Not Left for Dead

Why red scare attacks on liberalism are red herrings. A response to Fred Siegel.

Since the time I was in college in the late 1960s, liberalism has been under steady, sharp, and often shrill attack, while many liberals have seemed too uncertain in their convictions, or too angry about their critics, to argue their own case effectively. First there was the siege from the radical left, which denounced liberalism for complacently accepting the injustices of capitalism and miserably failing to achieve full equality and human liberation. Next came the broadsides of the neoconservatives, originally directed against the grand ambitions and unanticipated consequences of liberal social policy. Then, during the Reagan years, a revived free-market conservatism allied with the religious right mounted the first round of a frontal assault on modern liberal government. Round two of that offensive began after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and round three came after George W. Bush became president. Conservatives had long derided liberals during the Cold War as weak for merely trying to contain communism, not to roll it back; after September 11, rather than negotiate with hostile states, Bush and the neoconservatives renounced the traditions of liberal internationalism, seeking regime change through the unilateral use of force. And throughout these years, right-wing populists kept up a steady barrage of attacks, greatly amplified by the advent of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and Fox News in the following decade.

All of this took place during a period when the South flipped from the Democrats to the Republicans, unions suffered a steep decline, and a gender gap opened as white men turned right. The decline of unions reflected structural changes in the economy, while the Democrats’ loss of the South and of white men in all regions stemmed largely from a backlash against social changes set in motion by movements that liberals had championed.

Which brings us to the central question raised by liberalism’s critics, among them Fred Siegel [“Blinded by the Left,” Issue #5]: Is something basically wrong with liberalism as a public philosophy, and has that misconceived perspective been the source of failed policies and the primary reason that the Democrats lost their status as the nation’s majority party? Or, alternatively, is liberalism basically right, and did liberals lose the influence they enjoyed via the Democrats because of societal changes that they either could not control or could not conscientiously repudiate–and, to a lesser extent, because of remediable mistakes of policy and strategy?

A great deal hangs on the answer. The first view implies a need for a new public philosophy regardless of how our circumstances change; the second implies that new conditions may provide the grounds for a liberal reconstruction if liberals can correct the strategic and policy mistakes of recent decades. I take the second position. There is much that liberals need to reexamine, but they do not need to give up on their principles, rend their garments, and beg for forgiveness. They need to build on the strengths of their tradition and to refashion it to fit new conditions. Yet this position raises questions just as difficult as the first: What are liberalism’s fundamental principles, and how should they now be interpreted and applied?

These questions have a new urgency as the Bush presidency stumbles toward an end. Now it is conservatism that seems exhausted, divided, and deflated as a result of a devastating combination of overreach and underachievement. Moreover, the backlash against liberalism that began in the 1960s may now have petered out. Particularly among the young, public opinion has shifted in a more liberal and tolerant direction. None of this guarantees a liberal recovery, but it creates an opening, which liberals ought to seize not just through electoral politics–but by clarifying what they stand for and want to accomplish.

I wrote Freedom’s Power, as I say in its preface, “to get straight what liberalism is about and to set straight what has gone wrong with it in recent decades.” The book offers a historical interpretation of liberalism, a defense of liberal principles in their modern democratic and egalitarian form, and an analysis of what went wrong beginning in the 1960s and how liberals ought to frame their general approach to politics today.

Although Freedom’s Power is a short book, it takes a long view of its subject, going back to the origins of constitutional liberalism in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America. Two principal reasons motivate this approach. First, modern democratic liberalism sits atop the foundation that constitutional liberals created and that continually needs defending. As Michael Lind correctly observed in his review in the New York Times, I take the view that “Anglo-American democratic liberalism is the left wing of classical liberalism, not, like European social democracy, the right wing of democratic socialism.” And, second, I argue that from its beginnings liberalism has been a method not only of constraining power but also of creating it. That constitutionally limited power can be more powerful than unlimited power has been a crucial lesson of the past three centuries and the great, counterintuitive liberal triumph.

At the core of liberalism is the idea that each of us enjoys an equal right to freedom, but liberalism has never been solely about rights even as it has embraced a broader, more positive conception of freedom. Rights of personal and civil liberty imply that we are individually accountable for our own actions; rights to political liberty imply a civic responsibility to make democracy work; and rights to basic requirements of human development (such as education and a minimum standard of security) imply that we have obligations to one another, mutually and through our government, to ensure the conditions exist enabling every individual to live in dignity and have the opportunity for success in life. The central liberal project, I write, is “the effort to guarantee these freedoms and to create the institutions and forms of character that will lead a people to assume responsibility, not as an external burden imposed upon them, but from a force within.”

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