How Liberal Societies Learn
The first essay in our new series "Why Liberalism."
WHY LIBERALISM
Liberalism is under attack.
Its opponents, on both the left and the right, tend to follow a simple tactic. They associate anything they don’t like about the United States, or other developed democracies, with liberalism—and then blame this venerable philosophy for all of the world’s shortcomings. At the same time, they remain silent about the ways in which liberal ideals—including individual liberty, collective self-determination, and respect for the ability of citizens to choose for themselves what goals and ends should shape their lives—have produced the comparative peace, tolerance and affluence that distinguishes these societies from so many others in the history of the world.
But liberals must, as appropriate, remain open to self-criticism. Many supposedly liberal corners of the world really do contain genuine injustices. In many places, the institutions of liberal democracy are too corrupt, incompetent or unimaginative to satisfy the growing expectations of their citizens. And liberals themselves have, during their long period of public dominance, become too complacent: we have been insufficiently willing to champion—or, for that matter, to rethink—our political tradition.
Since I founded Persuasion, one of my aspirations for this community was that, together, we would help to change that. And so I’m especially excited that, today, in association with the Institute for Humane Studies, we are launching a new series of essays: “Why Liberalism.” Every week we will publish an essay advancing new ideas that can help liberals reinvigorate their commitments, and defend the tradition against its fiercest critics.
This week, Emily Chamlee-Wright, the President of IHS, defends the liberal system of learning against postliberal critiques from the right. Next week, Joseph Heath of the University of Toronto will examine the “illiberal liberalism” of portions of the left. To help sustain our work, and receive all contributions to this exciting series directly into your inbox, please become a subscriber today!
– Yascha
In two short years, Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Given the challenges we face as a country, this landmark birthday has me wondering… Are the liberal principles underlying the American experiment still guiding that experiment? And, as we ramp up our A250 plans, do we really get what it is that we’re celebrating?
On the first question, a sober assessment requires, well… sobriety. It’s important to recognize that relative to other places and other times, Americans are living lives marked by high degrees of political freedom, material abundance, and social equality. This is indeed worth celebrating.
At the same time, far too few Americans recognize these benefits—equality, material abundance, and social wellbeing—as the fruits of the liberal democratic project. On both the left and right, many pursue authoritarian politics rather than liberal norms and institutions, as the route to improving their lot. Also worrisome is the surge of illiberal extremism, again, on both the left and right. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 68% of Americans are concerned that extremists will engage in violence if the upcoming presidential election doesn’t go their way. While the motivation behind the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump is not yet known, the fact that it happened reminds us what’s at stake.
As troubling as illiberal extremism is, however, the rising influence of a more erudite illiberal movement—let’s call it the “post-liberal intelligentsia,” or PLI for short—is just as, if not more, concerning.
Who are the PLI?
Among this cast of influencers are self-described postliberals, Catholic integralists, common good constitutionalists, and nationalist conservatives. Admittedly, the PLI is a diffuse crowd, with competing platforms and occasional infighting reminiscent of a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Despite their differences, however, the PLI is united by a single, overarching belief: The constitutionally constrained liberal democratic order is the source of everything that is wrong in the world.
The list of grievances is long. Liberalism’s blind faith in individual liberty and autonomy, they argue, has devastated community and family life by pulling people away from their hometowns, delaying marriage and family formation, and making divorce too easy. Liberalism’s permissiveness has corrupted and stupefied America’s youth, compromised women’s traditional place within society, denigrated the moral status of masculine virtues, and degraded American culture through immigration from the developing world.
Most prominent is the movement’s forthright rejection of progress, which, they argue, has devastated the working class, fueled tyrannical corporate power, and sacrificed American economic interests at the altar of global trade. What’s needed to counteract these forces? According to the PLI, a new elite must emerge, one that sets aside the separation of powers, seizes the administrative state, and flexes its authority to impose political control over the economy and a pre-modern notion of “the common good” as the country’s governing ideal.
If none of this raises alarm, I get it. When we think of threats to an inclusive liberal democracy, we think of angry young men carrying tiki torches, the Proud Boys, and January 6 insurrectionists. The PLI are not these guys. They are smart, bookish, (mostly) polite people with ideas. They do their organizing at conferences in glamorous ballrooms. Some hold endowed chairs at the country’s most prestigious universities. They are people with whom you might strike up a pleasant conversation after religious services or in line at the grocery store.
And that’s exactly the point. As concerned as we should be about the instigators of political violence, elite intellectuals aligned against core liberal principles are far more likely to move the Overton window in a way that accommodates authoritarianism in our day-to-day politics and culture.
And indeed, the PLI are gaining ground. They are internationally networked and have significant influence on the world stage. We’re seeing their influence in mainstream American politics, with the rise of nationalist conservatives in Congress like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and the continuing influence of Donald Trump’s former advisor Stephen Miller on nationalist conservative immigration plans to “seal the border, deport all the illegals.” We’re seeing it with Trump’s decision to pick J.D. Vance as his vice president for a second term. And we’re seeing it in the PLI’s loose affiliation with populist right media figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
Liberal rejoinders are (understandably) incomplete
Public intellectuals—including William Galston, Stephanie Slade, Jonah Goldberg, Garrett Epps, Mark Lilla, Samuel Gregg, and others—have offered necessary and insightful responses to postliberal critiques of liberalism. But as good as these rejoinders are, when a liberal takes on the PLI, it’s like being on one side of the net in a tennis match facing a dozen opponents, all lobbing balls in different directions at the same time. A crushing response to a single complaint still leaves eleven others bouncing around on the court.
Part of the challenge is the gaslighting nature of PLI critiques. Is liberalism’s most important failing that it subordinates the church to secular politics? Is it that it allows too many goods, too much investment, and too many people from foreign shores? Or is its gravest crime that it allows Drag Queen Story Hour? It’s hard to tell. And just when you think you’ve nailed your response to one, the target changes.
But in fairness, another part of the challenge is that liberalism is, in fact, multi-faceted. Depending upon who’s making the case, liberalism may be championed as a political apparatus for constraining government power, or a set of rules aligning private and public interests, or as an ethos that favors reason-based inquiry and the open exchange of ideas. And running through all these facets of a liberal society is a moral philosophy grounded in the notion that each of us is the dignified equal of our fellow human beings.
We should consider any capable defense of a single facet of the liberal project as a welcome contribution. And yet, any such contribution is likely to be incomplete. If we are to fully “get liberalism,” we have to see it as a coherent system that allows for experimentation and learning. And this means that occasionally we need to pull back the lens to see how its principal domains—political, economic, intellectual, and civic freedoms—work together.
Getting liberalism in one glance
To help “get liberalism” in a single glance, see the “Four Corners” illustration below. At each corner is one of the major domains of the liberal project. The double-headed arrows signify the dynamic relationships that exist across each of these domains.
The most familiar corner of the liberal project, political liberalism, emphasizes the institutional rules of the social and political game. Liberal rules constrain government power, check the power of majorities, ensure procedural fairness, and protect individual and minority rights.
Politically liberal rules of the game provide the baseline protections needed for the other domains to do their work. Political liberalism, for example, protects rights of property and enforces contracts, which in turn form the foundation of economic liberalism. Economic liberalism affords people the freedom to openly innovate, produce, collaborate, compete, and exchange with others in their commercial lives. And it’s this corner that has driven what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey describes as the “Great Enrichment” we’ve experienced over the last 250 years.
Similarly, political freedoms of speech and assembly provide the enabling conditions for intellectual and civic liberalism. The free and open exchange of ideas, scientific experimentation, and creative endeavor can only flourish if protections for speech and expression are guaranteed. Likewise, freedoms of association are necessary conditions if a civic liberalism—the arena of associational life in which we forge social connections both thick and thin—is to thrive.
But it’s not just political liberalism that supports the health of other domains. Economic abundance fostered within the economic liberalism corner sustains intellectual labors and accelerates discovery within the intellectual liberalism corner. Those discoveries, in turn, accelerate the pace of innovation and growth in the marketplace.
Such loops of reciprocal support illustrate a key feature of the liberal order: It is a system that learns and course corrects. As imperfectly liberal as the American founding was, the political freedoms that did exist—freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly (at least for some)—were key inspirations for emancipatory social movements that gained momentum through the essays, publications, oratory, and activism of leading abolitionists, and later, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights leaders. These intellectual and civic efforts, in turn, shifted the Overton window that eventually made liberal political reform possible.
Contestation drives social learning
If there is a secret sauce that drives this learning, its primary ingredient is contestation.
At the core of political liberalism is the notion that government authority is contestable. By dispersing authority across the three branches of government, for example, each sphere of political power checks each of the others. The liberal marketplace too is an arena of contestation. The astonishing coordination we see in the marketplace is achieved not through top-down edict, but through the tugging and pulling of countless individual plans colliding with countless others.
Intellectual liberalism is also grounded upon the principle of contestation. Intellectual progress happens in the collision of ideas, but for that process to work, no one—no matter their title, role, or standing in society—can hold a special claim to truth that exempts them from challenge. Contestation also runs through civically liberal spaces, in which individuals and groups have the freedom to experiment with different ways of living, without the presumption that any particular group has the authority to impose its ways upon others.
And across all these domains, because there is contestation, there is experimentation. And wherever there is experimentation, there will be dead ends and wrong turns. But this is how liberal discovery unfolds.
This is perhaps easiest to see in the arena of intellectual discovery. When we want to solve a problem, we speculate, offer arguments, and run experiments. Any mature thinker knows that contestation—exposing one’s intellectual labors to the bright lights of scrutiny—helps us spot and weed out the bad ideas and sharpen the good ones. And through this process we become smarter. But it’s not just that individuals become smarter. Society as a whole accumulates and embodies—through continuous experimentation, learning, and fresh application—whole bodies of knowledge that no single person, no matter how smart they may be, could develop on their own.
And the same holds across the other domains of the liberal project. Every entrepreneurial endeavor is, in essence, an attempt to solve a problem. Many (if not most) attempts fail. But some succeed. And over time, through iterations of trial and error, entrepreneurs find the solutions that align incentives such that people unknown to one another can coordinate and get things done. (Through Uber, a stranger shows up at our doorstep and takes us where we need to go.)
Consider also the many civic lessons the liberal order has learned over time, lessons about how we can live together peacefully and productively, despite our differences. Interracial and same-sex couples can marry, raise children, put pictures of their spouses on their desks at work, and guess what? The world does not fall apart! These lessons may seem obvious today, but they were lessons that had to be learned.
In short, because liberal environments are contestable, we have the elbow room to try things out, make mistakes, adjust, and adapt. In the process, liberal societies have opportunities to learn, to become more consistently liberal over time.
The liberal promise is a society that learns
But all this contestability, experimentation, and adaptation is precisely what the PLI want to avoid. It’s the whirling openness of liberal societies, they argue, that renders us victims of social and economic progress.
To drive these points home, PLI critiques often deploy freeze-frame storytelling. These freeze-frame narratives point to something bad happening in the world, tie that bad thing to liberalism’s fondness for individual liberty, and then propose a top-down fix (if they propose a fix at all). Because liberalism is the supposed cause of the problem, the audience is expected to set aside any liberal squeamishness they may harbor, such as concerns about individual rights, constitutional restraint, or market-based reasoning, as the PLI elect impose their conception of the common good.
Freezeframe narratives are effective in the sense that they put any honest defender of the liberal project into a position of having to concede that a) problems exist, and b) solutions can be elusive. But where we agree that a problem does in fact exist, rather than responding apologetically or defensively, liberals ought to ask, “In which system will we have the best prospects of solving the problem?” Freezeframe storytelling, intentionally or not, has the effect of foreclosing this line of questioning, and keeps us from understanding liberalism as a system that fosters learning.
The liberal promise is not that bad stuff doesn’t happen. Liberalism doesn’t promise that there won’t be economic or social disruption. What it promises is that with liberal norms and institutions in place, free people tend to find solutions. But when we reject liberal principles, workable solutions are much less likely to be found.
As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, we should not deny that as a country we’re facing serious problems. But those problems should make us all the more grateful that we are still living in a society that, because of its liberal foundations, is capable of learning and meeting those challenges.
The critical question is: Will that foundation survive the next 250 years? Or will illiberal remedies destroy the marvelous system that learns?
Emily Chamlee-Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies.
The “Why Liberalism” series is a project of Persuasion in partnership with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS is a non-profit organization that promotes a freer, more humane, and open society by connecting and supporting talented graduate students, scholars, and other intellectuals who are advancing the principles and practice of freedom. For additional information and details, media, programmatic, and funding opportunities, visit TheIHS.org.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
As a defender of liberalism I found Emily’s article to be Whiggish and naive. Categorising a heterogeneous set of critiques as the PLI (splitters) does not do justice to their objections. The free exchange of ideas has often objectively retarded progress. That doesn’t make it worse than the alternative. The invention of the printing press allowed superstitious fears about witchcraft to gain traction in the Renaissance, after a thousand year hiatus. Economic incentives led the colony of Georgia, which included much of modern day Alabama and Mississippi, to overturn an absolute ban on slavery that had lasted for decades. The theory of evolution rapidly led to the concepts of eugenics and social Darwinism which underpinned the intellectual justification for the holocaust and the starvation of millions of Soviet PoWs. The free contestation of ideas doesn’t always work. Progressive policies can often unnecessarily constrain individual liberty and also erode community ties. We do need to think seriously about demographic change, and the balance of rights. Despite that, liberalism is worth fighting for.
The idea that liberal democracy is in decline reflects a basic truth. Liberal societies don’t exist for very long. The U.S. was a stable democracy for a long time because it was not liberal. It was in fact, deeply conservative (socially conservative, not politically conservative). Something called the “American Code” governed (severely restricted) personal behavior. Now it doesn’t and quite predictably political democracy is in decline.
The US (much less the world) is not Sweden and pretending it is doesn’t change that fact. Sweden’s laws and system of government don’t work in other places. Increasingly, Sweden is not Sweden either. For example, two very different countries with no liberalism have systems that work. China has not abandoned liberalism. China never had it. Does China’s combination of authoritarian government and a (mostly) market economy work? You bet it does. China has 25,000+ miles of HSR. California has zero miles of HSR (but plenty of liberalism). Of course, California does have men with dresses. El Salvador was once ‘liberal’. Now it is not. The current president (Nayib Bukele) has cracked down on the gangs plaguing his country. He has achieved a remarkable reduction in crime (murder).
Like it not, but mass immigration means the end of liberalism and probably democracy throughout Europe. A quote from Helmut Schmidt should make this clear
“Multicultural societies have only … functioned peacefully in authoritarian states. To that extent it was a mistake for us to bring guest workers from foreign cultures into the country at the beginning of the 1960s.”
Of course, mass immigration can not be stopped by liberal means. Either Europe (and the USA) will adopt illiberal policies to stop mass immigration or will adopt illiberal policies to deal with the consequences of mass immigration. Either way, illiberalism is the future (if there is any future).
The world (really the US and Europe) were lulled into temporary tranquility by the post-war (WWII) economic boom. The boom is over (and has been since the 1970s). Now we have an era of conflict.