Liberalism Reunited

In one form or another, liberalism used to stretch across almost the entire American political spectrum. Policy debates were about how to implement liberal democratic government, not whether liberalism should be overturned. 

It was nice while it lasted. 

Liberals on the political left were typically comfortable with political and cultural activism. But classical liberals, often on the right, hoped to discourage politics itself, perhaps altogether, by reducing politics’ scope and relevance. Left liberals campaigned for marriage equality, while some liberals on the right argued we could find peace by getting the government out of marriage. Because of their alliance with traditional conservatives, classical liberals didn’t offer the same positive arguments for cultural liberalism as they made for economic liberalism. That alliance is over. Maybe it has been for a long time.

A few weeks before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Jacob Levy argued that classical liberals belong not with, “the party of torture, the party of denial of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless, unsupervised executive power”—that is, the Republican Party—but with our fellow liberals, from whom we had been split by ambitious progressive agendas of the early 20th century and the intellectual battles of the Cold War. In January of 2017, the late Steve Horwitz presciently declared that liberalism itself is what hangs in the balance of our new political fight. 

It is long past time that liberals listened. The assault on liberalism is not one-sided, and neither left nor right liberals have to fight it alone.

The most salient political issues today have long been diminished or dismissed as “cultural issues.” The cost of losing ground in the ideological battles over gender, race, and immigration has been horrifying. Liberals have rightly shifted their focus to protecting the people against whom the power of the state has been turned because of their identity or their politics. This has pushed people who agree about the desirability of liberalism to one side of the divide in an ongoing political realignment. 

Classical liberals have to recommit to the politics of emancipation if we are to argue for liberalism within a new, liberal political coalition. That coalition, already forming, is one we should want to join. We should also be confident we have a spot in that coalition because, in many policy areas—surveillance, civil liberties, nationalism—we can offer insight into how even well-intentioned policies that expanded government powers have been turned towards abuse by reactionary governments. But we must also be humble. Classical liberals were reluctant to raise the alarm or rush to the field in response to growing political hostility to immigration, civil rights, feminism, queer rights, and access to gender and reproductive healthcare. There was much that we missed, too.

The libs divided

Liberals who have been on the political left tend to be for social progressivism, government-regulated markets, and fiscal redistribution. Left liberalism isn’t against markets, but neither does it trust markets to provide social goods on their own. Left liberals could therefore ally with others who were enthusiastic about government intervention. 

Liberals who used to break right, in contrast, were more focused on restricting the size and role of government, especially in the economy. These liberals cheekily called themselves classical liberals. The origin story assigned to this term is that the government intervention embraced by left liberals departs from original (and true) liberal principles. These original principles were supposed to have focused on the value of free markets and limited government, and to have stood against government intervention. 

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) was the first thinker to call himself a liberal and one of the first to articulate how modern concerns about liberty differ from pre-liberal conceptions. Constant made individuals the core of his political philosophy and demanded defensive rights against both the state and the will of the majority, with representative government and property rights as individuals' safeguards. Incorporating the market political economy of Adam Smith and belief in levelling effects of free labour and property made him a natural fellow traveller for classical liberals. 

However, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was another early liberal. Mill’s 1859 On Liberty, written with Harriet Taylor Mill (1807–1858), popularized and built upon many of Constant’s ideas for an English-speaking audience. Classical liberals love On Liberty, and like the free market economics in Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. But by the end of his life, Mill believed in fairly dramatic wealth redistribution and market interventions. Mill was also an enthusiastic political campaigner for women's rights, including political rights. In other words, Mill ended up in plenty of places comfortable for left liberals. It’s implausible that Mill didn’t count as a “true” liberal; that Taylor Mill, the co-author of On Liberty, was the one responsible for Mill’s abandoning liberalism; or that liberalism writ large turned on itself so early. A definition of liberalism so classical it doesn't last to the end of John Stuart Mill’s life is so restrictive it's virtually useless.

Helena Rosenblatt provides more evidence against the claim of an abandoned true liberalism that classical liberals can reclaim. She documents that there is no such neat-and-tidy timeline in her book A Lost History of Liberalism. Rather, classical liberalism excludes some early liberals and includes the thought of many later liberals. Hobhouse (1864–1929) and the new liberals are out and Hayek (1899–1992) and the Austrian economists are in. Classical liberalism is about ideas, not timelines. I admit to preferring the label “market liberal.”

It’s not only about markets, either. The point of this digression is that markets-only, politics-averse liberalism has never been all that there is to liberalism, no matter how “classical” one makes it. Government and politics were part of the same early conceptions of liberalism that recognized the incentives provided through market prices, profit, and loss as crucial ordering forces in extended, dynamic, open societies. 

“Classical liberalism” nonetheless has a clear and political meaning today. It refers to a liberalism that emphasizes the importance of property rights and markets in particular, and more generally, the ability of individuals to solve social problems without using government force. Classical liberals are skeptical about the effectiveness of government interventions and concerned about the power needed to make those interventions. 

This enthusiasm for reducing the relevance of the government often translated to distaste for political participation—not only partisan campaigning, but politics broadly conceived. It has been common to find classical liberals who emphasize the bias and ignorance of voters. They insist that politics is always zero-sum and makes people worse. The conviction that political participation is incompatible with sincerely held beliefs is a big part of the reason you’ll hear classical liberalism referred to by its exponents as an “ideas movement” rather than the political project almost everyone else sees. 

Classical liberal squeamishness about politics is misplaced. Skepticism about government action and power does not demand that classical liberals abandon liberalism’s other commitments. Classical liberalism can remain liberal, seeking to break down limited-access power structures and hierarchies to replace them with open societies that accommodate and encourage pluralistic dynamism. 

Liberalism’s previous split reflects one of its inherent tensions, the one the Mills ran up against: between the liberty of those holding property and wealth and the desire to increase the equal effective freedom of individuals—including individuals without a stake in the order represented by existing property and wealth. 

How liberalism’s tensions affect its political coalitions is not predetermined. It depends on context. 

Breaking down a stool

In the 20th century, a political alliance came together around opposition to state socialism. Embodied by libertarian conservatives like National Review’s Frank Meyer, it was dubbed “fusionism.” Meyer framed fusionism as a three-legged stool of libertarianism (against government), traditionalism (against social progress), and anti-communism (for fighting the Cold War). 

Post-mortems of Cold War politics sometimes skip over the communist opponents of fusionists (and of Cold War liberals more broadly). We shouldn’t. Soviet and Maoist communism were totalitarian systems of social engineering. Dissidents were shot, starved, enslaved, imprisoned—or some combination. Communist leaders were hostile to western countries and hoped to expand their systems and influence. What can now seem like conservative fever dreams of totalitarian socialism were once real, and fusionists united in opposition. Libertarians and liberals opposed illiberal governance, traditionalists opposed communist godlessness, and Cold War hawks, both neoconservatives and nationalists, pushed for political and military victory.

Fusionists today, like Stephanie Slade and Randy Barnett, reframe the concept this way: conservatism provides the morality (they say virtue); libertarians provide the institutional design that best enables (they believe) that morality. They let the Cold War, now behind us, drop away and hope two legs will suffice. The stool, after all, is a metaphor.

Setting aside for a moment whether the Cold War can drop away: libertarianism at its best was never value-neutral, as conservatives claim. Rather, it dials up its liberalism. It emphasizes free market economics as a tool for social coordination and opposes coercion, especially by government. It also argues for the positive good of personal freedom and the open society.But libertarians aren’t defined by, or limited to, those who dial up liberalism. As Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi say in their book, The Individualists, libertarians include not only radical liberals but also those who make property rights the center of their ideology and members of a political “liberty” movement. That movement blended with, and was influenced by, its fusionist alliance. 

Understanding how fusionism operated, and why it fell apart, can help explain how the alliance contained genuine liberals who have proven stalwart against rising authoritarianism, standing next to those who turned out to be authoritarian cheerleaders. It can also help those genuine liberals understand what to do next. Each portion of the alliance had to work to accommodate the others. Fusionist traditionalists worked in the alliance by focusing not on arguments for conservative morality, but against government interventions meant to bring about social change. Fusionist libertarians focused not on a positive liberal commitment to dynamic, disruptive markets and people, but similarly on opposition to government intervention. Cold War hawks conceded that so long as governments could meet anti-communist foreign policy goals, they should otherwise be small. 

These accommodations affected each group in the alliance. A different libertarianism emerged from fusionism, one that could be stripped of its liberal commitments. Dropping those commitments allowed the alliance to accommodate, in Meyer’s day, the stridently anti-civil rights National Review crowd. It would also accommodate, in the United States, the Republican Southern Strategy—a cynical and illiberal scheme to win Southern votes with white racial politics. An infamous interview with Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained how Republicans tried to appeal to the same voters who would use racial slurs with free-market-coded language that would also appeal to their fusionist coalition partners:

[Rather than using racial slurs,] you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing.

Far less mainstream was the coding of emancipatory politics with anti-communist and anti-government messaging by white power activists and militias after the Vietnam War. Kathleen Belew documents how coding immigration first as communist infiltration, and then as a drain on welfare that encouraged big government, helped unite the previously disparate white power movement (Bring the War Home, 44). The white power movement conceived of emancipatory politics as the result of a betrayal of the white race by overreaching governments. White power also added anti-feminism to their array of bigotry, joining prejudice against Black, Jewish, and immigrant people (163–164). 

That the far right adopted so much anti-government rhetoric should have been a bigger warning sign for fusionists opposed to far-right politics. These coded arguments, given respectable language, gained their own following within fusionism. The result was a group that later coalesced as paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism. This tendency would eventually support reactionary, post-liberal Republican politics, first in the form of Pat Buchanan and later, Donald Trump. Many libertarians did not embrace this strategy. In Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian singles out the “market process” libertarians (influential at the Institute for Humane Studies) as pushing a libertarianism inimical to the paleo push. Bleeding Heart Libertarians was another initiative for a more humane libertarianism. Some libertarians also warned specifically against the space that paleolibertarians made for violent racists.

But in general, the issues over which fusionist liberals and traditionalists disagreed tended to be downplayed, and arguments about them dismissed as counterproductive infighting. This suppression of disagreement over social issues, combined with the different meanings the messaging sent to different groups, allowed members of the coalition to tell themselves that they faced no trade-offs in their alliance. Conservatives trusted that libertarian free markets would elevate natural elites. Traditionalists trusted that shrinking the government would turn back emancipatory politics. And fusionist liberals trusted that rolling back government intervention would drive emancipation. 

Because of these disparate interpretations, the coalition could use small-government and economic messaging to mean (at least) three different things. Traditionalists and conservatives didn’t have to stop arguing for the cultural politics they believed in, but fusionist liberals sincerely put them aside. Indeed, liberals in the alliance conceded that political movements for social change would require the application of new legal force. The emphasis on reducing the power of the state was so strong that they opposed emancipatory movements that liberal principles should have supported. 

The politics of liberation were ceded to the left. 

By the turn of the century, both 20th-century fascism and Soviet socialism had definitively lost. Market economies were ascendant. Classical liberals believed the institutional economic battle had been decided in their favor.

The Cold War was over, but the fusionists didn’t feel like they’d won. The different factions kept working towards their version of a better world, but without the Cold War touchstone, their visions started to diverge. In When the Clock Broke, John Ganz argues that Meyer’s stool needed all three legs: “anti-communism had long provided the glue that bound the various factions of the right together and gave them common purpose,” (70). Fusionism lost its bogeyman when it won the Cold War. After that, the rest was bound to fall apart, and it did. 

Hope

Politics is war by another means. I was taught that phrase through fusionist institutions as a condemnation of politics—that it’s just more zero-sum fighting between enemies. The way to encourage peace and cooperation, I heard, is to suppress politics as often as possible. 

But people are as unavoidably political as they are diverse, social, and self-interested. Liberalism recognizes that and provides the institutions under which peace is still possible. Liberalism can explain why politics is a result of cooperative positive-sum exchange. 

Liberalism recognizes that democratic politics is another means, not more war. A liberalism that values peace should (as fellow Liberal Currents contributor Jason Kuznicki has pointed out) be for liberal democracy.

Part of the reason that some classical liberals feel so out of place in politics is that politics’ subject matter has changed. The purely economic language used to argue for small governments no longer resonates. Economic policy debates are no longer about liberal tinkering in largely free markets. Today, they are about the viability and desirability of liberalism itself. 

“Libertarians agree with everyone about something,” we used to say, when liberalism was split down the middle. From this, I surmise that classical liberals should already know we have allies on the political left. We just have to stop lamenting the willingness of those potential allies to act politically and join them—to stop acting as though we’re above the vulgar political fray and take our own side. The world we’re in now demands that liberals step into politics. 

In the same talk where Levy argued for a reunited liberalism in 2008, he said that when left and right liberals reunite in common cause, “they, as well as we, should be prepared to be changed or transformed by the alliance,” (35:06). And indeed, we must be prepared for this, in part as a corrective for how we were changed by fusionism. 

Neither side of the one-time liberal divide can claim straightforward vindication from the mess we’re in. Both sides can lay claim to prescience on some issues and dangers that old alliances downplayed. Classical liberal concerns about executive impunity, mass incarceration, and the danger of centralizing power have been vindicated. So have left liberal concerns about racist attacks on civil rights, feminism, and queer liberation; and the deadly seriousness of the anti-abortion movement. Bridging the gaps that let liberals talk past each other on these issues will leave both sides stronger. 

Classical liberals need the humility to join the political battles we used to frame as though they could be done away with. But we should also believe that we have something to add. Classical liberals who used to feel at home on the right were jettisoned from their onetime alliance precisely because their influence in that alliance constrained the power-hungry and reactionary—the illiberal—forces that are seizing power on the political right around the world.

In the cultural battles classical liberals too often formerly shied away from, about civil rights, queer rights, access to gender and reproductive healthcare, and free movement, our inclinations against government interference compel us to take the side that needs defending, with vulnerable people and against the state power we’ve spent so long opposing. We can learn from the liberals who never gave up on the political side of those fights, because now they have to be fought explicitly. 

Where using government power is urged in pursuit of emancipation, those urging it should not forget the classical liberal insistence that state power, once constituted, can be turned to illiberal purposes. Where inaction would entrench power dangerous to both individuals and liberalism, as it has in areas ranging from municipal zoning to immigration policy, that should not be forgotten, either. Liberalism is a striving and emancipatory idea because of the tensions that once split it. Far from being a weakness, balancing these considerations can lead to better solutions and discourage complacency. 

Each half of liberalism might not coherently stand alone, but together they form a vital and complete political philosophy. Liberals were never that far apart. We just took our agreements for granted.

Liberals of all sorts are already uniting around issues like the desirability of global trade, the right to bodily autonomy, the importance of the rule of law and its restraints on power, police militarization, criminal justice abuses, surveillance, American military impunity, and executive power. A broader coalition is already coming together around these agreements. Classical liberals need only join it. 

Liberalism has inspired revolutions, movements, and heroes. People put their lives on the line for freedom, even for the freedom of people different from themselves. Liberalism didn’t win by shaking off half of its commitments. It won when it treated liberalism as a coherent set of ideas aimed at human liberation.

Liberalism can fight back. We need to fight back. And so it’s to a reunited liberalism that we have to turn.

Featured image is The Popular Front