Liberal intellectuals frequently complain that the Democratic Party is failing. But lately, I’ve been wondering whether it’s the liberal writers who have been failing the Democrats.
In the midterms, Democrats more than did their job: they won in a generational blowout. That it was primarily a negative victory — won more by voters hating Trump than liking Democrats — makes no immediate difference for the task of checking Trump.
But it makes a great deal of difference for liberalism’s long-term future. Polls suggest Americans are fundamentally dissatisfied with both parties, and that part of the problem on the Democratic side is that they don’t really know what the party stands for. In a way, this is an opportunity: if Democrats can develop a new and exciting vision for the party’s purpose, they can reset the very terms of debate of American politics.
In theory, liberal intellectuals should be able to help with this.
While thinkers are generally quite bad at the nitty-gritty of political strategy, their remove from the immediate need to win and legislate gives them space to see the bigger picture. They can help develop new visions for politics that are useful for political leaders, who then adapt them in ways more suited to the campaign trail and realities of governance. Think about how Ronald Reagan’s adaptation of fusionist conservative thinking transformed American politics, or how a complex interplay between political theorizing and party politics built the European social democratic model.
Today’s liberal intellectuals1 are not very good at this. There is a kind of collective failure of imagination, with only limited and partial exceptions, that makes them less intellectually vital and politically useful2 than their peers on the right.
When people complain about not knowing what Democrats stand for, part of the problem is that Democrats don’t know where to look for ideas. Their intellectual class has not provided them with energizing ideological visions to latch on to, and they are thus forced to construct their political appeals out of a patchwork of polls and policy proposals.
I think this is a serious and underappreciated problem for American liberalism. But I think it is a fixable one. Part of what I’m trying to do here at Public Reason is to be the change I want to see in the world.
On ideological thinking, and why it matters
Broadly speaking, the work of political thinking takes place on three levels. At the lowest level of abstraction, there’s the development of policy and political strategy: what a better health care system might look like, or how to win a particular Senate seat. What people conventionally think of when they think about politics.
The highest level of abstraction, by contrast, is philosophical discussion of first principles and values — questions like the meaning of freedom and what makes political authority legitimate. This kind of discussion can guide or inspire political movements, but it offers little in the way of practical guidance.
Liberals excel at these lowest and highest levels of political discussion. There’s a reason why the best policy wonks and political philosophers working today tend to be somewhere on the liberal spectrum.
But there’s a level of thinking in between the two that liberals have come to neglect. It is the task of developing a worldview: a vision of political life that connects the highest and lowest levels of abstraction. Such a vision — properly termed an ideology — tells people who share a certain set of values how they should generally orient themselves toward real-world questions.
“Ideologies exist at the juncture of theory and practice, with one foot in the realm of abstract ideas and the other in everyday political reality,” the political scientist Sheri Berman writes in The Primacy of Politics, an account of social democracy’s rise. “They have their greatest impact when they can seamlessly relate the one to the other, offering adherents both a satisfying explanation of the world and a guide to mastering it.”
Ideology, in this sense, is where the right excels.
Think about Reaganite fusionism3: a movement made of commitments to free market economics, culturally conservative social policy, and militant anti-Communism abroad. These are not truly philosophical principles — they’re too applied for that. But they’re also too abstract to be policy doctrines. A general commitment to free market principles doesn’t tell you, say, how to structure monetary policy or childcare subsidies.
Instead, fusionism told a story about political life — one that gave people with right-of-center values a general guide they could use to think through practical politics. Fusionism says that if you are a person broadly committed to freedom and social stability, then you should be broadly skeptical of policies that regulate corporate behavior or alter social institutions like marriage.
It is that “if-then” structure — if you hold X value, then you should adopt Y orientation toward policy — that makes up the essence of ideological thinking.
If you are at all familiar with conservative thought, you’ll recognize that an enormous amount of its debates and discussions take place on this level. Marxists, too, have a robust tradition of ideological debate — pretty much every edition of Jacobin will have an article trying to articulate what socialist principles imply for a particular policy issue.
In the past, the ideological focus of these traditions has been a source of weakness. Ideology has a tendency to produce rigid thought, to make its adherents try to fit square pegs into round holes. Fusionist ideology produced the absurd idea that tax cuts lower the deficit; Marxist ideology produced apologias for the Soviet Union well after Stalin’s crimes were exposed.
But once Trump emerged on the scene, and shattered the old political consensus, ideological thinking became essential.
In her book, Berman argues that ideologies rise and fall through a “two-stage process.” First, “existing ideologies are questioned and tarnished, opening up a political space that competitors aspire to fill.” Second, “political actors start to develop and embrace alternative approaches…with contenders competing for mindshare and political power.”
America entered this two-stage process after the 2016 election. After the shock of The Celebrity Apprentice’s demagogic host winning the presidency, there was an enormous demand for explanation: not abstract theorizing or policy wonkery, but a holistic accounting of how the old ideological consensus broke and what a new order might look like.
Both the illiberal right and the socialist left were well-equipped to succeed after America entered Berman’s second stage.
Doctrines like postliberalism burst onto the scene to put ideological meat on MAGA’s personalist bones, providing material for leaders like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley looking to shape the GOP’s future. While Trump may not be a truly ideological actor, many of his top staff are — with people like Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, and Elon Musk all taking advantage of his victories to implement ideas drawn from the right’s new ideological ferment.
Similarly, socialist critics of liberalism offered a distinctive, emotionally compelling explanation for the old system’s failure — one that appealed especially to squeezed urbanites under 40. This, in part, explains the rise of the DSA as a major player in American politics.
But where were liberals? What were their bold new ideas?
Liberals are bad at ideology — even when they try
When you think about liberal ideological responses to the Trump era, there are probably two candidates4 for a genuinely new and exciting ideological approaches: the loose bundle of ideas called “wokeness,” and the abundance movement. Neither fully fits the bill.
Wokeness was, at heart, a bottom-up liberal appropriation of ideas and practices taken from radical left activism and academia. I think it ended up working well in some ways — it channeled what could have been destabilizing radical tendencies toward more productive ends — but also came with some well-known downsides that, ultimately, exhausted most everyone involved. We’re talking about “Woke 1” in the past tense for a reason.
Moreover, it’s not obvious that wokeness was ever a true ideology; it was notoriously difficult to pin down or define. No one really called themselves “woke” or attempted to codify a set of woke principles they themselves stood by; the term has mostly become an epithet used by critics of liberal social justice thinking and practices. In the end, “wokeness” was never really a coherent enough set of ideas to function as a true ideology systematically connecting values to practice.
Abundance, by contrast, is definitely a liberal ideological project. It’s also a pretty successful one, providing the Democratic Party with a useful new source of policy inspiration on issues like energy and affordability. It even helps us see what a better way to do liberal ideology could look like (I’ll return to this at the end).
However, abundance was not created to rebuild liberalism as such; abundance’s worldview is primarily about economic policy, and really a subset5 of it. The abundance movement isn’t trying to redefine liberalism in the holistic way that, say, postliberals are trying to redefine conservatism for the Trump era. Abundance is more like a component piece of a new liberal ideology than a full one in itself.
The most systematic attempts to do liberal ideology of late have come not from either of these camps, but rather from an older guard of liberal intellectuals — who have been less interested in building a new liberal ideology than vindicating a version of the existing one.
These writers have put out a series of “in defense of liberalism” manifestos since Trump that tend to follow a very familiar pattern. They define foundational liberal philosophical principles, make the case for their attractiveness, and defend them against perceived attacks on the right and left. They often point to some specific liberal policy or intellectual mistakes, and then conclude with some hasty musings about what liberals might do to bring themselves back from the abyss.
When I read this stuff, I tend to find myself nodding along with most of their arguments. Hell, I’ve written them. But the genre is limited by its intrinsic defensiveness, its focus on liberalism’s critics and failings rather than a path forward.
Perhaps most importantly, such work is almost never ideological in the sense that I’ve defined it — generally operating primarily, if not exclusively, on the philosophical or practical-political level. While a postliberal book like Why Liberalism Fails seamlessly blends the levels6 to produce a distinctive new ideological viewpoint, the defenses of liberalism generally fall into familiar and politically unproductive patterns.
I want to use two recent books to illustrate the point. Both are high-profile attempts to revitalize liberalism, written by celebrated liberal intellectuals at the top of their respective fields. They should, in theory, be the best the “in defense of liberalism” genre has to offer.7
The first is Daron Acemoglu’s What Happened to Liberal Democracy?. Acemoglu is by all accounts brilliant — an MIT economist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on political institutions and economic growth. His theory, that liberalism can be revived by a renewed focus on helping the working class, is considerably more forward-looking than most “in defense of liberalism” essays.
Yet the book itself is largely stuck on the lowest level of abstraction. Acemoglu conceptualizes liberalism’s current crisis as stemming primarily from its failure to deliver materially,8 and his proposed solutions are largely couched in policy terms. He proposes ideas like reserving “a fraction of candidacies and leadership positions in center-left parties for individuals without a college degree” and integrating AI into government service provision.
While Acemoglu is comfortable thinking in policy details, he’s basically uninterested in consideration of values. As the philosopher John Tasioulas observes, Acemoglu is strikingly resistant to any serious discussion of liberal moral principles — grounding his defense of liberalism almost entirely in the argument that it works in a practical sense (e.g., providing people the goods they need).
“This situation would not be so troubling if Acemoglu admitted that his theory of liberalism required philosophical supplementation in a broader intellectual division of labour, that it is not a ‘full justification of liberalism.’ Instead, he seemingly doubles down on denying the need for any such supplementation,” Tasioulas writes.
This may sound like exactly what a philosopher would say about an economist, but it’s actually a profound point. What philosophy does, that economics can’t, is help people think about questions of ultimate value and meaning: to give people a sense of what their political commitments should be about. Any ideology worth its salt has some answer to that question; Acemoglu’s economistic liberalism cannot provide one.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Cass Sunstein’s On Liberalism.
Sunstein, like Acemoglu, is widely acknowledged to be brilliant: a Harvard Law professor with extensive real-world policy experience working for both Barack Obama and Joe Biden. His book Nudge (with Richard Thaler) developed an entirely new way of thinking about public policy.
Yet On Liberalism is curiously abstract. It is almost entirely devoted to liberal philosophy — offering an account and defense of core liberal ideals like freedom of speech and the rule of law. His ultimate aim is to show that liberalism is not only an attractive political philosophy, but a capacious one — one that can encompass everyone from Hayek and Reagan on the right to Rawls and Obama on the left.
References to politicians aside, the practical work of politics is not his concern. Sunstein has no interest in developing an applied liberal vision, one that shows how to turn the liberal principles he defends into a real-world political doctrine. In an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Sunstein explains why in strikingly honest terms.
“Talking about the President makes me grumpy and talking about John Stuart Mill or John Rawls makes me the opposite of grumpy,” he says.
Hence why Sunstein’s book, for all its author’s intellectual firepower, failed to provide a blueprint for liberal revitalization. It was intended to operate exclusively on the highest level of abstraction.
Why liberalism is so bad at ideology — and how to fix it
I first started to think seriously about liberalism’s ideology problem a little over a year ago, when two young liberals asked me how to get started as a liberal in the ideas industry. I realized I didn’t have a good answer, and started wondering why. What I realized — summarized in this Vox piece — is that liberals don’t think about training their youth in the same way conservatives do.
Liberals tend to get their training in low-paying jobs at facially neutral institutions: hyper-specialized PhD programs in the humanities or social sciences, internships at mainstream newspapers, or entry-level policy think tank fellowships. These are not intended to do ideological education, but rather to train one to do a specific profession — professor, lawyer, journalist, policy analyst, etc.
By contrast, conservatism has a culture of explicitly ideological education. Donors have invested heavily in programs that are designed to encourage ideological thinking, training their young writers at retreats and fellowships where they study Burke, Hayek, and (more recently) Carl Schmitt. Young conservatives are simultaneously learning conservative thought, being trained to present that thought in a public-facing way, and being introduced to people who will give them a job doing just that.
Conservatives built this culture, in part, because they felt locked out of mainstream institutions. Indeed, liberals do benefit from being the majority on the Harvard faculty and New York Times masthead.
But by professionalizing their intellectual training, liberals have accidentally bifurcated it. Liberal philosophers and policy wonks are rarely collaborators, seeing themselves engaged in fundamentally different enterprises: one abstract and academic, the other applied and relevant. The culture of professionalism that suffuses the left precludes the boundary-breaking thinking inherent to the enterprise of ideological work, making the very principles of liberalism feel staid and boring in a world or rapid change.
The fact that conservatives are trained and socialized in a culture designed to produce ideologues rather than professionals often leads to lower-quality intellectual work. But it also makes conservatives natural ideological thinkers, and the movement they lead more equipped to fill ideological vacuums with exciting new ideas. The same is true, in a more complicated way, for socialists.
This would suggest a natural solution: rich liberal donors should fund people who want to create equivalents to the right’s training fora. That’s a great idea, and they should do it. But it’s not exactly a practicable short-term solution.
Immediately, liberals need to try to consciously unlearn their professionalized impulses. We should, in our writing and podcasting and video production, intentionally try to do work that connects the levels of philosophy and practical politics, taking ideas from both realms seriously. We should study the conservatives and socialists who are doing it successfully, and adapt some of their habits of mind.
To my mind, the exemplar here is Alexandre Lefebvre — a Canadian philosopher at the University of Sydney, who is currently working on a book attempting to do just this. His prior book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is a case study in how to do liberal ideology without falling into the “in defense of liberalism” trap.
The book’s central argument is that liberalism is not merely a political theory, but rather the source of many of the values that we hold dear in everyday life. Many of the qualities we see as virtues — for instance, treating people fairly regardless of background — are basically derived from the liberal morality that makes up “the water in which we swim.” Our current societies, which fall short of lofty liberal standards, can be improved by forcing them to confront the gap between their principles and reality.
In this, Lefebvre actually agrees with postliberals (like Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule) who argue that liberalism’s claim to value neutrality is something of a sham. But unlike those critics, Lefebvre thinks the liberal moral system is a good one: not just for societies, but for each of us as people. He looks at the “crisis of meaning” in the world around us and says renewed purpose can be found in trying to be true to liberal values — in trying to fix the ways our lives and societies fall short of liberal ideas.
“We’ve never given up on the core of religion: to seek meaning in life through something beyond us. Our beyond is found not on another plane of existence but instead in something worldly just beyond our grasp — an ideal of becoming a free and generous person in a fair and just society,” he writes.
It may not seem like it, but Lefebvre’s argument does exactly the kind of ideological work I’m calling for. He provides an illuminating discussion of what liberal values are, and then connects them to what is at heart a political problem: the collective sense of purposelessness, of aimlessness, of powerlessness that seems to suffuse modern life. He even outlines some “spiritual exercises,” drawn from liberal political philosophy, that people can use to fix their lives.
Lefebvre’s book is very different from Abundance, but both work better than the “in defense of liberalism” essay for the same reason: they follow the classic writing advice of show, don’t tell.
The “in defense of liberalism” genre spends a lot of time talking about liberalism, but vanishingly little time showing how to actually be a liberal in the world. By contrast, both Liberalism as a Way of Life and Abundance are interested in real-world liberal hypocrisy — when it comes to morality and economic policy, respectively — and in showing that they are not inherent contradictions, but rather defects that can be improved by a more thoughtful application of liberal values. They do not preach liberalism, but demonstrate what it means.
This is the way forward for liberal intellectuals: to take the philosophical and policy-level work liberals have done and turn it into specific, concrete liberal visions for a particular element of political life. Ultimately, these disparate efforts should be able to be stitched together into something truly comprehensive — a genuinely exciting reformulation of liberalism for modern times.
If liberal intellectuals choose instead to fall back on our old familiar habits, then we should be prepared to complain a lot less about the Democratic Party’s lack of vision. It would, to at least some degree, be our fault.
Normally, I draw a pretty sharp distinction between the two senses of liberalism: the American sense of “broadly center-left” and the philosophical sense of committed to a vision of politics based on liberty and consent of the governed. In this case, I’m comfortable running them together, because American liberals in both senses have become overwhelmingly concentrated in the Democratic Party — which isn’t an ideal state of affairs, but that’s a separate post.
Note that I did not say “substantively correct.” LIberalism’s problem is not correctness in a narrow sense, but imagination and verve.
Fusionism was, I think, part of the liberal family in philosophical terms — just with a very different intellectual culture than left-of-center liberalism. This cultural divide has persisted as American conservatism has become philosophically antiliberal, and the left-of-center faction has come to include pretty much all of America’s philosophical liberals.
One might think of others that resemble ideologies — like Bidenomics or popularism — but quite clearly are not the genuine article.
Abundance famously does not have a clear stance on distributional questions, for example.
This is not to endorse the book’s specific method of argument, which I think fails precisely because it is too willing to blend empirical and normative claims — sloppily assigning blame to liberalism for various real-world ills without sufficient empirical evidence. It’s possible to have too much of a good thing.
Believe me, I made this hard for myself — there are plenty of worse books I could have chosen as to pick on here.
I think this is almost certainly wrong.
As I read through your analysis of how and why conservatism got a toe-hold in the younger demographic—and then climbed the ladder to a wider audience—one name came to mind: Charlie Kirk. Through faulty logic and pseudo-intellectualism, and a soupçon of religion, he created his horrifying right-wing movement. It was a sexy mix for his manosphere.
This paragraph in your thoughtful essay gave me a real-time example of what a conservative ideologue looks like:
“The fact that conservatives are trained and socialized in a culture designed to produce ideologues rather than professionals often leads to lower-quality intellectual work. But it also makes conservatives natural ideological thinkers, and the movement they lead more equipped to fill ideological vacuums with exciting new ideas.”
Perhaps liberals should delve into Kirk’s appeal and employ his proselytizing strategies. I think someone like James Tallerico— already on the national stage— could deftly coax a wide audience towards ethical liberalism.
Thanks for the provocative read!
Thank you for a thought-provoking article. Definitely agree that the whole "value neutral" thing is a sham. Helena Rosenblatt makes that point too that the pioneers of liberalism never thought that way. (Where did that notion even come from?)
Couple of points of pushback:
1. I disagree with the point made in the latter half of footnote 1, although I understand why one might be led to believe it. Trump's movement is obviously illiberal. But many normies who vote R still would signal enthusiastic support for "the values of America's founding." Those are liberal values!
2. Similarly, when we talk of "liberal" in the philosophical sense, I question the choice to see liberal and conservative as opposites in the U.S. context. This is a point Hayek makes in his essay "Why I am not a Conservative." As Helena Rosenblatt points out, Edmund Burke did not want to concede the word "liberal" to the French revolutionaries!