Toward a more resilient account of freedom. Links on trade, authoritarianism, the Constitution, and more…
One of the major themes of a lot of intellectual debates these days is some supposed “crisis of liberalism.” (This isn’t just “liberalism” in the 20th-century sense of the political left, but the whole regime of market economics, personal liberties, and democratic government.) Threats to the “liberal order” are legion—from populism to nationalism to those sundry “postliberals.”
It’s true that we’re living in a time of great disruption. However, I think these “liberalism” debates risk becoming reductive and rigid—leading to a view of liberalism that is far too fragile and that ends up supporting a political program that often undercuts the deeper resources of a free society.
This week, I have two pieces that address this topic. These pieces argue (in their own ways) for recovering a more robust sense of freedom and for regaining the broader resources of the “liberal” tradition broadly conceived.
The first (and shorter one) is for City Journal. I examine the paradigm of crisis that has reigned in DC more or less since 2001 and has tightened its grip since 2016. Both Donald Trump and his opponents have embraced crisis politics. However, the project of “declare a state of emergency to save liberal democracy” may cut against the aims of both liberty and democracy.
The chaos leveraged to resist Trump has often helped him and further destabilized American politics. Torn by riots, the 2020 “reckoning” hurt Democrats in many working-class districts and set a grim precedent for the outbreak of anti-Semitism we see today. While many Trump critics warn that he may prosecute his political opponents if he returns to the White House, Trump allies argue that his opponents have already opened the door to such legal conflict. Joe Biden confided to aides that he thought Trump should be prosecuted for his efforts to challenge the 2020 election. The election-related Trump indictments rely on relatively untested legal theories and risk dramatically raising the stakes of future legal conflicts. If its aim is to reduce Trump’s influence, “lawfare” waged against Trump might prove politically counterproductive. The former president’s indictments have caused his stock with Republicans to rise. The legal crusade to use the Fourteenth Amendment to throw Trump off the ballot—and Republican officials’ threats to do the same to Joe Biden—reveals the explosive potential of state-of-exception politics.
Instead of crisis politics, I propose the paradigm of resilience.
“Resilience” stands for flexibility in the face of adversity. To be resilient means to draw from a range of resources in order to cope with difficulty. Imperfection is embedded in the idea of resilience; indeed, that idea is premised on some vulnerability, and a serious project built around it starts from recognition of imperfection.
Resilience for a free society would have two components. The first is theoretical. Especially in response to the challenges of populism, many doctrines of “liberalism” have become reductive, if not paranoid. Theoretically, resilience means finding the range of freedom that lies beyond some goal of “negative liberty.” Making freedom simply about escaping restrictions or having some absolute sense of self-direction obscures its broader traditions: freedom as internal cultivation, ethical enrichment, and participation in self-government. This more expansive notion of freedom reveals the importance of our connections with other human beings. Elements of it can be seen in religious scriptures, classical political philosophy, and Renaissance humanism—and in the “extraordinary liberality” of the Puritan settlers.
Resilience has policy implications, too. (See the piece itself for more.)
And that leads me to my second and much longer piece this week: a longform essay for FUSION on the role of the “good” for key thinkers of the “liberal” political tradition, including John Locke and J.S. Mill.
Here’s how it opens:
The status of the good is at the heart of today’s debates about “liberalism.” Both defenders and critics take for granted that liberalism somehow defers questions of the right way to live, both individually and collectively. While classical political philosophy (so the story goes) focused on arranging society according to the common good, liberal modernity is thought to center on material interest, diversity of opinion, and individual choice. In one of the most influential distillations of this theme, John Rawls argued at the end of the 20th century that the structures and norms of a politically liberal society need not depend upon some “comprehensive doctrine” about the good life. Whatever their metaphysical commitments, a Catholic, a Mormon, a Muslim, a Jewish person, a Buddhist, and an atheist could all subscribe to a common set of principles for protections for the person—essentially, a list of individual rights. In fact, Rawls argues, liberal politics often works by deflecting moral questions to private life.
Others have argued that the alleged deferral of the good has grave political risks. In an influential assessment of Rawls, Michael Sandel argued that removing the good from public contention can hollow out a political order, reducing it to an alliance of convenience that cannot sustain participatory citizenship. More recent “postliberal” critiques of liberalism have also emphasized the role of the good. Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change contrasts a “common good” approach to politics with the liberal order, which knocks over guardrails such as faith and family in order to create a “vast and widening playground for the project of [individual] self-creation.”
But this criticism may not reckon sufficiently with the tensions of the liberal tradition, broadly understood. Far from ignoring the good, many of the figures who developed and defended the ideal of a free society instead seem haunted by it. They cannot totally discard moral criteria for informing desires. They recognize that a sense of the overarching good may be far more than simply a product of personal preference. This good plays an important role in structuring one’s own preferences—and thus making each of us who we are. In his landmark Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor suggests that such an “orientation to the good” is a “condition of our being selves with an identity.” In that respect, the good isn’t an alternative to freedom—it’s the foundation.
This piece is at times dense. Essentially, I dig into the works of Locke, Mill, and Iris Murdoch (who is rarely invoked in these debates about liberalism) to show how they remain concerned with some sense of the good. Some proponents (and critics) of ideological “liberalism” argue that the liberal order is fundamentally about deferring questions of the good and instead focusing on personal preference. But many key figures in this tradition were aware of the need to ground our preferences on some deeper order.
Recovering that bigger sense of freedom’s opportunities and demands can cast a new light on contemporary concerns. And I have some more material in the works on that theme.
And why not a few links on resilience-related themes to close out this issue?
Last week, Oren Cass had a barnburner essay on the origins of “free trade” in Law & Liberty. He argues that much of the “free trade” agenda in the 20th century can be attributed to geopolitics, not economics. (As a quick aside, I think the geopolitical element of trade policy has often been understated, and it provides an important lens for current trade-related challenges—one that might complicate both “old right” and “new right” arguments.)
Also at Law & Liberty, Donald Boudreaux rides to the defense of economics-focused accounts of “free trade.”
Jan-Werner Mueller surveys three books on “liberalism’s forever crisis.”
A working paper by Julian Waller on “authoritarian” theorists. (See also this 2022 article by Waller in American Affairs, where he offers a much more evidence-based discussion of authoritarianism than you see in a lot of popular “democracy in crisis” discourse.)
A double-barreled take on resilience in National Affairs: “Taming the Modern” and “Recovering the Republican Sensibility.”
Tony at 25: Twenty-five years ago this week, The Sopranos premiered on HBO. The Sopranos is one of my favorite TV series—multilayered, thematically rich, and stylistically sophisticated. Like its cousin The Godfather, The Sopranos isn’t really about organized crime. To commemorate this anniversary, Zach Kessel goes on a New Jersey adventure. Daniel McCarthy reflects on the cultural context of the show.
Thanks for reading, and I hope your new year is off to a great start!
For me, a question remains. Following the horrors of the 2 world wars, did the West too hastily discard all forms of nationalism, traditionalism and populism - including its positive social aspects - thus permitting the ugly head of liberalism to emerge (atomization of society, commodification of everything, lack of meaning, etc.) ?
Is liberalism, pushed to its essence, really the optimal end game ?