Two recent events, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, point to the same problem. In Britain, the man widely expected to replace the stately Keir Starmer as prime minister is Andy Burnham, who touts “business-friendly socialism” as his credo. In New York, Democratic primary elections produced striking victories for democratic socialists, suggesting that the insurgent left has found a way to turn protest into power.
First, a caveat: The left is not marching uniformly toward socialism. Many primaries outside New York City were won by moderate Democrats. In a swing district just outside the city, combat veteran Cait Conley won handily. But a certain kind of liberalism is losing energy, confidence and connection to the people it claims to represent.
In Adrian Wooldridge’s new book “The Revolutionary Center,” a brilliant intellectual history of liberalism from the Enlightenment to the present, Wooldridge reminds us that liberalism was once the most radical force in politics. It attacked inherited privilege, monopoly power, censorship, aristocracy, clerical authority and closed guilds. It was not the ideology of the establishment. It was the battering ram against the establishment.
Today, liberalism has become identified with power — great universities, foundations, media organizations, corporations and bureaucracies. Wooldridge argues that this has produced two deep failures.
The first is passivity. Modern liberalism, certainly since the 1990s, has celebrated free markets and free people. In practice, that has meant deregulating both economic life and personal life, then treating the consequences as the price of freedom. In markets, this has allowed corporate consolidation and inequality to run wild. In personal life, liberals have become reluctant to say that certain behaviors are socially destructive.
The result is liberal fatalism. People camp out on city streets, addicted and mentally ill, and liberals often describe this as a housing problem. Millions suffer from obesity-related illnesses, and liberals are more comfortable blaming “food deserts” than taking on the companies that hook their customers on processed food. Social media companies do the same with their consumers’ attention.
Wooldridge calls for a revival of liberal paternalism. The phrase grates on modern ears. But a liberal society should celebrate individual rights — and also demand individual responsibility. It should understand that freedom can be destroyed not only by the state but also by addiction, monopoly, crime, ignorance and dependence.
This is not an argument for socialism. It is an argument for truer liberalism. Liberals should love markets not because they allow the strong to dominate or inequality to grow, but because genuine competition allows the little guy to challenge the strong. A healthy market is not one in which four companies quietly divide up an industry and use lawyers, lobbyists and algorithms to keep challengers out. It is one in which new entrants can rise, consumers can choose, workers can move and incumbents can fail.
The second failure Wooldridge identifies is more uncomfortable because it concerns liberals’ own status. Liberalism believes in meritocracy. Historically, this was one of its noblest causes. It argued that people should rise by talent and effort, not birth, race, caste or class. But over time, the meritocratic elite has hardened into its own aristocracy.
Elite liberals support social justice, but do little to dismantle legacy admissions. They want the poor to move up the ladder, but not if that requires building more housing in the leafy neighborhoods where they live. They praise individual merit, but have created a vast diversity bureaucracy that too often judges people by group identity rather than individual character.
Nowhere is this clearer than in K-12 education. A genuinely liberal politics would start with the child. It would attack any institution — union, bureaucracy, school board, university department — that feeds its own power while failing America’s children.
This is where democratic socialists and right-wing populists gain their power. They understand that people want someone to fight for them. They may offer bad answers — the left with class warfare, protectionism and state control, and the right with protectionism, ethnic resentment and racial nostalgia. But they sound like outsiders willing to take on entrenched privilege and offer protection in a world where freedom seems to mean chaos.
The way out of liberalism’s crisis is not to abandon liberalism. It is to recover its radical spirit. Liberals should once again be the people who hate monopoly, inherited advantage, closed systems and rigged games. They should champion real competition, real meritocracy and real equality of opportunity. They should take on corporate power when it crushes markets, government power when it protects insiders and cultural power when it creates bureaucracies that substitute group identity for individual dignity.
As Wooldridge argues, the center cannot be merely a midpoint between left and right. It has to be revolutionary in its own way. Liberalism’s great promise was never that people would be left alone to decay in freedom. It was that people would be given the tools, rules and responsibilities necessary to flourish.
Liberalism began as a revolt against encrusted power. It will survive only if it becomes one again.
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