As fascism has returned to political power, elite liberalism seems to have been caught off guard, left unsure how to respond, how to argue for itself. Why?
Pre-Trump liberalism did not cause or provoke a far-right backlash: Fascism is an agential ideology with ideas, goals, and plans of its own. That said, though, liberalism was in a poor position to deal with this new threat. That’s because the ideology—particularly at an elite level—had started to understand itself in ways that were philosophically confused and that proved very vulnerable when it suddenly had to fight for its life.
One prime instance of this was that liberalism began to think it was, or should be, “neutral.” Philosophically, this is the belief that the state should not favor any particular conception of what constitutes a good life for its citizens, but should create a neutral framework for people to pursue the good as they see it. In recent American history, the most powerful liberals, when asked to justify neutrality—to explain how and why they use it—will often say they are applying “the rules” fairly and impartially. And this, to them, is what liberalism is for. Its role is as the referee of the great ideological game, not a player in it.
In public discussions, this idea of liberal neutrality has often been in the background, manifesting as a set of genteel conversational norms. Elite liberalism over the last generation has concerned itself with matters of decorum, civility, and process—making sure that everyone played nicely together.
The Origins of an Idea
To those of us who grew up with it, this seems normal. Historically, it’s a considerable deviation from liberalism’s self-understanding and self-justification, not to mention general tone and tenor. The proto-liberalism of John Locke was a revolutionary project in the literal sense that it sought to justify revolution. The liberalism of the early twentieth century was a project aimed at social reform. That of the mid-century—of the New Deal, Great Society, and civil rights eras—while certainly complicit in many of the evils of its world, was also a creed with a strong sense of its own values. Far from being content to “neutrally” enforce existing rights, it sought to expand them and create new ones.
Then, in the final decades of the century, the United States (and to an extent the developed world) found itself in a strange, and in historic terms quite aberrant, period of mild economic and political conditions and an accompanying thin cultural consensus. From the Volcker shock of 1982 to the crash of 2008, the economy entered a stable period known as “the great moderation.” On the political front, following the “Southern strategy” of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, the fundamental cleavage of American society (anti-Black racism) was now split between the parties. This meant those who wanted to appeal to racism had to do so in coded language, forcing them to sanitize their speech—appealing, on a surface level, to a thin, “color-blind,” neutral set of rules.
In this new era—what Samantha Hancox-Li calls “the long ’90s,” defined by seeming stability and consensus—there was a feeling in elite spaces that the fundamental questions of governance had now been solved; the “end of history” and all that. Representative democracy, a classically liberal set of rights and freedoms, and free trade and markets had won. Communism, planned economies, protectionism, legally enforced race or gender hierarchies, and overt bigotry were being left in the past.
In this environment, neutrality became a highly attractive way for elite liberalism to understand its role: The basic order of things was now set. Everyone was playing the same game. All that was needed was an umpire.
The Age of Neutrality
The philosopher who offered the most important formulation of a neutral liberalism was John Rawls. His seminal Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1992) came just before, and at the heyday of, the long ’90s.
Rawls’s ideal society is an order justified not by appeals to “comprehensive moral doctrines,” but by “public reason.” People would hold a fair range of views, but all would agree on the basics of the Constitution—there would be an “overlapping consensus” that all “reasonable” people could buy into. Citizens would have to make their political arguments by appealing to premises that everyone else could accept (so “because my religion says so” is not a legitimate argument, as others do not share the starting point). The state, in turn, would be neutral between the different ideas and life paths its citizens might pursue outside of that. (It would not, for instance, have any preference how, or if, someone worships.)
I don’t want to overstate the impact of Rawls. As canonical texts go, he’s never had the cut-through of a Marx or a Rousseau. Crowds have never gathered in the street chanting “realistic utopia.” Elites in the long ’90s, however, tended not to be especially philosophical. They were pragmatic problem solvers, you see, not concerned with ideology (which became something of a dirty word). When they had to justify the fundamentals of their power, they would regurgitate some half-remembered formulations from that one college course (or simply mimic a peer doing that). Conservatives would give you a Cliff Notes Robert Nozick (property rights, markets, a limited state), and liberals would give you a Cliff Notes John Rawls (liberal neutrality, reasonableness, discourse norms)—these being the two thinkers who were generally taught in a Political Philosophy 101 class.
This isn’t the only side to Rawls’s legacy. For instance, he was a strong egalitarian, arguing that society should be organized to benefit the worst off. Political philosophers who are influenced by him tend to draw strongly on this side of his work. For liberal politicians however, while they were often more softly egalitarian, neutrality was the idea they most fully embraced.
Take the case of the abortion debate: The defining constitutional document in this period was the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey Supreme Court decision, which both upholds and partially limits the better-known Roe v. Wade a generation earlier. Unlike Roe, which has a clearer sense of its own values, Casey very much works through Cliff Notes Rawls reasoning. The plurality opinion, authored by Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Souter, starts with the amusingly detached, “Reasonable people will have differences of opinion about these matters”; its core thrust is that it is not the court’s role to choose one worldview over another: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”
Except the decision is not neutral at all. It cannot be neutral. This is not a case where two “reasonable people” can disagree about the outcome but both can accept the legitimacy of the process. The moral stakes are just too high. If the process doesn’t reach your desired end point, then the process must change. The abortion debate is, and has always been, about what sort of Constitution we should have, and how far its implied privacy protections should extend, not merely if a particular act is criminalized.
Specifically, the “pro-life” side is making two assertions about who is entitled to claim the protections of constitutional rights: that the unborn are so entitled and, tacitly, that women (or at least pregnant women) are not. To an extent, the court can punt on the first of these, but not the second. The logic of Roe is that people have the right to a certain sphere where the state may not intrude that includes bodily autonomy, that women are people, and therefore women have this right. The state cannot compel a pregnancy (even if doing so is believed to save a life) in the same way as it cannot force a man to donate a kidney.
Who counts as a person is not a question that can be decided neutrally without respect to comprehensive worldviews. This is basically a deal-breaker for a pure neutrality—it’s not just that it doesn’t work in this instance; this instance shows why it can never work at all. To neutrally apply a set of rules (rights), you have to agree about what set of things you’re applying them to (who or what has rights). But we don’t agree about this. We never have and we never will. Put simply, for you to referee there must be a shared understanding of who is a player in the game and who isn’t.
But this rhetoric was useful for a liberalism that had switched from offense to defense. Roe aggressively expanded rights, while Casey partially defended and partially abandoned them. The battle against overt bigotry had now been won, elite liberals imagined; the question now was do we maintain a few restorative measures (like affirmative action) or abandon them? (Liberals, to be fair, usually did favor affirmative action, but this defensive crouch often left them amusingly unable to say why.) On the economy, the Third Way liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair accepted the core thrust of the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions and sought only to temper them; to make them kinder, gentler.
This is not to say Third Way projects were identical to the political right at the time. Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and attempted to expand health care. All the Democratic presidents of my lifetime, at a minimum, acted as a veto on Republican attempts to make our society crueler and less equal. All, in different ways, would have done far more good but for the various roadblocks of American governance (like Republican-controlled courts). Yet these presidents never questioned these same blocking structures. Court reform, adding states, or even ending the filibuster were off the table. Liberalism was simultaneously held back by the constitutional system but unable (or unwilling) to put forward a vision of how it might work differently.
Neutrality works here because it has a status quo bias. Referees might award a point, or send a player off, but they’re not empowered to change the rules of the game. Rawlsian liberalism hence forgot an important element of itself; its progressivism. Like socialism, it is a futurist creed, but this became limited to smaller “within the system” changes. The system itself was imagined to have reached an end point.
The Cracks Start to Show
To return to America’s core social cleavage, anti-Black racism, it was imagined that we were leaving bigotry behind. It was, or would soon be, a relic: a barbarous one, but a relic nonetheless. Even in Barack Obama’s 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech—undoubtedly one of the great orations of the era—while he does not think racism has been solved, he still presents the issue as one of building consensus. The problem is not of fundamentally irreconcilable value systems; rather, it is of good people, Black and white, who want a “message of unity.” Obama cast himself as the referee between them (or perhaps even as a marriage counselor); arbitrating when one side made a valid point.
Well, what’s wrong with that? Is unity a problem somehow? No, as moral visions go, it’s an attractive one. It’s just that I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that white fears and frustrations about race are “grounded in legitimate concerns.” I think a reasonably large percentage of white Americans did, and do, hold views and values that cannot be addressed within a liberal framework of reasoned and empathetic discussion. They can only be defeated—deprogramed or marginalized. Now, I can fully understand why Obama wouldn’t want to say that. Hillary Clinton eight years later was pilloried for accurately (maybe even charitably) saying “half of Trump’s supporters” were motivated by bigotry.
It’s also worth asking what was meant, specifically, by leaving racism behind. The solution, we were told, was to move on from the weaponization of these frustrations to talk about the real problems that affected all Americans, regardless of race. What would this look like?
“This is the deal,” elite liberalism seemed to say: White people will refrain from overt bigotry, and Black people will stop talking about racism, and there will be the peace. It was a one-sided deal, imposed unilaterally by the more powerful party. Though highly flawed, it was not utterly vacuous: More opportunity was created for Black Americans through the long ’90s, and incomes did rise, even as the wealth gap remained stubbornly persistent. An equal opportunities framework did bring benefits, even as it locked in existing inequalities. Overt racism did become taboo for politicians, and for all those with a public image to protect, so it was easy for them to convince themselves that the deal was working.
But it didn’t last. It couldn’t. Politics does not reach end points; it goes on. The “deal” began falling apart as soon as it reached its symbolic height. The election of a Black president was, many insisted, proof of its success, its final ratification. White racists, however, had decided that if equal opportunity meant seeing Black people succeed where they had not, then they could do without it. A Black manager at work, or a Black president of their nation, was too much. They would no longer hide their true feelings. Conversely, through the 2010s, many Black Americans decided they were not happy to stay quiet about ongoing injustice, with police misconduct and mass incarceration becoming particular flashpoints.
During this time, the long realignment of race in American politics came to an end. The Southern, anti–civil rights block was now fully Republican, and the Republicans were now fully Southern. This removed the structural incentive for elites to mask their racism (anyone for whom racism was a deal breaker was now in the Democratic Party). As the realignment ended, the political culture it had generated—of civility, compromise, and the peculiarly American fetish for bipartisanship—started to evaporate. White racists increasingly asserted themselves through the Tea Party. Everyone could feel that the culture was pulling apart. Yet, Obama continued to give speeches throughout his second term on the fundamental rights all Americans agreed on; on our practice of “deliberative democracy” (a Rawlsian vision of liberal neutrality). Of the fury of the right, he famously predicted “the fever will break” in the run-up to the 2012 election.
There is something hopelessly naive about all this—the belief that a return to a neutral ground, or a cultural consensus, could be willed into being by presidential rhetoric alone, absent the economic and political structures that were generative of it in the first place.
In the latter Obama years—the waning days of the long ’90s—neutrality became a comfort blanket. The liberal elites of this period were mentally living in the world they wanted to be in, not the one they were in. From their perspective, you look around, and yes, the possibilities of politics are narrow, yes, the fruits of this culture have not reached everyone; but there is a thin sort of fairness to it. At the very least, it’s better than anything yet tried, and seemingly stable and peaceable. You and those around you are safe.
And then you hear the footsteps of the Lord of Hosts marching through history.
The Age of the Unreasonable
Like a strange inversion of a bankruptcy, the world of the long ’90s fell apart all at once, then bit by bit. The twin shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election loudly announced that the age of cultural consensus was over. From there, the old order suffered a death of a thousand cuts. Anti-Trump Republicans slowly lost what footing they had within the party. The activist right, like a snake shedding its skin, abandoned its libertarian rhetoric and became more and more openly fascistic. Constitutional protections, checks and balances, kicked in, but only slowed the deterioration of the system. The house was not remodeled or even demolished; it was drenched in acid, unevenly but inexorably disintegrating into exposed beams and toxic sludge.
In such an environment, neutrality simply cannot exist as an elite practice. Half of the political spectrum is openly, aggressively opposed to the most basic liberal rights and freedoms. Attempting to maintain a position between the two sides pulls purportedly liberal commentators, by the nose, to the far right. They end up taking preposterous positions, like maybe we abandon birthright citizenship in some, but not all, cases. To be a referee, the teams have to agree on what game they are even playing. And they don’t. Neutrality turned out not to be the final evolution of the liberal Pokémon, but a delicate species of hothouse plant, able to grow only under very specific political, economic, and cultural conditions. In the gentle, consistent, collegial days of the long ’90s, it bloomed. When we try to plant it in our harsher climate, it just dies.
Elite liberals have been, to put it mildly, caught off guard. They did not, contrary to both reactionary and antiestablishment left narratives, cause the fascist resurgence. Nor do they sympathize with it. Their fear and horror are real enough. But like the French generals in the early days of World War I, they found themselves fighting a war they were not mentally or structurally prepared for.
Part (not all, but part) of this unpreparedness is that liberalism forgot how to argue for its values. A neutral liberalism has always required values to underpin it, but its practice obfuscates them. We no longer talk of what rights are, or why people have them. We simply assume they do, and that the matter is settled. This, in a sense, is quite Rawlsian. His work purports to justify values it largely assumes. His most famous argument is the “original position”—very simply, what sort of society would people design if they did not know their place in it? But this thought experiment assumes that we’ve already “bought into” liberalism, at least in a basic sense that we think giving people equal moral consideration is a good thing.
This will no longer cut it. We need to explain, much more directly, why liberalism is good for people. This type of liberalism (sometimes called comprehensive liberalism) never went away. Liberal neutrality was always more of an elite thing. If you asked the average Democratic primary voter why they came to support gay marriage during this period, you wouldn’t hear about how the state must maintain a principled agnosticism between comprehensive worldviews. Rather, they’d say that their son had come out and they wanted him to have a happy life. Or that they wanted a better world for their children more generally. Or that they’d talked to someone who had brought home for them how painful discrimination can be.
This approach can seem less sophisticated, but I think is ultimately more philosophically defensible. It’s also clearly more persuasive and, I’ve come to think, more capable of going on a war footing when required. It doesn’t require a consensus about the rules of the political game, nor does it assume people buy into its basic values.
As much as anything, it’s much more capable of saying others are wrong. That the fascists are not just “unreasonable”; they are a malignant cancer. That listening to them will lead to you having a worse life.
A New Liberalism
But isn’t that, in itself, somewhat illiberal? Won’t that be us telling people how to live, just from a “liberal” perspective? Not at all. Or at least it needn’t. For example, fascists insist that there is a set thing to being a man—he must be resolute, rugged, heterosexual, muscular, violent—and that society should pressure or compel men into these behaviors. Our response as liberals shouldn’t be to construct our own “liberal man”—feeling, caring, sexually fluid, pacifistic—and insist everyone must be that instead.
Rather, we should say that men should be able to choose which attributes they take on. To be traditionally masculine, traditionally feminine, or some combination, as long, of course, as we don’t harm others. This later proviso is known as the liberty principle. At a first pass, it may not sound that distinct from the idea of liberal neutrality I’ve spent this essay bemoaning, but its justification is very different. John Stuart Mill’s (the philosopher credited with its formulation) argument for it is rooted in what is good for people:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.
So to take the case of masculinity, we want men to choose their lives, not because liberalism is neutral about this, but precisely because it’s not: because we believe that men having freedom is good for them. That we lead happier lives when we can form our own characters, pick our own hobbies and interests, rather than being forced into a narrow little box. That we will be more valuable to ourselves, and hence more valuable to others. That being self-formed will make us better sons, husbands, and fathers.
The difference is subtle but important: Both neutral liberalism and the sort I am arguing for agree that we should have freedom in how we approach gender roles, but they disagree as to why. It’s a question of how to make the argument. I think we as liberals can sometimes overthink our ultimate justifications. “Because it’s good for people” is a perfectly sensible starting point.
Why is slavery wrong? Well, it causes extreme suffering and is a profound denial of fundamental human dignity. This is bad and ought to be avoided. This simple argument, grounded in what is good for people, is none the worse for being simple. We might go on to ask what harm slavery does to a society. The slave economy of the antebellum South was outproduced by the Northern one and failed pathetically in war—its own self-justification. And how many less tangible goods were lost? How many Einsteins, Mozarts, and Shakespeares died working in its cotton fields?
How, liberalism should ask, do we avoid those things? What system will make people the happiest, give them the most dignity, lead to the most flourishing? How can we order society so it produces the greatest possible number of geniuses of every field? How can humanity continue to improve intellectually and morally?
We need to start thinking again in these terms—of people, progress, and reshaping the fundamental order of things. In the long ’90s we assumed agreement on equal rights. Now we can’t. In the early years of the Trump era, we could talk about protecting the constitutional order from him. Now it’s gone. Whether or not it’s desirable to return is beside the point. The point is, it’s not possible. The political culture of our youths, of tame and tamed discourse, of liberalism as a gentlemanly referee, no longer exists. It was a flower of a different climate.
Today’s climate demands something more direct. Liberalism must, to rephrase a Robert Frost quip, be able to take its own side in an argument. An aggressive liberalism does not mean an uncaring one; quite the contrary. Our denunciation of fascism’s society-destroying depravity must be matched by a hopeful, compassionate, and vibrant narrative about the lives we wish people to have.
So much of the new right’s vision—that we all return to rigid gender roles, that LGBT identities are banned, that our society be cleansed of foreign influences, that we only partake in what is authentically American—essentially boils down to the demand that we make ourselves small. That we follow a script we are handed at birth without deviation or question. This is wrong, not because it violates some abstract “neutral” constitutional balancing act, but because it is essentially inhuman. Because—and I can do no better than Mill here—“human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”
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