The Essence of American Liberalism

“Liberalism” is a term with a long history, dating at least from the Enlightenment, and which has
accumulated numerous meanings along the way. In the United States today, liberalism has a
distinct meaning and a distinct spirit. We can try to pin down American liberalism by its
policies—say, by enumerating the policies and politics of the Democratic Party.

I have always found this analysis deeply unsatisfying. After all, the conservative camp can point
to concrete principles on which it bases its political economy: chiefly the maximization of
freedom, especially in the form of immediate, individual liberty (whether it succeeds is another
question). What are the principles and philosophy of American liberal political economy? What
is its essence?

The Technocratic Consequentialists

In 2005, Jonathan Chait at The New Republic posed an illustrative thought experiment:
Imagine that God were to appear on Earth for the unlikely purpose of settling, once and for all,
our disputes over economic policy. And suppose that, to my enormous surprise, he announced
that every empirical claim advanced by conservatives was correct. Cutting taxes produces such
great economic growth that even the poor benefit. Privatizing or eliminating social
programs…will cause the elderly to save more money and enjoy higher living standards. …
Suppose that God presented these conclusions so convincingly — if his stature alone did not
suffice — that everybody immediately accepted them as truth.

How would liberals respond? No doubt by rethinking and abandoning nearly all their long-held
positions. … It may be hard to imagine liberals advocating capital gains tax cuts as a way to lift
up the working stiff. But that’s just because there’s no evidence to show they do. If the evidence
were to change, so would the liberal mindset.

Tony Blair, the now-retired leading figure of the U.K.’s neoliberal “New Labour” brand and a
natural parallel to Clinton-Obama “New Democrats”, makes the point more succinctly: “What
matters is what works.”

But what if God did the opposite, coming out in favor of heightened taxes, regulations, and
social programs? Would conservatives change their minds? Chait continues,

Some certainly would, but a great many would not…conservatism, unlike liberalism, overlays a
deeper set of philosophical principles. Conservatives believe that big government impinges
upon freedom. They may also believe that big government imposes large costs on the
economy. But, for a true conservative, whatever ends they think smaller government may bring
about…are almost beside the point. As Milton Friedman wrote, “[F]reedom in economic
arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an
end in itself.”
Though perhaps not all of us would bet on conservatives defying the word of God, the exercise
highlights something most Americans, of all political stripes, have long understood: the deeply
tenacious, deontological nature of the conservative worldview. In stark contrast, the liberal
mindset is focused on the outcomes and even specific metrics — it is consequentialist, utilitarian.

This consequentialist tendency immediately informs the kinds of solutions that are proposed; on
the whole, liberal policy discussions are characterized by technocracy—namely that if we
merely optimize our processes enough, everyone will be properly served. Capitalism can be
made to work for the many, if market regulations are designed with the right incentive structures
and governments armed with the proper Keynesian tools. Immigration should be expanded
because it boosts the economy. To counter the morally bankrupt corporatism of Wall Street,
encourage the formation of socially-conscious corporations in California.

Of course, technocracy is not the only basic tenet of liberalism. It also places a premium on
equality, especially in the cultural and political spheres, and to a lesser extent in the economic.
This is a virtue, I believe, that is broadly shared across the left-to-center half of the political
landscape.

Another, related essence of modern liberalism is empathy — understanding all points of view.

We can see it in the way liberals reacted to the election of Donald Trump by vowing to learn
about and listen to Americans between the coastal regions, some going so far as to take trips
through the heartland, Humans of New York-style, to talk to Trump voters firsthand.

But notice that this, too, is a special case of the liberal technocratic tendency. When the liberal
worldview is found to be deficient — for example, unable to convince voters to accept its
presidential candidate over a right-wing extremist buffoon — its first reaction is that the fault lies
not with the ideology of liberalism itself, but a lack of data about other people and groups, which
the coastal elites ostensibly forgot to account for in the past 40 years of policy and in the 2016
campaign apparatus.

Critique from the Left

What could possibly be a leftist critique of technocratic consequentialism? Is the goal not to
improve people’s everyday lives?

Of course the goal is to improve people’s lives. But hidden within the “what works” framework is
a slew of unspecified assumptions and decisions. We must ask: For whom does a proposed
policy “work”? Which metric will it attempt to optimize? Who chose it? What was the basis for
their authority? We should never lose sight of the fact that politics is about power; by dismissing
major questions of ideology and control, technocracy robs politics of its substance, confining us
to minor tweaks at best. Worse yet, it leaves in place, and sometimes solidifies, the problematic
power structures.
The distinction is not merely an abstract one; different answers to these unspoken questions
give rise to radically different policy visions. The socialist left does not propose to regulate
corporations, but to abolish them; to celebrate immigration on the basis of the human right of
free movement, not as a source of in-demand skill sets; to provide housing and health care as
social rights, not commodities for profit; to put workers directly in charge of their workplaces, not
timidly redistribute the profits taken from them by capital. All of these stances fall out naturally
from an ideological framework that puts people first, and develops a solution that “works” for
them. And all of these stances seek to abolish corrupt power structures, rather than invent
clever technical solutions to ameliorate symptoms.

Liberals and Leftists

Given the stark differences between the radical left and the liberal center, but also our common
horror at the rise of the fascist right, how should the left interact with liberalism? I believe the
answer is two-fold: we should battle and defeat the ideology of liberalism, but convince—on the
basis of morality, rationality, and emotional outrage—liberals (and others) towards a radical
vision for society.

The Ideology
Self-identified liberals often lament the corruption of Democratic Party leaders at the hands of
corporate influence. If we can elect representatives who are true to liberal values, they reason,
our democracy and economy will be saved.

Unfortunately, the reality is much worse than this. It is not the particular implementation of
liberalism that has to go, but liberal ideology itself. What can explain the consistent parity (and
often even superiority) of Democratic Party corporate campaign funding compared to
Republican campaigns, except that the donor class — that capital — is content to see Democrats
in power? After all, Democrats claim to fight oligarchy, yet generally do not name the oligarchs,
and virtually never identify the systems that bred them. There is no threat that under a
Democratic president or legislature, we might see the fundamentals of our political economy
upended.

More broadly, American liberalism is designed to neutralize leftism, by dismissing political

antagonisms as unnecessary. It calls for a balance between the “rights” and “perspectives” of
renters and landowners, workers and capitalists, and so on—as if there is some unfortunate
misunderstanding, in each case, between the two sides, which can be resolved by enlightened
policy or taxation schemes. But just as the interests of the serfs and feudal lords or the slaves
and plantation masters could not be reconciled, these dreams of harmonious compromise today
should be treated as morally repulsive and materially impossible. In this sense, the liberal center
is arguably more dangerous to the left than the right is—if nothing else, the latter at least
declares class war openly, while the former proposes whittling down the political realm until the
body politic no longer recognizes class interests.
Interestingly, some liberals (and their international counterparts) are well aware of this
irreconcilability. John McTernan, a member of the neoliberal wing of the U.K. Labour Party, says
of current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn:

For Jeremy Corbyn, [Conservative Prime Minister] Theresa May is not his political
enemy. She’s his political opponent. His political enemies are in the Labour Party: people like
me, people like Tony Blair; it’s Blairism.

Leftists in the U.S. should take a cue from McTernan’s open declaration of animosity. If we
recognize that the pitfall of liberalism is its belief in a politics without antagonism, we must
conclude that our own politics ought to look beyond compromise and coalition with liberal
politicians. To build a new left that can capitalize on the resurgence of interest in socialist and
social-democratic ideas in the U.S. today, we must convincingly defeat liberal ideology.

A Call to Liberals (and Conservatives)

At the same time that we do battle with ideology, we should recognize that people are capable
of change. Despite decades of steeping in a false liberal-conservative duopoly, there is much
we can do to change people’s minds and shift public discourse.

For example, consider the liberal value of equality. Shall we not apply this principle to our
material conditions as well as our cultural institutions? What would an economy — or perhaps
more concretely, your workplace — look like, if it were built on principles of equality from the
ground up?

And take the conservative value of individual freedom. What could be less free than spending
the majority of your waking adult hours in a dictatorship, which we happen to call a
“corporation”? If democracy means anything, it must mean democracy not only in the political
sphere, but every day at work. More broadly, can a person really be free if they do not have a
home, or access to decent health care?

Asking questions like these, and encouraging others around us to explore them in the context of
their own lives, can do much to change the very terms with which we debate politics.