Smug Delusions Won't Save Us

The last 10 years or so have seen countless diagnostics written about the state of liberalism (I’ve pumped out plenty myself). Tonally they’ve ranged from the apoplectic to the melancholy to the blisteringly smug. Content-wise, the liberal diagnosticians have looked deep and wide for new, old, and old-is-new ideas. The most impressive and thoughtful have been those who accept that liberals bear considerable responsibility for the diminution of our creed and try to imagine how it could once again inspire. The less impressive diagnostics read like the Red Queen’s dictum, saying the way for liberalism to save itself is to put a lot of energy into running very fast to stay in the exact same place. It's this kind of thinking that led Democrats to run three centrist candidates against Trump and eke out two defeats and one pyrrhic victory. But at least we’ll always have memories of brat summer. 

Adrian Wooldridge’s The Revolutionary Center is unfortunately the latter kind of book. This makes it the last sort of book liberalism needs right now. While rhetorically making some tentative efforts to awaken liberals from their dogmatic slumber, it is in fact a concealed anesthetic. It’s a book that sincerely aspires to reflect deeply on different strands within the liberal tradition. But the author ends up discovering only his own instincts and preferences gazing back at him. This is a moment when liberalism desperately needs ambition and new ideas. The best Wooldridge can do is ask the rich to be a bit better behaved, while asking us all to be meaner to refugees, trans people, and anyone who smokes pot. It’s a book that would be disappointing were it not both generically predictable and—for all its powdery aristocratic sensibilities—willing to retread intellectually easy routes.

Two books, too many aims  

As other reviewers have noted, Wooldridge’s opus is really two books in one. The first is a functional and readable history of liberalism, albeit a flattened-out version of what is in fact a crooked historical story. Wooldridge’s journalistic talents make him an accomplished storyteller, and I enjoyed his discussion. The second makes the case for the rejuvenation of centrist (really center-right) liberalism and rejects its competitors. This second book canvasses very broadly indeed, taking shots at “enemies of liberty” who are sincerely reviled and little understood, and often reviled more the more they are misunderstood. Wooldridge offers a lengthy set of recommendations for confronting those enemies, many of which involve surrendering and implementing soft versions of the right’s most illiberal ideas. 

The best part of Wooldridge’s book is the first third: the history of liberal thought and practice. Wooldridge acknowledges important antecedents to the liberal tradition; citing Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual to tip his hat to the importance of the Christian emphasis on moral equality in laying liberal foundations. But Wooldridge rightly stresses liberalism’s novelty and importance. Wooldridge insists liberalism “began life as an antidote to the twin evils of economic stagnation and religious war. Before the eighteenth century, economies had been stagnant—people had become rich by extracting value rather than creating it—and ideological zealots had slaughtered each other as a matter of routine” (xvii). Its core principles are “individualism and freedom. Liberals start with the individual and work upwards where previous political systems had started with the collective (the community or the state) and worked downwards. Liberals believe that people should be judged as individuals rather than as members of social or biological grounds” (xvii). 

This was a revolutionary idea, and it’s to his credit that Wooldridge doesn’t shy away from the often brute facts of (early) liberalism’s history. The American Revolution is lauded for its “vision of equality of opportunity and fair competition” (33). This enthusiasm dims when Wooldridge moves across the pond, since the “French Revolution was a less successful liberal revolution than the American because it degenerated into bloodshed, censorship and tyranny” (34). Nevertheless Wooldridge gives it points since the French Revolution “began as a revolution against hereditary privilege in the name of universal equality” (34). 

From these explosive beginnings, liberalism gradually spread across the world. Rejecting some of the more streamlined hagiographies, Wooldridge stresses the moral complexity of the historical process. He is willing to face up to “the problem of empire” and chastises liberals for failing to recognize that “liberalism was at the heart of the imperial project. The greatest liberal power of the nineteenth century was by any metric the greatest imperial power” (118). Despite this, he does not think the vicious legacy of imperialism and colonialism comprehensively discredits liberalism; Wooldridge observes that many colonial subjects appealed to liberal values precisely in order to agitate for their freedom from European and American rapacity (127). Wooldridge isn’t going to outdo Charles Mills anytime soon, but these sections are commendable in taking more seriously than usual the problematic legacies of imperialism, racism and colonialism.

Wooldridge is more willing to accept nuance the further back he goes. One suspects this is because further back nuance becomes ever more distant and thus harmless. As the book moves towards the present Wooldridge is less willing to contemplate ideological complications. In a sharply critical review, Raymond Geuss, Cambridge emeritus and author of the thoughtful Not Thinking Like a Liberal, points out that Wooldridge likes to credit liberalism with creating the modern world, all while largely and carefully insulating liberalism from serious responsibility for any of the bad things that now exist in the world liberalism apparently created. Geuss overstates the accusation, but not by much. The grandiosely titled section “How liberalism saved the world” involves a lot of elisions that tell you about Wooldridge’s instincts more than hard truths. These cover everything from historical revisionism to theoretical obfuscation.

Wooldridge makes sure to remind readers that Mussolini was a “former socialist turned fascist” (89). He then compares Italian fascists to the Bolsheviks no less than three times over a page and half. Wooldridge neglects to mention how many conservatives and Italian liberals helped Mussolini take office. In A History of Fascism 1914–1945, Stanley Payne describes how in early 1922 the liberal Facta government 

“was divided between three sectors. Facta himself and two other liberals who wanted to bring Fascists into the government; three liberals ready to resist that with force, and the two Popolari and one other liberal who wanted to resist but avoid the use of force. Meanwhile, a new congress on October 8 to found an official Liberal Party was dominated by the conservative liberals of Antonio Salandra, who was happy to be called an ‘honorary fascist.’ Italy’s leading liberal intellectual, Bendetto Croce, declared that fascism was ultimately compatible with liberalism” (Payne, 107). 

All this helped persuade King Victor Emmauel “who wanted to avoid any outcome that might revive the left” to offer Mussolini leadership of a parliamentary coalition with conservatives and liberal parties (Payne, 110). Mussolini insisted on being Prime Minister and took office with the support of conservative and right-wing liberal parties like the Italian Liberal Party, before gradually transitioning the Italian state into a dictatorship. Roger Griffin points out in Fascism: A Quick Immersion that the Duce donned a “bowler hat and bourgeois suit” to signify his new allegiances (55). 

As chronicled in Hugo Drochon’s book Elites and Democracy, liberals like Vilfredo Pareto were willing to embrace Mussolini for the PNF’s vicious suppression of left-wing parties and the labor movement. As economist Clara Mattei points out in The Capital Order, when the Duce implemented an austerity agenda to cheers from big business he was lauded by right-wing liberals like Ludwig von Mises. The same von Mises in Liberalism declared that the “deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists.” With the left gone, von Mises predicted a more “moderate course” as a “result of the fact that traditional liberal views still continue to have an unconscious influence on the Fascists” (49). He went on to express that “it cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization” (51).

Wooldridge admits that many “moderate” statesmen fell for Mussolini’s schtick, including his hero Churchill. But by and large he labors hard to align fascism with Bolshevism, or at least a kind of right-wing collectivism that is little different from its communist counterpart. As stressed above, this view lacks nuance and historical accuracy. Liberalism and the ideal of an open society are of course resolutely anti-fascist in principle, and liberals fought heroically against fascist movements. But it was socialists and leftists who were amongst the first victims of fascist regimes (first they came for the communists…), their persecution oftentimes abetted by conservatives and even center-right liberals. This history of center-right and conservative conciliation with fascists might be informative today—for instance, when considering why someone like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson—who Wooldridge rejects as right-wing populists—were able to seize control of formerly center-right parties to advance their own radical agendas. Or why center-right commentators from Ben Shapiro to Dave Rubin to Alan Dershowitz have gradually made their peace with Trumpism.

Discussing the post-war period Wooldridge repeats the typical line that the Allies defeated Germany and Japan and constructed a new international order defined by “constraining the expansion of the latest threat to the liberal order, global communism” (100). To read Wooldridge’s story, one would never think that approximately 75–80% of the German army by personnel was directed towards fighting the Red Army and destroying what Hitler in Mein Kampf called “the Jewish doctrine of Marxism.” This one-sidedness extends onwards. Wooldridge rightly calls attention to the need to defeat Soviet authoritarianism. But he is willing to downplay the brutality America was willing to accept to secure victory. Discussing Cold War liberalism’s willingness to install and prop up often vicious dictators, from the Shah to Suharto to Pinochet, Wooldridge shrugs that while the “world’s policeman-cum-banker made several mistakes, as any great power must” it was “nevertheless unswerving in its recognition” that Western power was needed to prevent the smaller powers from destructive behavior while containing “Soviet power by whatever means necessary” (103). 

When we get to the section on the liberal philosophy of the time, Wooldridge affirms the importance of J. M. Keynes’ thought, even while sidestepping Keynes’ endorsement of “liberal socialism” as the right approach for the future. But by and large Wooldridge’s mid-century liberal canon is doggedly limited by the cliches of the period, which many of the historians he cites might have taught him to grow past. Wooldridge follows Karl Popper in disappearing G. W. F. Hegel as a “holistic continental philosopher” despite the latter now being widely regarded as one of the more brilliant moderate liberals (114). Wooldridge takes a few bored stabs at acknowledging Isaiah Berlin’s self-described leftism, while still lumping him with the “neoliberals he disdained” for “trying to return liberalism to its nineteenth century roots” (114). Wooldridge styles many of these figures “Cold War liberals” following Samuel Moyn. Contra Moyn’s largely critical take, Woodridge argues while the term is usually intended as an insult it “in fact serves to highlight their moral seriousness” (113). This claim would resonate if Wooldridge demonstrated greater moral and intellectual seriousness by reading important philosophers’ works with more care. 

Shockingly, liberal egalitarianism, without a doubt the most novel and important strand of scholarly liberal thought in the world, is all but ignored by Wooldridge. John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Tommie Shelby, Brian Barry, and Danielle Allen are not mentioned at all. Amartya Sen gets what can barely be called a passing remark. In fairness Wooldridge never claimed to be offering a comprehensive history, but it’s a telling gap. Center-right liberals like Wooldridge failed to confront problems, like ascending oligarchy and deepening inequality, that they are now recognizing to be problems long after everyone else did. In part that was a failure to internalize the wisdom of the most intellectually dynamic and thoughtful strand of 20th-century liberal thought—the one which tirelessly and sometimes prophetically warned about what was happening. Yet what we get from Wooldridge instead, still, even now, is the same old Popperian errors reheated for the fifty-thousandth time. At best this will only contribute to liberals repeating well-worn mistakes about the history of political thought. At worst, it has political repercussions. 

Once more on identity politics and the managerial elite

The significance of these historical and theoretical elisions is magnified when you consider Wooldridge’s discussion of our contemporary woes and his proposals for a renewed liberalism. He argues that contemporary liberalism consists of three factions: neoliberalism, left-liberalism, and managerial liberalism. Each became corrupted in its own way.

Neoliberals became over-enamored with the market as the solution to all life’s problems, and in turn became excessively libertine in their moral outlooks. I agree. But by and large Wooldridge tends to laud neoliberal economics, seeing it as a “necessary corrective to the stagflation and disorder of the 1970s” (146). He admits these policies involved “some pain for workers” but in the end “restored the animal spirits to economies that had crushed them” (146). For Wooldridge the problems with neoliberalism are less economic and material than political and moral: tech firms that grew too powerful and underregulated, market norms pushed into the family and communities where they don’t belong. That the most impressive and longstanding scholarship on this very point has been produced by the kinds of critical theorists he disdains, a la Wendy Brown, is a reality Wooldridge passes over in silence. 

Left-liberalism was activated by the ’60s revolt against authority and absorbed the corrupting ideas of critical theory, with its “commitment to groups over individuals” (143). It came to embrace identity politics and indulged the illiberal rejection of meritocracy. Predictably, Wooldridge expresses a lot of contempt for this alleged species of liberal politics while seemingly knowing next to nothing about its substance. He references the usual boogeymen of center-right ire (Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Sartre, Fanon) without evidencing an understanding of their work, let alone clarifying how any of them are exactly liberals or even influenced liberal thinking and policy. By now the center-right bromide against critical theory is a genre better known for its heat than light. It’s frustrating we must still be subjected to it in a book that should be focused on more important things. 

Finally there are managerial liberals. These figures built the international architecture of the post-world world, from the UN to the EU to the many tri-lettered financial institutions (WTO, IMF, EEC, etc.). Many of these played an important role in securing post-war peace and delivering economic benefits. Wooldridge argues that “creating rules-based trading systems unleashed growth in the emerging world, and flooded the rich world with cheap goods, a lesson we are learning in reverse with Trump’s tariffs” (149). But over time managerial liberals insulated themselves from public opinion. The global institutions they built ignored the desire of ordinary people for local control and the retention of national traditions.

Wooldridge argues that the unstable coalition between these three factions of liberalism became decadent and corrupt over time. This is due in part to elite insulation from ordinary people. It was also the result of lacking formidable enemies, a conceit that was shattered when right-wing populists and woke activists animated by “identitarian politics” rose to prominence in the 21st century.

An agenda for the few pitched to the many 

In response to liberal decline Wooldridge proposes what he calls the “John Stuart Mill solution.” Liberalism needs to “follow Mill and move simultaneously to the left and the right” (224).  

In practice moving left a la John Stuart Mill apparently means not actually following any of Mill’s explicitly socialist or feminist recommendations. Instead over about a page and half Wooldridge suggests we should undertake some sensible but vaguely described “distentangling and repositioning” of government relative to monopolistic corporations (224). “More generally” we “need to devote more energy to remoralizing the ruling classes” by stressing moral probity and open competition (225). One supposes this is to be achieved by angrily shame-posting at the ruling classes more relentlessly. 

By contrast the section on “moving right”—twice as long as the one on “moving left”—means restoring “a sense of legitimate authority” in many domains, stressing the importance of character, and above all aspiring after greatness (227). That justice for all might be the greatest thing for a society to aspire after is unfortunately a view that Wooldridge pooh-poohs as both utopian and dwelling excessively on the failures of the past. Instead what will really put gas back in the liberal tank is firmly and finally rejecting the “right of biological men who identified as women to enter women’s changing rooms or women’s prisons” (310).

More specifically, Wooldridge has a list of policy recommendations that is as long as its actual vision is short. We need to re-embrace a kind of liberal paternalism. Drugs ought to be gradually restigmatized. The legalization of marijuana ought to be reversed so Wooldridge will no longer have to worry about walking around big cities being “enveloped in the sickly-sweet smell of the drug” (254). Immigration needs to be curtailed, and refugee policies made less generous by revisiting whether those fleeing danger ought to be allowed to “cross borders illegally [while still being] entitled to asylum hearings” (259). Our emphasis on multiculturalism needs to be downplayed for an “emphasis on assimilating the people who are already here.” Putting capitalism in its place is somehow going to mean reaffirming the meritocratic mythologies that have propped up its worst forms for generations (259). Wooldridge insists that the “social cost of inequality is more than compensated for by the improvement in general welfare produced by great entrepreneurs in terms of new products or higher productivity. Who but a fanatic would give up the convenience of the PC to take a few points off the country’s Gini coefficient?” (207). But we can temper the social animosity produced by inequality by doubling down on meritocracy. This will mean expanding the number of gifted programs, offering aid to talented students aspiring to enter elite schools while getting rid of identity-based affirmative action, and empowering devices of social mobility that reward poor people with high IQs like the SAT (269–270). 

This is exactly the list of recommendations you’d expect in a book where the word “Oxford” appears a dozen times (Wooldridge is an alumnus) and even second-hand references to housing, rent, and groceries scarcely appear at all. Labor and trade unions—now wildly popular—are discussed only to say boo and applaud Thatcher for smashing them in the 1980s. Wooldridge does mention that when he looks “at the physique of the average American…you discover that Plato’s problem of overindulged appetites is commonplace” (245). Maybe Wooldridge thinks the way to pitch liberalism to an increasingly skeptical working class is pointing out how empty fridges will be a net positive for their waistlines. 

Early on Wooldridge mentions that if liberals had to “choose between the many and the few, liberals instinctively preferred the few, if only because the few were easier to bind by constitutional restrictions” (52). These instincts are less reflective of liberals in general than Wooldridge as center-right liberal fascinated by elitist tropes. This instinctive basis explains the many tensions and contradictions that appear throughout his book that cannot be papered over by describing them as mere moderation. Wooldridge allegedly rejects collectivism and a commitment to group-based identity politics. But he is happy to uphold “liberal nationalism” while conditioning the liberties made available by multiculturalism and religious diversity as a concession to populism. That the “nation” is the imagined community par excellence and “nationalism” the quintessential identity politics doesn’t factor into Wooldridge’s broadsides against collectivism. Wooldridge invokes the importance of personal liberty and “autonomy” to push against the regulatory state. But he sees nothing wrong with the state once more crashing down on drug use, in spite of the millions that such policies have sent to jail. Wooldridge claims to want to defend the social mobility that comes with meritocracy because he’s enamored with ideas of aristocracy and excellence. All while blithely ignoring the fact that the two most important liberal thinkers of the 20th century—Rawls and Friedrich Hayek—insisted there never was and never could be a genuine meritocracy where “great” people get what they deserve through their own talents and efforts.

There is nothing inherently reasonable in aiming for the center-right. One can make sense of this lack of sense when you realize it has less to do with ideological consistency and more to do with an instinct to side with society’s winners over its victims. But these instincts are not wisdom, as proven by the existential danger they’ve led liberalism into. Wooldridge et al. often confuse the personal virtue of moderation and the civic virtues of prudence with a plausible ideological outlook. 

Wooldridge is correct that liberals have been far too insulated for a long time. What he doesn’t see is that center-right liberalism is the paradigm case of elite liberal withdrawal. Center-right liberalism has indulged in the conceit that holding any number of contrary and strange positions is none the less self-evidently good because they mesh with what elites flattered themselves was eternal common sense. But that world is no more. We ought not to mourn it even as we recognize authoritarian right-wing populism is utterly unworthy of replacing it.

The real John Stuart Mill solution 

Wooldridge expresses a great deal of admiration for J. S. Mill, describing his “intellectual rebirth” from utilitarianism as providing “both an example of liberal regeneration and blueprint for the form that a future regeneration should take.” This makes it all the odder that Wooldridge takes very few of Mill’s actual views onboard and rejects the entire spirit behind them. That spirit was, to quote Gregory Claeys in the Very Short Introduction to Mill, a commitment to a “much greater egalitarianism” than even the radical democrat Jeremy Bentham envisioned.

Wooldridge emphasizes the need to be more reverential of order, tradition, and national identity. This bears little similarity to the Mill of “Utility of Religion” who resented how traditional norms inhibit human beings from developing the “noble capability” of “identifying their feelings with the entire life of the human race.” Wooldridge all but elides how in his Autobiography Mill took great pride in being to the left of even the “advanced portion” of the Liberal Party on all issues except capital punishment and the seizing of enemy goods on neutral vessels (today we would add the glaring example of imperialism, as Wooldridge himself points out). On women’s suffrage, mass enfranchisement, abolition and of course freedom of speech and liberty of personal behavior Mill’s views were regarded with alarm by center-right critics like James Fitzjames Steven in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. In other words Mill was the quintessential left-liberal on cultural issues for his time. To the extent he internalized core conservative ideas from Coleridge and Carlyle it was always with the aim of democratizing them; Mill even linked an authentically noble personality with a commitment to equality. He thought it was vulgar spirits which were usually most fascinated by differences in rank and status. Excellence ought to be within reach of all to the extent they can achieve it. This led to his economic radicalism.

Wooldridge simply waves away Mill’s self-description as a liberal socialist suggesting his alleged “move to the right” was “more intriguing” and worth taking seriously (222). This is a big mistake, since Mill would not have been surprised that a society as unequal as ours was characterized by weakening liberal norms. In Socialism he describes socialists as the more “far sighted successors” to earlier levelling doctrines, and means it as a term of praise. This is especially true of socialism’s realization that “great poverty, and that poverty very little connected to desert—are the first grand failure of existing arrangements of society.” Contra Wooldridge’s moralization of drugs and poor behaviors, Mill insisted that “crime, vice and folly, with all the sufferings which follow in their train” can be traced to causes which are very much the fault of capitalist arrangements. More importantly Mill, who as Wooldridge correctly points out was unfailing in his emphasis on the pursuit of human excellence, related that to a rejection of many of Wooldridge’s cherished ideals. In his short tract Socialism he anticipated Rawls in pointing out how pretentious it is to even talk about “meritocracy” in a capitalist system: 

The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance. It is true that the lot of individuals is not wholly independent of their virtue and intelligence; these do really tell in their favor, but far less than many other things in which there is no merit at all. The most powerful of all the determining circumstances is birth. The great majority are what they are born to be. Some are born rich, others are born to a position in which they can become rich by work, the great majority are born to hard work and poverty throughout life, numbers to indigence. Next to birth the chief cause of success in life is accident and opportunity.

And so it goes. In Socialism and his Autobiography Mill notes that if anyone ought to be at the sharp end of the stick of meritocratic arguments, it would by and large be the rich. Mill noted if  one applied the rule “they who do not work shall not eat” with consistency then the trust fund class would be lean indeed. By contrast Mill noted the peculiar fact that the hardest-working people who do the most essential jobs are rarely the most well-compensated in society, while plenty of people gain wealth and privilege through the hard work of being born into them. Taken together Mill praised socialists for seeing further on these questions than earlier liberals, something liberal egalitarians also acknowledge today in our appreciative reflections on greats like Marx and G. A. Cohen. 

The authentic John Stuart Mill solution is the one liberals ought to commit ourselves to. Liberals ought to say “no thanks” to the faux John Stuart Mill solution Wooldridge proposes. He is far too enamored with the idea that what people want out of a rejuvenated liberalism is the 10,000th screed against postmodern critical race Marxism or whatever else they’re calling it now. By contrast Mill himself was deeply concerned about many things our fellow citizens actually care about: women’s equality, minority rights, freedom from authoritarian overreach, and of course securing the material conditions for the flourishing of all. He recognized that by and large capitalists serve little purpose in our society and, as Wooldridge himself acknowledges, have a predictable habit of regularly translating their economic power into oligarchic political power. Liberals would be wise to heed Mill over Wooldridge. 

Featured image is "Quo Vadis, Nero and the burning of Rome," M. de Lipman 1897.