Let’s bake the liberal sourdough
Yes, Jonathan V. Last, liberalism needs to revisit its recipe. No, Ross Douthat, we should not give up on the starter.
Earlier this month, Ross Douthat posted a piece headlined: “The liberal order can’t heal itself.” The very next day, Jonathan V. Last exhorted liberals: “Stop the masochism.”
The two essays didn’t reference each other, but they represented poles of a crucial debate. Douthat lamented that there are “no current resources inside liberalism commensurate” with the challenges it faces. Last countered: “Liberalism’s great liability isn’t ‘wokeness.’ It’s a lack of self-confidence bordering on masochism.”
Last would have liberals just buck up; Douthat would have them give up.
So which is it? Was liberalism—understood as the broad political tradition, with both left- and right-leaning variations, in support of liberal democratic capitalism—working fine before Trump stormed onto the scene, such that what we need now is an assertive campaign to restore the normal order? Or was liberalism already so feeble that MAGA’s home remedies were the only medicine left, and who knows? They may even do some good?
The firewalls Donald Trump still needs to break through to take us from constitutional democracy to Caesarism will prove stronger if they are buttressed by the confidence of liberal elites, both right- and left-leaning. So it matters what opinion leaders like Last and Douthat believe—especially since both are conservatives whose readers could shape the trajectory of the Republican Party. But the debate between them posits a false choice.
The answer is that we need neither liberal despair nor a liberal restoration, but a liberal reconstruction. It’s a play in four acts, or four states of mind: confidence to know what we did well in the period after the Cold War; clarity about what we face now; humility to see where we went wrong and what needs repair; and determination to harness liberalism’s powers of renewal rather than submit to fatalism.
We can build on pieces of Last’s and Douthat’s arguments to get through the first two acts, and part of the third. But a winning performance also requires something new.
What we face
1) Economic underperformance is insufficient to explain the rise of Trump, and a restoration of widely shared growth—already under way during the Biden years, inflation notwithstanding—will not suffice to arrest right-wing populism. The “affordability” debate now raging in Washington is substantively important and electorally devastating for the administration, but it is not a key out of our long-term crisis.
Douthat and Last agree that for all the flaws of the pre-Trump economy, the United States had a sound and widely accepted economic model that remains relevant today. Last focuses on the elite, arguing the nation had achieved a “neoliberal” consensus that capitalism works best but requires a muscular government to soften its excesses and secure global markets, with plenty of debate around the margins.1 Douthat focuses on performance:
Overall, Americans got richer across the neoliberal era, the populist and socialist alternatives yield slower growth and more corruption, and a lot of the specific economic problems cited by neoliberalism’s critics (housing costs, say) would actually be ameliorated by a stronger dose of deregulation and free markets, the old liberal prescription made new.
Inflation almost certainly got Trump elected a second time. But the forces that allowed him to remain viable after Jan. 6 were not animated by pocketbook concerns. Trumpism reflects deep cultural grievances—and fuses them to dark passions.
2) “Trumpism” is guided by illiberal and authoritarian ideas and impulses, but those ideas and impulses aren’t shared by all his supporters. Blatant lawlessness, flagrant and massive corruption, contempt for constitutional restrictions on power, demonization of opponents, shameless bigotry and stoking of racial resentment, celebration of violence, performative cruelty – these hallmarks of Donald Trump’s political vision mark him as a dangerous demagogue with deeply illiberal and authoritarian ambitions. And for core supporters of the so-called MAGA movement, Trump’s illiberalism is central to his appeal.
Many political insiders have grown weary of this argument, dismissing it either as outraged “virtue-signaling” or simply naivete about how politics works in the new Washington. But a liberal strategy must begin with clarity about the chief problem, and the chief problem is how to counter a movement that has taken control of one of our major parties, and the federal government itself, while repudiating core liberal values. As Last puts it: “For some people the turn to Trumpism was … born of frustration at being ill-served by the economic and social order. For many, many others, it was about something else.”
But liberals must be equally clear that authoritarian and racist impulses alone are far from sufficient to explain Donald Trump’s electoral wins. Many who voted for him did so in spite of the dark lurch away from America’s founding principles; they were simply voting against inflation, against border chaos, against a visibly diminished incumbent and the vice president who covered up for him. Indeed, instead of rejecting liberalism, many were reacting against illiberal “woke” excesses and threats of worse on the left. Finally, the deep discontent gripping the nation and underlying the rise of MAGA has to do with the sense that somewhere along the line, a whole range of institutions just stopped working for people. That brings us to the third point.
3) The substantive problems that liberalism must grapple with have grown much deeper than mere growth and redistribution. Douthat’s list is instructive but incomplete: technological alienation; the confluence of declining fertility and rising nativism; and the rise of hostile foreign powers who exploit the liberal order only to undermine it. That last point should be broadened to include contemporary liberalism’s tendency toward naivete about the enemies it faces, both foreign and domestic – which is why point 2 is so vital.
The cultural crisis of liberalism is not self-doubt, but separation
What both the Last and Douthat essays ignore is a deeper cultural crisis underlying economic complaints: the gap between the working classes and their professional-managerial counterparts. This is a problem the Trump-era New Right has diagnosed accurately, but often in feverish terms of conspiracy theory.
For their part, liberals have yet to reckon with the full depth of this problem, which goes far beyond voting coalitions. The many symptoms of the disease include a kind of blindness among the professional class, which is what allowed it to stumble headlong into censorious cultural orthodoxies that only fueled MAGA populism over the last decade. Left-liberals are coming out of that fever, and if all highly educated liberals come to grips with the class divide in our country, they can help return liberalism to the difficult road it has always tried to walk—forging the grand bargains that ensure peace across both cultural identities and classes.
Last acknowledges that thinkers like George Packer who emphasize the ways in which liberalism had grown stale are “almost certainly correct.” At the same time, he downplays this kind of grappling as crossing the line between “healthy self-interrogation and pathological scrupulosity.” He argues that “MAGA is not really a reaction to adverse economic consequences or ‘elite failures,’ but an affirmative preference for illiberalism.”
In fact, the lesson of the last decade is that a reaction to adverse economic consequences and elite failures can turn into a preference for illiberalism when complaints fall on deaf ears. Untangling this knot is our generational challenge. To meet it, liberalism needs to prove that it can tackle the big problems of security, economics, and culture that preoccupy Americans now. Not the problems of yesteryear—the problems of today.
Debating where liberalism has gone wrong in these matters is not a sign of weakness; it is a signifier of strength. It is not apology, but armor. Intellectuals should be forthright about this. And if we proceed with the assumption that a huge swath of the country is irredeemably authoritarian, rather than deeply misguided, we lose our power to persuade.
Which leads us to the final point.
4) The last act: Only liberalism, with its ability to deliver prosperity and its insistence on human dignity and the free exchange of ideas, can find solutions to these problems. In doing so it can draw on its rich tradition of synthesis with religion, national pride, and theories of civic virtue.
Thinkers who purport to transcend the liberal inheritance and cheerlead the politicians who despise it are wandering into caves rather than out of them. As Laura Field shows in her new book Furious Minds, even the most credible postliberal intellectuals dabble in conspiratorial and fantastical ideas that too often wish away our history and pluralist reality. And as Jonathan Chait observes in his recent essay on “the conservative movement’s intellectual collapse,”
Identifying and correcting errors is an important role for a political movement’s intellectuals … It is impossible to fulfill this role when a lone man defines what counts as success or failure — often in self-contradictory ways and regardless of the evidence.
We might add that in the age of social media and short-form video, this danger goes beyond Trump. An intellectual movement, left or right, will swiftly cease to be intellectual if it seeks its north star among mercurial media personalities with gullible audiences.
Intellectual life can only thrive and find real solutions within the parameters of liberalism, which encourages wide-ranging debate anchored by a set of principles that protect against the bigoted idiocy that is now surging on the extremes, boosted by the president himself.
As to a restoration of our broken culture, it may be true that the barebones liberal assumptions driving a microeconomic model are inadequate to the job. But in assuming that this represents the actual reality of liberalism, we sip far too deeply from the postliberal well. In a discussion of our crisis of despair and alienation, Douthat writes:
[While] hopefully culture and politics will adapt, those adaptations will not themselves be liberal in either a philosophical or a post-Cold War political sense of the term. They might be postliberal in the sense of political regulation of technology or in the sense of religious-moral regulation of individual choice—but they will not just emerge organically from the proper application of John Stuart Mill or Milton Friedman.
This caricature of liberalism represents precisely the kind of “masochism” Last warns against. Solutions to social problems that call on us to reckon with global conflict and cultural disaffection are not foreign to the liberal tradition. They are central to the liberal tradition. It was this tradition that grew out of Europe’s wars of religion, and much later won two world wars and a Cold War. It was this tradition that created the space for the flourishing of religious communities throughout American history.
It was also this tradition that was merged more or less seamlessly with a “republican” tradition that prized civic virtue and the formation of citizens. Generations of schoolchildren memorized Daniel Webster’s speech that ends, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” not because it prescribed ruthless individualism enforced by a national government, but because it sought to forge a national culture in which Americans from Maine would feel kinship with Americans from Louisiana.
Contemporary liberalism has indeed strayed from that tradition. As Field observes:
Liberalism was invented in part to sidestep and quell the flames of ideological fanaticism. Partly as a result of that history, liberals have for far too long accepted a minimalist self-understanding that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision; they have similarly refused to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives.
But the solution is not to concede an impoverished vision of liberalism and declare it bankrupt; it is, as Field insists, to “become more upfront about the core ideas and ideals of liberalism: about what liberalism values and why, in language that can be broadly understood.”
The United States cannot return to the liberal status quo ante that prevailed before 2016. It was already past its expiration date then, and the transformations we are living through have only accelerated.
But the good news about liberalism is that it’s like the sourdoughs so many of us began baking during the pandemic. We can always make it anew. There’s no need to dump powdered sugar on a batch that has gone bad. But there’s no need to throw out the starter, either.
David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.
He’s broadly correct, even if he overstates the degree to which the Ryan-era GOP had reconciled itself to propositions such as, “‘Small government’ is an impossibility for a hyperpower; government should be more concerned with efficacy than size.’”