The Positive Case For Liberalsm

Liberalism's public intellectuals need to move to the front foot.

Photo by Naveen Chandra on Unsplash

Liberal intellectuals have become experts at arguing what they are against as reactionaries have forced them into the defensive stance. They have become very rusty at making the positive case.

I want to take this observation seriously and develop it, because I think it names something important about why the present moment feels the way it does — and why the liberal response to the reactionary mobilization has been inadequate in a way that is not about effort or intelligence but about mode.

The people doing the defensive work are not bad at it. Many of them are quite good. The critiques of Trump, of the MAGA coalition, of the broligarch ascent, of the Bukeles and the Orbáns and the Yarvinsanities populating the current reactionary imagination — these critiques are being made at high levels of skill by writers I respect and read. The problem is not that the defensive work is being done badly. The problem is that the defensive work has become almost the only work being done, and the work that has been crowded out is the work that actually moves people at the level where politics becomes meaningful to them.

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Why the defensive posture emerged.

It is worth being generous about the conditions that produced the current mode. The reactionary mobilization over the last decade has been real, sustained, and better-organized than most liberal observers were prepared for. It has had money, platforms, institutional vehicles, a theory of itself, and a willingness to pursue its project at a register of seriousness that surprised the people who were expecting the usual oscillations of democratic politics. The response required was not optional. Someone had to document the pattern. Someone had to trace the money. Someone had to name the ideological substrate. Someone had to make the argument, repeatedly and in detail, that the thing that was happening was in fact happening and was in fact what it appeared to be.

That work has been done, and it has been done well. The problem is not that it was unnecessary. The problem is that it has become habitual. The defensive posture, forced on the liberal intellectual class by the urgency of the moment, has calcified into a default mode. Writers who came of age inside the defensive posture now know no other way to write. The capacity to make the positive case — to articulate, from the inside, why liberty is compelling, why democratic self-governance is dignified, why the tradition of ordered freedom under constitutional government is the specific human achievement it is — has atrophied. The muscle is there. The muscle has not been used in a long time.

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What the positive case actually requires.

To see what the defensive mode cannot do, consider what the reactionary project is actually offering. It is not offering a policy argument. It is offering a vision of human life — a picture of order, hierarchy, meaning, belonging, civilizational continuity — that operates at the level of aspiration rather than at the level of consequence. The reactionary says: here is how a life should be lived, here is what a community should look like, here is what it means to be part of something larger than yourself. The picture is wrong in ways that can be named and documented. But the picture is a picture. It is offering something to want.

The defensive response to this works at a different level. The defensive response says: this picture leads to bad outcomes, this picture is historically discredited, this picture misreads human nature, this picture is inconsistent with the evidence. All of these claims may be true. None of them operates at the level where the reactionary picture is doing its work. A reader who is ambivalent about liberal democracy does not need a reader to tell them why the reactionary alternative is flawed. They need someone to tell them why the liberal alternative is worth choosing. The refutation of the alternative is not the affirmation of the choice. These are different operations, and the liberal intellectual ecosystem has spent so long performing the first that it has forgotten how to perform the second.

This is what I mean by rust. The positive case requires a specific set of capacities: the capacity to articulate what a life under liberty actually looks like and why that life is beautiful, the capacity to make the civic inheritance feel like a civic inheritance rather than a procedural arrangement, the capacity to draw on the mythopoetic resources of the tradition rather than ceding them to the reactionaries, the capacity to ground the tradition in a picture of reality that the consequentialist defenses of it do not reach. These capacities are not alien to liberalism. They are constitutive of the tradition at its highest moments. Lincoln had them. Jefferson had them. Frederick Douglass had them. James Baldwin had them. The liberal tradition produced some of the most compelling mythopoetic civic writing in human history. The tradition has not lost the capacity. The current ecosystem has merely stopped exercising it.

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The mistake that made this happen.

The mistake was assuming the answer to the question why liberal democracy was obvious. Everyone knows liberty is good. Everyone knows democracy is better than its alternatives. The job of the liberal intellectual, in this understanding, is to defend what everyone already agrees is the correct arrangement against the specific attacks it is suffering in the moment. The positive case does not need to be made because the positive case is already held. Only the defense is needed.

This was wrong. It has been wrong for some time. The answer to why liberal democracy is not obvious to the generation that has come of age watching liberal democracy fail to deliver on its promises, watching the institutions of liberal democracy be captured by oligarchic interests, watching the consensual fictions of liberal political culture dissolve under the pressure of social media and ideological sorting. The positive case has to be made again, because the inheritance of the positive case has not been transmitted. The people for whom the case was obvious are aging out of the discourse. The people taking their place did not receive the transmission. And the writers who should be making the transmission have been too busy defending against the reactionaries to perform the work.

The result is a generation of potential liberal democrats who have heard the defensive arguments and not heard the positive arguments, and who are therefore vulnerable to any competing vision that operates at the level of aspiration rather than at the level of consequence. The reactionaries are offering such a vision. The liberal intellectuals are offering critiques of that vision. The critiques are not enough. They are not what the moment requires.

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What the positive case looks like when it is made.

I will describe what I mean by the positive case in a register that is itself the positive case, because the alternative is to describe the positive case in the defensive register I am arguing against, which would undercut the point.

Liberty is not the absence of constraint. Liberty is the condition under which human beings get to be the authors of their own lives. It is the political expression of a specific ontological claim: that consciousness, in each of us, is the site where meaning is made, and that no elite, no expert class, no algorithmic optimization, no civilizational tradition, no hierarchical ordering of souls can legitimately substitute its judgment for the judgment of the person whose life is being lived. This is not a pragmatic claim about governance. It is a metaphysical claim about what human beings are. The political arrangement that honors this claim is the arrangement in which people get to decide their own lives together, through the imperfect and contested process of democratic deliberation, because there is no superior standpoint from which the decision could be made for them.

This picture is not obvious. It has not always been held. It was won, in the West, through a long and bloody struggle against the competing picture — the picture in which some people have access to a superior standpoint, and those people’s judgments should therefore prevail. The struggle produced the specific achievement we call liberal democracy: a political arrangement that treats every consciousness as sovereign over itself, that institutionalizes the refusal of any elite to occupy the superior standpoint, and that builds into its own structure the revisability that consciousness, being fallible, requires. This achievement is fragile. It is newer than most of human history. It is under sustained attack from ideologies that never accepted it and from oligarchic interests that find its constraints inconvenient. But it is, when it works, the political form most adequate to what conscious beings actually are.

The life that becomes available under this arrangement is a specific kind of life. It is a life in which the person gets to author their own meaning — to choose their work, their loves, their faith or absence of faith, their ways of being in the world, within a framework that protects their capacity to make these choices and protects others’ capacity to make theirs. It is a life in which the public sphere is not a competition among tribes for dominance but a conversation among citizens about what we, together, think we owe each other. It is a life in which the weight of tradition is real but not final, in which the past is honored but not imposed, in which the future is open because we, the people living now, are the ones who will make it.

This is beautiful. I mean that word precisely. The arrangement under which human beings get to be the authors of their own lives, in a polity constituted by their own ongoing consent, is beautiful in the specific sense that it matches what human beings are to how human beings should be able to live. It is not a utilitarian calculation about outcomes. It is a vision of human flourishing. The reactionary alternative — hierarchy, submission, order imposed from above, tradition as constraint rather than inheritance, identity as fate rather than undertaking — is offering something smaller. The liberal vision, properly articulated, is larger. It is more demanding. It asks more of the person living it. And it is worth what it asks.

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Why this register has been surrendered.

I want to be honest about why the positive register has atrophied, because the diagnosis is part of the recovery.

One reason is that the register was claimed, for a long time, by people who used it poorly. Cold War liberalism produced a lot of positive-case writing that was self-congratulatory, historically selective, and insufficiently honest about the failures of the arrangements it celebrated. The generation that came of age after Vietnam and the civil rights struggles learned, correctly, to be skeptical of the easy liberal triumphalism that had preceded them. But the correction overshot. The skepticism of the bad positive case became a skepticism of the positive case as such, and the register itself was abandoned to people who would use it badly. This was a mistake. The register can be used well. The tradition contains resources — Lincoln, Douglass, Baldwin, Arendt, the Niebuhrs, Rawls at his best — that show what the register looks like when it is used honestly. Those resources have not been drawn on sufficiently.

Another reason is that the positive register requires a kind of metaphysical seriousness that the academic and journalistic institutions of liberal intellectual life have become uncomfortable with. To make the full positive case, you have to say what human beings are. You have to stake a claim about consciousness, about meaning, about dignity, about what makes a life a life rather than an optimization target. The reactionary writers are willing to stake these claims — badly, usually, but willing. Liberal writers have been trained to treat such claims as philosophically embarrassing, as outside the permitted register of serious analysis. This is a mistake. The claims are unavoidable. Anyone arguing for a political arrangement is implicitly staking a view of what human beings are. The question is only whether you stake the view honestly or pretend you have not staked it. The reactionaries are pretending less. This is part of why they are being heard.

A third reason is that the positive register requires a tolerance for the mythopoetic that the contemporary liberal intellectual class has largely lost. Myth, story, aesthetic weight, the specific language of meaning — these are the vehicles through which the positive case reaches the reader at the level the reader actually lives in. The reactionaries have claimed this territory almost by default, because the liberal writers would not claim it. The Lord of the Rings is not an inherently reactionary text. It is a text about the fight to preserve the small, the beloved, the particular against the will to power that would consume it — which is, at its heart, a liberal vision. But the reactionaries have been willing to invoke Tolkien and the liberals, in the main, have not, which is how the reactionaries have come to be perceived as the party of meaning and the liberals as the party of procedural objection.

This is recoverable. The mythopoetic register is available to anyone willing to use it. The traditions liberal intellectuals could draw on — the civic republican tradition, the abolitionist tradition, the labor tradition, the American founding understood generously rather than skeptically, the long history of people who built the specific institutions we are trying to preserve and who bled to build them — are rich with the kind of material the positive case requires. The material has to be taken up. It will not be taken up by writers who have been trained to treat such material as naive.

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What the recovery looks like.

I am not interested in prescribing what other writers should do. I am interested in describing what the work I am trying to do is, and in naming the absence of this kind of work in the broader ecosystem, so that other writers who want to do it will recognize that there is a space for it and that the space is not being filled.

The work I am trying to do at Notes from the Circus is the positive case, rendered in whatever register the specific piece requires. The philosophical essays ground the case in a picture of reality. The Crisis Papers extend the case into the present moment, defending it against the reactionary mobilization while simultaneously making the positive argument that the defense is for. The mythopoetic pieces do the work of reaching readers at the level where political meaning actually happens. The meditations, the cultural essays, the engagements with figures like Springsteen and Bowie and Baldwin and Watts and Tolkien, are attempts to recover the aesthetic register of the liberal tradition and put it back into service. These are not separate projects. They are a single project, in multiple modes, because the construction of a positive vision requires all of the modes.

The work is not finished. It will not be finished. The positive case is a permanent civic labor, not a destination. Every generation has to make it again for the conditions of its own moment. The labor that has been neglected for a generation has to be resumed.

I am resuming it. I do not think I am alone in doing so. There are other writers — I will not list them, because the list would be incomplete and would do the listed writers a disservice by conscripting them into a project they have not themselves named — who are doing versions of this work from their own angles. The positive case is there to be made. The readers who want it are there to receive it. The ecosystem that has forgotten how to make it is not the whole of what liberal intellectual work can be.

If the reactionaries are the party of meaning in this moment, it is because the liberals have let them be. That is a failure of practice, not a failure of the tradition. The tradition is enormous. The tradition contains everything required for the full positive case to be made. What is needed is writers willing to make it.

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Liberty is not an arrangement we defend. It is an inheritance we are either worthy of or not. The question for our generation is not whether the defensive arguments will hold — they may, they may not, the contest will be decided by forces larger than our writing. The question is whether the thing being defended will still be understood, by those defending it, as the thing it is. Whether we still know what liberty is for. Whether we still feel the weight of what our ancestors built and bled for, and whether we can transmit that weight to the children who will inherit whatever is left when this moment passes.

This is the transmission that has been failing. The defensive work, however skilled, does not perform the transmission. What gets transmitted through sharp critique of the reactionary right is a list of things not to be. What does not get transmitted is what to be, what to want, what to build, what kind of human life to aspire to under what kind of political order. Without the transmission, the tradition becomes a set of procedural reflexes without a soul. And a tradition without a soul does not survive contact with a tradition that has one, however ugly that other tradition’s soul may be.

The reactionaries have a soul. It is a cramped and frightened and hierarchical soul, and it is wrong about almost everything that matters, but it is a soul, and it is animating its bearers with the specific energy that only a positive vision can animate a person with. The liberals have, for a generation, assumed that the soul was obvious and therefore did not need to be articulated. This was a catastrophic assumption. Nothing about the soul is obvious. The soul has to be articulated in every generation, by the writers who have taken on the civic labor of that articulation, or the soul does not survive the generation.

I am trying to articulate the soul. Not the arrangement, not the procedures, not the policy consequences — the soul. The thing liberty is for. The thing democracy honors. The picture of human life that the American experiment, at its highest moments, was attempting to make possible. The contemplative ground under the creative act, the specific beloved thing that the field is fought for, the dignity of consciousness governing itself inside the only reality there is.

Liberty is compelling. Democracy is dignified. The human life that becomes available under their protection is a life worth wanting, worth building, worth defending at whatever cost defending it exacts. These are not concessions to sentimentality. They are the foundation of the argument. They are the thing the argument is for.

The positive case has been rusty for a long time. It is time to take it out, clean it up, and put it back to work.

That is what I am trying to do here. It is what others should be doing, from their own angles and in their own voices. And it is what the tradition, if it is to survive this moment, requires of the those who claim to be its inheritors.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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