Liberalism is under attack. It’s not just a problem for the US Democratic Party, which could again face losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory by a narrow majority. It is widely believed around the world that the entire vision of political liberalism – with its commitments to limited government, personal liberty and the rule of law – is in trouble.
It was not so long ago that liberals proclaimed the “end of history” after their victory in the Cold War. But for years, liberalism has felt perpetually on the edge: challenged by the rise of an authoritarian China, the success of far-right populists, and a sense of blockade and stagnation.
Why do liberals so routinely find themselves in this position? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind. It was during this time that liberals reinvented – and reinvented for the worse – their ideology, which has its roots in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied with the continuity of liberal government and managing the threats that could disrupt it, the same concerns liberals have today. To save themselves, they must undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their faith.
Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His reign closed well over a century in which liberalism had promised to unleash humanity after millennia of hierarchy – by dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and removing barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all these achievements were dogged by racial differences. In its most visionary form, liberalism implied that it was the duty of government to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.
But just a few years later, Cold War liberalism emerged as a rejection of the optimism that flourished before the crises of the mid-20th century. After witnessing the painful destruction of Germany’s short experiment with democracy in the interwar period, the liberals saw their communist ally in the fight against fascism transformed into a fearful foe. They responded by reconceptualizing liberalism. Philosophers such as Oxford don Isaiah Berlin emphasized the concept of individual liberty, which was defined as the absence of interference, especially from the state. Gone was the belief that freedom is guaranteed by institutions that empower humanity. Instead of committing to making freedom more credible to more people — promising a bright future for themselves, for example — these liberals prioritized the fight against mortal enemies who could crash the system.
This was a liberalism of fear, as another Cold War liberal intellectual, Harvard professor Judith Shklar, said. In a way, the fear was understandable: liberalism had enemies. In the late 1940s, the communists took over China, while Eastern Europe fell behind an Iron Curtain. But reorienting liberalism toward the preservation of liberty carried its own risks. Anyone held hostage by fear is likely to exaggerate how dangerous their enemies really are, overreacting to the imminent threat they pose, and foregoing better choices than fighting. (Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who signed up to cover the Nazis only to see paranoia corrupt the country he volunteered to save.)
During the Cold War, concern for freedom from tyranny and self-defense against enemies sometimes led not only to the loss of the very freedom that liberals should care about at home, but also led to violent regimes of terror abroad, as liberals supported authoritarians or go to war in the name of fighting communism. Millions died on the killing fields of this brutal global conflict, many of them at the hands of America and its allies fighting in the name of “freedom.”
Frustratingly, the Soviet Union made the kind of promises about freedom and progress that liberals once thought belonged to them. After all, in the 19th century, liberals had overthrown aristocrats and kings and promised in their place a world of liberty and equality. Liberals like the French politician and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, while concerned about possible government excesses, saw democracy as a form of politics that opened up surprising new opportunities for equal citizenship. And while such liberals placed too much faith in markets to both emancipate and equalize, they ultimately struggled to right this wrong. Liberals like the English philosopher John Stuart Mill also contributed to the invention of socialism.
The Cold War changed all that. It wasn’t just that socialism became a liberal epithet for decades (at least before Senator Bernie Sanders revived it). Liberals came to the conclusion that the ideological passions that led millions of people around the world to communism meant that they should refrain from promising self-emancipation. “We must be aware of the dangers lurking in our most generous wishes,” explained Columbia professor and Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling.
The transformation of Cold War liberalism wouldn’t matter so much today if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their beliefs in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to ignore their own mistakes, despite the longer-term consequences. our time. Instead, the Liberals doubled down. After decades of endless wars against succeeding enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals are shocked by a backlash. History did not end; In fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in the declining new democracies and in the United States now see this as a deficit.
In 2016, a major referendum on liberalism kicked off following Trump’s landslide election victory. Books such as Patrick Deneen’s bestseller “Why Liberalism Failed” took a positive or negative view of liberalism throughout modern times, which took Mr. Deneen back centuries. In frantic self-defense, the liberals responded by appealing to abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy,” and “truth,” the only alternative being tyranny, while diverting attention from their own mistakes and from what it would take to correct them. correct. Both sides have failed to recognize that liberalism, like all traditions, is not a matter of ‘take it or leave it’. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; Liberals can only revive the promises of their philosophy by clinging again to its earlier impulses.
Is that likely? Under President Biden’s watchful eye, China and Eastern Europe — the same places where events shocked Cold War liberals in their position in the first place — have adopted a Cold War stance. Under Mr. Biden, as under Mr. Trump before him, Washington rhetoric increasingly treats China as a threat to civilization. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has made Eastern Europe once again a battleground between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Some like to argue that the war in Ukraine has reminded liberals of their true purpose.
But look closer to home and that seems more questionable. Mr. Trump is the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee (if not the potential winner of the election). Yet liberals seem to base their success less on a positive view of America’s future, and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation. Even if one of Trump’s many prosecutors succeeds in convicting him, it will not save American liberalism. The challenge goes deeper than eliminating the current enemy in the name of our democracy, if not reimagined.
Since his election in 2020, Mr Biden has been defended by some pundits – and by his administration itself – as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt warned that “too many of those who talk about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things the way they were. Democracy must also deal with things as they should be.”
Mr Biden, despite an ambitious agenda of so-called supply liberalism, appears not to have internalized the message. And in turn, voters don’t seem fully convinced yet. A liberalism that survives must resonate with voters who want something to believe in. And liberalism once had that, not about the fear of enemies, but about the hope of institutions leading to what Mill called “experiments in life.” He meant that people all over the world would be given the opportunity by society to choose something new to try in a short period of time. If their hands are forced – especially by a coercive and unequal economic system – they will lose what matters most, which is the chance to make themselves and the world more interesting.
If there’s one bright spot in the next phase of American politics, which Mr. Trump continues to define, it’s that it offers liberals another chance to reinvent themselves. If they instead double down on an outdated Cold War ideology, as they did after 1989 and 2016, they will miss it. Only a liberalism that finally delivers on some of its promises of freedom and equality is likely to survive and flourish.
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Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale and author of the forthcoming book Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.
