A Renewed Liberalism Can Meet the Populist Challenge

New York Times

26-01-2025

With President Trump back in the White House, it should be abundantly clear that 'establishment liberalism' is no longer viable. We need a new liberalism that is more faithful to its original values but adapted to our times.
Establishment liberalism is liberalism as it came to be practiced in the mainstream of Western countries and their institutions throughout the post-World War II era, by both center-right and center-left parties.
But a renewed liberalism must rediscover its most inspiring roots: an energy coming from opposition to the unfair and unrestrained use of power; a commitment to freedom of thought and celebration of different approaches to our common problems; and a concern for the community as well as the individual as the basis of efforts to improve the opportunities of the disadvantaged.
With Mr. Trump's radical agenda to reshape U.S. institutions, liberalism's revival is urgent: It is again in opposition and in a position to speak truth to power.
Liberalism and its failure
At its core, liberalism includes a bundle of philosophical ideas based on individual rights, suspicion of and constraints on concentrated power, equality before the law and some willingness to help the weakest and discriminated members of society.
Liberalism is not just an abstract philosophy. It lays the foundation for institutions and systems that have contributed to the heights of human flourishing.
Yet countries throughout the industrialized world have turned to right-wing populist parties such as the National Rally in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and AfD in Germany.
And many detractors have proclaimed that liberalism is discredited. One of its best-known critics, Patrick Deneen — the author of the 2018 book 'Why Liberalism Failed' — recently emphasized the flaws of liberalism 'in an increasingly tyrannical state-corporate nexus that governs every minute aspect of our lives.'
Mr. Deneen and other critics contend that liberal ideas were flawed from the beginning, because they attempted to change culture from elite institutions down and emphasized individual autonomy ahead of community.
This critique ignores the many successes of liberalism (fighting fascism, the civil rights movement, the opposition to Soviet totalitarianism). It ignores that countries that switch from authoritarian political regimes to democracy, which tend to increase civil liberties and constraints on abuse of political power and coercion, typically experience faster economic growth, more stability and more spending and better outcomes in health and education.
It ignores that we need liberalism because we are living in a world shaped by the largest corporations humanity has ever seen and powerful governments unshackled from democratic norms and armed with huge fiscal might and artificial intelligence.
More important, these criticisms confound establishment liberalism with the very different roots of liberalism in the past.
These roots can be gleaned from another 2018 book, 'The Lost History of Liberalism,' by Helena Rosenblatt, which recounts the sensibilities and struggles of the founders of liberalism from ancient Rome to European philosophers of the past four centuries.
These liberal thinkers used to have a more expansive view, emphasizing human fallibility, community and ethical responsibilities related to reciprocity and working for the common good — not just radical individualism and an overarching emphasis on autonomy.
Ms. Rosenblatt quotes Cicero, who could be considered the first philosopher in the liberal tradition: 'Since we are not born for ourselves alone,' he wrote 'we ought to contribute our part to the common good, and by the interchange of kind offices, both in giving and receiving, alike by skill, by labor and by the resources at our command, strengthen the social union of men among men.'
Liberal thinkers were also diverse. Friedrich von Hayek, one of the most important liberal philosophers of the past two centuries, grappled with how to combine human ignorance and fallibility together with institutions protecting freedom. He wrote that 'the case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends.' Yet today's liberal progressives would reject even having Hayek in their ranks.
Another important distinction among the founders of liberalism: They were in opposition to and often speaking truth to power. This made liberalism a philosophy that criticized how power was exercised by economic and political elites.
We cannot understand the problems of the liberal establishment today without recognizing that it became the establishment and never adjusted to this new reality.
The three pillars
In the United States, establishment liberalism became the more or less bipartisan governing philosophy following the New Deal and World War II. Republicans from Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon accepted it.
The Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan conservative revolution rolled back some of the New Deal-era regulations, reduced taxes and favored large corporations, but three pillars of establishment liberalism grew in strength: (1) cultural liberalism, with emphasis on individualism, autonomy and progressive cultural attitudes; (2) the empowerment of educated elites, in the form of both technocracy and meritocracy, but going beyond just technical matters and extending to issues like moral values; and (3) an emphasis on establishing procedures for predictable application of laws and regulations.
Each one had positives and negatives. The problem was that there was little balance of power. The way that liberalism became the establishment and turned into practice was not, after the 1980s, seriously or coherently questioned from within the Democratic Party in the United States and many center-left parties in Europe.
Yet historically, these three pillars of the establishment were not essential to liberalism. At best, they should have been thought of as part of a bundle of practices adapted to the times and exigencies that the modern state encountered.
Cultural liberalism was part of the spectrum of values that helped reduce discrimination against ethnic, religious and sexual minorities in the United States. But the balance here is delicate. It is one thing to defend minorities (and this is very consistent with liberalism as an opposition movement); it's an entirely different thing to impose values on people who do not hold them (for example, telling people which words are acceptable and which are not).
Without the adequate balance of power, cultural liberalism shifted more and more toward imposing values. It also came to conceptualize liberty with individual rights, without recognizing the importance of reciprocal contribution to community.
Empowerment of the educated elites: The past four decades have seen a steady increase in the economic, social and political power of college graduates and more recently of postgraduates.
The ascendance of the educated elite is partly economic, driven by the decline of manual work in postindustrial society. It is also a consequence of the growing role that experts came to play in the state institutions and the intellectual towers of liberal democracies. Establishment liberalism and these elites justified this ascendance with meritocracy. But this justification also contributed to their top-down practice of imposing policies and cultural liberalism.
The rest of society, in part as a reaction, came to view technocracy as biased and meritocracy as a rigged game.
Procedures and effective governance: a big promise of liberal democracy was to deliver widely accessible, high-quality public services. This is what the British poet laureate John Betjeman pithily summarized when he wrote, 'Think of what our Nation stands for' — 'Democracy and proper drains.'
Yet democracy came not to stand for proper drains anymore. We saw a proliferation of regulations to deal with safety and risks from new products, from cars to pharmaceuticals, and paperwork to deal with federal regulations on the environment and anti-discrimination provisions. These procedures have multiplied over time, and special interest groups have used them to push their own agendas (from NIMBYs stopping public housing to progressive groups piling on anti-discrimination paperwork on federal contracts).
A pronounced decline in the efficiency of providing public services followed. Recent research by the economists Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow finds that from the 1960s to the 1980s, government spending per mile of highway increased more than threefold, most likely because additional regulations were introduced so that groups of citizens were not harmed by new highway construction. These came to be strongly policed by activists and special interest groups. Other economists have found similarly mounting inefficiencies in the construction industry, with a similar explanation: onerous land-use regulations.
These three pillars combined to create the impression that liberalism was hectoring and not even efficient. It is true some of this discontent was manufactured by talk shows and right-wing media and social media. But some of it was real.
The new liberalism
At least three principles should guide a reform of liberalism. The first is a much greater emphasis on freedom of speech and a repudiation of 'thought-policing.' If liberalism is partly about our ignorance, fallibility and doubt about what is right, then it should always stand against efforts to shut down different thoughts and perspectives.
This doesn't mean that certain types of social media cannot be regulated. But it does mean that liberals should welcome diversity of viewpoints and criticism and stop putting social pressure on those who deviate from the accepted lines.
It also means that elite universities should be more welcoming of different ideas, including those from conservative thinkers. They should also more generally try to diversify their social-economic base, particularly from rural and manual worker backgrounds.
The second principle should be an explicit attempt to have greater social-economic diversity among political activists and elites. Part of the problem and a major source of the lack of balance of power is that progressive activists are mostly from the upper middle classes, with elite education degrees (and few ties to working-class people).
Center-left parties should explicitly welcome the working class and people without college degrees, particularly into leadership positions. These policies can work. Recent research shows how gender quotas put in place in the 1990s by the Swedish Social Democrats, requiring local candidates to alternate between men and women, were effective in promoting the representation of women, and they raised the quality of the candidates as well.
The third principle should be a new approach to regulation that emphasizes effectiveness and minimizes paperwork and procedural barriers. The modern state, and especially liberal parties and politicians, have to find a way of regulating with minimal red tape and delay. The modern state also has to focus on core regulations: It is one thing to deal with risks from nuclear technology, new pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and a completely different thing to build a bureaucracy for piling up permits for repairs or licensing hairdressers and massage therapists.
One way to remake regulation is to eliminate many unnecessary regulations and empower politicians to streamline the regulatory process, with strict accountability following after the fact — meaning that rather than restricting what politicians and bureaucrats can do before policies are carried out, serious and well-designed accountability should come after policy execution and according to the success of the policies.
Experimentation with different alternatives is key — which is another liberal idea that has been forgotten.
The Democratic Party, arguably the worst offender in establishment liberalism's faults, can and should take the lead. It must oppose Mr. Trump when necessary, but Democrats should experiment with local and state governments where they hold power. There they can show how they can streamline regulations, promote more citizens from working-class backgrounds to positions of power and move away from all sorts of thought-policing.