, nearly every major presidential candidate in my lifetime was fundamentally committed to liberalism, however imperfectly implemented. Ronald Reagan could speak of the beauty of liberty and immigration, Barack Obama on the value of free markets and free trade, George W. Bush on the importance of religious pluralism. Liberal values were the given foundation from which other arguments proceeded.
But of course you all saw the word 'nearly' there and have guessed where I am going. But before someone of you get angry, let me ask - when I wrote nearly, why did you already know who I meant?
Because he promises to be dictator (for a day; he says - because how many dictators left after one day?). Because he amplifies calls for idea of military tribunals to prosecute political opponents for speech. Because he suggests that he could round up large numbers of immigrants using the military in violation of the laws because "these aren't civilians." Because he used a grab bag of federal law enforcement agencies to violently clear a peaceful protest so he could have a photo-op. Because the president of the Heritage Foundation, the leading pro-Trump think tank, is promising a "second American Revolution" (though the Trump campaign, perhaps realizing this rhetoric was a bit too honest incendiary, backed away from it). Because he openly aligns with anti-liberal political movements abroad. Because he riled up his supporters to use force to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
Whatever you may think of this fellow or of his opponent, do not tell me that this fellow speaks from within the tradition of liberalism. He does not. Perhaps some of his supporters do, or imagine he does, but he does not.
And what I hope to have shown here, as a historian, is both that liberalism was created to solve very real problems and that liberalism works. Perhaps tomorrow we will devise another, better system of government than liberal democracy, but we haven't done so yet. A liberal political order, buttressed by democratic governing institutions, is the only system that reliably delivers the opportunity for the 'good life' - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Consequently, my opinion on everything else, on marginal tax rates, trade policy, defense spending, environmental regulation, and so on - and I have strong opinions about at least some of those things! - come second to ensuring the United States remains within the tradition of liberalism.
Because outside of that tradition is a wasteland of oppressive, authoritarian regimes, endless sectarian wars and economic stagnation. And perhaps even more importantly, a liberal society which leaves choice to the individual, provides the greatest opportunity of any for dignity, virtue and honor, because without choice, without liberty, our actions cannot express any of these.
I do not think that the United States is one election away from collapse; indeed that sort of idiotic hyperbolic panic is far too often used to justify the very illiberalism that concerns me. The United States has survived lawless populists before. At the same time, elections matter, especially in the long term as one public choice mounts on another. Freedom can go backwards, liberties can be curtailed, as they were at the end of Reconstruction - liberties delayed by nearly a century.
Liberalism is the American tradition: it has graced our best virtues, motivated our most righteous victories, illuminated our deepest flaws, animated our greatest rhetoric, elevated our finest documents; it has defined our country. It is a tradition we now share, of course, with a great many good friends abroad, because liberty is a thing which grows stronger when shared and weaker when hoarded. And whatever tribulations, economic hardships, political headwinds, frustrations and sincere differences we have, we should not surrender it to any man who claims that 'he alone can fix it,' if only we tender some of our liberties (or some of our neighbor's liberties) first.
It is rather, as Lincoln reminds, for us to be here dedicated to the preservation of that government of the people, by the people and for the people, the one conceived in liberty. It is for us to assert again and again, the self-evidence of these truths we hold, to guard the unalienable Rights of our neighbors and to preserve the liberal form of government which in turn ensures the Life, Liberty and Happiness of us and our posterity.
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