Where have all the liberals gone?
No, I’m not talking about Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey. I’m not pining for those guys. I mean classical liberals, the ones who stood for personal liberty, limited government, and the rule of law. I’m talking about Republican liberals, the Calvin Coolidges, the Barry Goldwaters, and the Ronald Reagans.
I became a Republican when I was old enough to understand politics, because I thought the GOP was the party of small government. And I didn’t need much experience with government to know that I wanted less of it. That feeling hasn’t changed.
I know this terminology sounds odd. For strange historical reasons, the Democrats were called “liberals” in the second half of the 20th century as the Democratic Party continued to move further away from what had been known as liberalism for hundreds of years. And now, most Americans of middle or advanced age equate liberalism with the policies that Reagan fought against: being soft on crime, soft on communism, and having great enthusiasm for expansive welfare programs, for example. But that is not liberalism, or at least not what liberalism had meant for hundreds of years. And Reagan was more of a liberal than his opponents.
The Democratic Party was (and is) a party that favors bigger government and central planning. If you’re itching to have more and more of our decisions made by alleged experts deep in a government basement in Washington, D.C., they’re your guys. And that’s fine. My gripe right now is not with the policies, but with the name. Because what I just described isn’t liberalism.
Liberalism, or classical liberalism before we got the terminology all screwed up in this country, is a philosophy based around liberty: limit government power—have government do less things with more checks on governmental power—and protect individual rights, economic and political.
And, sorry Mike Dukakis, but we need to take back the name “liberal.” Because without that term, I don’t know how to discuss the fight now taking place on the American right.
The American right has always been a hodgepodge of different groups. In the post-WWII era it was always a fusion between traditionalists (often religious conservatives), business interests, and liberals. All of these groups could come together to oppose communism abroad and socialism at home.
Now this fusion has come unraveled. And some on the right are arguing that we must move beyond classical liberalism—the philosophy of Jefferson and Adams, not to mention Goldwater and Reagan—and embrace big-government conservatism instead.
This would, I think, be a disaster.
The American left abandoned liberalism long ago. From around the beginning of the 20th Century, progressives were arguing that the Constitution was outdated and unfit for a modern state and a modern economy. They sought to break free of the limits the Constitution imposes on the federal government so it could get involved in solving more problems; they wanted an expansive, centralized state run by bureaucratic experts. They still do.
Yes, there were areas where the progressives maintained a classically liberal perspective. The American Left has, at times, been pretty good on free speech, for example. (Not all of them; progressive icon Woodrow Wilson has horrible on speech and most everything else. The man was, essentially, a racist fascist.) And the American Left has long believed in checks on law enforcement and stringent protections for criminal defendants. But over time many of these vestiges of liberalism have disappeared from the progressives’ platform, free speech being the most-recent casualty. At this point, progressives are liberals when it comes to abortion and sex and little else. It’s hard to imagine anywhere else that progressives do not welcome federal hall monitors peeking into our lives and communities with the power of the state’s bayonet by their side.
For much of the 20th Century, then, it was the American right that stood for limited government. (Or at least claimed to.) Which means it was American conservatives who sought to protect liberalism, as strange as that sounds. And that’s because it was American conservatives who sought to conserve, as George Will puts it, “the American Founding.” That is, they have sought to preserve the governmental structure set up by and thinking representative of the founders in the late 18th century—the Constitution most of all. And the United States Constitution is fundamentally a classical liberal document.
Many on the right today dissent from Will without articulating their governing philosophy all that clearly. Most politicians aren’t political philosophers; they’re entrepreneurs searching for votes. And it would be the height of folly to ask a Donald Trump or a Marjorie Taylor Greene to opine on philosophy; the former cares only for promoting his own personal interests—they might change daily; ask TikTok—and the latter couldn’t articulate an intelligent philosophical point if you gave her Socrates and an extra 30 IQ points. The more intelligent of the new right politicians—say, J. D. Vance—seem to have abandoned Reaganism to embrace what look suspiciously like the economic policies of the 1970’s Democratic Party minus the tax hikes: trade protectionism, government economic planning, and a bunch of other ideas long associated with the American left. Bill Clinton once told us “the era of big government is over.” It wasn’t, and now many on the right are jumping on the big-government bandwagon next to the Clintons.
So, to get a deeper understanding of this new perspective on the right, I recently read Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery. You should read it. Hazony is bright, articulate, well-educated, and lives what appears to be a model and very conservative personal life.
And he’s wrong about almost everything.
It’s worth noting that Hazony challenges the basic claim that I (and others far more qualified, like George Will) have made that the American founding was an act of liberalism and that, therefore, American conservatives seek to preserve classical liberalism. Hazony concedes the liberalism of Jefferson and Thomas Paine, but argues that the founders whose arguments truly carried the day—such as Adams, Washington, Hamilton—were not classical liberals at all; they were, he contends, nationalists who were primarily interested in preserving their nation’s way of life, including its religion and culture. Hazony contends that America took a turn toward liberalism only after the Second World War, and he says that turn to liberalism was self-defeating and destructive.
Hazony’s analysis is, I think, both bad history and bad philosophy, and it would lead ultimately to bad policy. The bad-history part might sound petty (Bad history? Who cares?), but it’s not—at least not for a conservative. Conservatives believe in conserving the wisdom of those who came before us. If we get wrong what came before us, it’s not at all clear that we’re “conserving” the wisdom of our forebearers.
Hazony says that the Founders sought to preserve and extend their rights as Englishmen. For this reason, he thus sees their revolution as fundamentally conservative. He is right about what they sought to preserve and extend. But he misses something critical. What they sought to protect was the liberal part of the British constitution and political system. The rest—the rigid class system, the nobility, the monarchy, the state-controlled church—they were content to leave across the Atlantic. The American system was designed to limit the power of the state and preserve the rights of individuals and communities to live without national-government interference. And that, my friends, is classical liberalism, not European-style conservatism. And while Hazony is right that the Founders believed in the importance of the country’s Christian heritage (even those founders who weren’t particularly devout), the Founders did nothing to guarantee and propagate a national church. Indeed, the First Amendment gave us the opposite.
But, really, we don’t have to argue about what the Founders believed. They told us. They signed off on the Declaration of Independence—you might have heard of it—the foundation of which is, as Hazony admits, liberalism. Hazony belittles the importance of the Declaration, concluding that it is the Constitution that is the real foundation for American republicanism. But this is a strange historical revision. The Founders signed off on the Declaration—including the “conservative” Founders that Hazony reveres—and we should assume they meant it and put some thought into it. After all, the Declaration wasn’t a minor draft of an academic article never sent to a publisher. It wasn’t the idle musings in Jefferson’s diary. This was the worldwide, public proclamation by the thirteen colonies as to the philosophy underlying their revolution. We should assume they meant what they loudly proclaimed to the world. And the liberal parts weren’t even hidden in the middle of the document or in an obscure footnote, either; they were the lead, the parts still quoted as guiding principles today.
Hazony’s analysis is also bad history for another reason. Hazony’s argument is, strangely, that things went south in America when liberalism became dominant in America in the post-WWII era. But the battle lines between the conservatives and the progressives were drawn long before the post-war Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Coolidge and Wilson were fighting over the scope and purposes of the national government decades before that, and Coolidge’s conservative position was inarguably a classically liberal one similar to later classical liberals like Goldwater and Reagan.
Moreover, it is nonsensical to argue that America became a libertarian society since WWII. While the country became more liberal in some ways—sexuality, abortion, and a greater acceptance of individual hedonism—it’s hard to argue that the country became politically liberal overall. The biggest change in government since WWII is not that government shrunk and left people to their own devices, which is, of course, the traditional liberal position. To the contrary, the national government (really, governments at all levels) have taken on more and more, and in the process have encroached upon more and more of our lives. Did I miss the post-WWII administration that shed government agencies, lessened administrative bloat, and reinstated federalism? Because I would hate to have missed that.
No, we didn’t become liberal after the Second World War; we became more and more dependent on big government and less willing to put limits on that government. It was shortly before WWII that the Supreme Court reversed its previous position on the limits of federal power—the clear position based on the text of the Constitution—and simply allowed the federal government to blow past its enumerated powers and do whatever it wanted as long as it claimed to be effecting “commerce.” If that were liberalism, I could understand Hazony’s argument. But it’s not. Any analysis that rests upon the premise that America became classical liberal after 1945 is an analysis divorced from reality.
Finally, and also critically, Hazony’s analysis is fundamentally non-conservative, which might be the criticism that would sting Hazony the most. Conservatives traditionally don’t reason from first principles and create a framework from that principle using reason divorced from experience. Indeed, this is one of Hazony’s primary criticisms of liberalism itself and one of his bases for distinguishing it from conservatism. Hazony rightly argues that conservatism doesn’t try to start society anew from principles recently generated in a thinker’s brain; conservatism reasons from experience and practice, and venerates the wisdom of those who came before. As Lincoln put it, conservatism is “adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untested.”
Yet in analyzing liberalism, Hazony throws out our practical experience and instead attacks John Locke’s 350-year-old first principles. Why? Liberalism isn’t a proposed philosophy that has yet to be tried; it isn’t John Locke’s doctoral dissertation at this point. It is a philosophy that has been tried in the real world for hundreds of years. Why would any conservative attack John Locke’s philosophical premises from hundreds of years ago rather than focus on our history with liberalism and its actual effects; more pointedly, why would a conservative ignore what our forefathers can teach us from experience about the benefits and dangers of liberalism and focus only on theory? If a modern-day Leftist promoted communism as a valid political and economic system in the modern world solely by looking at Marx’s writings and ignoring Stalin’s purges, the Holomodor, or the Cultural Revolution, a conservative like Hazony would rightly mock him. Yet that is essentially what Hazony does in attacking liberalism.
Whether we accept all or none of John Locke’s first principles, we have hundreds of years of practical experience with liberalism—literally many generations of practical learning about liberalism from our ancestors—that can guide our thinking. We can see what liberalism has done.
And what we now know—not because John Locke hypothesized about it, but because real people have lived it—is that liberalism is the greatest engine for human freedom and prosperity the world has ever seen. It is liberalism that freed people to discuss and pursue new and innovative ideas that led to astounding advances in technology, science, and philosophy. It is liberalism that opened markets and allowed for experimentation and, yes, through the pursuit of profits, revolutionized the economies of free nations and, almost overnight, brought prosperity that ended millennia of squalor. (We still have poor people today. Before liberalism and its free-market approach to economics, practically everybody was poor.) It is liberalism that opened up opportunity to more and more people—freeing, over time, people of lower classes, women, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities—such that liberal societies could more effectively take advantage of the talents of all their peoples. It is liberalism that freed us from sectarian violence, that guaranteed that our communities would not be wracked by armed religious conflict and that none of our people would be burned at the stake for their religious beliefs.
None of this happened overnight, and none of it has ever been perfected in any liberal society. But the progress has been remarkable, and the boon to mankind has been incalculable. It is liberalism—as opposed to the blood, soil, and crown conservatism of the continent—that made the United Kingdom the richest and freest country on earth, and it was even more liberalism that later made the United States freer, more powerful, and more prosperous yet. Negating the immense benefits of liberalism is not “conservative,” because doing so requires us to ignore and reject hundreds of years of practical experience with a philosophy that has made life dramatically better for millions of people.
None of this is to diminish the problems we and our fellow classical liberals face in the west. It is true that our families and communities are breaking down. It is true that our social institutions are disappearing or, in some cases, largely unrecognizable. It is true that this country’s moral consensus has largely gone away. These are serious problems. Hazony and others are right to be concerned.
But many of these problems are more traceable to an ever-present government’s heavy-handed efforts at social engineering than they are to liberalism run amok. As conservatives have known and argued for decades now, it was progressive efforts to fix poverty and other social ills through intrusive government programs that began the process of breaking down the American family. If the United States had truly become a libertarian country after WWII, it’s hard to imagine that Ronald Reagan’s campaign built on shrinking ever-encroaching government would have had much traction. Indeed, his campaign would have made no sense. Reagan’s arguments won because the federal leviathan had been growing bigger and stronger, not weaker, and everybody could see that. Reagan sought to fight the communists abroad and the centralizers of power here at home. That’s what happened. Hazony’s revisionist history is just plain odd.
No, America did not become a libertarian paradise after WWII. That’s nonsense. I think what Hazony is really complaining about is the turn towards a culture of unfettered individual freedom, or hedonism. I think it’s hippyism and the sexual revolution and internationalism (i.e., the offshoring of jobs) that Hazony is troubled by.
But classical liberalism is not the same as libertinism. You can believe that government should largely leave people and communities alone without believing that each individual should be free of any obligation to his family, friends, community, or right conduct. Freedom from government coercion does not mean freedom from any restrictions on our behavior. Indeed, our Founders were quite explicit that a free society cannot exist without people governed by a strong moral compass. Washington called “religion and morality” the “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. And Madison noted that it was our fallen nature that made government necessary at all. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But it is our fallen nature that also requires strict controls on those who wield power; as Madison continued, “if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls would be necessary.” But our rulers are not angels (though increasingly they have been around just as long). That’s why we have to limit the power of government. It’s an argument for liberalism, not against it.
And, critically, the importance of our people and communities having a strong moral compass does not mean we should expect government compulsion to lead to our desired results. Put another way, complain all you want about liberalism, but there is still no reason to believe that illiberalism will give us heaven on earth.
I understand those conservatives who see the woke revolution and want to fight fire with fire by capturing control of the state and using its powers to conservative ends. But even if those “conservatives” achieve their goal of capturing the state and the elite institutions in an effort to impose conservative ideals, they will have lost the game. Central planning will still be foolish and ineffective; it will still make us poorer and less free, whether the central planning is done by progressives, nationalists, or so-called conservatives. Government will continue to be a blunt instrument that is more likely to create unanticipated and undesired consequences than it is to solve the problems that allegedly justify its use of authority. And the state will continue to be subject to capture and control by interest groups and largely run by bureaucrats whom most conservatives would not trust to run the neighborhood lemonade stand, much less take charge of restoring religious faith or community morals or the other conservative ends that Hazony champions.
And let us never forget, that once conservatives join with progressives in seeking to impose their perspectives through the power of the state, that power will ultimately be used against us and what we seek to conserve. Progressives miss this point when they turn against free speech; in some places and on some issues, their destruction of free-speech norms will come back to bite them. But for conservatives, the danger is even more acute. It is a truism in our world—the rule itself is attributed both to columnist and political advisor John O’Sullivan and anti-communist historian Robert Conquest—that "all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."
So be careful, nationalists. The communities, families, and states that you want will not be created by government imposition. Conservatives are highly unlikely to see their efforts to de-throne the shallow leftism of the woke college students, spineless university presidents, and dishonest journalists result in strong conservative leaders instead. Conservatives are unlikely to re-staff the federal bureaucracy—whose pay, prestige, jobs, and job security depend on the largesse of a large nanny state—with anti-government crusaders. An army of Ron Swansons are not about to enter and take over the Department of Education. And even if you miraculously accomplished these aims, the victory will be temporary—far more temporary, I suspect, than the power you willingly turned over to the state. Any additional powers you concede to the state for your conservative ends will eventually be used against you when, inevitably, those institutions, agencies, and bureaucracies are re-captured by the left.
Rather than abandon liberalism, we are far better off embracing it and arguing it as an alternative to the foolish and destructive wokeism that dominates so much of our government and so many of our elite institutions (which are, themselves, often empowered by our overgrown state). Far better to limit the power of the state and fight to establish institutions that teach the principles we believe in. They are far better to do it effectively than, say, a new Department of Religious Training, the funding and goals of which will be fought over by people like Chuck Schumer and Matt Gaetz, will be staffed by government bureaucrats who care more about their job security and job duties than your mission, and which will be doomed from inception by the inescapable fact that people can live their lives more effectively, joyously, righteously, and for more worthwhile causes if they are free of the heavy hand of government than if they are complying with edicts from on high.
One last point, since it is a focus of Hazony’s work. Hazony writes from a religious perspective. He is a devout, practicing Jew, and he believes (no doubt rightly) that his religious faith is crucial to his happiness and that of his family and community. He believes it is a better way to live than libertinism.
I suspect he’s right. But we should be very careful about believing the state can force the “right” moral choices by compulsion at the point of a bayonet. (And that’s what government compulsion ultimately boils down to.) Indeed, the rising Christian nationalists should be extraordinarily careful, as I think they’re not only getting politics wrong, but also their own faith. We talk of Judeo-Christian culture, and that concept is real. But there is also a real break between the Old and New Testaments when it comes to the state. It was Jesus who made clear that his kingdom was not of this world. It was Jesus who said to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Christianity largely invented the separation of church and state by making clear that the two are different kingdoms and have different purposes.
Jesus’s early followers continued in that tradition. The apostles Paul and Peter both made clear that Christians should be subject to what was a very unchristian Roman government. It was much later generations of Christians who sought to capture state power and use it for “Christian” purposes. I question the extent to which their success helped God’s kingdom. And I question the extent to which a more “Christian” government would establish morality and right conduct in ours.
But I know this: the separation between the state and the church, between the things of God and the things of man, is not the unholy byproduct of John Locke’s mind; it is a fundamental teaching of Jesus and the early church. Christian nationalists should be careful who they’re fighting against.
They should also understand that early Christianity was in many ways the inventor of modern freedom. It was Paul’s letter to the Galatians that proclaimed freedom in Christ. Paul’s other letters stressed the importance of free will and freedom from compulsion. It was Paul that taught the early church that it was okay for Christians to disagree on important and fundamental things (such as the Jewish holidays and how to interact with the idolatrous world around them—see 1 Corinthians 8). And it was Paul who told the church that it must take seriously the immoral conduct inside the church and also that its job was not to judge the conduct of those outside the church. “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges.”
The idea that Christians should use the power of the state to impose Christian morality and theology on our non-Christian neighbors is a distinctly unchristian view. Christianity does not teach that the church should claim the levers of state power in order to institute God’s kingdom here on earth. Historically, efforts to do so were naked and ambitious deviations from Scripture that led not to God’s glory but to man’s bloodshed. While many so-called Christian rulers have used the power of the state to impose Christianity, that is not the position of Jesus or the New Testament writers, and we should not welcome a return to such a world—a world that liberalism has freed us from in the west.
The arguments of Hazony and his fellow religious-conservative anti-liberals are wrong, and their vision is dangerous for conservatives and America.
As always, thoughtful and thought provoking. Sadly, there don't seem to be many in American politics today who embrace your view of liberalism.