Liberalism Is for Ordinary People

Given our name and our mission statement, we often face the question “what is liberalism?”

In The Reconstruction Papers this year, Executive Editor Samantha Hancox-Li decided to answer the question directly. She wrote that “Liberalism is the philosophy of freedom.”

Samantha’s essay in that collection is a throwback to our origins. Shortly after we launched in 2017, co-founder and associate editor Paul Crider wrote an essay on the principles of liberalism, which remains an excellent jumping off point for any answer to this question.

Paul and Samantha’s essays are excellent. The other essays you will read this week that delve into the philosophy and the history of liberalism are also excellent.

What I will offer you instead is something simpler, and perhaps harder: a vision of life under liberalism, as distinct from the political project.

In Sabrina—a 1954 movie with Humphry Bogart that is frankly ridiculous—there is a quote that has stuck with me:

A new product has been found, something of use to the world. A new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines go in and you’re in business. It’s coincidental that people who’ve never seen a dime now have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their faces washed. What’s wrong with an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds and movies on a Saturday night?

We need to get better at describing our goals in these terms. My instinct, even now, is to say that the goal of liberalism is to produce an open society, to encourage mutual enrichment and mutual support under conditions of freedom. But we need to be able to paint a picture like the above, to say what these abstractions mean for the people who live where the factory opens, what it means to the local kids when a library opens up where there wasn’t one before.

Life under liberalism is creativity. 

The creativity of a Henry Ford, envisioning a luxury product as a mass market good. Or a Steve Jobs, prioritizing the design aspects of a consumer tech product instead of just its specs. Or the founders of countless unsung distributors and logistics providers, fine tuning their processes year after year so that we can all get what we need. 

But it is also the creativity of a Ray Tomlinson, developing email just because it was useful and without any expectation of making money off of it. It’s the creativity of Tim Berners-Lee, inventing the World Wide Web while working at CERN, an intergovernmental research organization. It’s the creativity on display at research universities and at corporate bodies like Xerox’s PARC or Bell Labs.

It is also the creativity of artists, from those quietly working alone on their craft, to those working together at a major animation studio. It is Wallace Stevens, working full time in insurance—a career he never quit—giving him the financial independence to write his poetry the way he wanted to write it. It is the massive teams of writers, animators, game designers, illustrators, programmers, and musicians working on AAA video games. It is Eric Barone laboring alone for years to craft his dream, Stardew Valley. And it is those artists who will never make a living doing it, but benefit from living in a world with abundant resources available to learn how to improve and to stick with it for as long as they wish to.

It is the creativity of those engaging in “experiments of living,” as J.S. Mill memorably put it—pioneering unconventional lifestyles today that might become entirely conventional later. Such as, for instance, taking your wife to be an equal partner in all things, as Mill himself did.

Life under liberalism is mobility. If you have an abusive partner, parent, or boss, you should be able to pick up and go, without the law or any form of social control keeping you in place. In the liberal ideal, you should be able to pick up sticks and leave because you are “able to afford an apartment in a vibrant urban space w[ith] transit on a min[imum] wage job.”

And life under liberalism is also choosing an ordinary, conventional life, made all the more meaningful because you chose it for yourself. It is having an ordinary job, making friends, getting married, having children, all the basic things that people get up to—without the old hierarchies that trap people into particular relationships and choices without asking what it is that they want for themselves.

The freedom to choose is, as Samantha puts it in her Reconstruction Papers essay, “terrifying.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, confronting a modernity that had killed God and swallowed the horizon, said, “Perhaps there has never been such an open sea.” To Nietzsche, this condition of freedom was an occasion for joy—the opportunity to create beautiful things in a beautiful world. Yet the idea that you cannot take refuge in mere tradition, that “I was just following orders” is no excuse, that all of life is a choice, and a test—a test of more than physical courage, a test of your innermost self—this terrifies. Freedom is both a burden and an opportunity. (Indeed, it could not be otherwise.)

Life under liberalism is facing this terrifying burden, being given the chance to seize this opportunity.

Liberalism as a political project is dedicated to building up all of the scaffolding required to offer people this burden and opportunity. Democracy to give people more agency over their government, robust social safety nets so that those poor boys won’t have to go barefoot under any circumstances, universal schooling that equips people to see their choices as choices, to hone their judgment to be better able to make choices—to list just a portion of what is needed!

But we talk about institutions and policy enough around here. 

All I wish to say is that life under liberalism as I have described it is the goal. Building up the legal, policy, and social scaffolding necessary to produce it is the political project.

That is my answer to the question of what liberalism is.

Featured Image is Outdoor sculpture in Frederiksplein, Amsterdam, by Fons Heijnsbroek