Something is wrong with America. A generation after the Great Republic vanquished the Soviet Union and established the superiority of constitutional self-government and free markets, voices in the public square lament domestic threats to “our democracy,” and it has become commonplace to list the failures of the globalized American economic system. Our institutions, once trusted, are held in disdain. Our culture, once optimistic and innovative, is now coarse, decadent, and dark.
Some argue that liberalism—broadly understood as a commitment to individual freedom as the highest political good—is the root problem. One might as well argue that the trouble with Buddhism is the Noble Eightfold Path. The United States was founded on the principle of individual liberty. Abraham Lincoln saw America as a covenantal nation, a kind of divine project patterned after ancient Israel (as Meir Soloveichik has argued in these pages). True, and the covenant has been a liberal one, the aspiration to honor the equal freedom of all citizens.
Yet today’s critics of liberalism are not entirely wrong. The liberalism we have today—call it “open liberalism”—increasingly afflicts us with its excesses. It is marked by a dogmatic rejection of all boundaries, material or social, particularly inherited ones. It presses upon us a novel notion of the good life as a life of perpetual choice and fluidity across all conceivable areas, private and public, from cradle to grave.
Open liberalism has some genuine achievements to its credit. In its early years in the 1980s, it spurred economic growth, unleashed technological creativity, and helped the West win the Cold War. Today, however, this late-stage liberalism is breaking its promises to millions of people. Many reject altogether what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “liquid modernity” it promotes. Others find open liberalism’s ideal of the good life alluring but discover that it is out of reach except in the fantasy world of social media. And an alarming number find, as they attain the desired state of perpetual motion and change, that it entails depression, anxiety, and permanent medication.
One sympathizes with the social media “extremists” who entertain dreams of a radically different social order. Open liberalism’s paradoxical imposition of permanent and comprehensive choice means that citizens who might want to commit permanently to family, profession, community, religion, and even friends find it difficult to do so. Open liberalism has culminated in enforced fluidity. It has dissolved the authorities upon which institutions such as marriage depend for their coherence and their ability to command loyalty.
Yet we need to avoid a myopic presentism. Endless choice is not the only form liberalism has taken in the past. Like the people of Israel, with whom God made a series of covenants, first with Abraham, then through Moses, and again with King David, America’s liberalism has had many faces, many phases. Our present collective distempers and diseases are not caused by a timeless “liberalism” that can be adumbrated in a graduate seminar in political philosophy. The life of a nation cannot be reduced to theories and their implications. Rather, we are living in a time when a particular expression of the liberal drive toward greater freedom (an always nebulous but nevertheless engaging and inspiring goal for Americans) has become dysfunctional. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it has happened in the past with other forms of liberalism, and liberalism has adapted and persisted.
Instead of entertaining dreams of an entirely new regime, we need to recognize that past times of social and political turmoil have motivated a revision and reorientation of America’s covenant of equal freedom. This pattern strongly suggests that our future will not be “post-liberal,” and certainly not “anti-liberal.” We are on the cusp of a new phase of liberalism’s promise, one more adequate to our times. The future consensus will assemble around pluralistic liberalism, a liberalism that embodies a paradox different from the compulsory fluidity of open liberalism: the paradox that freedom can entail choosing to stop choosing.
America came by its liberalism honestly. Our mother country, Great Britain, had as one of its basic principles equality before the law. Thousands of settlers in British North America were members of dissenting religious groups whose existence depended on respect for liberty of conscience. No surprise, then, that the Declaration of Independence announces at the outset that all men have an equal right to liberty, and then proceeds to arraign George III for trampling on that right in various ways. The Constitution declares as one of its purposes the securing of “the blessings of liberty.” The Bill of Rights enumerates claims individuals have over against the state.
As every American schoolchild no longer knows, the commitment to individual freedom originated in the struggle for religious toleration in early modern Europe. In the sixteenth century, princes and cities in the Holy Roman Empire gained the permanent right to establish either Catholic or Protestant Christianity as they saw fit. Within those states and cities, rulers could still persecute dissenters. Rulers did this because they believed that religious uniformity was a matter of life and death for a political community. The medieval formula religio vinculum societatis (“religion is the bond of society”) implied that the elevation of individual conscience was dangerous to public order.
It was the young Dutch Republic that first took a chance on accommodating individual conscience. Born in a revolt against the Spanish Empire that began in 1568, the Netherlands soon became a commercial powerhouse, to the bafflement of its larger neighbors. The Dutch had an established church—a Reformed one—but only a minority of citizens belonged to it. Merchants in Amsterdam and elsewhere pressed for toleration of Lutherans, Baptists, and other dissenting Protestants who had begun to immigrate to the country. The Reformed clergy and the merchants struck a bargain: Anyone who pledged allegiance to the republic—still vulnerable to invasion by Spain or France—could worship openly and even construct church buildings.
The Netherlands attracted talented immigrants, and its “Golden Century” got under way. As the spectacular commercial success of the Dutch attracted wide notice, the notion spread abroad that toleration was not only safe but even superior to enforced religious conformity. English Separatists (Pilgrims) settled in Amsterdam before sailing to North America to found the Plymouth colony. The Pilgrims (unlike their Puritan counterparts) allowed Quakers and other religious minorities to settle in their midst. Decades later the philosopher John Locke spent five years of exile in the Netherlands, where he composed his famous Letter concerning Toleration. For Locke and most other Protestants, Catholicism was a bridge too far, as it appeared to entail loyalty to a foreign prince (the pope). But the North American colony of Maryland, founded by the Catholic Lord Baltimore in 1629, officially tolerated even the Church of Rome. By the time of the American Revolution, individual freedom had extended far beyond religion, encompassing rights over against the state in the areas of speech, the press, assembly, and criminal trials.
The liberalism of the American covenant evolved over time. It went through several cycles or stages, wherein its core commitment to individual freedom remained in place even as proponents of liberalism changed their conceptions of who qualified as a rights-bearing individual and what constituted freedom. In new social, political, and material circumstances, liberals began to see that not everyone was free after all. People relegated to subordinate status came to be accepted as full individuals and citizens. Furthermore, restrictions that had been taken for granted as natural, even good, came to be seen as oppressions to be overcome. It is important to note that throughout these changes, liberals asked the same fundamental question: What, in our time, is the chief threat to individual freedom? Proposals were made as to what new laws and institutions, what modes of power, were needed to tame the threat, which is not the same in every era. Over time, therefore, a continuous concern for liberty gave rise to new, reconstituted forms of liberalism.
The cycle has been repeated three times. The first stage, which shaped the American Founding, was classical liberalism. First-stage liberals considered the chief threat to individual liberty to be the despotic state, the old regime that married altar and throne. Classical liberalism’s remedy was to reduce the scope of the state, to get it out of the way of individuals to the extent possible. Locke was an early theoretical source, to be joined in the eighteenth century by French philosophes such as Condorcet, and by Adam Smith and other British thinkers. American statesmen Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played roles, as did the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Classical liberals attacked the old regime not only for restricting religious practice, but also for interfering with commerce, granting monopolies, and otherwise acting to keep landed interests and favorites of the crown in power at the expense of everyone else. Their goal was to free the individual from these shackles by shrinking the state and making it more responsive to individuals and their desires to make their own way in the world.
Classical liberalism never dominated the European continent, but it formed the modern Anglo-American world. Englishmen defined their constitutional monarchy in contrast to the absolute monarchism they saw on the Continent. The U.S. Constitution was a classical liberal document, and the freedom that Americans enjoyed to self-organize struck Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s as contrasting profoundly with what he saw in his native France.
First-stage liberalism had its flaws and hypocrisies, to be sure. Those who did not count as individuals, such as Indians and blacks, could be treated brutally. Free-Soilers such as Lincoln showed classical liberalism’s potential for development by using it to argue against slavery. But for all its limitations, classical liberalism did what it was supposed to do, increasing personal freedom and, with it, social and geographic mobility, technological development, and wealth.
The culture of classical liberalism was that of the materially independent man—the farmer, the entrepreneur, the factory owner, always free to form a household, to move, to innovate, and to generate wealth. He was free to associate with his fellows, to found, join, or leave churches, clubs, schools, political parties, as he liked. The state’s job was not to regulate these activities, but to enable them by protecting personal liberty. It was classical liberalism that produced the America depicted by Tocqueville—an America of the strong voluntary associations that were the “schools of democracy.”
Classical liberalism eventually gave way to second-stage liberalism, or welfare liberalism. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century midwifed the change. Anti-liberals such as Karl Marx knew that the coming of mechanized production not only increased humanity’s power over nature but also created a vast new social group, the working class, and a new kind of individual, the factory worker. These workers were not in the situation classical liberalism envisaged. Technically, workers were individuals freely selling their labor. The solitary worker, however, was at a decided disadvantage over against the owners of capital, who offered employment. Owners often exploited their greater power, requiring long hours in dangerous workplaces for low wages.
The concentration of discontented workers in cities and towns gave rise to the “social question.” Labor unions and socialist parties developed, demanding the right to bargain collectively with employers. Their cause was refined by professors and advocated by journalists. In Britain, T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse argued that classical liberalism was no longer making men free. It was in fact preventing collective action and thus barring millions of men from what they needed in order to be free: stable employment at fair wages. According to welfare liberals, the average worker in 1900 was no freer than a serf in 1200 had been.
In this new world, liberals no longer identified the state as the greatest threat to liberty. The new danger was unfettered capital. The state was now freedom’s ally. Tamed by classical liberalism, government power could be used to tame capital. Britain’s new Labour Party and American Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt sought to employ political tools to shift wealth and power from capital to labor. Welfare liberals had a fight on their hands, and post–World War I governments shifted back toward classical liberalism. Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl founded The New Republic in 1914 to make the case for welfare liberalism. In that magazine in 1929 to 1930, John Dewey published a six-part series, “Individualism: Old and New,” arguing that in the new industrial society of the twentieth century, government had to shape economic and social conditions so as to promote individual liberty for all citizens.
It took the Great Depression of the 1930s to catapult welfare liberalism to the heights of power. Franklin Roosevelt carried out the New Deal, a set of experiments in second-stage liberalism. As he said in the 1932 presidential campaign, “Under the [Declaration of Independence] rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.” The liberal state was to regulate the economy and redistribute wealth. In other industrial democracies, welfare liberalism took hold in the 1940s and went still further, supplying free healthcare and other social benefits to all citizens. A web of international institutions regulating trade and finance was set up after World War II to help governments coordinate their economic policies.
Like its classical ancestor, welfare liberalism had a particular culture—one of conformity and security. It encouraged stability and clear roles. The era of welfare liberalism was a time of large, trusted institutions. Governmental policy sought the full employment of adult males. A glance at an American high school yearbook from 1955 can be startling today: The boys sport the same short hair and wear jackets and ties; the girls’ hair is bobbed and bears signs of overnight curlers; all look quite a bit older than high schoolers do today. These are the faces of welfare liberalism.
The older liberalisms are still around, in the commitments and proposals of think tanks, scattered academics and intellectuals, and small political parties and movements in many democracies. But third-stage, open liberalism began to take the field in the late 1970s. It held that welfare liberalism had clotted the economy with inefficient and burdensome regulations, weighed down entrepreneurs with onerous taxes, and failed to encourage innovation. Deregulation became the overriding imperative, not just in economic affairs but in culture. The widespread adoption of no-fault divorce in the 1970s corresponded with the first stages of economic deregulation.
The culture of open liberalism dominates today. It is sharply different from the cultures of its predecessors. Its notion of the good life is captured by Christian Smith: The ideal is to become “autonomous, self-directing, individual agents (who should be) out to live their lives as they personally so desire . . .”
First to go was the conformism of welfare liberalism. Romantic nonconformism had always had a presence in liberalism, but it had been restricted to the elites who could afford it. The German liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt had written in 1792 that freedom’s purpose was “individuality of power and development.” Two generations later, John Stuart Mill lamented his country’s failure to enact Humboldt’s vision of “experiments in living.” The Beat movement of the 1950s embodied this bohemian discontent. Only in the 1960s did nonconformism gather enough force to penetrate the middle class and go mainstream. In 1962, as welfare liberalism neared its peak, the Students for a Democratic Society issued the Port Huron Statement condemning American conventionality. Men “have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity,” the students declared, and “the goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”
Most today have forgotten the great enmity that subsisted between New Left and Old Left in the 1960s. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse called for a new political coalition, one not of the working class but of “outcasts and outsiders,” and student activists were to be the vanguard. The new movement pitted itself against the establishment—which included labor unions, the police, and other institutions of welfare liberalism. As one student put it: “As ‘middle-class’ students we learned that this was the working class—the ‘racist, insensitive people.’”
The cultural clash boiled over in Chicago during the summer of 1968, when thousands of Yippies, hippies, antiwar and civil rights activists, communists, and others came to town to disrupt the Democratic National Convention. Mayor Richard Daley, an exemplary welfare liberal, unleashed on the protestors the police and National Guard, many of whom had fought in Vietnam or had relatives who were doing so. The mutual contempt between the two groups was palpable. In the Battle of Michigan Avenue, Daley’s men beat and arrested hundreds of protestors who chanted, “The whole world is watching!” There was hardly a Republican in sight.
The New Left lost the battle in 1968—the Democratic Party went on to nominate the pro-war Hubert Humphrey for president—but it won the culture war. And in a great historical irony, the New Left’s ambition to deregulate culture so as to bring about an “open society” ended up merging with the new economic face of liberalism—neoliberalism, a repudiation of welfare liberalism’s heavy regulation of capitalism.
Neoliberalism arose because the Keynesian fiscal policies that had kept market economies stable encountered grave trouble in the early 1970s. Western countries were hobbled by stagflation, a miserable combination of inflation, low growth, and persistent unemployment, and welfare liberals were powerless to stop it. Waiting in the wings were the free-market economists of the Chicago and Austrian schools, who called for the state to pull back from economic intervention. Jimmy Carter, never an old-style Democrat, began deregulating the oil and airline industries. Ronald Reagan took neoliberalism much further, and European counterparts such as Margaret Thatcher and even the socialist François Mitterrand adopted similar policies. The United States and its Western partners altered international institutions to penalize countries that persisted in welfare liberalism and its presumption that state power should oversee their economies.
Open liberalism’s economic project did not return the West to classical liberalism. Classical liberals had seen markets as tools with which to enrich their countries. Adam Smith titled his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations, not The Wealth of Men. Open liberals, by contrast, disdained boundaries. For them, nations were outdated constructs that stood in the way of the maximization of global wealth.
The economic and cultural facets of open liberalism came from different political corners, but eventually they fit together snugly, as the West’s parties of the left made their peace with markets, and those of the right accommodated themselves to the sexual revolution and other social changes. As Mark Lilla has written, “The cultural and Reagan revolutions have proved to be complementary, not contradictory, events.” The “Third Way” was embraced by Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in Britain, Jean Chrétien in Canada, Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, Wim Kok in the Netherlands, and a host of other politicians in wealthy democracies. And why not? Free-market capitalism had humbled and destroyed the once-mighty Soviet Union. The Cold War and even History itself were over, and open liberalism, with its relentless drive toward efficiency and innovation, claimed much of the credit.
NAFTA, the WTO, and other post–Cold War frameworks for the free flow of goods, services, and capital are the pillars of open liberalism’s economic ambitions. They enjoyed bipartisan support. The Schengen Agreement in Europe, which ensured open labor markets, had similar support across the political spectrum. In cultural policy, gay rights and the rainbow flag epitomized the aspiration to remove taboos and build a more open society. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, nearly all right-wing politicians and parties had adopted this agenda. The remaining task was to spread democracy, markets, and an emancipatory conception of human rights to the rest of the world—particularly to the main stubborn holdouts, China and the Islamic world.
But it took only a generation for open liberalism to reach the point of diminishing political returns. U.S.-led efforts to democratize the Middle East foundered, and Middle America turned against the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda.” The razing of national economic boundaries meant that China, with its immense low-wage labor force, could join the World Trade Organization. Economist David Autor has found that the China shock cost 2.4 million industrial jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2010. The construction of a borderless world (or at least a world with more permeable borders) also meant more foreign investment and more immigration. Globalization has assuredly increased the world’s wealth and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia and elsewhere; it also has powered the hollowing out of entire regions of the wealthy democracies.
Open liberalism’s culture has also alienated millions in the deindustrialized West. It is a culture of perpetual experimentation that encourages disdain for inherited institutions, norms, and boundaries. The good life for the individual is not a life of autonomy and consent, as for older liberalisms. The reigning ideal has become autopoiesis, or self-creation. For a significant number of the well-educated city-dwellers and suburbanites who manipulate symbols for a living, open liberalism has delivered on its promises (although even among these beneficiaries, an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and loneliness has boosted sales of psychotropic drugs). Meanwhile, for rural and small-town residents, people who work with their hands or labor in the service industries, self-creation makes less sense. The demolition of stable roles and institutions has left millions rootless and demoralized.
Individual liberty is indelibly part of what the late Samuel Huntington called the American Creed: Dismiss it, and you have a different country. It would seem impossible to renew America, as America, without giving priority to freedom. And it would be unwise to try, for regimes that fail to give freedom its due are detrimental to human flourishing. But we can address the diseases caused by open liberalism while remaining true to the American Creed. Liberalism is adaptable. Just as classical liberalism gave way to welfare and welfare to open, open liberalism can give way to something new. We need a liberalism committed to individual freedom but adapted to the cultural and economic realities of the twenty-first century.
The first step is to ask liberalism’s perennial question: What is the chief threat to individual freedom in our time? The answer is no longer the despotic state, unfettered capital, or traditional norms and an over-regulated economy. It is rather the imperative, now lodged in most of our institutions and social norms, of perpetual choice and self-creation. This cultural consensus is paired with an ideological prohibition on economic policies that aim at anything other than efficiency and growth. In open liberalism, economic affairs are not to be constrained by classical political questions concerning the common good. In a real sense, open liberalism fulfills Rousseau’s call to force people to be free. It constrains them to not constrain themselves.
To address this threat of obligatory openness, twenty-first-century liberalism needs to become more pluralistic. Liberalism must create space for individuals who want to bind themselves to norms, communities, and ways of life that require long-term commitment. Doing so will require reforming domestic policies and transnational institutions such as the European Union.
We are already beginning to lay the foundations for pluralistic liberalism. Progressive economists such as Dani Rodrik and conservative writers such as Oren Cass warn that open markets have disrupted lives and communities and undermined confidence in constitutional self-government. Both call for restoring to national governments more control over their economies. In an interdependent world, this restoration needs to be coordinated with other mature democracies, many of which are going through agonies similar to those of America. Simply closing up national economies would be unthinkably costly. But according governments more say over the movements of capital, goods, services, and people—as was done as recently as thirty years ago—would mean less disruption and, not incidentally, more democracy. The same tolerance of greater domestic control is needed in regard to cultural policy. Why shouldn’t European countries that want to buttress and restore traditional institutions of authority such as marriage be free to do so?
The pluralistic liberal consensus also requires a fresh approach to foreign policy. The United States must step back from its self-defeating efforts to export open liberalism. Other parts of the world do not want it. The liberalism we need for the twenty-first century should respect that choice. America fares better in a more democratic world, and we should shore up existing and aspiring democracies. But even at the height of its power, America could never, as George W. Bush announced in 2005, “end tyranny in our world.” It was a utopian ambition that harmed our body politic. Using force to topple autocrats and occupying their countries for decades has exacted high economic and social costs, particularly from rural and working-class America. Fortunately, many on both the left and the right, chastened by misadventures in the Middle East and American hegemonic overreach, recognize the need for a more modest, more pluralistic vision of global cooperation and comity.
America’s cultural conflicts seem to be intensifying. Pundits even talk of civil war. When it comes to social norms and moral outlooks, it’s hard to see a way forward for liberalism. Yet there are signs of realism. Government-funded school choice allows warring factions to disengage and cultivate their own institutions rather than fighting over limited public goods. The Supreme Court, often with large majorities, has underlined the classical-liberal rights of free speech and religious freedom, which in the present context protect the choice to dissent from open liberalism’s dominant cultural dogmas. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and forced one of the bitterest battles over open liberalism back to the states, in another sign of a move toward pluralistic liberalism.
At the present moment, polarization debilitates America’s political system. This debility is perhaps the most evident and troubling sign of the demise of open liberalism, which is no longer the national consensus, but rather the increasingly rigid and ineffective ideology of one side. Perhaps wise statesmen will emerge who recognize that “winning” is neither realistic nor a solution. The way forward will require a new liberalism, a pluralistic liberalism capable of winning the loyalty of both sides because it works, not only to promote comity among a diverse and fractious people, but also to promote freedom in the twenty-first century.
John M. Owen IV is Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.
Image by picryl, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
