I think the crisis runs deeper than the article suggests.
Much of today's liberal reconstruction debate still assumes that the central task is to regain control of existing institutions. Some liberals want stronger courts and procedural safeguards. Others want better housing, infrastructure, and economic delivery. But both approaches largely accept the existing political architecture and focus on making it function more effectively.
What seems missing is a willingness to question the sacred assumptions of the age.
Classical liberalism was historically powerful because it challenged sacred authority. It questioned the divine right of kings, inherited hierarchies, and concentrations of power that had come to be seen as natural and unquestionable. Its greatest strength was not administration. It was skepticism.
Today, however, liberalism often appears reluctant to apply that same skepticism to the institutions it now inhabits. Instead of questioning power, it increasingly seeks to manage power. Instead of challenging dominant structures, it competes to occupy them.
This is why so much “reconstruction” sounds like restoration. The goal often seems to be recovering legitimacy for an existing order rather than examining whether the order itself has become part of the problem.
In my view, the defining contradiction of our era is not primarily between liberalism and populism, nor between democracy and authoritarianism. It is the growing mismatch between globally interconnected systems and the continued sanctification of sovereign nation-states as the ultimate source of political legitimacy.
Our largest challenges—AI governance, climate change, financial networks, migration, digital platforms, and even modern warfare—operate at a civilizational scale. Yet political authority remains organized around sovereign structures designed for a different historical environment.
As a result, liberalism often asks who should hold state power. It is far less willing to ask whether the structure of power itself has become obsolete.
This is where the discussion of power becomes unavoidable. We routinely measure inequality through wealth, but rarely through power. Yet power asymmetries may be far more consequential than wealth asymmetries. Wealth ultimately depends on political protection. In the presence of overwhelming power, even immense wealth can become fragile overnight. We overlook this because wealth is visible and measurable, while power is harder to quantify.
For that reason, I am not convinced that liberalism's central problem is a failure of delivery, meaning, or electoral strategy. Its deeper problem may be that it has lost the habit that once made it transformative: the willingness to challenge the legitimacy of dominant power arrangements.
Liberalism once asked whether kings were too powerful.
Today it asks which party should control the state.
It rarely asks whether the political architecture itself has become the source of the crisis.
If liberalism is to reconstruct itself, perhaps it must recover its original courage: not simply to govern existing institutions more effectively, but to question the sacred status of the structures from which those institutions derive their authority. Only then can reconstruction become something more than a sophisticated form of restoration.
I agree. Liberalism has become conservative in the most literal sense: it now sees its task as preserving institutions that it once would have subjected to radical scrutiny. Any serious reconstruction would require to recover a revolutionary impulse toward institutions themselves. We are very far from that.
Oh, I don't think we're very far from that at all. Your comment here is only about 'radical scrutiny' and 'reconstruction'. All fine and good. Yes, we need those. But you aren't mentioning your "philosophy and reinvention". Radical scrutiny and reconstruction will not win elections. And if we don't win elections will will indeed be "very far from that". "If they're so damn smart, how come they're not running everything?" "Philosophy and reinvention" are our best hope. Back to "soul". There are plenty of people who have written about this and realize this, including Yascha Mounk. But so far nobody on the D side is taking it up. Get away from the brain and back to the heart. "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." "Value(s)" It's been there a long time and we need desperately to resurrect it.
I agree that philosophy and moral imagination are indispensable. What fascinates me is the historical pattern that follows: once a philosophy becomes a source of political legitimacy, it often becomes less capable of questioning the power structure it helps sustain. That's one of the questions I'm exploring in my current writing.
On the theme of recovering a revolutionary impulse toward institutions, the 2026 Liberalism in the 21st Century conference has just happened in Washington DC. Shikha Dalmia is the founder of that conference series and the ISMA organization that hosts it. A few weeks ago I was arguing at their Substack magazine, The UnPopulist, for a civic 4th branch of government, ie. a (moderately) revolutionary attitude and approach to institutions. Dalmia jumped into the chat and accused me of arguing for pure democracy and seeking to do away with the entire checks-and-balances system, which was obviously false. So, she's a "conservative" liberal in your sense of desiring to return to some purer version of classical liberalism and the US Constitution, as if that would solve any of our problems. Now, to Robert Ley's points about Mark Carney and his book on Value(s), both economic and moral, Carney is not seeking to overturn the entire institutional order (and neither am I). What Carney needs is a civic movement to back him up and to help legitimate his decisions with a clearer idea of what the "will of the people" actually is -- what is the true majority position on all the most important policy issues. Liberalism and capitalism are *already* revolutionary systems; the problem is that we don't know how to use them very well. Additionally, public opinion is so divided that we're stuck in the position of having a woman who is rabidly anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian running the "most important" conference in "the world" on the future of liberalism. Robert Ley is also right that political liberalism needs a thicker practice of moral values as well as a secular political theology that's genuinely sensitive to faith traditions. People like Carney and Danielle Allen have already gone a long way toward developing such a political theology. Libertarians like Dalmia are mostly against all that....
Hi Seth, I actually find your point about institutional innovation very interesting.
Where I probably see things a little differently is that most proposals—including civic assemblies, a fourth branch of government, or deliberative democracy—still assume that the sovereign nation-state remains the fundamental unit of political organization.
My question is whether the deeper problem lies one level beneath that assumption.
Many of the systems we now depend on—AI, digital platforms, financial networks, climate, even modern conflict—already operate beyond national boundaries. If that's true, are we trying to solve a civilizational coordination problem by continually redesigning institutions that evolved for a much earlier political environment?
Perhaps the next institutional innovation is not simply a better mechanism within the state, but rethinking why the state remains the unquestioned endpoint of political legitimacy in the first place.
Hi Deep, sorry for the delay. I'm sure you're familiar with the standard responses to moving beyond the nation state framework. The top-line one I believe would be national defense, and secondly that there are too many vested interests in the status quo for people to give up the nation state without civilizational collapse first. My favorite response is of course my own, which is that we shouldn't give up on liberal democracy before fully attempting it in the first place. Lib dem as we know it is still incomplete. To give up on liberalism is to admit that human beings are too selfish and irrational for democracy, for both freedom and responsibility, in which case it doesn't matter what the framework of political organization is -- the size of the state or federation, the precise wording of the constitution and its libertarian principles, etc. I think liberalism is the open-ended, perpetually revolutionary system we have been waiting for; we should be excited at the prospect of collectively and democratically attempting to harness the full potential of government and capitalism. Liberalism is a challenge and a thrill all can be part of. Now, correct me if I err: the framework for political decisionmaking is arbitrary except insofar as it includes checks-and-balances and bills of rights, and that the framework conduces to the best methods for good decisionmaking, ie. good deliberation and good policy outcomes. Checks and balances and bills of rights essentially embody principles of internal defense. Likewise, the top-line reason for the nation state is the Hamiltonian one of external defense. While creating borders may seem to generate the necessity of defense, individuals still have to defend themselves from each other, regardless. So, there's no escaping the necessity of defensive frameworks. With that caveat, democracy comes down to a simple choice: in the condition of freedom we have the moral choice to deliberate for the good of everyone, or not. If we choose to deliberate in good faith, to take self-government seriously, then we are certainly capable of building a civic, opensource 4th branch of government that makes deliberation far easier and more efficacious for the majority of citizens. On the other hand, if we are not willing to do that, we can sit back and watch the Mad Max future unfold before our eyes.
Hi Seth, I actually agree that liberal democracy has never been fully realized. I don’t think we should abandon the liberal tradition. In fact, I think we need to return to it.
Where I probably see things a little differently is that I’m becoming less convinced that the crisis is primarily an American one. Similar patterns are emerging across very different political systems. Democracies, authoritarian states, and hybrid regimes all seem to be struggling in their own ways. That is why I’ve increasingly come to think of states as a kind of power species. They differ enormously in culture and ideology, yet they often display remarkably similar behavioral traits.
That’s one of the questions I’m exploring in my recent series, Rethinking the State. My intuition is that the problem may not simply be that democracy is incomplete, but that the political architecture we’ve inherited is reaching the limits of what it can coordinate.
For that reason, I’m not sure that improving democratic institutions alone will be enough to repair either the United States or the wider world. Those reforms are valuable, but they still operate within the same architecture of sovereign power.
To me, the more liberal response is to recover the original liberal impulse of questioning established power itself. Rather than focusing primarily on how to gain control of the existing hierarchy, perhaps we should ask whether that hierarchy has itself become one of the sources of today’s civilizational dilemmas.
That is why I find myself returning to universal human rights rather than the sanctity of sovereign states as the starting point for political imagination. If liberalism once challenged the divine right of kings, perhaps its next chapter is to ask new questions about the political structures that have since become equally unquestionable.
I see better where you're coming from now. So, here's the thing: anyone who refuses to democratically deliberate in good faith implicitly rejects the notion of universal human rights. Full stop.
That's exactly where I think the question becomes even more interesting.
Your observation that liberalism has become conservative in the literal sense resonates with me. But I also wonder why this pattern keeps recurring throughout history.
This is hardly unique to liberalism. Political legitimacy has repeatedly crystallized around ideas that were once revolutionary. Religious authority became politically sacred. The divine right of kings became politically sacred. Liberalism emerged by challenging those sacred orders, yet today it increasingly finds itself defending another one.
One idea I'm exploring in an essay I'm currently writing is that this is not simply a story about liberalism. It is a recurring feature of how states evolve.
Ideology is not the state's identity; it is the state's diet.
When an ideology becomes the primary source of political legitimacy, it gradually loses its capacity to question the very power structure it now helps sustain. It does not necessarily betray its original principles. Rather, it becomes integrated into the machinery of legitimacy itself.
That may explain why contemporary liberalism spends so much time debating who should govern the state, while asking much less often whether the sovereign nation-state itself remains the appropriate political architecture for a civilization whose most important challenges—AI governance, climate change, financial systems, digital platforms, migration, and even war—have already become global.
To me, this is the deeper civilizational contradiction. The world has become increasingly interconnected, while political legitimacy remains anchored in the sanctity of sovereign states. Liberalism continues to compete within that framework, but rarely questions the framework itself.
Perhaps the next genuinely liberal question is not who should control the existing architecture of power, but whether the architecture itself has become the source of our greatest coordination problems.
"I also wonder why this pattern keeps recurring throughout history.... Political legitimacy has repeatedly crystallized around ideas that were once revolutionary."
You can find the explanation in Ibn Khaldun (the loss of "asabiya"), in Vico's observation of civilizational cycles, in Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy.
Unfortunately, such a cyclical view does not suggest any method for liberalism to adapt to the obsolescence of the very paradigm in which it germinated.
What it DOES suggest is that the very notion of "man taking control his own destiny" (let alone on a granular level, but on a planetary scale!) is itself an act (or manifestation) of hubris that will always end in tragedy or tyranny. "The best laid plans..."
I agree that Ibn Khaldun, Vico, and Michels all describe important recurring patterns. They each capture something real about the tendency of power, legitimacy, and institutions to harden over time.
Where I probably see things a little differently is that recurrence does not necessarily imply repetition.
Evolution often produces recurring dynamics without producing identical outcomes. Species repeatedly compete, cooperate, adapt, and sometimes disappear, yet evolution is not cyclical in the sense of returning to the same organisms. History may display recurring structures while still generating genuinely new forms of political organization.
What I find most fascinating about evolution is that once a species or a civilization develops a genuinely new capability, technology, or mode of coordination, that innovation itself becomes part of the environment shaping all future evolution. Language, writing, markets, science, the nation state, and now AI are not simply events within history. They permanently change the space of what can evolve next.
That's why I'm hesitant to see history as a kind of Groundhog Day. We may repeatedly encounter familiar tensions between power and legitimacy, order and freedom, centralization and decentralization, but we do so under profoundly different evolutionary conditions.
Evolution repeats its grammar, not its sentences.
That's why I'm optimistic that new forms of political organization remain possible, not because history escapes recurring patterns, but because evolution continuously creates new possibilities from which those patterns can unfold.
I fully agree -- but I'd take this a step further.
I believe that this time around we're nearing the end of a 5,000-year-long cycle that began with the advent of externalized memory (aka "history") -- approaching an evolutionary bottleneck, after which homo sapiens (as we know ourselves) will lose its perch as the planet's apex predator (with a concomitant shift in our self-concept -- i.e., in the nature of consciousness itself).
We've exploited our ecological niche in what we know as information, but we've exhausted the options opened by dualistic thinking -- i.e., by "playing the float" -- as language closes in on universal simultaneity.
The transition is likely to go beyond what we think of as "forms of political organization," and will likely incorporate the insights of Buddhism regarding human existence or consciousness (or of monotheism as it's evolved through Spinoza).
Evolution continuously creates new possibilities from which new patterns unfold, but we can't know (and it's not for us to say) what they are -- though ironically (in terms of politics), liberalism (with its very open-endedness) is the closest we've come thus far.
It seems so obvious yet it remains a blind spot. What has happened to the quality of jobs? The decline of pensions, and of unions. The rise of gig work. Outsourcing. When center left parties took as their mission support of the working class and lower middle class, liberalism was much more popular.
But center left parties abandoned that focus. They passed China entering the WTO, NAFTA, etc despite significant public anxiety (which turned out to be warranted). Now liberalism itself has run into deep skepticism. It shouldn't be surprising. But you must connect the dots.
Indeed. And decent jobs were about more than a decent paycheck. They provided the day-to-day conditions for a sense of community and shared purpose. A gig worker alone in his car, picking up Uber rides, or a housecleaner doing one-off work for a Taskrabbit customer, is isolated, unseen, and unsupported. The intellectuals arguing about reform versus reconstruction haven't a clue how the precarious people get through their days.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has created massive social, political, cultural and work mayhem. Be honest: WE do NOT know how to fix it. All of the issues you mention are secondary to the changes in society caused by the revolution. If you think the "abandoned focus" caused the skepticism, you're way off. We are zillions more comfortable than Europe--Britain has the GDP of Mississippi. So, even if we KNEW how to do all those things (which we don't--see my comment above to Steve Stoft) the job problem would still exist. Kyla Scanlon says it best: "We have lost the path of predictable progress." I don't know what's coming, you don't know what's coming, and that makes people scared and reactionary. Can't blame them.
And here's how I put it on another Substack (Yascha Mounk):
Here I am dreaming again:
Given the current funding sources for dems (highly progressive), is there ANY hope for someone to lead us spiritually, to finally step up and say: *This is NOT who Americans are.* We shouldn't put our neighbors in pens and deport them. We don't shoot protestors. We shouldn't release all the prisoners so the poor can suffer even more. We shouldn't let mothers and children die at rates that match many very underdeveloped countries. When we tax the "massive corporate developers" to death, who exactly is going to build all the housing we need?
We can do better than this. We ARE better than this. I read very similar things from David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Yascha Mounk and others. "We need to get away from the self and back to the soul." We need to "restore a path to predictable progress" (Kyla Scanlon). I believe firmly that this is what virtually all of the middle of the electorate wants and we all need.
My opinion is that someone (at present I think Buttigieg can do it) in the D party should campaign under "We Are Better Than This." If the progressives don't want to come on side and vote with us, let them have more Trump Sandwich and see how they like it. YES, we will listen to them. Yes, we will internally support some of their excellent ideas. But we will NOT vocalize support for any of their unacceptable, illiberal positions. "Wink wink, nudge nudge."
I would also like to see this same campaigner say something like: "Hey! We are in the midst of an industrial revolution. EVERYTHING is changing very rapidly. NOBODY knows what the "right" fix is. [i.e., how to get back on the path of predictable progress]. But we see it, we understand your confusion and frustration and pain, and we will help you through it as best we can. The more you support us, the better job we can do."
I think it's a bit of a stretch to look at the horrible situation in England and compare it to the US. Standard of living in Britain is the same as our poorest states. They have many, many things to fix and very limited means to fund those fixes. We have gazillions of tons of money. But it benefits a few and it's not making a difference to most of America.
Oddly enough, I was just discussing Buttigieg in this context yesterday with a friend who took a position much like yours. Though I'm a gay male (with Andrew Sullivan's or Jasmie Kirchik's "non-queer" perspective), I'm skeptical of Pete's McKinsey-style technocratic polish -- his promotion of bike lanes and "trans" identities (and probable use of terms like "people of color" or "latinx") --and (in speaking with my friend) contrasted this with Ruben Gallego's American Dream of a "big-ass [electric?] truck."
I'm not sure Buttigieg has what it takes to win those folks over -- or to capture Obama/Trump voters who saw Hillary as Nurse Ratched and voted for (a fake) Tom Sawyer or McMurphy instead. (Full disclosure: I voted for Bernie in 2016 as a California write-in to send my own version of that message without benefiting Trump.)
My problem with the current "abundance" agenda is that's a piss-poor shadow (a "road-diet" version) of what Pat Brown built in California.
See Joel Kotkin on this. A(n electric) car in every garage! Now, THAT'S abundance!
I get my perspective from "the KKK": Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka!
To me, "Make America Great Again" should hearken back to the broad-based prosperity (and "color-blind," integrationist liberalism) of 1964-67 -- the dream that was shattered on the streets of Chicago in 1968 (by the predecessors of today's "woke" left?). Nixon, and especially Reagan, drove the last nails into that coffin, and now the oligarchs won't relinquish the money or the power it would it would take to restore the dream.
To top it off, my fear is that Vance will blame this all on the Jews -- and the "Free Palestine" folks will be along for the ride. (If you think that [as a Jew] I'm merely being parochial or paranoid, just ask Ro Khanna or Scott Wiener how that works.)
As I lament to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore!"
(Ironically -- and contrary to my leftist friends -- I saw Woodstock as an exercise in radical individualism: the notion that in a liberal democracy, "self-determination" is an individual attribute, and that what brings us together is a recognition that we're ALL exiles on Main Street!)
Meanwhile, where is Al Franken now that we need him?
You seem to understand all these nuances, so I'd be interested in your own perspective here.
PS: In a dialogue with Google’s AI last night, the AI concluded: “Charles Reich thought Consciousness III would green America. Instead, it built me.”
Professor Laurelle describes three different responses to what she terms the crisis of liberalism and advocates strongly for the third response.
In the first response she describes a liberalism, so satisfied with itself that its adherents don't even ask why liberalism has fared so badly at the polls. The liberals who fall into this category, by her reckoning, have “a programmatic agenda, that centers on courts, accountability, executive power – all that constitute the machinery of democratic self-defense.” I frankly do not take this category terribly seriously. I’m not sure I know anybody, and I have a wide range of fellow liberal friends, who fail to ask why liberals are losing, at least in the United States. Nor do I know liberals, whose programmatic agenda is centered simply on the need to maintain the rule of law and democratic norms. Certainly the need for the rule of law and honoring the procedures of democracy is part of our DNA, but it does not constitute a programmatic agenda and I’m willing to concede that my conservative friends also have a strong attachment to democratic norms and the rule of law
It is in her second and third categories that Laruelle forces us to think of what liberalism should be all about. I recognize myself most completely in her second category, the kind of liberal that defines himself or herself primarily in relation to achieving the best public policies. And I must admit, I think of my liberalism in very material terms. I am a strong believer in the free market system; it has produced an extraordinarily vibrant economy in which small businesses still count for more than 50% of the labor force. But I also recognize that capitalism by its very nature has produced extraordinary inequality of wealth that requires some level of redistribution, particularly to ensure that all Americans have access to decent jobs, appropriate medical care, good education, and adequate shelter. While liberals will differ among themselves on specifics, they are all willing to use the power of government to regulate and to tax in furtherance of these ends.
For me, the value of Professor Laurelle's piece lies in her third category where she implores liberals to think more deeply, more philosophically, about what it means to be a liberal. She asks for real self-examination aimed at what she calls a reconstruction of liberalism. She wants liberals to think about what liberalism “means for those people who live under it.”
Clearly, she believes, correctly in my view, that liberalism has become too comfortable with itself and in the process lost a vital connection to a substantial majority of people, voters who have then turned to populists, both on the left and the right, in the search for leadership which actually seems interested in them. Oddly, she seeks to define reconstruction in terms of what liberals should be ready to renounce. Here. I confess that I’m not sure I fully understand what it means to renounce being “fluent in the language of expansion” or “treating legitimacy as something produced by correct procedures, expert management, courts, and platforms.” I do recognize, however, real content in her third proposed renunciation, one that would require confronting “the private powers liberalism too often treated as neutral: finance, philanthropy, universities, consultancies, and the technology platforms that now organize political reality.”
Paradoxically, the introspection she seeks has the most potential political benefit if it leads to a liberalism that recognizes the need to account for the practical impact of issues like immigration, religion and climate change on everyday lives. Such a purpose driven inquiry will require liberals to think, in pragmatic political terms. If the Democratic Party, in which most liberals reside, can convey a sense that they understand the values and aspirations of everyday Americans and can explain how its programs are most likely to achieve those aspirations, they will actually have achieved a resonance that will last far beyond the next election cycle.
Thanks for this! On dismissing the first category: I'd distinguish between “asking why liberals are losing” from “having an answer that doesn't just externalize the loss.” Plenty of liberals ask the question but far fewer accept an answer that implicates their own governance rather than disinformation, Russia, or voter confusion. That's the distinction I'm drawing. And I think in practice the rule-of-law-and-norms does constitute a programmatic agenda for many. An enormous share of liberal institutional energy and moral urgency has gone to it over the past decade, at the expense of the material questions you place at the center of your own liberalism. On the renunciations: fair that “fluent in the language of expansion” is compressed. What I mean is a liberalism that has struggled to say “no” or “enough” on anything (immigration levels, growth, mobility, choice) without treating the very act of setting a limit as a betrayal of liberal principle.
While this discussion has all the earmarks of faculty lounge conversation, it entirely misses the most glaring point of what has led to America's divided voting populations. Malinformation* has been growing for over 30 years, starting with Rush and quickly becoming a successful business model. "Flood the zone with shit," says Steve Bannon. Shit indeed. Many Americans would read this piece and say, "Whut?" They simply don't have the media literacy chops to separate the chaff from the grain or to understand the differences between repairing versus rebuilding a democratic republic. These voters swim in an ocean of lies, misogyny, false anger, racism, conspiracy theories and related bile. They vote according that world view and it has given us not just one DJT administration, but two. You can debate how liberalism can be fixed until the next elected populist takes office and you will still be debating how liberals went wrong. There's plenty of blame on the liberal side, without question (trans females have no place on boys sports teams e.g.) However, as long as America has an electorate that doesn't share a common narrative of truth and facts, a democratic republic teeters and likely falls. Madison said it succinctly "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." *Malinformation: information create specifically for malicious intent.
At a high level I agree with you that malinformation is the key problem. I may be more focused on malinfo from ideologies because they're more capable of malicious intent. In any case, I've been working on the problem (w/ websites & books) since 2003, and think the key is to attack what Krugman calls zombie ideas (their long-life makes them most damaging). Success requires narrowly-focused, extremely simple take-downs. Nothing complex can make headway. Currently I'm serializing a book on the far-left ideology (since I was part of it and I'm still on the left). The idea is to identify the targets and then involve people like you in a discussion of practical ways to attack them. I hope you'll check out my forever-free Substack, DareToKnow.Stoft.com .
It's not about facts, it's about emotion. People believe what they want to believe and all the fact-checking, mal-information-deleting and other attempts are destined to fail because it's not factual, it's emotional. You can't stop politicians from telling people what they want to hear. Liberal Conceit (which is Consensus Bias): Because I'm rational and make sense out of the world and my life with facts, everybody else does too. NOPE.
That's the standard mantra, but if you pay attention to how emotions are generated, every single time it's with facts. Every time. Do a check. The facts can be true or false, to the person that gets emotional they believe they are seeing and getting worked because of some fact. So you are looking at a false dichotomy.
The reason this mistake is so popular, is that Democrats seem to think tricky statistics and complex boring facts are the facts they should use. Drives me nuts. And of course they generate no emotion.
The trick is to find true facts that cause emotion that counters the hateful false facts that caused the wrong emotions.
When you make a broad generalization like "It's not about facts" you should actually check it on 3 or 4 examples before you believe it. Science requires a hell of a lot more checking an that why science works.
Sorry, Steve, but I think you have it exactly backwards. Electing Donald Trump proves the point. Virtually every "fact" he told people was either completely false or totally invented bullshit. So the "facts" you say his voters are getting are not actually facts, even though they're presented that way by Orange Menace. But they heard what they wanted to hear and voted for him. All the "true facts" in the world will not, cannot, protect you/us from lying, bullshitting demagogues. We know for a "fact" (AKA the best science we currently have which might change) that people vote with their hearts. Read Haidt (revelatory for me) or Kahneman or any of the other folks writing about this. We are primarily, almost exclusively, emotional animals. We think only with great effort.
Before calling someone completely wrong, read them carefully. In line 2 I say "The facts can be true or false." I broadened the usual definition because in this discussion, what matters is the psychological process and that depends only on the person believing the "fact" is true and not at all on whether it IS true. So Trumps followers, believing false facts, react as if they were true facts, and that generates their emotion of hating Democrats (or whatever). That shows that the psychological process of "facts" causing emotions is real. (psychology operates on belief not on hidden reality.)
Next, because their emotion was caused by a false fact, if we can prove that's wrong (difficult but sometimes possible) it will undo the psychological link from false fact to emotional hate. Now how do you prove a false fact is wrong? There's only one way -- with the truth, which is, by definition a Fact. So this time a true fact is cancelling a false fact and causing an emotional change. Again a Fact causes the Emotional reaction.
If you look at what causes emotions, it is Always Facts (either true of false). Or you can put it this way: it is always what people believe are facts.
If you look at any emotional reaction you will find it based on a fact (T of F). Example people see ICE kill someone (a true fact) they get extremely upset (emotional). A true fact did that. Or people are told Biden destroyed Trump ballots (a false fact) and they get emotional and storm that capitol. And the only way to undo that is with a true fact.
Really you should try looking at real-world examples.
Fact v. Emotions is a false dichotomy. Yes emotions rule the world, but every one of them is triggered by some fact, some external reality. If you ignore the triggers you will have no way to influence the emotions. That's why this popular false dichotomy is so lethal for the Democrats.
Sorry, we're getting hung up in terminology here. I'm not familiar with "False Facts"; lies, bullshit, misinformation are not "facts". In my world those are falsehoods. Better to say what I think we're both saying: Things (you say they're all "facts" but I can't accept that definition) said to people can get them emotionally riled up. Agreed. My point is that there was NO WAY you were going to undo the "stolen election" "Fact" (actually a lie), because the words (call them what you want) appealed to those who wanted to believe a liar. Because IMO you can't fix that with true "Facts", "the facts don't matter." If they mattered, you could fix it.
"Virtually every 'fact' he told people was either completely false or totally invented bullshit." -- No, Really!!? did you figure that out all by yourself? Gosh I never heard anything like that before. (Try again, without assuming I'm a complete idiot.)
Don't be nasty! It was directed at you and I apologize if you read it that way. It was directed at the subject of "facts" and your contention that "facts" make us respond. Well, so do lies and bullshit. Usually more so than actual facts because they can be very black-and-white while many "facts" are much grayer. Which makes actual "facts" essentially irrelevant to winning elections.
Thanks, Steve, I will read your Substack as advised. You may read my forever free Substack “The 13th Clown” which posts only occasionally when the ridiculous and sublime move me.
Perhaps the problem is that skepticism has been replaced with cynicism. Ideas are rarely challenged on their merits. Ideas are challenged on the perceived motivations of those who have them.
Party politics bring out the worst in us, so liberal democracies need to develop a system that incentivizes our more cooperative and inquisitive tendencies. While political parties probably need to be maintained as basically an extension of the checks-and-balances system, lib dems have to find a way to get beyond the toxicity of party dynamics to harness the full potential of democracy and capitalism.
Liberalism was a response to skepticism toward dominant, absolutist, power arrangements. And it succeeded by elevating the idea of freedom as an ultimate good. Liberalism needs a reason for existence other than managing the institutions it created which in many ways have mutated into a failing dominant, absolutist, power arrangement. Reconstruction of liberalism will entail a meaningful alternative to the current mechanisms for defining and managing institutions that promote the ultimate good: freedom.
Nope. The defining and management of institutions HAS to happen and I don't see what "mechanism" could improve on what we do now. That's how we govern ourselves and get things done. Given the turmoil (see my comments above) we don't know how to fix those institutions yet. Liberalism needs to get back to its roots of promoting both freedom AND responsibility. I believe we need much less self and tons more soul. Behave nicely and things work. We've forgotten how to do that.
Danielle Allen just wrote *the* book on liberalism promoting both freedom and responsibility, aka both negative and positive liberties: Justice by Means of Democracy. She discusses the principles for a better liberalism..... but we still need a mechanism. "Mechanism" is a good word choice. Liberal democracy is a system of government and constitutionalism dependent on public opinion which nonetheless lacks a system for organizing public opinion. The mechanism we need, therefore, is a civic fourth branch of government. To connect the dots from Allen's principles of liberal political theory and political economy to the mechanism, we need a theory of radical centrism and the 4th branch. If we think about these things, it becomes obvious that when the political theory of liberal democracy is still profoundly incomplete, it's not surprising that capitalism is running wild and democracy has gone mad. The people are pissed off as they should be, since the "experts" have failed us.
Thanks for these excellent comments. There is waaaaaay too much to say on this topic for this forum. I will try and keep it brief:
Except for some suggestion by Mounk at the end of the Allen interview, most all of the things mentioned by you, Prof. Laruelle, Danielle Allen, and virtually everyone else, are self-abuse about "what's the best way forward." As with the prior crises in Liberalism that Mounk and Allen talked about, NOBODY KNOWS what the right way forward is. We've never been here before. Nobody in Europe knows. We don't know. It's all guesswork and hope. And then you have to hope that you'll be able to sell whatever you create to people abused by misinformation and simpler plans. Again: It's not about the policies, it's about the heart.
Yes, Liberalism needs to do this rearrangement and reconstruction. But though it's BY FAR the most important, it is Laruelle's last bit about philosophy and the need for "reinvention" that you are all ignoring. If you can't appeal to the people in their hearts (think Clinton, Obama, Reagan) you will not get their vote.
IMO we need a Democrat who will play Mark Carney in the US. He has resurrected liberalism and is rebuilding his country. Read his book! Listen to his speeches. His views have to do with VALUES, with soul, with how we treat people and what we should be doing for them follows from those values. THAT is the kind of leadership the Dems need and we can only pray they find it. Our candidate needs to tell America: "We are better than this. I don't have a magic answer for you. Nobody does. But trust me to work for you and with you to be a better, more trusting, more united United States." Heart, not policy.
Hi Stephen. Thanks for the reply. Citizen assemblies are only part of it. When it comes to deliberative democracy, I like both Helene Landemore and James Fishkin's ideas but I'm not qualified to debate which are better. As an academic paradigm, however, deliberative democracy lacks a unified theory such as radical centrism and a 4th branch. You can see that is obvious from reading something like The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, especially the opening chapters, or just reading around DD literature generally. Liberalism needs an entire civic paradigm, as well, that involves all sectors of society. For example, the Wisconsin Idea is the guiding philosophy of the University of Wisconsin system. During Robert La Follette's governorship of Wisconsin over a hundred years ago the WI Idea was thought of as a 4th branch of government. Few people took that idea seriously though and it has been essentially forgotten. Today the Idea is outdated because it lacks a theory of radical centrism and universities simply have no civic mission to speak of. Not surprisingly, the "multiversity," as Clark Kerr called it, is in crisis along with the rest of liberalism. Because our public institutions have no specific, unified civic mission, they are all atomized and cannot defend themselves from an internal illiberal attack. They also fail to inspire robust public confidence and trust.
What's to prevent thst "civic mission" from becoming (to oligarchy and "expert" bureaucracy) what Marxism (or the communist "mission") became in the Soviet Union?
Good question. At the end of the day, in a democracy the people will vote and we can (at present) only hope their vote will be well-informed and considered, and that the choices on offer will be good ones. Liberal democracies cannot continue to rely on political parties and generational political talents like Mark Carney to solve their problems or just muddle through. The tyranny of the majority will always be a possibility, but more often we find ourselves living under a tyranny of a minority combined with a perpetually low quality of government and high level of political conflict. So, we can either make the effort to achieve a higher level of genuinely liberal majority rule, or we can watch our laissez-faire approach to deliberation and the civic realm continue teetering our dems further into illiberalism and autocracy. Presidents and political parties don't represent the true majority opinion on all the major policy issues. What that majority opinion is, the "general will," remains to be discovered. Opinion polling doesn't get at it very well, either, but that's a complicated discussion. In short, the civic mission of liberal democracy, of "radical centrism," is to define the general will as precisely as possible. The preamble of the US Constitution begins with the words "We the People." To define the general will is to define the We. This can only be done through free speech, full standpoint diversity, epistemic egalitarianism, and the fullest possible social inclusion. We're also talking about a partially opensource system, probably something like a Wikipedia general will. So transparency is essential. I'll say a bit more on that above later today.
Censoring free speech is not the liberal way; however, it is true that lib dems have generally failed to give sufficient voice, responsibility, and attention to the people. Furthermore, Trump has done things no one else could have done: he smashed the neoliberal economic status quo, as well as neocons' delusions of foreign policy "realism." He forced political liberals to stop kicking the can down the road on fixing our failing democracies. And his war on Iran may even be spurring the world to give up it's oil addiction much more quickly, as Putin's invasion has done in Europe. Yet, while numerous populist complaints about globalization are legitimate ones, the people in general also need to be far better informed, and we need much higher levels of social and political trust. Liberal majorities also have the right to block illiberal minorities from destroying the system, so long as they use politically liberal and constitutional means to do so.
I think the crisis runs deeper than the article suggests.
Much of today's liberal reconstruction debate still assumes that the central task is to regain control of existing institutions. Some liberals want stronger courts and procedural safeguards. Others want better housing, infrastructure, and economic delivery. But both approaches largely accept the existing political architecture and focus on making it function more effectively.
What seems missing is a willingness to question the sacred assumptions of the age.
Classical liberalism was historically powerful because it challenged sacred authority. It questioned the divine right of kings, inherited hierarchies, and concentrations of power that had come to be seen as natural and unquestionable. Its greatest strength was not administration. It was skepticism.
Today, however, liberalism often appears reluctant to apply that same skepticism to the institutions it now inhabits. Instead of questioning power, it increasingly seeks to manage power. Instead of challenging dominant structures, it competes to occupy them.
This is why so much “reconstruction” sounds like restoration. The goal often seems to be recovering legitimacy for an existing order rather than examining whether the order itself has become part of the problem.
In my view, the defining contradiction of our era is not primarily between liberalism and populism, nor between democracy and authoritarianism. It is the growing mismatch between globally interconnected systems and the continued sanctification of sovereign nation-states as the ultimate source of political legitimacy.
Our largest challenges—AI governance, climate change, financial networks, migration, digital platforms, and even modern warfare—operate at a civilizational scale. Yet political authority remains organized around sovereign structures designed for a different historical environment.
As a result, liberalism often asks who should hold state power. It is far less willing to ask whether the structure of power itself has become obsolete.
This is where the discussion of power becomes unavoidable. We routinely measure inequality through wealth, but rarely through power. Yet power asymmetries may be far more consequential than wealth asymmetries. Wealth ultimately depends on political protection. In the presence of overwhelming power, even immense wealth can become fragile overnight. We overlook this because wealth is visible and measurable, while power is harder to quantify.
For that reason, I am not convinced that liberalism's central problem is a failure of delivery, meaning, or electoral strategy. Its deeper problem may be that it has lost the habit that once made it transformative: the willingness to challenge the legitimacy of dominant power arrangements.
Liberalism once asked whether kings were too powerful.
Today it asks which party should control the state.
It rarely asks whether the political architecture itself has become the source of the crisis.
If liberalism is to reconstruct itself, perhaps it must recover its original courage: not simply to govern existing institutions more effectively, but to question the sacred status of the structures from which those institutions derive their authority. Only then can reconstruction become something more than a sophisticated form of restoration.
I agree. Liberalism has become conservative in the most literal sense: it now sees its task as preserving institutions that it once would have subjected to radical scrutiny. Any serious reconstruction would require to recover a revolutionary impulse toward institutions themselves. We are very far from that.
Oh, I don't think we're very far from that at all. Your comment here is only about 'radical scrutiny' and 'reconstruction'. All fine and good. Yes, we need those. But you aren't mentioning your "philosophy and reinvention". Radical scrutiny and reconstruction will not win elections. And if we don't win elections will will indeed be "very far from that". "If they're so damn smart, how come they're not running everything?" "Philosophy and reinvention" are our best hope. Back to "soul". There are plenty of people who have written about this and realize this, including Yascha Mounk. But so far nobody on the D side is taking it up. Get away from the brain and back to the heart. "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." "Value(s)" It's been there a long time and we need desperately to resurrect it.
I agree that philosophy and moral imagination are indispensable. What fascinates me is the historical pattern that follows: once a philosophy becomes a source of political legitimacy, it often becomes less capable of questioning the power structure it helps sustain. That's one of the questions I'm exploring in my current writing.
On the theme of recovering a revolutionary impulse toward institutions, the 2026 Liberalism in the 21st Century conference has just happened in Washington DC. Shikha Dalmia is the founder of that conference series and the ISMA organization that hosts it. A few weeks ago I was arguing at their Substack magazine, The UnPopulist, for a civic 4th branch of government, ie. a (moderately) revolutionary attitude and approach to institutions. Dalmia jumped into the chat and accused me of arguing for pure democracy and seeking to do away with the entire checks-and-balances system, which was obviously false. So, she's a "conservative" liberal in your sense of desiring to return to some purer version of classical liberalism and the US Constitution, as if that would solve any of our problems. Now, to Robert Ley's points about Mark Carney and his book on Value(s), both economic and moral, Carney is not seeking to overturn the entire institutional order (and neither am I). What Carney needs is a civic movement to back him up and to help legitimate his decisions with a clearer idea of what the "will of the people" actually is -- what is the true majority position on all the most important policy issues. Liberalism and capitalism are *already* revolutionary systems; the problem is that we don't know how to use them very well. Additionally, public opinion is so divided that we're stuck in the position of having a woman who is rabidly anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian running the "most important" conference in "the world" on the future of liberalism. Robert Ley is also right that political liberalism needs a thicker practice of moral values as well as a secular political theology that's genuinely sensitive to faith traditions. People like Carney and Danielle Allen have already gone a long way toward developing such a political theology. Libertarians like Dalmia are mostly against all that....
Hi Seth, I actually find your point about institutional innovation very interesting.
Where I probably see things a little differently is that most proposals—including civic assemblies, a fourth branch of government, or deliberative democracy—still assume that the sovereign nation-state remains the fundamental unit of political organization.
My question is whether the deeper problem lies one level beneath that assumption.
Many of the systems we now depend on—AI, digital platforms, financial networks, climate, even modern conflict—already operate beyond national boundaries. If that's true, are we trying to solve a civilizational coordination problem by continually redesigning institutions that evolved for a much earlier political environment?
Perhaps the next institutional innovation is not simply a better mechanism within the state, but rethinking why the state remains the unquestioned endpoint of political legitimacy in the first place.
Hi Deep, sorry for the delay. I'm sure you're familiar with the standard responses to moving beyond the nation state framework. The top-line one I believe would be national defense, and secondly that there are too many vested interests in the status quo for people to give up the nation state without civilizational collapse first. My favorite response is of course my own, which is that we shouldn't give up on liberal democracy before fully attempting it in the first place. Lib dem as we know it is still incomplete. To give up on liberalism is to admit that human beings are too selfish and irrational for democracy, for both freedom and responsibility, in which case it doesn't matter what the framework of political organization is -- the size of the state or federation, the precise wording of the constitution and its libertarian principles, etc. I think liberalism is the open-ended, perpetually revolutionary system we have been waiting for; we should be excited at the prospect of collectively and democratically attempting to harness the full potential of government and capitalism. Liberalism is a challenge and a thrill all can be part of. Now, correct me if I err: the framework for political decisionmaking is arbitrary except insofar as it includes checks-and-balances and bills of rights, and that the framework conduces to the best methods for good decisionmaking, ie. good deliberation and good policy outcomes. Checks and balances and bills of rights essentially embody principles of internal defense. Likewise, the top-line reason for the nation state is the Hamiltonian one of external defense. While creating borders may seem to generate the necessity of defense, individuals still have to defend themselves from each other, regardless. So, there's no escaping the necessity of defensive frameworks. With that caveat, democracy comes down to a simple choice: in the condition of freedom we have the moral choice to deliberate for the good of everyone, or not. If we choose to deliberate in good faith, to take self-government seriously, then we are certainly capable of building a civic, opensource 4th branch of government that makes deliberation far easier and more efficacious for the majority of citizens. On the other hand, if we are not willing to do that, we can sit back and watch the Mad Max future unfold before our eyes.
Hi Seth, I actually agree that liberal democracy has never been fully realized. I don’t think we should abandon the liberal tradition. In fact, I think we need to return to it.
Where I probably see things a little differently is that I’m becoming less convinced that the crisis is primarily an American one. Similar patterns are emerging across very different political systems. Democracies, authoritarian states, and hybrid regimes all seem to be struggling in their own ways. That is why I’ve increasingly come to think of states as a kind of power species. They differ enormously in culture and ideology, yet they often display remarkably similar behavioral traits.
That’s one of the questions I’m exploring in my recent series, Rethinking the State. My intuition is that the problem may not simply be that democracy is incomplete, but that the political architecture we’ve inherited is reaching the limits of what it can coordinate.
For that reason, I’m not sure that improving democratic institutions alone will be enough to repair either the United States or the wider world. Those reforms are valuable, but they still operate within the same architecture of sovereign power.
To me, the more liberal response is to recover the original liberal impulse of questioning established power itself. Rather than focusing primarily on how to gain control of the existing hierarchy, perhaps we should ask whether that hierarchy has itself become one of the sources of today’s civilizational dilemmas.
That is why I find myself returning to universal human rights rather than the sanctity of sovereign states as the starting point for political imagination. If liberalism once challenged the divine right of kings, perhaps its next chapter is to ask new questions about the political structures that have since become equally unquestionable.
I see better where you're coming from now. So, here's the thing: anyone who refuses to democratically deliberate in good faith implicitly rejects the notion of universal human rights. Full stop.
That's exactly where I think the question becomes even more interesting.
Your observation that liberalism has become conservative in the literal sense resonates with me. But I also wonder why this pattern keeps recurring throughout history.
This is hardly unique to liberalism. Political legitimacy has repeatedly crystallized around ideas that were once revolutionary. Religious authority became politically sacred. The divine right of kings became politically sacred. Liberalism emerged by challenging those sacred orders, yet today it increasingly finds itself defending another one.
One idea I'm exploring in an essay I'm currently writing is that this is not simply a story about liberalism. It is a recurring feature of how states evolve.
Ideology is not the state's identity; it is the state's diet.
When an ideology becomes the primary source of political legitimacy, it gradually loses its capacity to question the very power structure it now helps sustain. It does not necessarily betray its original principles. Rather, it becomes integrated into the machinery of legitimacy itself.
That may explain why contemporary liberalism spends so much time debating who should govern the state, while asking much less often whether the sovereign nation-state itself remains the appropriate political architecture for a civilization whose most important challenges—AI governance, climate change, financial systems, digital platforms, migration, and even war—have already become global.
To me, this is the deeper civilizational contradiction. The world has become increasingly interconnected, while political legitimacy remains anchored in the sanctity of sovereign states. Liberalism continues to compete within that framework, but rarely questions the framework itself.
Perhaps the next genuinely liberal question is not who should control the existing architecture of power, but whether the architecture itself has become the source of our greatest coordination problems.
"I also wonder why this pattern keeps recurring throughout history.... Political legitimacy has repeatedly crystallized around ideas that were once revolutionary."
You can find the explanation in Ibn Khaldun (the loss of "asabiya"), in Vico's observation of civilizational cycles, in Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy.
Unfortunately, such a cyclical view does not suggest any method for liberalism to adapt to the obsolescence of the very paradigm in which it germinated.
What it DOES suggest is that the very notion of "man taking control his own destiny" (let alone on a granular level, but on a planetary scale!) is itself an act (or manifestation) of hubris that will always end in tragedy or tyranny. "The best laid plans..."
The event is in the hand of God.
I agree that Ibn Khaldun, Vico, and Michels all describe important recurring patterns. They each capture something real about the tendency of power, legitimacy, and institutions to harden over time.
Where I probably see things a little differently is that recurrence does not necessarily imply repetition.
Evolution often produces recurring dynamics without producing identical outcomes. Species repeatedly compete, cooperate, adapt, and sometimes disappear, yet evolution is not cyclical in the sense of returning to the same organisms. History may display recurring structures while still generating genuinely new forms of political organization.
What I find most fascinating about evolution is that once a species or a civilization develops a genuinely new capability, technology, or mode of coordination, that innovation itself becomes part of the environment shaping all future evolution. Language, writing, markets, science, the nation state, and now AI are not simply events within history. They permanently change the space of what can evolve next.
That's why I'm hesitant to see history as a kind of Groundhog Day. We may repeatedly encounter familiar tensions between power and legitimacy, order and freedom, centralization and decentralization, but we do so under profoundly different evolutionary conditions.
Evolution repeats its grammar, not its sentences.
That's why I'm optimistic that new forms of political organization remain possible, not because history escapes recurring patterns, but because evolution continuously creates new possibilities from which those patterns can unfold.
I fully agree -- but I'd take this a step further.
I believe that this time around we're nearing the end of a 5,000-year-long cycle that began with the advent of externalized memory (aka "history") -- approaching an evolutionary bottleneck, after which homo sapiens (as we know ourselves) will lose its perch as the planet's apex predator (with a concomitant shift in our self-concept -- i.e., in the nature of consciousness itself).
We've exploited our ecological niche in what we know as information, but we've exhausted the options opened by dualistic thinking -- i.e., by "playing the float" -- as language closes in on universal simultaneity.
The transition is likely to go beyond what we think of as "forms of political organization," and will likely incorporate the insights of Buddhism regarding human existence or consciousness (or of monotheism as it's evolved through Spinoza).
Evolution continuously creates new possibilities from which new patterns unfold, but we can't know (and it's not for us to say) what they are -- though ironically (in terms of politics), liberalism (with its very open-endedness) is the closest we've come thus far.
(See also: "Triton," by Samuel Delany)
It seems so obvious yet it remains a blind spot. What has happened to the quality of jobs? The decline of pensions, and of unions. The rise of gig work. Outsourcing. When center left parties took as their mission support of the working class and lower middle class, liberalism was much more popular.
But center left parties abandoned that focus. They passed China entering the WTO, NAFTA, etc despite significant public anxiety (which turned out to be warranted). Now liberalism itself has run into deep skepticism. It shouldn't be surprising. But you must connect the dots.
Indeed. And decent jobs were about more than a decent paycheck. They provided the day-to-day conditions for a sense of community and shared purpose. A gig worker alone in his car, picking up Uber rides, or a housecleaner doing one-off work for a Taskrabbit customer, is isolated, unseen, and unsupported. The intellectuals arguing about reform versus reconstruction haven't a clue how the precarious people get through their days.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has created massive social, political, cultural and work mayhem. Be honest: WE do NOT know how to fix it. All of the issues you mention are secondary to the changes in society caused by the revolution. If you think the "abandoned focus" caused the skepticism, you're way off. We are zillions more comfortable than Europe--Britain has the GDP of Mississippi. So, even if we KNEW how to do all those things (which we don't--see my comment above to Steve Stoft) the job problem would still exist. Kyla Scanlon says it best: "We have lost the path of predictable progress." I don't know what's coming, you don't know what's coming, and that makes people scared and reactionary. Can't blame them.
Prause where it's due!
I got on your case for the (rather strident tone of) your response to Steve Stoft -- but this comment (and the insight it embodies) is spot-on! :-)
And here's how I put it on another Substack (Yascha Mounk):
Here I am dreaming again:
Given the current funding sources for dems (highly progressive), is there ANY hope for someone to lead us spiritually, to finally step up and say: *This is NOT who Americans are.* We shouldn't put our neighbors in pens and deport them. We don't shoot protestors. We shouldn't release all the prisoners so the poor can suffer even more. We shouldn't let mothers and children die at rates that match many very underdeveloped countries. When we tax the "massive corporate developers" to death, who exactly is going to build all the housing we need?
We can do better than this. We ARE better than this. I read very similar things from David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Yascha Mounk and others. "We need to get away from the self and back to the soul." We need to "restore a path to predictable progress" (Kyla Scanlon). I believe firmly that this is what virtually all of the middle of the electorate wants and we all need.
My opinion is that someone (at present I think Buttigieg can do it) in the D party should campaign under "We Are Better Than This." If the progressives don't want to come on side and vote with us, let them have more Trump Sandwich and see how they like it. YES, we will listen to them. Yes, we will internally support some of their excellent ideas. But we will NOT vocalize support for any of their unacceptable, illiberal positions. "Wink wink, nudge nudge."
I would also like to see this same campaigner say something like: "Hey! We are in the midst of an industrial revolution. EVERYTHING is changing very rapidly. NOBODY knows what the "right" fix is. [i.e., how to get back on the path of predictable progress]. But we see it, we understand your confusion and frustration and pain, and we will help you through it as best we can. The more you support us, the better job we can do."
I think it's a bit of a stretch to look at the horrible situation in England and compare it to the US. Standard of living in Britain is the same as our poorest states. They have many, many things to fix and very limited means to fund those fixes. We have gazillions of tons of money. But it benefits a few and it's not making a difference to most of America.
"We Are Better Than This"
And you can add Antara Haldar to the list,
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g8ys3p1wdh20m22wic27l/Capitalism-s-Creature-by-Antara-Haldar-Project-Syndicate.pdf?rlkey=xjahdum4krn97slsb5iuf0bqy&dl=0
as well as Francis Fukuyama and many others. Let's get this train moving!
Oddly enough, I was just discussing Buttigieg in this context yesterday with a friend who took a position much like yours. Though I'm a gay male (with Andrew Sullivan's or Jasmie Kirchik's "non-queer" perspective), I'm skeptical of Pete's McKinsey-style technocratic polish -- his promotion of bike lanes and "trans" identities (and probable use of terms like "people of color" or "latinx") --and (in speaking with my friend) contrasted this with Ruben Gallego's American Dream of a "big-ass [electric?] truck."
I'm not sure Buttigieg has what it takes to win those folks over -- or to capture Obama/Trump voters who saw Hillary as Nurse Ratched and voted for (a fake) Tom Sawyer or McMurphy instead. (Full disclosure: I voted for Bernie in 2016 as a California write-in to send my own version of that message without benefiting Trump.)
My problem with the current "abundance" agenda is that's a piss-poor shadow (a "road-diet" version) of what Pat Brown built in California.
See Joel Kotkin on this. A(n electric) car in every garage! Now, THAT'S abundance!
I get my perspective from "the KKK": Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka!
To me, "Make America Great Again" should hearken back to the broad-based prosperity (and "color-blind," integrationist liberalism) of 1964-67 -- the dream that was shattered on the streets of Chicago in 1968 (by the predecessors of today's "woke" left?). Nixon, and especially Reagan, drove the last nails into that coffin, and now the oligarchs won't relinquish the money or the power it would it would take to restore the dream.
To top it off, my fear is that Vance will blame this all on the Jews -- and the "Free Palestine" folks will be along for the ride. (If you think that [as a Jew] I'm merely being parochial or paranoid, just ask Ro Khanna or Scott Wiener how that works.)
As I lament to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore!"
(Ironically -- and contrary to my leftist friends -- I saw Woodstock as an exercise in radical individualism: the notion that in a liberal democracy, "self-determination" is an individual attribute, and that what brings us together is a recognition that we're ALL exiles on Main Street!)
Meanwhile, where is Al Franken now that we need him?
You seem to understand all these nuances, so I'd be interested in your own perspective here.
PS: In a dialogue with Google’s AI last night, the AI concluded: “Charles Reich thought Consciousness III would green America. Instead, it built me.”
What can we say to that?
Thank you, kind sir.
Walter frank
Professor Laurelle describes three different responses to what she terms the crisis of liberalism and advocates strongly for the third response.
In the first response she describes a liberalism, so satisfied with itself that its adherents don't even ask why liberalism has fared so badly at the polls. The liberals who fall into this category, by her reckoning, have “a programmatic agenda, that centers on courts, accountability, executive power – all that constitute the machinery of democratic self-defense.” I frankly do not take this category terribly seriously. I’m not sure I know anybody, and I have a wide range of fellow liberal friends, who fail to ask why liberals are losing, at least in the United States. Nor do I know liberals, whose programmatic agenda is centered simply on the need to maintain the rule of law and democratic norms. Certainly the need for the rule of law and honoring the procedures of democracy is part of our DNA, but it does not constitute a programmatic agenda and I’m willing to concede that my conservative friends also have a strong attachment to democratic norms and the rule of law
It is in her second and third categories that Laruelle forces us to think of what liberalism should be all about. I recognize myself most completely in her second category, the kind of liberal that defines himself or herself primarily in relation to achieving the best public policies. And I must admit, I think of my liberalism in very material terms. I am a strong believer in the free market system; it has produced an extraordinarily vibrant economy in which small businesses still count for more than 50% of the labor force. But I also recognize that capitalism by its very nature has produced extraordinary inequality of wealth that requires some level of redistribution, particularly to ensure that all Americans have access to decent jobs, appropriate medical care, good education, and adequate shelter. While liberals will differ among themselves on specifics, they are all willing to use the power of government to regulate and to tax in furtherance of these ends.
For me, the value of Professor Laurelle's piece lies in her third category where she implores liberals to think more deeply, more philosophically, about what it means to be a liberal. She asks for real self-examination aimed at what she calls a reconstruction of liberalism. She wants liberals to think about what liberalism “means for those people who live under it.”
Clearly, she believes, correctly in my view, that liberalism has become too comfortable with itself and in the process lost a vital connection to a substantial majority of people, voters who have then turned to populists, both on the left and the right, in the search for leadership which actually seems interested in them. Oddly, she seeks to define reconstruction in terms of what liberals should be ready to renounce. Here. I confess that I’m not sure I fully understand what it means to renounce being “fluent in the language of expansion” or “treating legitimacy as something produced by correct procedures, expert management, courts, and platforms.” I do recognize, however, real content in her third proposed renunciation, one that would require confronting “the private powers liberalism too often treated as neutral: finance, philanthropy, universities, consultancies, and the technology platforms that now organize political reality.”
Paradoxically, the introspection she seeks has the most potential political benefit if it leads to a liberalism that recognizes the need to account for the practical impact of issues like immigration, religion and climate change on everyday lives. Such a purpose driven inquiry will require liberals to think, in pragmatic political terms. If the Democratic Party, in which most liberals reside, can convey a sense that they understand the values and aspirations of everyday Americans and can explain how its programs are most likely to achieve those aspirations, they will actually have achieved a resonance that will last far beyond the next election cycle.
Thanks for this! On dismissing the first category: I'd distinguish between “asking why liberals are losing” from “having an answer that doesn't just externalize the loss.” Plenty of liberals ask the question but far fewer accept an answer that implicates their own governance rather than disinformation, Russia, or voter confusion. That's the distinction I'm drawing. And I think in practice the rule-of-law-and-norms does constitute a programmatic agenda for many. An enormous share of liberal institutional energy and moral urgency has gone to it over the past decade, at the expense of the material questions you place at the center of your own liberalism. On the renunciations: fair that “fluent in the language of expansion” is compressed. What I mean is a liberalism that has struggled to say “no” or “enough” on anything (immigration levels, growth, mobility, choice) without treating the very act of setting a limit as a betrayal of liberal principle.
Just realized that I twice misspelled Professor Laruelle's name. My apologies to her,
I should have also expressed more directly my thanks for a very thought-provoking piece.
Great essay. For comparison, Lawrence Lessig just wrote a similar analysis in a review of 5 books that could "save America." The fifth was Helene Landemore's Politics Without Politicians. https://lessig.substack.com/p/the-five-books-that-could-save-america?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7zd2b
Great piece. I hope my party (The Dems) can learn from such a solid analysis.
While this discussion has all the earmarks of faculty lounge conversation, it entirely misses the most glaring point of what has led to America's divided voting populations. Malinformation* has been growing for over 30 years, starting with Rush and quickly becoming a successful business model. "Flood the zone with shit," says Steve Bannon. Shit indeed. Many Americans would read this piece and say, "Whut?" They simply don't have the media literacy chops to separate the chaff from the grain or to understand the differences between repairing versus rebuilding a democratic republic. These voters swim in an ocean of lies, misogyny, false anger, racism, conspiracy theories and related bile. They vote according that world view and it has given us not just one DJT administration, but two. You can debate how liberalism can be fixed until the next elected populist takes office and you will still be debating how liberals went wrong. There's plenty of blame on the liberal side, without question (trans females have no place on boys sports teams e.g.) However, as long as America has an electorate that doesn't share a common narrative of truth and facts, a democratic republic teeters and likely falls. Madison said it succinctly "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." *Malinformation: information create specifically for malicious intent.
At a high level I agree with you that malinformation is the key problem. I may be more focused on malinfo from ideologies because they're more capable of malicious intent. In any case, I've been working on the problem (w/ websites & books) since 2003, and think the key is to attack what Krugman calls zombie ideas (their long-life makes them most damaging). Success requires narrowly-focused, extremely simple take-downs. Nothing complex can make headway. Currently I'm serializing a book on the far-left ideology (since I was part of it and I'm still on the left). The idea is to identify the targets and then involve people like you in a discussion of practical ways to attack them. I hope you'll check out my forever-free Substack, DareToKnow.Stoft.com .
It's not about facts, it's about emotion. People believe what they want to believe and all the fact-checking, mal-information-deleting and other attempts are destined to fail because it's not factual, it's emotional. You can't stop politicians from telling people what they want to hear. Liberal Conceit (which is Consensus Bias): Because I'm rational and make sense out of the world and my life with facts, everybody else does too. NOPE.
That's the standard mantra, but if you pay attention to how emotions are generated, every single time it's with facts. Every time. Do a check. The facts can be true or false, to the person that gets emotional they believe they are seeing and getting worked because of some fact. So you are looking at a false dichotomy.
The reason this mistake is so popular, is that Democrats seem to think tricky statistics and complex boring facts are the facts they should use. Drives me nuts. And of course they generate no emotion.
The trick is to find true facts that cause emotion that counters the hateful false facts that caused the wrong emotions.
When you make a broad generalization like "It's not about facts" you should actually check it on 3 or 4 examples before you believe it. Science requires a hell of a lot more checking an that why science works.
Sorry, Steve, but I think you have it exactly backwards. Electing Donald Trump proves the point. Virtually every "fact" he told people was either completely false or totally invented bullshit. So the "facts" you say his voters are getting are not actually facts, even though they're presented that way by Orange Menace. But they heard what they wanted to hear and voted for him. All the "true facts" in the world will not, cannot, protect you/us from lying, bullshitting demagogues. We know for a "fact" (AKA the best science we currently have which might change) that people vote with their hearts. Read Haidt (revelatory for me) or Kahneman or any of the other folks writing about this. We are primarily, almost exclusively, emotional animals. We think only with great effort.
Before calling someone completely wrong, read them carefully. In line 2 I say "The facts can be true or false." I broadened the usual definition because in this discussion, what matters is the psychological process and that depends only on the person believing the "fact" is true and not at all on whether it IS true. So Trumps followers, believing false facts, react as if they were true facts, and that generates their emotion of hating Democrats (or whatever). That shows that the psychological process of "facts" causing emotions is real. (psychology operates on belief not on hidden reality.)
Next, because their emotion was caused by a false fact, if we can prove that's wrong (difficult but sometimes possible) it will undo the psychological link from false fact to emotional hate. Now how do you prove a false fact is wrong? There's only one way -- with the truth, which is, by definition a Fact. So this time a true fact is cancelling a false fact and causing an emotional change. Again a Fact causes the Emotional reaction.
If you look at what causes emotions, it is Always Facts (either true of false). Or you can put it this way: it is always what people believe are facts.
If you look at any emotional reaction you will find it based on a fact (T of F). Example people see ICE kill someone (a true fact) they get extremely upset (emotional). A true fact did that. Or people are told Biden destroyed Trump ballots (a false fact) and they get emotional and storm that capitol. And the only way to undo that is with a true fact.
Really you should try looking at real-world examples.
Fact v. Emotions is a false dichotomy. Yes emotions rule the world, but every one of them is triggered by some fact, some external reality. If you ignore the triggers you will have no way to influence the emotions. That's why this popular false dichotomy is so lethal for the Democrats.
Sorry, we're getting hung up in terminology here. I'm not familiar with "False Facts"; lies, bullshit, misinformation are not "facts". In my world those are falsehoods. Better to say what I think we're both saying: Things (you say they're all "facts" but I can't accept that definition) said to people can get them emotionally riled up. Agreed. My point is that there was NO WAY you were going to undo the "stolen election" "Fact" (actually a lie), because the words (call them what you want) appealed to those who wanted to believe a liar. Because IMO you can't fix that with true "Facts", "the facts don't matter." If they mattered, you could fix it.
"Virtually every 'fact' he told people was either completely false or totally invented bullshit." -- No, Really!!? did you figure that out all by yourself? Gosh I never heard anything like that before. (Try again, without assuming I'm a complete idiot.)
Don't be nasty! It was directed at you and I apologize if you read it that way. It was directed at the subject of "facts" and your contention that "facts" make us respond. Well, so do lies and bullshit. Usually more so than actual facts because they can be very black-and-white while many "facts" are much grayer. Which makes actual "facts" essentially irrelevant to winning elections.
Thanks, Steve, I will read your Substack as advised. You may read my forever free Substack “The 13th Clown” which posts only occasionally when the ridiculous and sublime move me.
Perhaps the problem is that skepticism has been replaced with cynicism. Ideas are rarely challenged on their merits. Ideas are challenged on the perceived motivations of those who have them.
Party politics bring out the worst in us, so liberal democracies need to develop a system that incentivizes our more cooperative and inquisitive tendencies. While political parties probably need to be maintained as basically an extension of the checks-and-balances system, lib dems have to find a way to get beyond the toxicity of party dynamics to harness the full potential of democracy and capitalism.
Liberalism was a response to skepticism toward dominant, absolutist, power arrangements. And it succeeded by elevating the idea of freedom as an ultimate good. Liberalism needs a reason for existence other than managing the institutions it created which in many ways have mutated into a failing dominant, absolutist, power arrangement. Reconstruction of liberalism will entail a meaningful alternative to the current mechanisms for defining and managing institutions that promote the ultimate good: freedom.
Nope. The defining and management of institutions HAS to happen and I don't see what "mechanism" could improve on what we do now. That's how we govern ourselves and get things done. Given the turmoil (see my comments above) we don't know how to fix those institutions yet. Liberalism needs to get back to its roots of promoting both freedom AND responsibility. I believe we need much less self and tons more soul. Behave nicely and things work. We've forgotten how to do that.
Danielle Allen just wrote *the* book on liberalism promoting both freedom and responsibility, aka both negative and positive liberties: Justice by Means of Democracy. She discusses the principles for a better liberalism..... but we still need a mechanism. "Mechanism" is a good word choice. Liberal democracy is a system of government and constitutionalism dependent on public opinion which nonetheless lacks a system for organizing public opinion. The mechanism we need, therefore, is a civic fourth branch of government. To connect the dots from Allen's principles of liberal political theory and political economy to the mechanism, we need a theory of radical centrism and the 4th branch. If we think about these things, it becomes obvious that when the political theory of liberal democracy is still profoundly incomplete, it's not surprising that capitalism is running wild and democracy has gone mad. The people are pissed off as they should be, since the "experts" have failed us.
Thanks for these excellent comments. There is waaaaaay too much to say on this topic for this forum. I will try and keep it brief:
Except for some suggestion by Mounk at the end of the Allen interview, most all of the things mentioned by you, Prof. Laruelle, Danielle Allen, and virtually everyone else, are self-abuse about "what's the best way forward." As with the prior crises in Liberalism that Mounk and Allen talked about, NOBODY KNOWS what the right way forward is. We've never been here before. Nobody in Europe knows. We don't know. It's all guesswork and hope. And then you have to hope that you'll be able to sell whatever you create to people abused by misinformation and simpler plans. Again: It's not about the policies, it's about the heart.
Yes, Liberalism needs to do this rearrangement and reconstruction. But though it's BY FAR the most important, it is Laruelle's last bit about philosophy and the need for "reinvention" that you are all ignoring. If you can't appeal to the people in their hearts (think Clinton, Obama, Reagan) you will not get their vote.
IMO we need a Democrat who will play Mark Carney in the US. He has resurrected liberalism and is rebuilding his country. Read his book! Listen to his speeches. His views have to do with VALUES, with soul, with how we treat people and what we should be doing for them follows from those values. THAT is the kind of leadership the Dems need and we can only pray they find it. Our candidate needs to tell America: "We are better than this. I don't have a magic answer for you. Nobody does. But trust me to work for you and with you to be a better, more trusting, more united United States." Heart, not policy.
Best thing on this that I've read is:
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/on-inequality-and-socialism
Is your 4th branch a plebiscite sort of mechanism?
Fukuyama did a great interview with Fishkin here https://substack.com/@frankfukuyama/note/p-179573763?r=7zd2b
https://persuasion1.substack.com/p/the-multiversity-is-finished?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7zd2b
Hi Stephen. Thanks for the reply. Citizen assemblies are only part of it. When it comes to deliberative democracy, I like both Helene Landemore and James Fishkin's ideas but I'm not qualified to debate which are better. As an academic paradigm, however, deliberative democracy lacks a unified theory such as radical centrism and a 4th branch. You can see that is obvious from reading something like The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, especially the opening chapters, or just reading around DD literature generally. Liberalism needs an entire civic paradigm, as well, that involves all sectors of society. For example, the Wisconsin Idea is the guiding philosophy of the University of Wisconsin system. During Robert La Follette's governorship of Wisconsin over a hundred years ago the WI Idea was thought of as a 4th branch of government. Few people took that idea seriously though and it has been essentially forgotten. Today the Idea is outdated because it lacks a theory of radical centrism and universities simply have no civic mission to speak of. Not surprisingly, the "multiversity," as Clark Kerr called it, is in crisis along with the rest of liberalism. Because our public institutions have no specific, unified civic mission, they are all atomized and cannot defend themselves from an internal illiberal attack. They also fail to inspire robust public confidence and trust.
What's to prevent thst "civic mission" from becoming (to oligarchy and "expert" bureaucracy) what Marxism (or the communist "mission") became in the Soviet Union?
Good question. At the end of the day, in a democracy the people will vote and we can (at present) only hope their vote will be well-informed and considered, and that the choices on offer will be good ones. Liberal democracies cannot continue to rely on political parties and generational political talents like Mark Carney to solve their problems or just muddle through. The tyranny of the majority will always be a possibility, but more often we find ourselves living under a tyranny of a minority combined with a perpetually low quality of government and high level of political conflict. So, we can either make the effort to achieve a higher level of genuinely liberal majority rule, or we can watch our laissez-faire approach to deliberation and the civic realm continue teetering our dems further into illiberalism and autocracy. Presidents and political parties don't represent the true majority opinion on all the major policy issues. What that majority opinion is, the "general will," remains to be discovered. Opinion polling doesn't get at it very well, either, but that's a complicated discussion. In short, the civic mission of liberal democracy, of "radical centrism," is to define the general will as precisely as possible. The preamble of the US Constitution begins with the words "We the People." To define the general will is to define the We. This can only be done through free speech, full standpoint diversity, epistemic egalitarianism, and the fullest possible social inclusion. We're also talking about a partially opensource system, probably something like a Wikipedia general will. So transparency is essential. I'll say a bit more on that above later today.
Yascha Mounk did an excellent interview with Danielle Allen recently. Mounk is dissatisfied because he too is looking for the "mechanism" and cannot see it. https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/danielle-allen?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7zd2b
This is really good
So what the US needs is a pervasive "liberal" censorship regime to minimize wrongthink amongst the yahoos?
Censoring free speech is not the liberal way; however, it is true that lib dems have generally failed to give sufficient voice, responsibility, and attention to the people. Furthermore, Trump has done things no one else could have done: he smashed the neoliberal economic status quo, as well as neocons' delusions of foreign policy "realism." He forced political liberals to stop kicking the can down the road on fixing our failing democracies. And his war on Iran may even be spurring the world to give up it's oil addiction much more quickly, as Putin's invasion has done in Europe. Yet, while numerous populist complaints about globalization are legitimate ones, the people in general also need to be far better informed, and we need much higher levels of social and political trust. Liberal majorities also have the right to block illiberal minorities from destroying the system, so long as they use politically liberal and constitutional means to do so.