The Decline of Liberalism

Having discussed the intellectual qualities of today's liberalism, I will now turn to its historical development. The roots of liberalism lay in populism, in the class and regional animosity of small farmers against wealthy landowners and urban mercantilists, who they saw as trying to exploit them. This anger was exploited by Jefferson (who actually represented the planters) and given full expression by Jackson. It was primarily rural and agrarian in tone, although it did reach out to manufacturing workers in the cities. For a long time this constituted the dominant political force in the United States.

The populist supremacy was unraveled by two factors: the civil war (which split northern and southern populists) and the industrial revolution (which diluted its voting strength). And for a while the right, led by the Republican party in the north and the Bourbon Democrats in the south, was supreme. Then the reaction set in. The abuses of the corporate world generated the labor union movement, which was a revival of urban populism, and persuaded rural populists to change their strategy by becoming pro-government. The other new force was progressivism, who distrusted corporate and party institutions and wanted to democratize, centralize, and professionalize the American political system.

These three groups were finally united by FDR, forging the ideology that today we call liberalism: using government power on behalf of the little guy. In this form liberalism was the dominant force in American politics for over a generation. The Republicans got back into the game by attempting to smear liberalism as communist, but their real success came in the 1960's. The civil rights revolution and its aftermath created pluralism, which extended egalitarianism from economic to cultural issues. This threatened the populist-progressive coalition, because on social issues the populists had always been fairly traditional.

The right saw its opening and made the most of it, beginning with Nixon. They worked steadily to define a new enemy for populists: not Big Business, but Big Government, which now looked to be shifting resources from the white working class to women and minorities. The existence of pluralism also transformed a lot of populists into cultural traditionalists. After all, populism had always been about conserving what they had, whether that be small town life our their jobs. As soon as conservatism was able to define a new force causing their problems, they flipped to the other side. So liberalism was left with pluralists and progressives, but lost all the rural populists and a lot of the urban ones.

Ideologically, liberalism passed from forward-looking change to defensive protection of the New Deal and Great Society. Instead of aggressively seeking out new problems to solve and innovating new solutions to these problems, liberals became obsessed with defending their legacy. This was entirely sensible, given that conservatism was determined to destroy that legacy. But liberalism has never found its way back to its core ideals: that the community owes justice to the least of its members, and that preserving democracy requires constant change in the face of historical change.

At the same time, liberalism still believes that it is a fractured coalition. Organizationally, this is true - every issue group insists that its is the most important. But liberals in the main disagree on virtually nothing. In the 1960's the left really did disagree on policy. Today it is only a difference of degree, i.e. which issue should be emphasized. But the false consciousness that exists on the left has prevented us from creating central organizing institutions, and hence no overarching strategy or consistent rhetorical narrative. And we lose.

Intellectually, liberalism has also become somewhat rigid. Rather than coming up with solutions to new problems (and we have a lot of them), we are defending old solutions to old problems. And we have a knee-jerk support of the sort of solutions that worked before: using the central government's bureaucracy and relying on technocratic expertise. Finally, liberalism has become far too secular and urban. It vision appears to have little place for people of faith or people who don't live in cities. You can't call suburban life a wasteland and expect to win suburban votes.

Finally, liberalism reliance on bureaucratic solutions is somewhat undemocratic, and is part of what makes us vulnerable to the charge of elitism. Progressives really do sort of believe in rule by experts. But when you rely on an intellectual elite to govern, you have a society in which citizens are not active determiners of their own destiny but merely consumers of government services and subjects of external power. All we have asked them to do is vote. None of this is really all that democratic.

So these are the reasons for our generation-long retreat, as I see it: intellectual rigidity, technocracy, a defensive attitude, the loss of our populist roots, and simple political incompetence. So how do we fix it? I'll try to begin answering that question tomorrow.