The Politics of Equality, the Politics of Autonomy

There is no shortage of agreement that liberalism, in the face of fascist authoritarianism and reactionary backslide, is in crisis. And there has been no end of rationalizations, responses, and reactions to this crisis, both from within and from without. 

These range from the reactionaries themselves, who (at least the more articulate ones) claim that liberalism has produced atomization, social decay, and national disintegration, to the farther left, who claim that liberalism has been a destabilizing economic force that has placed economic efficiency over human flourishing, and to those within liberalism itself, where some argue that liberalism has prioritized identity or self-expression over promoting a unified vision of the good life. 

While the quality and veracity of those critiques vary, I do believe that liberalism, as a political program, has not been good enough at answering them. Thus, it is critical that the liberal tradition articulate a vision of the world that compels and inspires.

But we cannot answer the question ‘what should we do’ before we answer ‘who are we’ and ‘what are we for.’ We must refocus on our core principles, then analyze the extent to which our society, laws and culture satisfy or violate those principles, and then organize politically in order to close that gap. 

Equality under the law

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The most famous sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Declared self-evident by its writers. Of course, it is important to remember that this phrase was aspirational from the very start, given how many of its writers held other human beings—humans like me and you—in lifelong bondage. This contradiction was known at the time. As early as 1775, before the Declaration was even written, Samuel Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

But the hypocrisy of those who wrote those words does not detract from their moral force. It is no less than the demand that our social, political, and legal systems extend full and equal dignity to every human person. It was that moral force that animated the abolitionists against the Slave Power, and caused Frederick Douglass, a former slave, to argue the Constitution opposed, rather than upheld, slavery. It was that moral force that led Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges to argue that the Rights of Man left Woman out, and fueled a century of agitation to make those rights real. It was that moral force that underlay the struggles for equality in the 20th century, from Selma to Stonewall. 

The liberal framework, in its idealized form, says that, regardless of wealth, status, or influence, everyone is equal under the law and equally accountable to it. The law binds all, but also protects all. Unlike the feudal system it supplanted, there are no formal privileged classes, no protected guilds, no forced ties to land or place. However much liberal systems have failed to live up to it, that underlying moral framework of equality has been a touchstone for those who have fought for a better life within liberal systems.

This is who we are, and what we are for.

Individual autonomy

Alongside equality, both legal and social, is autonomy—Thomas Jefferson’s equally famous “pursuit of happiness.” But what does autonomy mean, really? The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as both the right of an individual to make decisions for oneself without external control, and for an institution (e.g., a church, a collective, or a family) to govern itself, again, without external control. John Locke emphasizes the role of self-ownership and choice. Immanuel Kant locates autonomy in self-legislation—the capacity to govern oneself by laws one gives oneself as a rational agent, rather than by external forces or mere impulse. 

Autonomy is indeed a critical part of the liberal moral framework. One is not beholden to the dictates of family, community, church, nation, or collective, but freely chooses any of these bonds, or none of them, insofar as practical or necessary. At the same time, we are fundamentally social creatures, and a liberal conception of the world does not disdain those social connections. Rather, by emphasizing our freedom to consent or not consent to these bonds, we make them stronger and healthier, as consent is critical to healthy relationships of all sorts! In fact, many argue that autonomy is built through those connections, not despite them.

But what does autonomy mean, in practice? Autonomy means that a woman may, rather than being bound to the traditionalist cage of home and hearth, pursue her passions as a free woman. Autonomy means that an immigrant from any part of the world may come and live and work as they please. Autonomy means that a child may choose not to take up the family trade, that a person may join a different church than what they were born to. Autonomy means that a person has sovereignty over the very body itself—whether that is to wear an outfit, to terminate a pregnancy, or to change a gender. In short, autonomy, above all, means that all people must have meaningful and accessible options with regards to how they choose to live their own life, without being threatened by death, destitution or exile, whether that is physical or social exile, without due process of law.

Thus, liberalism is bound to take up the struggle against legal and social barriers to both defining the good life and living one’s version of it. As such, it must oppose institutional coercion and institutional oppression, it must speak out against political oppression, it must challenge social tyranny and hierarchy. And it must loudly defend those people who choose to exit abusive situations, whether in the case of abusive families, abusive workplaces, or abusive communities.

Freedom, tyranny, and the rule of law

In the popular imagination, the rule of law is often set against the principle of autonomy. The righteous vigilante versus the corrupt sheriff. The kids of Footloose versus the oppressive town. “Don’t tread on me” is an Americanism older than “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And certainly, the law can be, and often is, a vehicle of oppression. We are well aware of the historical depredations of the Slave Power, and the modern depredations of the Border Power. We are well aware of the Red Scare and Jim Crow. And of course, those outside American borders know how tyrannical the state can be, in whatever ideological guise it wraps itself, including the guise of freedom itself. But this understanding of power and the rule of law—the fear of the strong state that tramples on the autonomy of the individual—is only half the story. It is also the lack of rule of law that creates oppression. The private tyranny is to be as feared as the public tyranny.

Oppression arises through impunity. It is very often a state of affairs where private or social tyranny is imposed on the victim, who, either due to a lack of legal recognition, a lack of appropriate legal frameworks, or simply due to the weakness of the state in a given territory, has no recourse against harm inflicted by another, particularly one with more social power than them. Even in cases where tyranny is explicitly written into law, as in Jim Crow, the legally sanctioned, institutional violence was backstopped by the informal, extralegal violence. Black oppression was segregation by day and the Ku Klux Klan by night.

The popular conception, in many cases, gets the causation reversed. Rather than oppressive laws generating oppressive social structures, as some libertarians might imagine in their anti-state zeal (and antipathy for the liberal administrative state that turned from upholding these structures to undermining them), it is often oppressive social structures that generate oppressive laws. Even though slavery was destroyed, the racial caste system remained. Reconstruction, a legal regime that allowed Black social, economic, and political advancement, was dismantled by organized terror—the Klan, the Colfax massacre, paramilitary groups like the White League and the Red Shirts—while it was still the law of the land. The systematic Jim Crow regime of segregation and disenfranchisement was codified only afterward, largely in the 1890s and 1900s. Thus, far from undermining freedom, the rule of law, through impartial, unbiased, and accountable legal institutions, is a bulwark against oppression, and the principle of equal protection of the law, expressed in the 14th Amendment, is critical to the liberal concept of freedom.

Formal liberalism and structural tyranny

Now that we have defined the key pillars of liberalism, we must discuss where and how these ideals fail to be realized in practice, and the implications for liberal politics and liberal praxis. 

Many conceptualize liberalism as a politics of mere proceduralism, simply enshrining formal rights on paper while saying nothing about the underlying power structures. In addition, there are those, both detractors and supposed supporters, who believe liberalism is a mere handmaiden of the status quo, duty-bound to go no farther than incremental, careful, piecemeal reforms, and certainly forbidden from going too far in challenging social and economic hierarchy. They present an idealized vision of free association that is neutral to existing social structures, while the actual reality is one of exclusion and marginalization. They look at the ideal of the free market, which is indeed a powerful social technology that facilitates hitherto unprecedented economic growth, and ignore not only that many never see the benefits of that growth, but that many are structurally unable to participate in that market in a meaningful way.

It is here that we find one of the greatest contradictions of the concept of autonomy—that autonomy must be balanced against both equality and the rule of law, because autonomy unchecked begins to infringe on the autonomy of others. We of course accept the idea that someone may swing their fist until the knuckle of that fist connects with a face. But beyond that, autonomy unchecked can reify rather than erode existing power structures. The familial autonomy of the patriarchal father infringes on the individual autonomy of the queer child. The material autonomy of the capitalist to generate wealth infringes on the material autonomy of the worker to make a living. Joseph Raz in The Morality of Freedom argues that autonomy requires an adequate range of options. If poverty leaves one with no realistic choices, there is no realistic autonomy. This, in turn, requires proactive measures via the rule of law—by democratic governance—to rectify these inequities. One is not free if they cannot say no to a tyrannical boss, or leave an abusive relationship for lack of money or options.

Of course, we cannot ignore that a state strong enough to crush private tyranny has the ability to enact a potentially worse public tyranny. Here is one of the great questions of the liberal tradition, encapsulated by the tension between Locke’s framework of liberty and individual sovereignty and Thomas Hobbes’ framework of the leviathan necessary to prevent tyranny from rising out of a breakdown of order (the war of all against all must have losers, after all). But there is a way out, a key to the cage—democracy. It is through democracy, and democratic institutions, that power is bound to the rule of law, to the public good, and to the general welfare. Imperfectly, often undermined and subverted, still more often inadequate and ineffective—but it is the democratic mechanism that can find a good medium between private and public tyranny. It is through democracy that we can permit the maximum amount of autonomy to every individual.

Liberal radicalism

For some on the right, any actual struggle toward liberalism is somehow itself illiberal if it refuses to play by a set of self-imposed handicaps, or somehow oppressive in its own right if it acts against the hierarchies they hold sacred. For those to liberals’ left, liberalism is simply the legitimizer of a reactionary, oppressive capitalist order that offers freedom in theory, but subjugation in practice. And of course, it is quite true that liberalism has been all too often conciliatory to those oppressive power structures. But these standpoints distort not just liberalism’s moral force, but erase its radical history. 

Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations of the democratizing age that followed the American and French Revolutions are instructive in contrast to such modern understandings of liberalism as merely a polite legitimizer of the existing order, blind to the structural violence of patriarchy and capitalism. An aristocrat by birth, Tocqueville was simultaneously awed by the leveling force of his period and fearful of its excesses. He called the revolutions irresistible and providential. He saw the hand of God moving in the New World. He describes “a great democratic revolution,” a leveling of conditions he traces back some seven hundred years, steadily eroding the very foundations of aristocratic hierarchy. 

When one considers the implications of the liberal moral tradition, it remains as radical as it was in 1789. It is that radicalism, updated for modern times and modern challenges, that liberalism must reclaim. 

Liberalism is not just the legal right on paper but the practical ability to be seen as, to live as, an equal under the law and within society. It is the idea that human beings have dignity and value just by virtue of being human. Against a rising authoritarianism that demands that social hierarchy not only be reinforced in custom but also enshrined into law, liberalism must be steadfast in defending the equal dignity of all human beings. Against the modern neo-feudalist and neo-reactionary movement, which covertly or overtly seeks to roll back the achievements of the Enlightenment, liberalism must deliver formal equality under the law and, further seek to undermine the oppressive hierarchies that continue to plague our society.

The future that liberals (should) want

With all this in mind, what is the vision that liberalism must embrace for the future? What kind of society should liberals look to build? Look to our core principles. A society of equals is one that does not recognize unaccountable hierarchies of dominance, status, or power, and works to overturn them. As seen throughout history, even as we speak, unchecked social and economic power has had a deeply corrosive effect on our democracy, and the existence of the hierarchies of structural violence is a dagger pointed at the heart of liberal society.  Autonomy must be guaranteed to every single person—and not just legal autonomy. Liberals must account for how power, wealth accumulation, and socioeconomic inequality undermine autonomy. This means decoupling the power structure of capitalism from the social structure of the market economy. The rule of law must protect and bind everyone equally, from prince to pauper, from barista to billionaire; all must, insofar as possible, be held accountable to it, with their natural rights of due process and dignity protected.

The future liberals want, and should want, is one where every single person within society is materially secure. Fed, clothed, housed, and cared for medically, without dependence on another actor’s whim. Where every single person has social and political recognition and is protected from discrimination and violence. Where every single person is subject to the impartial rule of law.

This is the vision we fight for.

Featured Image is Federal registrar assists long line of new voters, by Bob Fitch