We Have It in Our Power to Begin the World Over Again

The New World

In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” I love this quote because it captures the romantic spirit of any good revolutionary movement. This kind of sentiment has really only fallen out of favor among liberal intellectuals and commentators within the last several decades. 

While listening to a talk given by the late historian Gordon Wood, I learned about a letter that Daniel Webster wrote to an Austrian diplomat, who was concerned that the United States had something to do with the 1848 revolution in Hungary. Webster denies that the United States was acting in any way that would breach neutrality, but essentially gives the United States credit for every revolution that has occurred since 1776, critiques the “crowned heads” of Europe for denouncing popular government, and identifies the American people as the vanguard of the world republican revolution.

“Well known circumstances in their History, indeed their whole History, have made them the representatives of purely popular principles of government. In this light they now stand before the world. They could not, if they would, conceal their character, their condition, or their destiny.”

As late as the mid-20th century, liberals kept the faith that there was something really world-changing and revolutionary about their ideas. In 1960, the Democratic Party platform began “In 1796, in America's first contested national election, our Party, under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, campaigned on the principles of ‘The Rights of Man.’ …In 1960, ‘The Rights of Man’ are still the issue. It is our continuing responsibility to provide an effective instrument of political action for every American who seeks to strengthen these rights-everywhere here in America, and everywhere in our 20th Century world.”

An audacious choice, considering both the fact that Jefferson lost that election, and the fact that “The Rights of Man” had clear revolutionary connotations in the 1790s—and equally revolutionary connotations in 1960. Liberals only a few generations ago demonstrated that same desire to remake the world.

We have all lived through the long '90s in which that desire faded from our imaginations. That time is over. In a recent column by Ezra Klein in the New York Times, he says that the chaos and destruction of this political era herald the coming of “those who would remake this world.” This was a funny experience for me. Over the last year I have made this point repeatedly, including in a video critical of Ezra Klein.

The Trump movement, in its enthusiastic destruction of our preexisting political norms and institutions, has neglected to build anything new. Instead of inaugurating a new political era, like Reagan did after smashing the New Deal Coalition in 1980, Trump has left us in a sort of interregnum. 

Periods like this are dangerous, but only because the possibilities for change are boundless. The instability makes a new world seem possible, and invites interest in what the principles of this remade world will be.

Here is my answer: liberalism is the belief in a new and better world founded on the principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

Those principles in that order were most elegantly expressed in French, but as a patriotic American, I believe Jefferson beat them to the same general idea. Obviously the Declaration of Independence references liberty and equality near the beginning, but the very end is pure fraternité:

“...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Understanding liberalism’s fundamental principles, and taking seriously what they demand of us, is the first step towards that better world.

Liberty

Liberty means that people are able to flourish free from arbitrary domination. Liberals recognize that many things are good only when they are freely chosen. Choosing to work hard is good, being forced to work is not. In this way, if you are unfree, entire categories of human flourishing are unavailable to you. 

The strictly “freedoms from government interference” definition of liberty is not convincing. All our freedoms require other people’s effort. This includes libertarian favorites like the right to property as much as it does modern progressive goals like a right to healthcare or housing. The “positive vs negative freedom” debate is one that only happens among commentators and intellectuals. In real life, people who call themselves liberals are enthusiastic about “positive freedoms.”

That we should take positive action to make people more free in fact, and not just in theory, is a powerful and correct moral impulse. Liberalism has been at its best whenever our project is freedom-expanding. FDR, the president responsible for the modern American meaning of the word liberal, frequently utilized the language of rights expansion. His “Second Bill of Rights” is well known and unfinished. Too many people in our country still do not have “adequate medical care.”

So liberals should feel slightly embarrassed that the people making headlines most with this kind of rights-expansion language today call themselves socialists. That ought to be you, and socialists ought to be calling rights “impositions of the bourgeois value structure.” As Engels said of the French Revolutionary Republic:

“We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic.”

Ah, the good old days!

Freedom expansion is essential to liberal politics and philosophy. To the extent that other ideological currents are able to better utilize rights-expansion language, it’s a mark of our own timidity and lack of creativity. There are opportunities for revolutionary liberals here.

Our political institutions are certainly not as free as they should be. Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. The Senate spits on “one person, one vote” at a foundational level, and makes itself even less democratically responsive with procedural rules like the 60-vote filibuster. Our Supreme Court composition is determined by heart attack and strategic retirement. 

Tariffs are another obvious example of where a liberal movement could distinguish itself. Conservatives today are protectionists, and socialists often have ideological hangups about trade that prevent them from reflecting how most Americans feel about tariffs today. The words “trade” and “tariff” are both conspicuously absent from the DSA program, despite trade policy being one of the most unpopular parts of the Trump agenda.

It is equally obvious that freedom needs protecting from corporate interests. To that end, liberals should be prepared to go beyond just protecting the right to organize or raising the minimum wage. We are made less free when we find that yet another aspect of human life is now mediated through a private platform. We are made less free when corporations can make money by helping the government work around the Fourth Amendment. 

This list is not exhaustive. You probably have your own. Our world lacks liberty in too many places. It is our liberal responsibility to fix that.

Equality

The principle of equality goes hand in hand with liberty, or rather, equal liberty is the only type of liberty that liberals should be interested in. Legal inequality is just another way of saying freedoms for some and not for others.

The population of Qatar is about 85% non-citizens, mostly workers with temporary residence status. The citizens of Qatar, while still living under an absolute monarchy, are very wealthy and are much more free than the non-citizen population. It’s a contemptible modern day example of exactly the kinds of inequality and unfreedom liberals in the Enlightenment era hated. Given all this, it’s no surprise that Qatar gets along so well with reactionaries in this country. 

Liberals believe that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. Creating by law a class of non-citizens without rights is anti-liberal, and anything that would bring us closer to this situation, like the end of birthright citizenship, should be resisted. Any vestiges of legal inequality should be scrutinized by liberals. We might be able to justify not letting people vote until they’re 18, or requiring someone to pass a citizenship test, but would anyone seriously defend American agriculture’s systematic dependence on people with no path to legal status?

Liberals also shouldn’t limit ourselves to defending formal legal equality. After all, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.” Equality is inherently social; we can only talk about equality by comparing how different people are treated. Liberals don’t want to eliminate all differences. This would destroy the individual. But a liberal world is one where the highest office really is citizen. Tocqueville captured the essence of this idea when describing his experience in America (Journey to America, p. 260).

“Although two men may never see each other in the same drawing-rooms, if they meet outside, they meet without pride on one side or envy on the other. At bottom, they feel themselves to be, and they are, equal.”

This kind of social equality is threatened by the persistence of incredible material inequality. To protect it, liberals have to make the total elimination of poverty a goal. The continued existence of poverty means exploitation and people unable to pursue happiness. It means a class of people who do not feel like and are not seen by others as essentially equal citizens. 

Equality without liberty is tyranny. So is liberty without equality.

Brotherhood

Modern American liberalism is very technocratic. Our most important thinkers and commentators, the people defining what liberalism means to politicians and the public, are policy wonks at heart. 

This mode, at its best, produces rational analysis of complex issues. It breaks down solutions and helps people understand potential tradeoffs. At its worst, this mode produces a sneering contempt for average people, incompatible with a philosophy that believes in the right of people to rule themselves.

This intellectual environment, combined with a world that feels increasingly atomized and impersonal, demands that we remember the humanistic side of liberalism represented by the principle of brotherhood. Today, brotherhood is not often included as one of the core liberal values, but it pops up all over liberal history. Article 1 of The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

I appreciate that the invocation of brotherhood by the U.N. is in the context of an appeal for people to act in a particular way. Liberalism is frequently accused of being toxically individualistic or totally aloof about how people behave. “Act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” is a useful reminder that liberals have always been concerned with virtue. 

Brotherhood is the respect that we pay to each other, and also the respect that society pays to its members. Lately the various AI barons and their hangers-on have been discussing forms of universal basic income. That is, when their technology makes everyone obsolete, things will be fine, because us pitiful men of flesh will be able to collect UBI checks and spend our days sports gambling. 

Setting aside if AI will or will not come for our jobs, there’s something hilariously naive about thinking the only thing a job provides a person is a paycheck. I’ve had the occasion to spend some time with the work of Francis Fukuyama lately after reading his new book. One of the videos on his charmingly understated “Frankly Fukuyama” YouTube channel explains this well:

 “A job and an income mean much more than support for the material basis of life. Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labor sufficiently to compensate you for it and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth.”

Liberals should be aware that our policy proposals must speak to the human need for dignity and recognition. Crucially, caring about dignity is not some irritating concession the highborn make to the rabble. Cultivating a spirit of brotherhood among people is an essential part of liberalism. Even the most technocratic bloggers have a need for respect, dignity, and recognition. This is why they spend all day fighting on Twitter. 

Brotherhood is also a component of liberalism’s universalistic impulse. This was very clear in the era before liberal democracies became so common. The Republic of Letters crossed national borders. Revolutionary leaders like Lafayette or Garibaldi traveled the world fighting monarchies. There was a feeling that people were in a collective struggle against their own despotisms and ancien régimes. They believed that together they could remake the world, and with fits and starts, they did.

March on the horizon

Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice was an economic plan for the French Republic, but it ends with a universalistic declaration about the strength of Enlightenment ideals.

“An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.”

It is probably not what he intended, but I use this passage to remind myself of the importance of having principles in the first place. If we are in the time of “those who would remake this world” like Klein says we are, people with strength in their convictions will be the ones rebuilding. The project of liberalism is simply unfinished. Who would seriously say that we have achieved all the freedom we can? Drive around any city and tell me that people are really equal. Universal brotherhood as a concept is downright utopian.

But for all the work that’s left to do, I enjoy history because it reminds me how far we’ve come. So many horrors have been swept away by people with principles who believed those principles would make the world a better place. Paine was right. Liberty, equality, and brotherhood really did march across the world. 

They’re still marching.

Featured image is "The Battle of Lexington," William Barnes Wollen 1910.