Remember Who You Are, Liberal

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

Has liberalism run out of steam? After the second election of Donald Trump, it sure felt that way. MAGA was ascendant. A new, muscular, vigorous, cruel energy had taken over America, and it was our task to just adapt ourselves to this fact. Even as resistance to Trump built on the ground, elite liberals felt at sea.

Maybe Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way.¹

One manifestation of this was an inability to articulate what liberal values actually are. This resulted in a kind of neurotic poll obsession, desperately asking the American people which marginalized group we needed to sacrifice to maintain a sliver of liberal values—or, worse, acting as if conducting polls might tell us what our values should be.

Even as elite liberals lost their way, a thunderous reaction to Trump was rising in the streets—as ordinary, everyday liberals found themselves outraged in blood and bone and soul at the horrors Trump was wreaking on our country—thugs in our neighborhoods, Americans murdered, allies threatened, and bloody wars started. That thunder demands change. It demands that we fight.

And elite liberals have recoiled from this demand.² As if the realization that we have enemies must, out of necessity, collapse all politics into the friend-enemy distinction, as if we will find Carl Schmitt waiting at the end of that road, smiling, telling us that liberalism was always a daydream now fading like mist before the hard light of reality. These liberals fear not just power but the corrupting effects of power, too. They fear that recognizing the existence of our adversaries will make us worse than we were. They tell us that liberalism is defined by “forbearance.” Yet forbearance cannot be the definition of liberalism: it is not fit for purpose. Forbearance is another way of saying “restraint,” but restraint from doing what? What are the ends of liberalism that it must be restrained in pursuing?

Liberalism is in crisis for another reason: It seems unable to answer our deepest personal questions. It might have a great deal to say about high abstractions, but it fails to answer our most intimate yearnings. Indeed, various elite liberals have said as much to me: Liberalism cannot speak to people’s lives.

Perhaps under the baleful influence of the late John Rawls’s vacuous Political Liberalism, these liberals are captured by a vision of liberal neutrality: Liberalism is specifically disallowed from saying anything about the conduct of one’s personal life so long as it complies with the law. Instead, liberalism is said to be the correct social system because of various large-scale social effects (economic growth, peace and stability, etc.). But of course you as an individual are not going to bend the curve of economic growth. Why should you care about any of these things you don’t affect? Why even be a liberal?

Meanwhile, this hollow liberalism is confronted by alternatives on the right and the left—a left that has positioned itself as a deeper, truer, less compromised, and less hypocritical expression of these ideas of justice and empathy; a right that seems resurgent, confident, speaking unironically of its “strong gods” of family, faith, and nation.

These spiritual crises have a common root. In the long, gray end of history, after liberalism seemed to have slain all its enemies, we liberals forgot who we are.

A militant history

The idea that liberalism is the ideology of forbearance—the ideology of technocratic tinkering—would have been news to our liberal forebears, who sought to reshape the world and remake their societies according to a vision of human freedom and human equality.

The Reconstruction Congress fought and won the bloodiest war in American history. I do not think this made them worse men. They did not revel in slaughter. They did not turn their newfound power against their friends. They stuck to their platform, the liberal ideology they had defined before the war: free soil, free labor, free men. They pursued that platform aggressively by rewriting the Constitution, not once but three times, and deploying the American military to the American South to enforce those changes. But that military did not loot and pillage and enslave. It enforced the law and crushed the Klan.

Reconstruction ended, and in many ways it failed: Redemption took its place, and Jim Crow after that. But Reconstruction did not fail because the Radical Republicans went mad with power and reduced all politics to the friend/enemy distinction. Thomas Jefferson worried that his slaves were to be given “freedom and a dagger.” Yet when the descendants of his slaves gained their freedom, this did not come to pass. And when the civil rights movement broke the back of Jim Crow a century after the war, the nation was not swept by mass purges of honkies and crackers.

Reconstruction is hardly the only historical episode I might reference here. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the liberal reformers of Eastern Europe and East Asia, the American Founding itself—they were all liberalism on the march. They worked to break what must be broken.

Still, history has no shortage of movements that pretend to embrace liberation but descend into oppression, from Jean-Jacques Dessalines forcing his newly freed citizens back onto the sugar plantations to Stalin returning Russia’s peasants to a new serfdom on collective farms. It matters, then, what principles you cleave to. Principles are what separate these movements.

So what are liberalism’s principles? Do these principles have the resources to respond to the most pressing problems of our age? Or is liberalism an exhausted ideology in need of replacement by something new and more vigorous and manly, whether that’s the right’s “strong gods” or the left’s zombie communism?

Over the course of the essays in this collection, we hope to have demonstrated that the liberal tradition has answers—good answers, answers that will work—to address the multiplying crises facing America today. But the liberal tradition is more than a compilation of policy papers. In the remainder of this essay, I want to articulate the philosophical lodestars that guide these reflections. Liberalism is the philosophy of freedom. But what exactly does that mean?

Liberalism’s lodestar

Here is my thesis: You are free but finite. Liberalism is the answer to that problem. Not the only answer but the only honest one. To liberalism’s alternatives I will return; for now let me try to explain what I think freedom is—and why it is a problem.

“It’s a free country,” we claim, or a free world, or we say that we are all born free and equal. “The land of the free”—we put that right in the national anthem. Freedom can be something you have, though you can be deprived of it, in prison. But in prison you might say, “I am a free woman” and be right. We are not free because the laws make us free: We have made such laws because we are free, because such laws befit free people. So what is freedom?

Freedom is the capacity to evaluate your options and choose accordingly. Freedom is your ability to live by your own lights. Freedom and reason are in that way inseparable. Reason is what liberates us from the prejudices of our ancestors, the “common sense” of our society, the urgings of our appetites.

Freedom and reason, choice and responsibility: These are all joined at the hip. Your freedom consists of your reason, your ability not to simply parrot what others feed you but to subject the world to your own mind’s evaluation—to weigh the possibilities and follow your own judgment. There’s no one standing behind you, working you like a finger puppet. It’s just you—your mind, your thoughts, your judgments, your actions. There are no alibis left.

This is 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.)

From these reflections I think there are three fundamental virtues of a free person: reason, humility, and courage.

Reason

Reason means recognizing that gap between your mind and the world. I believe it, but it might not be true. It feels good, but it might not be right. It might be what I have learned from my earliest childhood, might be what all the world and all my community insist on, and yet: bullshit. Reason is the attempt to close that gap, to inch that much closer to correctness, rather than retreating into the comfort of an imagined childhood.

Humility

Reason begins from the gap between what you want and what is real. But that gap is ineradicable. This may be reinforced by the memory of the mistakes you’ve made, the times you’ve gotten it wrong, the times you had to go back and think again. Maybe rarely—maybe just one dark night when you felt your faith slipping between your fingers like sand, faith in God or your father or your lover, but still: a pillar of your world, crumbling. Humility means remembering that what you believe now may, in turn, be wrong.

Courage

Despite all this, you’re stuck in the world, time rolling on at one second per second. You can doubt yourself, but even as you doubt, you are condemned to choice and action. So we might as well have some courage. Yes, our judgments are imperfect and subject to revision, but sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe and do what you think is right. There is no alternative: Courage is recognizing that fact.

Liberalism as a way of life

These are virtues of the self. They are ways of being honest with yourself about what kind of thing you are, ways of taking responsibility for being a free and thinking thing. But they also have implications for how we ought to relate to others. In our fundamental moral nature we are equal: equally free. Our relations to others are a matter of how one free person relates to another.

Free but finite, I said. Social creatures, born in a specific place and time, with no choice but to live among others. Reason may be a powerful light, but it casts a narrow beam; we are not perfect creatures subjecting every moment to perfect reason. We are, constantly, imperfect. So how do we live with one another?

In the abstract, the answer is simple. We show others the same respect for their freedom that we would expect them to show—and the same respect for our finitude that we’d want them to give us. This means to account yourself to others not just in terms of might—“I can, so I will”—but also in terms of what is true and good. It means to reason together, even if that doesn’t result in agreement. It means not to take their finitude as a weakness to be exploited by force or fraud.

But here’s the thing: There will always be areas of substantial disagreement between us free and finite beings—not merely disagreement on trivial things, on whether hot dogs or hamburgers taste better, on whether the dress is blue or white, but on matters of great import. Respect for others’ freedom is therefore not a matter of general agreement or mutual love. Respect is what we need when love and agreement are absent. It’s respect for those who emphatically disagree with us, who are genuinely different from ourselves.

This has political implications—to which I will return momentarily—but it is also a matter of personal conduct. Liberalism speaks to how you should conduct yourself, well beyond the minimal requirements of law and the Constitution. Stand up for your principles vigorously, articulate your ideas to the world, and listen when others articulate theirs back. Recognize that beyond disagreement there is that bedrock of mutual freedom, and someone exercising that freedom in a different way does not diminish that.

Political principles

These principles have implications for the structure of a free society. In the political realm, it is straightforward: Only we have the right to govern ourselves. Democracy is the form of government appropriate to free people not simply because it works better than the alternatives (though it does) but because it is the most honest expression of our condition. Society has no outside, and there is no one coming to save us: just us, and how we live together.

This doesn’t mean democracy is easy or that we’ll always agree. Indeed, we should expect not to—as discussed before. Democracy isn’t about unanimity. Democracy is about genuine political competition among genuinely different ideals. As a result, the elite managerialism so pervasive among today’s “liberals” has got to go. In this vision, experts do polling but take no sides themselves; they are not themselves political actors but merely passive reflectors of “the will of the people.” This is a bizarre kind of submission to public opinion that doesn’t imagine that the public might themselves engage in politics. Here is my alternative model: Win elections. Do stuff. Tell people what you’ve done. If the public doesn’t like you, it votes you out.

The lodestar of freedom also has implications in the economic realm. Freedom is the ability to chart the course of your own life—to fit yourself into the great machine of production and consumption according to your own lights. It is by now obvious that grotesque excesses of wealth or poverty prevent this. In that respect, mere capitalism must be managed. Yet we must also remember that economic freedom means recognizing that others will exercise that same freedom, and maybe not always in ways you personally agree with. That is another expression of liberal pluralism.

The marketplace has its own logic. I might not bear the bartenders at Hanko 60 any particular ill will. But their cocktails are dogwater, so I won’t be buying another. Charity and sympathy don’t enter into it. That’s just capitalism.

Freedom has implications for the whole “nonpolitical” sphere of human existence, too: family, friends, community, faith. These are the deep ties of meaning and connection that are often said to be meaningfully different from the cold logic of politics and markets. It is alleged that these are connections that are not chosen, and therefore not best understood through the lens of freedom and reason. This, too, is false. Those around us are, in some sense, free to go. “But Samantha’s family can’t just leave!” Yes, they can. It happens all the time.

People give up on one religion and embrace a new one. They leave the place of their birth and move to a new city and build a new community there. They pick which relatives to spend more, and less, time with. And on and on and on. We might not choose our associations based on some starry abstraction, but we very much do choose them. Liberalism means understanding that others do this and—in many ways—making yourself someone worth choosing under conditions of freedom. “You can love whoever you want to” is a permission for others, not just yourself.

There is a certain rough competition to all the arenas I have discussed—politics, economics, association. There is the absence of the illusion of safety provided by the society of orders. We have instead the possibilities and perils of freedom. There are limits—in the normal case, the competition is not existential. The bartenders at Hanko 60 aren’t losing their heads. But the point is that we don’t have to particularly like each other. What we require is mutual respect. Mutual respect does not mean mutual love.

This is not merely a statement of public policy. This is a way of life. I say “rough competition,” but what I mean is that the liberal aspires to be someone worth listening to in conditions of freedom, worth working or trading with in conditions of freedom, worth loving in conditions of freedom. To put a fine point on it: I am not owed a wife. Neither are you. There is something inspiring in this view of life, of earning the esteem of your fellows not through force or fraud or extraction from some subordinated Other but through genuine merit. That, to me, is what it means to stand up straight with your shoulders back.

What makes this possible—what separates this from mere anarchy—is that we pursue our own judgments within a framework that ensures that each doing so is consistent with all doing so. What specific institutions and structures are necessary to sustain these ideals? Abstract reasoning won’t tell us. Answering that question has been the work of the essays in this collection—ever unfinished, ever evolving, difficult but necessary, as liberal principles adapt themselves to changing times.

Alternative visions

Thus my brief for liberalism. But every choice must be ranked against its alternatives. And in our present times we are confronted by alternatives on the right and the left. These do not merely prescribe some alternative vision for society, justified in abstract technocratic terms. They teach you who you are, how to live, and how to relate to others.

The right believes that you are defined not by your freedom but by your capacity to obey. Its “strong gods” of family, faith, and nation are not meant to be chosen or even thought about too deeply; they are meant to be submitted to. Shut up, don’t ask questions, do what Daddy tells you. The world is full of hierarchies and you’re at the bottom. They promise rewards, of course. Reaction tells you it will make your dick big and your muscles shine and why it’s not your fault you don’t have a girlfriend, and then it builds a politics on top of that. If everyone just submitted to the dictates of gender, we’d all be so much happier. The politics of reaction is your father shouting, “STOP RESISTING!” forever.

But the thing is, you’re free. Just look around you. The world is full of choices. Other religions you can explore, other nations you might immigrate to. Families you might find or make or, frankly, give up on. Those choices are there whether you like them or not. Better to recognize that fact than flee from it into the imaginary daydreams of reaction.

There is another flight from freedom that cloaks itself in the guise of liberation. A secular millenarianism that believes you are defined by your capacity to suffer. After all, the world is so full of suffering, so full of iniquity and unrighteousness. There is so much work to be done, and you personally are better for knowing about it. What could be worse than suffering, and what higher goal of politics is there than eliminating it?

But it runs deeper than that. In suffering there is truth. The more you suffer, the more righteous you are and the wiser you become. If you don’t suffer sufficiently yourself, you may borrow the suffering of others in imagined empathy, identifying with the wretched so intensely as to make yourself likewise wretched. Don’t think, just feel: That way, righteousness lies.

This does not lead to a politics of minimizing suffering. Instead, it results in an utter paralysis of action, insofar as any exercise of power will likely lead to someone somewhere suffering—and we can’t have that. Thus in the end we pretend not to choose—we pretend to reject all “compromised” options in favor of a Revolution™ in which suffering will be redeemed and vanquished.

Yet there is no escape from action. Even inaction is a choice. Like the reactionary right, left-millenarianism promises an escape from the burden of freedom. It offers a shortcut around the burden of thinking. Don’t think, just identify the worst off and “listen” to them (or their anointed representatives) uncritically. “You can have any identity you like as long as it’s communist.” It presents an escape from the burden of responsibility—from the burden of weighing an array of bad options and doing the best you can regardless.

We can argue about this or that policy. But there is something deeper, too. The vision of life liberalism offers is the one that most expresses who we truly are. Reaction demands submission and promises bliss; millenarianism exalts suffering and promises righteousness. Both flee from the terror of freedom. In the cold light of day, neither of these seems an attractive option, to me at least.

Peroration

Liberalism is neither just a collection of policy objectives nor just a series of historical lessons learned. It is an answer to the question “What does it mean to be human?” Freedom is what you are. Liberalism is the answer to that problem.

Freedom means taking responsibility for yourself. To not just act like you’re this abject thing, liable to be toppled by a stiff breeze; to not make a totem of your own vulnerability and make that totem an excuse for your own wanton cruelty, as today’s most annoying crybullies are wont to do. Yes, you are vulnerable, you are finite; you are an agent, too, with your own levers on the world and on others. Yet neither are you some conquering hero, a prince whose rightful kingdom has been stolen by those unrighteous bitches from HR. You are free and equal, just like all the rest of us poor bastards.

I find the politics of cruelty abhorrent. No one is immune to the lure of those dark pleasures. But those violent delights have violent ends. Yet we once again find ourselves on what Katherine Cross has called the jagged shore that separates our dream of peace from the realities of war. And make no mistake, we are once again in a great struggle not unlike war against those movements that do not believe in freedom, that fear and hate what freedom represents to them as much as to the rest of us.

“But what does this matter to Joe from Ohio?” Joe from Ohio isn’t reading this. You are.³ In the age of Trump II, liberal elites have experienced a profound crisis of faith. They have forgotten how to fight for themselves, or what they are even fighting for, reduced to obsessively following the latest polling and reading their own convictions off it. I want to remind you who you are: what your liberal forebears fought for and won, and what is still worth fighting for.

Liberalism is a way of life. That way of life is built on the fundamental freedom and equality of all human beings. It speaks both to the great questions of our day—of politics and policy—and to the most intimate relations of human existence. The world owes you a little. But it doesn’t owe you much. Love isn’t to be demanded or bought. Be worth loving in conditions of freedom. Authority isn’t to be forced or extracted. Be worth listening to in conditions of freedom.

This way of life is worth defending against its competitors. In the long struggle ahead, we will not lose our way, so long as we keep our eyes on our lodestars. Liberalism is not an ideology without an idea but instead the project of realizing freedom in the world, yesterday, today, tomorrow.

1. Ezra Klein, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” The New York Times, September 11, 2025.
2. Kevin Elliott, “If Liberals Get Tougher, What Will They Become?”, Liberalism.org, March 24, 2026.
3. Apologies to any Ohio Joes in the audience.