What is Liberalism?
Part I of IV:
“Liberalism” is one of the most vexing and elusive terms in US political discourse. A peculiar feature of its usage in the US, as opposed to almost everywhere else in the world, is that it is often used interchangeably with “leftism.” Ezra Klein, one of the more prominent liberal public intellectuals, is typical in this regard. In a recent New York Times interview he seamlessly slipped between the words in describing a pervasive political gloom outside of the right: “I think there has been an evaporation of a bright horizon in liberal thought, in a lot of left thinking.” If the terms are not presented as outright synonymous as they are here, they are just as often framed as gradations of the same political tendency, where being leftist is understood to merely be a more extreme version of being a liberal. Elsewhere in the same interview Klein demonstrates this alternate framing: “The left — the thing that I would think of as the left of the liberals, the Bernie Sanders left — I think has actually had real moments of incredible optimism.”1 This muddling together of terms, either as synonym or as plotted points along the same axis, not only elides centuries of divergence between left and liberal thought, but it also invites the conclusion, now commonplace in US political discourse, that liberalism is simply a more reasonable version of leftism; more pragmatic, more open to compromise with its opponents.
As Trump’s support seems to be faltering and early indicators point to a resurgent Democratic wave in the 2026 midterm elections (barring extralegal or quasi-legal election interference), it is more crucial than ever to clarify the terms of political possibility, lest we repeat the failures that led to the rise of Trumpism. Without pretending to be exhaustive of an extremely rich and complex topic, in the next series of posts I will discuss some of the material and ideological conjunctures that gave rise to liberalism, its salient features, and taking inspiration from the radical republican tradition of Rousseau, what a leftist departure from liberalism might entail. This last point will be the most suggestive here, but I hope to revisit it further down the line.
That Trump’s victory in 2024 demonstrated a resolute indictment of the status quo has hardly seemed debatable, except among the Democrat’s out-of-touch leadership.2 However, what has constituted the status quo has been rather loosely defined. In the days after the election, Bernie Sanders criticized Democrats for defending business-as-usual while the working class clearly demanded change.3 Even David Brooks reluctantly conceded that to win the Democrats may need to “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption” in order effectively respond to the increasing gulf that separates educated elites from the working class.4 But what was it exactly that needed disruption?
Gabriel Winant offered a more clear-eyed structural analysis when he observed that both parties seemed to be proposing an “exit right” from neoliberalism to economic nationalism. Whereas Trump was able to frame this departure in ideologically coherent terms that spoke directly to the interests of target constituencies, Winant noted that Harris and the Democratic party more broadly have come to embody an increasingly untenable alliance of antagonistic structural forces (endeavoring to be both the party of neoliberal capitalism and that of the working class) yielding a “duplicitous and incoherent orientation.” When given the opportunity to signal a bold departure from politics as usual, Winant observed, the best the Harris campaign could muster was “advocating an ill-defined status quo.”5
In these instances and others, the internet commentariat tended to place blame for Trump’s victory on the current leadership of the Democratic party, the messaging of the Harris campaign, or on chthonic structural forces. Each of these has explanatory power, to be sure, but the conclusions they invite–changing leadership, picking better candidates or PR staff and altering the material landscape–seem elusive or short sighted at best. Conspicuously absent from these postmortems was an accounting of the specific political vision that had failed to animate American voters.
Francis Fukuyama was unusual in this regard. Once again called upon to account for the stubborn persistence of historical time, Fukuyama observed that the triumph of liberalism in the Cold War may have put the nails in history’s coffin, but “two great distortions” of that tradition had loosened the seal. The first, he argued was neoliberalism, which departed from liberalism’s promise of respecting the “equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law” by “sanctifying markets” and limiting the “ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change.” The second distortion was what he termed “woke liberalism:” a shift away from working class interest in favor of “targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalized groups” including “racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like.” The end result, he concluded, was the abandonment of the world’s traditional left wing’s working-class base to the predation of right-wing populists like Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy and Trump in the US, each of whom promised to soften these distortions of hitherto somnolent liberal hegemony.6
In fact, what Fukuyama identifies here as “distortions” are ambiguities that run to the very heart of the liberal political tradition and indeed, as I will argue here, are its defining characteristics. From its inception, liberalism has obscured inequities of power behind lofty ideals that plausibly benefit everyone but in fact reinforce the power of propertied classes. Neoliberalism and so-called “woke” liberalism are merely the two poles between which the pendulum of the liberal tradition has always swung: alternatively hoarding the surplus of the market when it can get away with it and strategically distributing it in moments when it must broaden its coalition to stay afloat. Trump has violently disrupted this cycle, which, while destabilizing, opens the possibility for the left to reimagine the political terrain, unfettered by liberal overdetermination.
In this way, excavating the intellectual moorings of the liberal tradition is not merely an object of academic curiosity but is urgently important for plotting a viable course against the tide of Trumpian authoritarianism. The ready capitulation (or quaintly ceremonial dissent) of Democrats, university administrators and media conglomerates in the face of Trump’s ruthless consolidation of power are not betrayals of liberal ideals but rather are an honest articulation of the limits of ideals under liberalism. The summary disregard of the uncommitted movement in 2024 and dismissal of Sanders in the 2020 primaries by the opaque and antidemocratic DNC were further evidence of these limits. For too long, the left has been rendered enfeebled as a junior and expendable partner in a coalition whose interests are inimical to a viable left. Now more than ever, the left must resist being seduced by the vaunted promises of the liberal tradition in whatever guise and recognize that only socialism, and not capitalism plastered over with promises of “joy,” “hope,” or “abundance” will create the conditions that make those ideals achievable.
Stay tuned for Part II next week.
Delicate, fragile, raw ambience from Gordon Ashworth:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times-ross-douthat-ezra-klein.html
Notably with Nancy Pelosi’s interview in the Nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/magazine/nancy-pelosi-election-interview.html
Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders), “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” X, Nov. 6, 2024.
David Brooks, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” New York Times, Nov. 6, 2024.
Gabriel Winant, “Exit Right, Dissent, Nov 8, 2024 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/exit-right/
Francis Fukuyama, “Trump unleashed: What now for America?,” Financial Times, Nov 9, 2024.