In politics, the language of morality can be energizing but also risky, which is arguably one reason mainstream liberals were long reluctant to use it. At least since the liberal victories of the civil rights era, social conservatives were generally the ones who railed against “cultural rot” and “moral decay”; liberals would respond with win-win platitudes and technocratic fixes, avoiding anything that might sound too judgmental or zero-sum.
The Democratic Party’s standard-bearers tended to treat politics as a matter of tapping into a bipartisan consensus. Bill Clinton famously “triangulated” his way into welfare reform and a crime bill. Barack Obama, who in 2008 campaigned as a visionary promising “hope and change,” mostly governed cautiously. In his signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, he retreated from his own previous commitments to single-payer health care because it “would be too disruptive.”
To liberals fending off culture-war attacks from the right, a conciliatory posture seemed safer than making forceful declarations of moral judgment, which risked stoking partisan ire. The rhetoric of evenhandedness also seemed to reflect something more fundamental: a presumption that liberal ideals like tolerance, freedom and rule of law were morally incontestable and therefore beyond reproach.
The upheavals of the Trump era have changed all of that. Politicians can no longer find safety in technocracy and compromise. Like a lot in American politics, the very idea of what is “morally incontestable” has been turned upside down.
These days, a blandly neutral vocabulary, once a liberal mainstay, increasingly looks like a vestigial tail — anachronistic and functionally useless. Among a growing cohort of liberals, making bold moral claims is now seen as mobilizing and even essential. In Texas, the Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico links his concerns for the poor and oppressed to his Christian faith. The online magazine Liberal Currents, which launched in 2017, promotes ethical commitments with “ambitious agendas”; the more centrist outlet Persuasion started a series last year titled “Liberal Virtues and Values.” In May, in an opinion essay in The New York Times, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, called out his fellow legislators’ lack of “moral and strategic clarity” for continuing to supply bombs to Israel as it bombarded Gaza. (Indeed, in New York City, anger over Gaza has been offered as an explanation for why three congressional candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their primaries last week.)
New books by the Democratic senators Cory Booker, Chris Murphy and Raphael G. Warnock explicitly put the moral condition of the country at their center. Murphy calls for “stronger communities, and a shift in our understanding of what we owe one another.” Warnock says democracy is “the political enactment of a spiritual idea.”
As illiberalism becomes ever more ruthless and relentless, liberals have been pushed to articulate what they believe. The contours of these beliefs are still vigorously contested; after all, one of liberalism’s distinguishing features is granting a great deal of latitude to people when it comes deciding what the good life entails. Still, liberals are reaching for a moral language that was barely audible even a decade ago. This language might appear to be novel, but there turn out to be plenty of precedents when you look deeper in the past.
Free and Generous
According to the historian Helena Rosenblatt, the contemporary tendency to equate liberalism with the protection of individual rights and private interests is an extremely recent development. For centuries, liberals offered prescriptions about justice and a common good. In “The Lost History of Liberalism,” she explains that the word “liberalism” didn’t even exist until the 19th century; before that, being “liberal” was connected to “liberality,” or what the Roman statesman Cicero called liberalitas, which contained within it the Latin term for being both “free” and “generous.”
A freeborn citizen of the Roman Republic wasn’t supposed to use his freedom to selfishly pursue his own interests; he was obliged to act in ways that reinforced his bonds with his fellow citizens. In the 18th century, Adam Smith would echo this notion in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Smith’s citizen promoted “the welfare of the whole society.” It made no sense to sense to speak of rights without duties.
“At heart, most liberals were moralists,” Rosenblatt states plainly. She later adds that, until the middle of the 20th century, they were “virtually obsessed with morality and the building of character.” Her book, which was published in 2018, was partly conceived as a way to help liberals “reconnect” to some “core values” that include a dedication to “improving mankind.” History offers a much more fluid and dynamic portrait of liberals than the caricature of the atomized individual who rejects the importance of a common good. When latter-day liberals shy away from talking about moral obligations and shared values, they concede “the high ground to their adversaries,” she writes.
So what happened? Why did liberals abandon this moral high ground? One possibility is excessive optimism: Since 1965, when the Voting Rights Act put an end to Jim Crow and ushered in an era of multiracial democracy, liberal pluralism — from reproductive rights to marriage equality — seemed to be gaining ground. Righteous rhetoric wasn’t needed anymore.
An alternative possibility is excessive fatalism. Some historians, including Rosenblatt, argue that the Cold War had a lot to do with the increasing fixation on individual rights at the expense of social conscience. After two devastating world wars, liberals felt pressed to distinguish liberalism from totalitarianism by moderating their goals, relinquishing collective liberation to settle for personal autonomy. The legal historian Samuel Moyn calls the defensiveness of so-called Cold War liberals a “betrayal” of their tradition. Instead of promoting emancipation, they emphasized limits.
In his 2023 book “Liberalism Against Itself,” Moyn describes the upshot of this development as a “vilification of progress for fear that it always serves as pretext for terror.” In a world of state-sanctioned cruelty — show trials, killing fields, death squads — intellectuals like the influential political theorist Judith Shklar increasingly defined liberalism as a form of protection: a bulwark against violence, not an engine for freedom.
Where Moyn laments this shrinking horizon of expectations, the British journalist Adrian Wooldridge celebrates it. A columnist for Bloomberg and before that The Economist, Wooldridge approvingly cites Shklar’s “liberalism of fear” in his recent book “The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.” “The most important job of the liberal therefore is not to maximize happiness,” Wooldridge maintains. “It is to prevent bad people from inflicting harm on citizens.”
Wooldridge cites both Moyn and Rosenblatt while coming to very different conclusions. He, too, uses the language of values. But as his seemingly paradoxical title suggests, he toggles between forcefully arguing in favor of “nonnegotiable liberal principles” — his list includes meritocracy, “universal rules” and, yes, “individualism” — and finding all kinds of reasons to mitigate against them. He warns against zealots on the right and the left, but is much more responsive to pressure from the right. “Liberalism needs to rediscover its radical spirit,” he writes. “Yet at the same time it needs to rediscover the spirit of moderation.”
Though Shalt Not Be a Jerk
No wonder liberals have been confused; the history of liberalism is so voluminous and dynamic that what it tells us often seems to be in the eye of the beholder. The philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre makes a similar point in “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (2024). Throughout history, liberals have constantly sought ways to “remain free and generous” in response to their changing times. Citing Rosenblatt’s book as an inspiration for his own, he jokes that a more accurate title for hers would have been something like “The Continuing Adventures of the Ideal of Liberality in the Face of Unprecedented Setbacks and Opportunities.”
Lefebvre, like these other thinkers, intends his book as both an illumination and an intervention. “Liberals,” he writes, “could do a much better job of promoting the creed.” They can get so caught up in current (and admittedly crucial) political debates over institutional checks and balances that, like their Cold War forebears, they retreat to a defensive crouch. They “fixate on the opponents of liberalism, and how horrible populists, nativists and authoritarians are,” Lefebvre says. “Only rarely are the strengths and virtues of liberalism talked up.”
Much of this situation has to do with people’s habit of taking liberal values for granted — or failing to recognize them as values in the first place. Lefebvre compares us to the fish so accustomed to swimming in water that they don’t even know what “water” is. People living in liberal democracies are immersed in a value system that permeates everything from our political expectations to the jokes we make and the television shows we watch. This “way of life” connects freedom to fairness. It also looks down on being a jerk — Lefebvre uses a saltier synonym — someone who willfully indulges in wrongdoing.
As it happens, liberalism’s critics, especially its conservative ones, also see liberalism as a way of life — one that has infiltrated everything from the larger forces of politics and pop culture to the more intimate domains of sexuality and the family. Lefebvre vigorously disagrees with conservatives’ condemnation of liberalism as an oppressive force, but he says they properly grasp its scope. Liberalism is a system of values that differs from its critics’ system of values. Liberals cannot and should not avoid this fact, he says; nor can they shrink away from the confrontation this entails.
Lefebvre’s book is bracingly original and terrifically entertaining. He writes playfully, actively showing us that, by his lights, being liberal is a “fun way to be.” But even though the book is only two years old, its tone — so confident and carefree — can sound, in the dog days of 2026, as out of touch as Kamala Harris’s campaign messages of joy and coconut trees.
Lefebvre accentuates the positive. Yes, he admits, there “are straight-up rule breakers who, if assured they can get away with it, will lie, cheat and steal,” he writes at one point. “But we shouldn’t focus on this hardened minority.”
Yet some members of this hardened minority seem to be finding favor with the federal government these days. There is perhaps another argument to be made that liberals weren’t defensive enough — that they were confident to the point of complacency and failed to address what Warnock calls in his book “a gnawing spiritual hunger.” They presumed that the answers to the big moral questions had been settled in their favor. Of course pregnant women shouldn’t die for lack of medical care. Of course immigrants shouldn’t be hunted down and brutalized. Of course Nazis are bad.
But at a time when some of the most powerful people in the world don’t just ignore cruelty but actively embrace it, Shklar’s decision to “put cruelty first” — to deem the deliberate infliction of pain on another living being the worst of all vices — doesn’t seem today like a matter of diminished expectations. After all, putting something first doesn’t have to mean that you give up imagining what could come after you denounce it. One can stare hard at reality as it currently exists and still propose a way forward. A shipwrecked crew must swim to shore before reaching higher ground.
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