My hot take is that the vast majority of US leftists are also liberals and I wish they’d just admit it.
Bernie and Zohran and Warren are calling for Scandinavian-style welfare programs and labor protections, not the abolition of private property. And how many writers at Jacobin or The Nation support throwing out individual rights and democracy in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat? Almost none. Hell, one of the top leftist causes right now is antitrust, on the grounds that monopolies harm market competition. So leftists aren’t even anti-market anymore!
I think the distinction is mostly about aesthetics, not core values. This is why leftist politicians, who actually have to govern, are much more positive toward the abundance agenda. Abundance policies actually help them achieve their goals.
Sanders doesn't want immigration. Mamdani wants government-run grocery stores, rent controls, public housing, and an unobtainable minimum wage. And both of them are at war with "the 1%" - Sanders isn't saying "hey, we have a shortfall, here's how we can make it up", he's saying that having billionaires is fundamentally bad, and needs to be rectified.
And that's fundamentally at odds with liberalism.
Sanders and Mamdani are socialists: That's how they self-identity and also the bedrock for their policies. And that's true of many of their voters, especially their strongest supporters.
Warren is different. Warren said "I am a capitalist to my bones", and she meant it. Warren is in many ways a liberal, as are the significant majority of her Democratic colleagues.
(Though, I would wager, a far smaller percentage of their voters.)
A lot of leftists are in too deep into a decade-long movement that hasn't actually accomplished much, but they can't about they wasted a decade of their lives.
I think it depends on what “a lot” means here - is he talking about a few key rights-of-way and locations for markets? Or is he talking about broader changes to real estate ownership for the average homeowner?
Haven’t read the whole article yet but I do find it quite funny that Against Me! later put out a song called “I Was A Teenage Anarchist” talking about how they were wrong to be a teenage anarchist.
Having read her memoir, followed her on Instagram and seen her live twice, I can confidently say that Laura Jane grace is a chaotic person whose political advice should not be followed and her romantic advice even less
This is a great piece that speaks to my heart, Jerusalem - I have never identified as a centrist and chafe when people try to put me in that box. But on this quote, I have a question: "Liberals are extremists on human flourishing, individual freedom, and freedom of movement." That is true. But "individual freedom" is where I may deviate. Maybe I'm not a liberal, then. Because it seems to me this country's hyperindividualism has become a structural weakness, and we need to shift to a more communitarian approach where it's less about "me me me" and more about "us us us." How do we balance individual freedom with community flourishing? I think "human flourishing" and maximal individual freedom (depending how that is defined) are not entirely compatible, and that has to be explored. Maybe for another piece?
I think being an extremist on individual freedom doesn't mean that liberals don't care about building community or have strong views on the best way to live a good life. The point is that in our efforts to do those, do we trample on people's free speech rights? Physical autonomy? Religious freedoms?
I think not. I also think, as you've read about in Yoni Appelbaum's great book, Stuck, that many individual freedoms are community-enhancing, not community-destroying.
I would never say liberals don't care about building community: that's clearly untrue. And I can readily agree to 'no, we don't trample on *those* rights.' But what about trampling on the freedom/rights of homeowners who want to block that triple-decker down the street because of views/traffic/shadows? I'm good with stripping them of their right to block housing. I'm good with taking away their freedom to protest every project. But would an ideologically pure liberal be good with that?
NIMBYism is grounded in individual freedom. It's a negative liberty, but still a form of freedom: freedom from having views blocked and scary new people, possibly with children, living next door. This freedom bumps up squarely against human flourishing. You and I agree, I think, that child-hating, duplex-hating people should be stripped of their right to make the community worse off.
Whose individual freedom wins when they conflict? Does community wellbeing provide a basis for choosing? As a planning commissioner, I'm balancing these "whose rights win" questions all the time: they are not abstract.
These are exactly the kinds of debates we liberals should be having :)
For my part: I don’t think anyone has the right to block a home and I do think they have the right to protest every project I just want to make the state less hijackable!
There are many individual freedoms that enhance a community (as one might notice, the high trust parts of the United States are extremely liberal), how one defines freedom is important though.
A lot of hay has been made about how tiktok, facebook, et all are driving Americans insane, but banning tiktok, facebook, etc would be fundamentally incompatible with the American conceptualization of individual liberty. The Government? Banning social media? Authoritarianism!
A great example I would cite here would be prohibition (which for all the talk of having failed, it did permanently reduce the amount of alcohol consumed by the average american), as a movement, it gained popularity and power because American freedom to consume as much booze as they want was causing massive social problems throughout the country.
This is the important critique of liberalism that has most troubled me and led to the most times when I didn’t identify as liberal. Some parts of it are internal tensions in liberalism though - some real and important human freedoms are the freedom to participate in groups that limit your other freedoms (like families, companies, religions, and the like). But other parts are just the counterpart of constraints on market freedoms where market failures are common - namely constraints on freedom to engage in addictive behavior that ends up actually being unfree when part of the self overwhelms one’s main desires.
I think the way to properly frame this in the current landscape is "Liberals believe in maximizing the amount of people who can thrive" via a high trust society.
So much of current leftist discourse focuses on maximizing freedoms for people who either refuse or cannot participate in society. Focusing on these small fringe populations comes at tremendous costs for the large majority of people who do try to participate in the common good.
Meanwhile the right tries to minimize the amount of people who can thrive by making society exclusive to a narrow band of people they deem acceptable, regardless of capability or interest in participation.
Both approaches from either side fundamentally destabilize the common good. Liberalism correctly sees both as threats to a society that allows for human flourishing and also curtails personal freedom.
Interesting but imo people read abundance-oriented liberalism as centrism because it sidesteps the core political question: how far redistribution should go. It seems like abundance libs are comfortable guaranteeing a strong floor: universal benefits, public investment, broad access but stop short of limiting what the wealthy can consume or opt out of. From what I can gauge, that hesitation comes from a belief that constraining the top is “zero-sum” and risks harming innovation or dynamism.
Leftists, by contrast, argue that without some ceiling or some mechanism that keeps everyone in the same institutions, the floor itself eventually collapses. The fight over different variations of Medicare for All is actually the perfect illustration : should the wealthy be able to pay more to get ahead in line if we do universal healthcare? The left argues that if the wealthy can carve out private tiers, they drain resources and political support from the public plan.
I think the disagreement isn’t rlly about technocracy or optimism or “abundance” itself imo it’s about whether fairness requires equalizing outcomes at the top, not only raising conditions at the bottom. and if you are willing to sacrifice some growth or dynamism for producing less inequality within the nation state.
Limiting what people can consume, or what they can earn, wealthy or otherwise, isn't just zero-sum and bad for innovation and dynamism. It's fundamentally authoritarian, so pretty much the opposite of liberalism.
I think this is backwards. Excess concentrations of wealth can have distortional effects on democracy that is core to liberalism. We don't need to reach back to the gilded age for examples of this either, viktor orbans rise to power in Hungary was enabled by wealthy far right business owners buying out all of the countries media. This is something we are currently seeing repeated in the United States too, illiberal pro-trump billionaires are buying out every legacy media company, and control of tiktok is being given to pro-trump billionaires.
Liberal democracy is not a naturally occurring isotope, it has to be nurtured and actively maintained. Part of maintaining it is not allowing wealth to accumulate so much that it cuts off the sunlight and oxygen democracy needs to grow.
You can cherry pick examples of wealthy people doing things that were bad for liberal democracy, but the evidence that economic inequality is bad for liberal democracy on the whole is weak. Too weak, I think, to justify the suspension of liberal principles required to limit concentrations of wealth. You can dress it up in all the technocracy you want, but any way of limiting the upper bounds of wealth ultimately means that some political poobah gets to tell Taylor Swift "no no, if you release one more album or put on one more concert, we're going to throw you in jail/confiscate your profits/nationalize your IP. Not very liberal. Surely the better path is to convince the greatest beneficiaries of liberal democracy to be its greatest champions?
"We'll just convince billionaires its in their best interests to support democracy!" is a great sentiment, but doesn't really solve the problems of someone like elon musk spending 400 million dollars to help get some elected, get appointed to his own special position, and then start ripping the proverbial copper wiring out of the walls of our institutions.
Note I never said we need to put people in jail. I'm not putting words in your mouth, don't put words in mine. I believe that no human needs more than 500 million dollars of stuff (and that's being very generous given all the data out there on how human happiness caps out around 2-10 million net worth). I don't want to throw people in jail because their stock went up, I want to tax them.
If this means we get 10% less innovation I'm more than willing to accept that trade off. Maybe you aren't! Fundamentally I just disagree with you about the effect of wealth inequality on democracy.
Yes, liberalism absolutely does reject the kind of ceilings you discuss because they do not actually help the poor.
I think we should significantly expand the safety net and increase welfare spending. We need tax revenue to do that, and I believe we should have a revenue maximizing tax rate on the wealthy in order to do that. A revenue maximizing income tax rate would be about 70% for very high incomes, much higher than the status quo. If we simply place a ceiling on the wealthy or impose non-revenue maximizing taxes then we can't spend as much to help people.
Ironically, some "leftists" minimize the importance of these welfare programs and seem more concerned with the income differences between the very rich and the merely well-off. Those leftists are fighting for the bourgeoisie rather than fighting for the poor.
Of course what blocks those revenue maximizing taxes is actually political pragmatism. Centrists politicians who are rightfully concerned about their re-election prospects have resisted these tax rates out of a fear of massive spending against them. That dynamic is much harder to overcome, and squabbling over the difference between a 70% tax rate and a 90% rate is pointless.
Strong disagree that abundance liberalism doesn’t answer those questions. It may be that the answer isn’t satisfactory to you or others, but that’s not the same as it not existing.
I'm glad to see the Argument writing about the liberal tradition, but just know that Jerusalem doesn't speak for all liberals here. Which is fine, to be clear! But just know that what she's referring to is just one form among many.
Think of liberalism a bit more like you think of Christianity. There are tons of denominations who, while loosely unified around some core commitments, will appear to actually disagree about most things. Some Christians believe in biblical literalism, penal substitution, and the exclusion of women from ministry. Others, like the Episcopal Church to which I belong, believe in none of that. Just so, there are libertarian liberals who strongly emphasize non-interference and a minimal state and egalitarian liberals (like me) who emphasize fairness and welfare. There are proceduralist liberals who emphasize transparent rules and political neutrality, and perfectionist liberals who think the liberal state can and should advocate for a particular conception of the good life. There are liberals who are hawkish about intervention in the affairs of sovereign nations to promote liberal outcomes, and liberals who hold sovereignty as sacrosanct even when other states use their sovereignty to choose illiberalism. There are liberals who would like to see open borders, and liberals (like Joseph Heath) who think that tightly controlling immigration volumes and assimilation is essential to maintain the social order that sustains liberal norms.
Take Abundance, for example. Abundance is self-consciously a reaction to the excesses of small d-democratic, participatory, and procedural governance that defined the neoliberal era. This was the liberalism of Ralph Nader, notice and hearings, and CEQA. Abundance rejects that, but it's not because that wasn't liberal and they are. It's just that liberalism is a loose container for ideologies that may actually be radically different.
While I do think that there are some loose commitments shared across the many different forms of liberalism, these are so thin that it's hardly worth trying to mobilize people behind them without the substantive scaffolding of the whole picture. Just as many people who would like to call themselves "Christian" simpliciter, or "non-denominational" are actually just reformed protestants whose theology is basically just Presbyterian, many folks who would call themselves "liberal" simpliciter are actually wedded to a particular form of liberalism. It does us all well to name these particular forms and their commitments so that we can avoid talking past each other. Precision doesn't come easy, but neither does clarity, excellence, and non-violent political achievement.
I’m not a centrist by choice but when I saw the pro-Palestine march through Seattle within a month of Oct 7 and argued with a Boomer communist downtown about how far back into history we should reach to justify violence I became relieved Bernie lost for the first time. Now people on X tend to think I’m MAGA.
Politics is not 2 dimensional. “Left” is defined by chaos in resistance to oppressive order.
"Leftists" tend to define themselves by fixation on particular tactics. Reforming healthcare, for instance, only counts if it's "single-payer." Which they vaguely define as "patients get whatever they want, with zero out of pocket costs, and it's paid for by 'the wealthy.'" Climate issues can only be solved with full-stop decarbonization, and if, for instance, a college decides not to divest its endowment from fossil fuels, it must be because they just don't really care about climate or are sellouts to "the wealthy" or whatever.
There's a dog chasing car quality to it, because there isn't really any policy thought that goes into it. There aren't any policy papers behind "Medicare for All" that consider, for instance, how much that hypothetical "Medicare" (which looks nothing like actual Medicare as it exists) pays for stuff, or what it pays for. Nor is there a sense of what happens if MIT or Swarthmore College actually divest from fossil fuel companies. Does that mean that they won? Seems like a pretty busted metric for success.
There is leftwing politics out there that is hostile to social disorder, chaos, radical religious conflict and is very tough on crime. It's also the politics the United States has defined itself as being in opposition to since uh, the end of world war II.
You can define leftism generally as opposition to the establishment but I think progressivism versus conservatism is more relevant there. There’s really no reason to allude to the French Revolution unless there’s a good metaphor for the guillotine.
I'm not talking about the french revolution. I'm talking about the USSR, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China, etc. The american strain of leftism, which has its roots in anarchism, is a very different beast to how socialism, leftism, whatever you want to call it takes its form outside the United States.
For a more contemporary, local example. In mexico claudia sheinbaums flavor of socialism is tough on crime, pro-military, and socially moderate (pro-womens rights, meh on gay rights).
For numerous historical and political reasons. American liberals, and many american leftists hate hate hate what some might call "Right Socialism" or if your a GMU professor "Authoritarian Socialism". So that doesn't really exist as a political tendency in the United States outside of like, zohran mamdanis caucus in the NYC DSA.
“Left” is specifically in reference to those against the ancien regime, any modern usage is an analogy. W.r.t. communism it’s because capitalist imperialism was the status quo being revolted against. It means nothing without that context it’s just an arbitrary indicator of direction.
I'm not sure I buy this argument. I'm here for liberalism but it's not clear to me that housing abundance and permitting reform and abolishing the filibuster are "liberal" causes exactly (I support them); rather, they are movements for a different set of values: more construction as opposed to local control (which chills construction), legislative action as opposed to inaction (because of the filibuster). If we want to define it as a substantive liberalism, maybe it is better called "big government liberalism" or a liberalism of action.
But what makes this magazine liberal is its spirit, not its policy positions. You want to persuade others, not scold them into submission or shun them (which the rest of the chattering classes on the left often seem to want to do). It's "liberal" as an adjective, as Michael Walzer has put it.https://dissentmagazine.org/article/what-it-means-to-be-liberal/ + a set of policy positions that the left seems to have a lot of discomfort with.
Is there really a liberal consensus on the filibuster? I consider myself a liberal, but I have some reservations about which questions should be decided democratically. In fact, I think most things should probably be decided by other mechanisms - the color of my curtains should be decided by my personal preferences and the options provided by the market, not subjected to democratic deliberation! I'm also skeptical that 51% is the right threshold when we decide to use democracy to make a decision that had previously been handled by other mechanisms. And I'm extra extra skeptical when the decision being made is of the form of 51+% voting to take something from 49-% for themselves.
I would like to see the US move towards a nordic model with a strong social safety net, flexicurity, all funded by a substantially higher tax burden on the top twenty percent of the income distribution.
All that being said, I am not a leftist. Why? Because the big ideas and policies of the left--greedflation, MMT, public grocery stores, jobs guarantee, left-NIMBYism--are all very bad ideas that will not help anyone and could lead to disaster, cough MMT. People talk about the right being dominated by populism, but the left has its own version. Sure many of the people behind these proposals are well-educated, with secondary if not tertiary degrees. But that isn't enough. You can't just go with whatever sounds good to you with your liberal arts major or law degree or whatever. There actually is a lot of social science research and if you ignore it all, which is exactly what the Left is currently doing, you just end up with a big pile of garbage. Ignore the research on housing scarcity and you're just as anti-science as any climate denier or anti-vaxxer.
In what way is MMT a leftist idea? It's primarily a framework for understanding and working within the fiat monetary/banking systems that we already have. Some policy ideas then come from that understanding, to various degrees.
I guess I should probably ask what exactly you think MMT is, as many people seem to think that it's "print an infinite amount of money", or something similar.
In a moment when illiberalism is on the march, it seems like a mistake to so narrowly define liberalism as "a normative political philosophy concerned with universal individual rights, pluralism, and *the limits* of free enterprise." Liberalism surely includes those (like me) whose support for universal individual rights and pluralism includes an appreciation for *the value* of free enterprise, markets, and price signals. That market liberalism may include support for safety net programs but dynamism and markets, not regulation and redistribution, are central to its concept of economic liberalism.
Freedom of inquiry and conscience are also central enough to liberalism to merit separate mention.
Americans have problems with the word "liberal," because it means two distinct things, one of which is a subset of the other. There is "liberal" as in the Great Society (the "liberal" that conservatives sometimes label incorrectly as "leftist") and "liberal" as in the broader philosophical tradition.
I think the question isn't whether Jerusalem is centrist (she was always left of Yglesias on The Weeds but whether The Argument is. Is it a liberal big tent that has centrists on the periphery or is it a centrist tent that has some liberal positions for spice?
Just based on her own words, "Hosting differing voices from socialists to conservatives" is just the democratic party circa the new deal, which was a very diverse big tent!
That's fair. It just feels right now like she's building another space for centrists, especially on environmentalism and maybe immigration. There's already Slow Boring for that.
Having said that, as smart as he is, I think Liam Kofi Bright is wrong about the historical conditions that gave birth to liberalism. He argues that liberal neutrality on private matters only ever worked in a homogenous society of people who agreed on most substantive topics.
To make that point, he asserts that 16th-century Europe was such a society, but he doesn't 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘦 it. I'd say he 𝘤𝘢𝘯'𝘵 argue it, because it wasn't anything of the sort. Geographic, ethnic, religious, and class divisions were wider and more pronounced then than now. If you spend any time reading Martin Luther, inquisition records, or private correspondence among heretics and dissenters you'll see how unlikely it was that that their intellectual descendants would ever tolerate disagreement on the things most important to them. Beyond that, outside the standardizing influence of Latin-speaking religious elites, local populations were bewilderingly diverse by today's standards.
(I also disagree with his Socialist/Marxist critique of liberalism, but that's built on a large stack of priors that's not going to translate well to a lunchtime comment.)
Yeah I think Liam is wrong in that post (in particular he handwaves away how to solve the problem of pluralism without liberalism) but it would be really interesting.
It seems to me that the strongest resemblance of liberalism to centrism is on "meta" issues, where liberals support discourse norms that tolerate a wide range of political views; the ideas of the neutral moderator or the common-carrier platform are liberal in motivation while appearing centrish in effect.
On questions like "should you have your life ruined for posting left-wing political views on the internet", liberals side with the left, but on questions like "should you have your life ruined for posting right-wing political views on the internet", liberals side with the right. To an uncareful thinker, someone who sides sometimes with the left and sometimes with the right can appear moderate and centrist.
Also, the idea of one's enemies having rights can sound like a call for moderation (in the sense of "now, let's not go too far here") to someone trying to whip up a mob howling for blood. Sometimes "radical" means "I want to stop exercising self-restraint and start going The Purge on my enemies".
If liberals want to expunge the reputation of being centrists, they should stop agreeing with and repeatedly publishing fake "studies" to propagandize in favor of the centrists. You can't pretend go be non-centrist all while going out of your way - including publishing bullshit polls and fake analysis - to justify, defend, and push forward the centrist line. At some point, you actually have to prove that you are different in substance. Instead, every other piece you people put out is shifting on the left and progressives. If you want a different reputation, behave differently.
My hot take is that the vast majority of US leftists are also liberals and I wish they’d just admit it.
Bernie and Zohran and Warren are calling for Scandinavian-style welfare programs and labor protections, not the abolition of private property. And how many writers at Jacobin or The Nation support throwing out individual rights and democracy in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat? Almost none. Hell, one of the top leftist causes right now is antitrust, on the grounds that monopolies harm market competition. So leftists aren’t even anti-market anymore!
I think the distinction is mostly about aesthetics, not core values. This is why leftist politicians, who actually have to govern, are much more positive toward the abundance agenda. Abundance policies actually help them achieve their goals.
Sanders doesn't want immigration. Mamdani wants government-run grocery stores, rent controls, public housing, and an unobtainable minimum wage. And both of them are at war with "the 1%" - Sanders isn't saying "hey, we have a shortfall, here's how we can make it up", he's saying that having billionaires is fundamentally bad, and needs to be rectified.
And that's fundamentally at odds with liberalism.
Sanders and Mamdani are socialists: That's how they self-identity and also the bedrock for their policies. And that's true of many of their voters, especially their strongest supporters.
Warren is different. Warren said "I am a capitalist to my bones", and she meant it. Warren is in many ways a liberal, as are the significant majority of her Democratic colleagues.
(Though, I would wager, a far smaller percentage of their voters.)
A lot of leftists are in too deep into a decade-long movement that hasn't actually accomplished much, but they can't about they wasted a decade of their lives.
I think Zohran in fact has been on record calling for buying out a lot of private property, which is fairly extreme.
I think it depends on what “a lot” means here - is he talking about a few key rights-of-way and locations for markets? Or is he talking about broader changes to real estate ownership for the average homeowner?
His point was that most housing should be owned by the government.
That is definitely a more extreme view! (Though Vienna and Singapore give very different models of how that might look.)
Haven’t read the whole article yet but I do find it quite funny that Against Me! later put out a song called “I Was A Teenage Anarchist” talking about how they were wrong to be a teenage anarchist.
Such a good band though.
Having read her memoir, followed her on Instagram and seen her live twice, I can confidently say that Laura Jane grace is a chaotic person whose political advice should not be followed and her romantic advice even less
This is a great piece that speaks to my heart, Jerusalem - I have never identified as a centrist and chafe when people try to put me in that box. But on this quote, I have a question: "Liberals are extremists on human flourishing, individual freedom, and freedom of movement." That is true. But "individual freedom" is where I may deviate. Maybe I'm not a liberal, then. Because it seems to me this country's hyperindividualism has become a structural weakness, and we need to shift to a more communitarian approach where it's less about "me me me" and more about "us us us." How do we balance individual freedom with community flourishing? I think "human flourishing" and maximal individual freedom (depending how that is defined) are not entirely compatible, and that has to be explored. Maybe for another piece?
I think being an extremist on individual freedom doesn't mean that liberals don't care about building community or have strong views on the best way to live a good life. The point is that in our efforts to do those, do we trample on people's free speech rights? Physical autonomy? Religious freedoms?
I think not. I also think, as you've read about in Yoni Appelbaum's great book, Stuck, that many individual freedoms are community-enhancing, not community-destroying.
I would never say liberals don't care about building community: that's clearly untrue. And I can readily agree to 'no, we don't trample on *those* rights.' But what about trampling on the freedom/rights of homeowners who want to block that triple-decker down the street because of views/traffic/shadows? I'm good with stripping them of their right to block housing. I'm good with taking away their freedom to protest every project. But would an ideologically pure liberal be good with that?
NIMBYism is grounded in individual freedom. It's a negative liberty, but still a form of freedom: freedom from having views blocked and scary new people, possibly with children, living next door. This freedom bumps up squarely against human flourishing. You and I agree, I think, that child-hating, duplex-hating people should be stripped of their right to make the community worse off.
Whose individual freedom wins when they conflict? Does community wellbeing provide a basis for choosing? As a planning commissioner, I'm balancing these "whose rights win" questions all the time: they are not abstract.
These are exactly the kinds of debates we liberals should be having :)
For my part: I don’t think anyone has the right to block a home and I do think they have the right to protest every project I just want to make the state less hijackable!
There are many individual freedoms that enhance a community (as one might notice, the high trust parts of the United States are extremely liberal), how one defines freedom is important though.
A lot of hay has been made about how tiktok, facebook, et all are driving Americans insane, but banning tiktok, facebook, etc would be fundamentally incompatible with the American conceptualization of individual liberty. The Government? Banning social media? Authoritarianism!
A great example I would cite here would be prohibition (which for all the talk of having failed, it did permanently reduce the amount of alcohol consumed by the average american), as a movement, it gained popularity and power because American freedom to consume as much booze as they want was causing massive social problems throughout the country.
This is the important critique of liberalism that has most troubled me and led to the most times when I didn’t identify as liberal. Some parts of it are internal tensions in liberalism though - some real and important human freedoms are the freedom to participate in groups that limit your other freedoms (like families, companies, religions, and the like). But other parts are just the counterpart of constraints on market freedoms where market failures are common - namely constraints on freedom to engage in addictive behavior that ends up actually being unfree when part of the self overwhelms one’s main desires.
I think the way to properly frame this in the current landscape is "Liberals believe in maximizing the amount of people who can thrive" via a high trust society.
So much of current leftist discourse focuses on maximizing freedoms for people who either refuse or cannot participate in society. Focusing on these small fringe populations comes at tremendous costs for the large majority of people who do try to participate in the common good.
Meanwhile the right tries to minimize the amount of people who can thrive by making society exclusive to a narrow band of people they deem acceptable, regardless of capability or interest in participation.
Both approaches from either side fundamentally destabilize the common good. Liberalism correctly sees both as threats to a society that allows for human flourishing and also curtails personal freedom.
Interesting but imo people read abundance-oriented liberalism as centrism because it sidesteps the core political question: how far redistribution should go. It seems like abundance libs are comfortable guaranteeing a strong floor: universal benefits, public investment, broad access but stop short of limiting what the wealthy can consume or opt out of. From what I can gauge, that hesitation comes from a belief that constraining the top is “zero-sum” and risks harming innovation or dynamism.
Leftists, by contrast, argue that without some ceiling or some mechanism that keeps everyone in the same institutions, the floor itself eventually collapses. The fight over different variations of Medicare for All is actually the perfect illustration : should the wealthy be able to pay more to get ahead in line if we do universal healthcare? The left argues that if the wealthy can carve out private tiers, they drain resources and political support from the public plan.
I think the disagreement isn’t rlly about technocracy or optimism or “abundance” itself imo it’s about whether fairness requires equalizing outcomes at the top, not only raising conditions at the bottom. and if you are willing to sacrifice some growth or dynamism for producing less inequality within the nation state.
I honestly don't see a lot of abundance liberals who are opposed to lots of redistribution. Here's my take on that: https://substack.com/@jerusalemdemsas/p-176106976
Limiting what people can consume, or what they can earn, wealthy or otherwise, isn't just zero-sum and bad for innovation and dynamism. It's fundamentally authoritarian, so pretty much the opposite of liberalism.
I think this is backwards. Excess concentrations of wealth can have distortional effects on democracy that is core to liberalism. We don't need to reach back to the gilded age for examples of this either, viktor orbans rise to power in Hungary was enabled by wealthy far right business owners buying out all of the countries media. This is something we are currently seeing repeated in the United States too, illiberal pro-trump billionaires are buying out every legacy media company, and control of tiktok is being given to pro-trump billionaires.
Liberal democracy is not a naturally occurring isotope, it has to be nurtured and actively maintained. Part of maintaining it is not allowing wealth to accumulate so much that it cuts off the sunlight and oxygen democracy needs to grow.
You can cherry pick examples of wealthy people doing things that were bad for liberal democracy, but the evidence that economic inequality is bad for liberal democracy on the whole is weak. Too weak, I think, to justify the suspension of liberal principles required to limit concentrations of wealth. You can dress it up in all the technocracy you want, but any way of limiting the upper bounds of wealth ultimately means that some political poobah gets to tell Taylor Swift "no no, if you release one more album or put on one more concert, we're going to throw you in jail/confiscate your profits/nationalize your IP. Not very liberal. Surely the better path is to convince the greatest beneficiaries of liberal democracy to be its greatest champions?
"We'll just convince billionaires its in their best interests to support democracy!" is a great sentiment, but doesn't really solve the problems of someone like elon musk spending 400 million dollars to help get some elected, get appointed to his own special position, and then start ripping the proverbial copper wiring out of the walls of our institutions.
Note I never said we need to put people in jail. I'm not putting words in your mouth, don't put words in mine. I believe that no human needs more than 500 million dollars of stuff (and that's being very generous given all the data out there on how human happiness caps out around 2-10 million net worth). I don't want to throw people in jail because their stock went up, I want to tax them.
If this means we get 10% less innovation I'm more than willing to accept that trade off. Maybe you aren't! Fundamentally I just disagree with you about the effect of wealth inequality on democracy.
Yes, liberalism absolutely does reject the kind of ceilings you discuss because they do not actually help the poor.
I think we should significantly expand the safety net and increase welfare spending. We need tax revenue to do that, and I believe we should have a revenue maximizing tax rate on the wealthy in order to do that. A revenue maximizing income tax rate would be about 70% for very high incomes, much higher than the status quo. If we simply place a ceiling on the wealthy or impose non-revenue maximizing taxes then we can't spend as much to help people.
Ironically, some "leftists" minimize the importance of these welfare programs and seem more concerned with the income differences between the very rich and the merely well-off. Those leftists are fighting for the bourgeoisie rather than fighting for the poor.
Of course what blocks those revenue maximizing taxes is actually political pragmatism. Centrists politicians who are rightfully concerned about their re-election prospects have resisted these tax rates out of a fear of massive spending against them. That dynamic is much harder to overcome, and squabbling over the difference between a 70% tax rate and a 90% rate is pointless.
Strong disagree that abundance liberalism doesn’t answer those questions. It may be that the answer isn’t satisfactory to you or others, but that’s not the same as it not existing.
I'm glad to see the Argument writing about the liberal tradition, but just know that Jerusalem doesn't speak for all liberals here. Which is fine, to be clear! But just know that what she's referring to is just one form among many.
Think of liberalism a bit more like you think of Christianity. There are tons of denominations who, while loosely unified around some core commitments, will appear to actually disagree about most things. Some Christians believe in biblical literalism, penal substitution, and the exclusion of women from ministry. Others, like the Episcopal Church to which I belong, believe in none of that. Just so, there are libertarian liberals who strongly emphasize non-interference and a minimal state and egalitarian liberals (like me) who emphasize fairness and welfare. There are proceduralist liberals who emphasize transparent rules and political neutrality, and perfectionist liberals who think the liberal state can and should advocate for a particular conception of the good life. There are liberals who are hawkish about intervention in the affairs of sovereign nations to promote liberal outcomes, and liberals who hold sovereignty as sacrosanct even when other states use their sovereignty to choose illiberalism. There are liberals who would like to see open borders, and liberals (like Joseph Heath) who think that tightly controlling immigration volumes and assimilation is essential to maintain the social order that sustains liberal norms.
Take Abundance, for example. Abundance is self-consciously a reaction to the excesses of small d-democratic, participatory, and procedural governance that defined the neoliberal era. This was the liberalism of Ralph Nader, notice and hearings, and CEQA. Abundance rejects that, but it's not because that wasn't liberal and they are. It's just that liberalism is a loose container for ideologies that may actually be radically different.
While I do think that there are some loose commitments shared across the many different forms of liberalism, these are so thin that it's hardly worth trying to mobilize people behind them without the substantive scaffolding of the whole picture. Just as many people who would like to call themselves "Christian" simpliciter, or "non-denominational" are actually just reformed protestants whose theology is basically just Presbyterian, many folks who would call themselves "liberal" simpliciter are actually wedded to a particular form of liberalism. It does us all well to name these particular forms and their commitments so that we can avoid talking past each other. Precision doesn't come easy, but neither does clarity, excellence, and non-violent political achievement.
I’m not a centrist by choice but when I saw the pro-Palestine march through Seattle within a month of Oct 7 and argued with a Boomer communist downtown about how far back into history we should reach to justify violence I became relieved Bernie lost for the first time. Now people on X tend to think I’m MAGA.
Politics is not 2 dimensional. “Left” is defined by chaos in resistance to oppressive order.
"Leftists" tend to define themselves by fixation on particular tactics. Reforming healthcare, for instance, only counts if it's "single-payer." Which they vaguely define as "patients get whatever they want, with zero out of pocket costs, and it's paid for by 'the wealthy.'" Climate issues can only be solved with full-stop decarbonization, and if, for instance, a college decides not to divest its endowment from fossil fuels, it must be because they just don't really care about climate or are sellouts to "the wealthy" or whatever.
There's a dog chasing car quality to it, because there isn't really any policy thought that goes into it. There aren't any policy papers behind "Medicare for All" that consider, for instance, how much that hypothetical "Medicare" (which looks nothing like actual Medicare as it exists) pays for stuff, or what it pays for. Nor is there a sense of what happens if MIT or Swarthmore College actually divest from fossil fuel companies. Does that mean that they won? Seems like a pretty busted metric for success.
There is leftwing politics out there that is hostile to social disorder, chaos, radical religious conflict and is very tough on crime. It's also the politics the United States has defined itself as being in opposition to since uh, the end of world war II.
You can define leftism generally as opposition to the establishment but I think progressivism versus conservatism is more relevant there. There’s really no reason to allude to the French Revolution unless there’s a good metaphor for the guillotine.
I'm not talking about the french revolution. I'm talking about the USSR, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China, etc. The american strain of leftism, which has its roots in anarchism, is a very different beast to how socialism, leftism, whatever you want to call it takes its form outside the United States.
For a more contemporary, local example. In mexico claudia sheinbaums flavor of socialism is tough on crime, pro-military, and socially moderate (pro-womens rights, meh on gay rights).
For numerous historical and political reasons. American liberals, and many american leftists hate hate hate what some might call "Right Socialism" or if your a GMU professor "Authoritarian Socialism". So that doesn't really exist as a political tendency in the United States outside of like, zohran mamdanis caucus in the NYC DSA.
“Left” is specifically in reference to those against the ancien regime, any modern usage is an analogy. W.r.t. communism it’s because capitalist imperialism was the status quo being revolted against. It means nothing without that context it’s just an arbitrary indicator of direction.
I'm not sure I buy this argument. I'm here for liberalism but it's not clear to me that housing abundance and permitting reform and abolishing the filibuster are "liberal" causes exactly (I support them); rather, they are movements for a different set of values: more construction as opposed to local control (which chills construction), legislative action as opposed to inaction (because of the filibuster). If we want to define it as a substantive liberalism, maybe it is better called "big government liberalism" or a liberalism of action.
But what makes this magazine liberal is its spirit, not its policy positions. You want to persuade others, not scold them into submission or shun them (which the rest of the chattering classes on the left often seem to want to do). It's "liberal" as an adjective, as Michael Walzer has put it.https://dissentmagazine.org/article/what-it-means-to-be-liberal/ + a set of policy positions that the left seems to have a lot of discomfort with.
Is there really a liberal consensus on the filibuster? I consider myself a liberal, but I have some reservations about which questions should be decided democratically. In fact, I think most things should probably be decided by other mechanisms - the color of my curtains should be decided by my personal preferences and the options provided by the market, not subjected to democratic deliberation! I'm also skeptical that 51% is the right threshold when we decide to use democracy to make a decision that had previously been handled by other mechanisms. And I'm extra extra skeptical when the decision being made is of the form of 51+% voting to take something from 49-% for themselves.
I would like to see the US move towards a nordic model with a strong social safety net, flexicurity, all funded by a substantially higher tax burden on the top twenty percent of the income distribution.
All that being said, I am not a leftist. Why? Because the big ideas and policies of the left--greedflation, MMT, public grocery stores, jobs guarantee, left-NIMBYism--are all very bad ideas that will not help anyone and could lead to disaster, cough MMT. People talk about the right being dominated by populism, but the left has its own version. Sure many of the people behind these proposals are well-educated, with secondary if not tertiary degrees. But that isn't enough. You can't just go with whatever sounds good to you with your liberal arts major or law degree or whatever. There actually is a lot of social science research and if you ignore it all, which is exactly what the Left is currently doing, you just end up with a big pile of garbage. Ignore the research on housing scarcity and you're just as anti-science as any climate denier or anti-vaxxer.
In what way is MMT a leftist idea? It's primarily a framework for understanding and working within the fiat monetary/banking systems that we already have. Some policy ideas then come from that understanding, to various degrees.
I guess I should probably ask what exactly you think MMT is, as many people seem to think that it's "print an infinite amount of money", or something similar.
In a moment when illiberalism is on the march, it seems like a mistake to so narrowly define liberalism as "a normative political philosophy concerned with universal individual rights, pluralism, and *the limits* of free enterprise." Liberalism surely includes those (like me) whose support for universal individual rights and pluralism includes an appreciation for *the value* of free enterprise, markets, and price signals. That market liberalism may include support for safety net programs but dynamism and markets, not regulation and redistribution, are central to its concept of economic liberalism.
Freedom of inquiry and conscience are also central enough to liberalism to merit separate mention.
Americans have problems with the word "liberal," because it means two distinct things, one of which is a subset of the other. There is "liberal" as in the Great Society (the "liberal" that conservatives sometimes label incorrectly as "leftist") and "liberal" as in the broader philosophical tradition.
I think the question isn't whether Jerusalem is centrist (she was always left of Yglesias on The Weeds but whether The Argument is. Is it a liberal big tent that has centrists on the periphery or is it a centrist tent that has some liberal positions for spice?
Just based on her own words, "Hosting differing voices from socialists to conservatives" is just the democratic party circa the new deal, which was a very diverse big tent!
That's fair. It just feels right now like she's building another space for centrists, especially on environmentalism and maybe immigration. There's already Slow Boring for that.
You should have Liam Kofi Bright on to argue about liberalism, based on his post about disagreeing with liberalism: https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2022/04/why-i-am-not-liberal.html?m=1
That would be extremely interesting.
Having said that, as smart as he is, I think Liam Kofi Bright is wrong about the historical conditions that gave birth to liberalism. He argues that liberal neutrality on private matters only ever worked in a homogenous society of people who agreed on most substantive topics.
To make that point, he asserts that 16th-century Europe was such a society, but he doesn't 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘦 it. I'd say he 𝘤𝘢𝘯'𝘵 argue it, because it wasn't anything of the sort. Geographic, ethnic, religious, and class divisions were wider and more pronounced then than now. If you spend any time reading Martin Luther, inquisition records, or private correspondence among heretics and dissenters you'll see how unlikely it was that that their intellectual descendants would ever tolerate disagreement on the things most important to them. Beyond that, outside the standardizing influence of Latin-speaking religious elites, local populations were bewilderingly diverse by today's standards.
(I also disagree with his Socialist/Marxist critique of liberalism, but that's built on a large stack of priors that's not going to translate well to a lunchtime comment.)
Yeah I think Liam is wrong in that post (in particular he handwaves away how to solve the problem of pluralism without liberalism) but it would be really interesting.
It seems to me that the strongest resemblance of liberalism to centrism is on "meta" issues, where liberals support discourse norms that tolerate a wide range of political views; the ideas of the neutral moderator or the common-carrier platform are liberal in motivation while appearing centrish in effect.
On questions like "should you have your life ruined for posting left-wing political views on the internet", liberals side with the left, but on questions like "should you have your life ruined for posting right-wing political views on the internet", liberals side with the right. To an uncareful thinker, someone who sides sometimes with the left and sometimes with the right can appear moderate and centrist.
Also, the idea of one's enemies having rights can sound like a call for moderation (in the sense of "now, let's not go too far here") to someone trying to whip up a mob howling for blood. Sometimes "radical" means "I want to stop exercising self-restraint and start going The Purge on my enemies".
Is incrementalism really categorically centrism? Like, for example, if I wanted to incrementally implement anarcho-capitalism, am I a centrist?
"Liberals are extremists on human flourishing, individual freedom, and freedom of movement" is one hell of an awesome line
If liberals want to expunge the reputation of being centrists, they should stop agreeing with and repeatedly publishing fake "studies" to propagandize in favor of the centrists. You can't pretend go be non-centrist all while going out of your way - including publishing bullshit polls and fake analysis - to justify, defend, and push forward the centrist line. At some point, you actually have to prove that you are different in substance. Instead, every other piece you people put out is shifting on the left and progressives. If you want a different reputation, behave differently.
What exactly is fake about their polls and analysis? That seems to be stronger claim than that you disagree with it, but that needs some support.