The Two Materialisms: Why I’m a Liberal

A Comprehensive Defense of the Liberal Tradition and a Case for Its Renewal

Photo by Dan Mall on Unsplash

This essay is the culmination of work I’ve been doing in my free time (and now full-time) for years—work that began on my old Medium blog, when I was still in the tech industry. This kind of writing—trying to work out the philosophical foundations for how we think about politics, economics, and what it means to live together—is what I always intended to do when I stepped away from that career.

Notes From The Circus has become a strange mix of real-time political commentary and something more systematic: a philosophical argument for a rejuvenated liberalism capable of addressing the crises we now face. When I started, I thought it would be denser, more purely philosophical. Instead, it has evolved into a form that moves between immediate analysis and deeper theoretical work. This essay is closer to what I originally imagined—the philosophy piece that ties the whole project together.

I know this is a long read. If you want to skip it, I understand. But I needed to write it all down. It took four days—plus a few breaks for shorter, timelier posts—but this one had to be said fully and carefully, for myself and for readers who’ve followed along. It pulls together threads from dozens of essays into a coherent statement about what I think liberalism is, why it’s distinct from both socialism and neoliberalism, and why it’s worth defending.

This is where everything meets: the epistemology, the political theory, the practical policy arguments, and the moral commitments. This is my political ideology. It doesn’t have to be yours. But it’s mine. — Mike.

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The fundamental difference between liberalism and socialism isn’t about economic policy. It’s about whether material conditions or spiritual values are primary.

By “spiritual values” I don’t mean religion—I mean human dignity, democratic participation, meaning-making, solidarity. The things that make life worth living beyond material comfort.

Marxist historical materialism treats the economic base as determining the political and cultural superstructure. Change material relations of production, and consciousness follows. Liberation comes through economic transformation.

But there’s another form of materialism most people don’t recognize. This is what happened to liberalism during the Cold War—it became a philosophy that treats economic prosperity as the ultimate good and a political framework as legitimate only insofar as it serves markets.

Classical liberalism—the tradition I’m trying to recover—was never materialist. It insisted spiritual values are primary and economic arrangements are instrumental means serving them. This is what distinguishes me from both socialists and neoliberals.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The Two Materialisms

Historical materialism makes a specific claim: the economic base determines the political and cultural superstructure. Your consciousness, your values, your beliefs emerge from your relationship to means of production. Change the economic structure—establish worker ownership, abolish private property—and you transform human relations, culture, politics. Material conditions are primary; everything else follows.

This is why Marxists focus obsessively on ownership structures. Who owns the means of production isn’t just an economic question—it’s the question. Get that right and everything else falls into place. This is materialism in the classical philosophical sense: treating material conditions (economic relations, property structures) as determining spiritual and political values rather than the reverse.

The Cold War produced a different materialism. Not historical materialism’s focus on ownership, but what philosopher Charles Taylor called “the malaise of immanence”—reducing human flourishing to material prosperity and consumer choice.

What I’m calling liberal materialism—the philosophy underlying neoliberalism—makes economic growth and market freedom ultimate values. GDP becomes a measure of societal success. Consumer choice becomes a primary form of freedom. Markets get privileged normative status—what emerges from market process is treated as having special legitimacy.

A note on terminology: “Liberal materialism” isn’t a standard term in political philosophy, and political philosophers might reasonably object that “materialism” risks confusion with Marxist historical materialism. But this is an unfortunate case of intellectual traditions tripping over themselves. Let me rescue “materialism” from the economists: I’m using it in its broader moral sense—describing what we treat as ultimate versus instrumental—rather than as a technical term about economic determinism. The parallel between Marxist and neoliberal materialism becomes visible once you see both treat economic arrangements as having normative primacy, even though they disagree about which arrangements.

I should also distinguish ontological from normative materialism.

Ontological materialism is the claim that only matter exists—consciousness emerges from physical processes, there’s no supernatural realm. I accept this; I’m a naturalist. Normative materialism is the claim that material conditions (economic arrangements, market outcomes) should determine or have primacy over our values. This is what I’m critiquing. You can be an ontological materialist (consciousness emerges from matter) without being a normative materialist (material conditions determine what we should value). The fact that consciousness arises from physical processes doesn’t mean economic analysis can replace democratic deliberation about values.

This isn’t crude “money is everything”—it’s more sophisticated than that. Instead, the argument goes: markets produce prosperity, prosperity enables flourishing. But notice what happened: material prosperity became the necessary condition for spiritual goods, which makes it functionally primary even if not explicitly stated.

Austrian School economists and Chicago School theorists explicitly rejected Marxist materialism—and I do too. But they’re still materialist in the broader philosophical sense—they treat economic arrangements as having normative weight beyond mere efficiency, make market outcomes the arbiter of political questions, define freedom primarily through economic participation.

Milton Friedman’s “Freedom to Choose” explicitly makes economic freedom primary, treating political freedom as derivative. Friedrich Hayek argues market outcomes have epistemic privilege—they aggregate information no planner could access, giving them normative weight beyond just efficiency. The Chicago School applies cost-benefit analysis to everything including human life, making economic reasoning the ultimate arbiter. Policy success gets measured through GDP growth and market indicators rather than through democratic satisfaction or human dignity.

Both materialisms—Marxist and liberal—treat economic relations as primary and spiritual values as derivative. Both think you can resolve normative questions through analysis of material arrangements. Both make the same category error: treating “what kind of society should we build?” as if it could be answered by economic analysis rather than democratic deliberation about values.

The Cold War forced a false choice: which materialism? Which arrangement of material conditions best serves human needs? But both sides accepted that material arrangements determine spiritual values rather than the reverse.

Classical Liberalism as Anti-Materialist

Classical liberalism—Madison, Jefferson, the Progressive Era reformers, FDR—was never materialist. It made a different claim: the political framework enabling democratic self-governance is primary. Economic arrangements are instrumental means that should be debated and decided within that framework.

The classical liberal hierarchy:

1. Human dignity and democratic citizenship (ultimate values)

2. Political framework enabling self-governance (necessary means)

3. Economic prosperity and property rights (instrumental to the first two)

Property rights weren’t ultimate goods—they were means to the independence needed for democratic citizenship. Economic freedom wasn’t self-justifying—it served capacity for self-governance. Markets weren’t privileged institutions with special normative status—they were useful tools requiring governance to serve human flourishing.

Madison’s insight about power was fundamentally anti-materialist. He wasn’t asking “what economic arrangement is optimal?” He was asking: “how do we structure institutions so fallible humans with different values can govern themselves without concentrated power (public or private) destroying capacity for democratic deliberation?”

This is prior to economic questions. Get the framework right—constitutional constraints, democratic accountability, pluralism, rule of law—and people can deliberate about economic arrangements. Get it wrong and no economic system produces genuine liberty.

The Federalist Papers reveal this priority consistently. Federalist 10 and 51 focus on preventing power concentration—whether from a majority faction or a concentrated minority. Economic arrangements matter only insofar as they affect power distribution. Madison understood that concentrated wealth could threaten republican government as surely as concentrated political authority, but the concern was power, not economics as such.

Jefferson’s agrarian republicanism had an economic component—small farmers as the base of democracy—but even here property ownership was means to independence needed for citizenship, not his ultimate good. His championing of public education revealed the priority: democratic citizenship requires educated citizens capable of self-governance. Material prosperity serves this end; it doesn’t constitute it.

The Progressive Era made this explicit. Louis Brandeis famously wrote: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting was about political power, not economic efficiency. When Standard Oil was broken up, the justification wasn’t that monopoly was economically inefficient—it was that concentrated private power threatened republican government.

Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life articulated this philosophy systematically. Democratic citizenship was the ultimate good; economic arrangements should be reformed to serve it. This wasn’t socialism (Croly explicitly rejected it) but the recovery of classical liberal concern with preventing power concentration from destroying self-governance.

FDR’s relationship to this tradition is contested—I acknowledge that. But his framing is revealing. The Economic Bill of Rights speech (1944) extended liberal concerns about freedom to include “freedom from” economic domination. Security, opportunity, freedom from want—these weren’t ultimate goods but necessary conditions for democratic citizenship. You cannot participate as equal in self-governance if economic precarity makes you dependent on concentrated private power.

FDR fought “economic royalists”—his language matters. Not “capitalists” but “royalists.” The problem wasn’t private ownership as such but concentration of private power threatening political equality. The New Deal preserved a market economy and private property while constraining their most destructive tendencies. This was the Madisonian principle applied: power must counteract power. When private power concentrates sufficiently to threaten democratic self-governance, federal power expansion is a liberal response, not an abandonment of liberalism. Modern political theorists would call this “state capacity”.

I recognize this reading is controversial. Libertarians see the New Deal as abandoning classical liberalism through federal expansion. Some historians see FDR as a pragmatist borrowing from many sources without systematic philosophy. Many on the left see him as building social democracy that shouldn’t be called “classical liberalism” at all.

But the pattern is undeniable: FDR consistently made democratic citizenship primary and economic arrangements instrumental. He expanded federal power to check concentrated private power—application of Madisonian principle, not contradiction of it. The alternative—letting private power destroy democracy to preserve small government—would have been dogmatic, not liberal.

The Cold War Distortion

The Cold War trapped American political thought between two materialisms. You could be:

• Communist (economic transformation as liberation)

• Capitalist (economic prosperity as freedom)

• Pragmatist compromiser between them

What disappeared was classical liberalism’s anti-materialist position: that the political framework is primary and economic arrangements should serve spiritual values determined through democratic deliberation.

FDR’s New Deal makes sense as a recovery project when you understand this. He wasn’t compromising with socialism or expanding government for its own sake. He was responding to economic royalism—concentration of private power threatening democratic self-governance—within the classical liberal tradition’s core concerns.

The New Deal insisted:

• Economic arrangements serve democratic citizenship, not vice versa

• Material prosperity is means to human dignity, not a substitute for it

• Liberal concern for freedom should include freedom from domination

• Fighting economic royalists was a liberal project—preventing material concentration from destroying political equality

FDR was recovering classical liberalism’s anti-materialist core against both emerging materialisms—communist and market fundamentalist.

But the Cold War obscured this. American liberalism got redefined as a “left” position within capitalism vs. communism frame. The question became which side of material arrangements debate you were on, not whether material arrangements were primary at all.

This distortion produced neoliberalism—the attempt to defend markets against communism that ended up making markets an ultimate value rather than an instrumental good. Liberal materialism emerged as reaction to Marxist materialism, but both accepted material primacy.

Consider how radically political vocabulary shifted. “Liberal” became synonym for “left” in American usage when elsewhere it meant something different. Classical liberal concerns about concentrated private power got coded as socialist. Defense of markets became “conservative” when classical liberals had always supported markets as useful tools requiring governance. The entire framework collapsed into the Cold War binary that made anti-materialist position nearly impossible to articulate.

Why I’m Not a Socialist

So why am I not a socialist? Because socialism, even democratic socialism, ultimately makes economic relations primary—or at least, that’s what the label historically meant.

But here’s where it gets interesting, and where I’m only half-joking when I say: democratic socialists should just admit they’re liberals.

The sophisticated democratic socialist response to my argument would be: “We’re not making economics primary—we’re recognizing that economic and political democracy are inseparable. Workplace autocracy undermines political democracy. You can’t have genuine democratic self-governance if people spend eight hours a day in authoritarian command structures, then expect them to exercise democratic citizenship for an hour in the voting booth. We’re pursuing democratic self-governance through economic democracy, not treating economic transformation as a separate goal.”

This is a very fair critique. And it reveals the very real distinction:

The question isn’t whether economics and politics are separable (they’re not—concentrated economic power obviously threatens political democracy—how can one seriously deny this now?) The question is logical and temporal priority: Must you democratize production relations first to have genuine political democracy? Or can you have a democratic political framework that then deliberates about—and potentially chooses—various forms of economic democracy?

I say the latter. The framework comes first. Within it, democratic socialists can advocate worker ownership, economic democracy, codetermination, cooperative structures. And if they pursue these through democratic process—voting to require corporate governance reforms, creating public options, incentivizing cooperatives—then they’re operating as liberals even if they call themselves socialists. They’ll furiously disagree with me. I understand.

I would under those protests, insist that the historical socialist position was stronger: the economic base determines the political superstructure. You must transform ownership relations to enable genuine democracy. Political democracy under capitalism is necessarily sham democracy because material conditions (private ownership of production) determine consciousness and political possibilities. Therefore economic transformation is prerequisite, not just useful policy.

That’s the materialism I’m critiquing. That’s what makes it socialism rather than liberalism.

But I observe that many—not all—contemporary democratic socialists have completely abandoned this strong claim. They work within existing democratic institutions. They don’t treat political democracy as impossible under capitalism. They advocate economic democracy through political democracy, not as precondition for it.

Which raises the question: If you believe political democracy is real enough to be the means through which you pursue economic transformation, if you accept constitutional constraints and pluralism, if you’re willing to convince rather than command—what makes you socialist rather than liberal social democrat?

The answer, I suspect, is often historical identity and moral emphasis more than logical necessity. The socialist tradition puts exploitation and class conflict at the center in ways liberalism historically doesn’t. It takes worker dignity and economic equality more seriously than liberals often have. These emphases matter.

Class conflicts can emerge in a liberal polity, and they can be expressed and politicized through populist movements, but I’d argue that’s just democracy happening as it should within liberal institutions.

But if you’ve abandoned economic determinism—if you think the political framework is real and prior—you’re just operating within the liberal framework even if you maintain socialist identity for its moral emphasis and historical solidarity.

Consider someone like Zohran Mamdani. When I look at his proposals—progressive taxation, free transit, universal childcare, worker protections—I don’t see someone treating economic transformation as prerequisite for democracy. I see someone using democratic process to pursue policies that, if voters choose them, represent legitimate expression of popular self-government.

Nothing he proposes requires ownership transformation as logical prerequisite. Nothing violates constitutional constraints. Nothing treats political democracy as impossible until production is democratized. He’s advocating social democratic content through liberal institutions. He appears committed to working within those institutions.

So if that’s what voters want, he’s pursuing it through proper means. I don’t ally with him on distributive policies—we likely disagree significantly about content. But I do consider him a small-d democratic ally against anti-democratic forces. He comes to his positions through socialist moral tradition—its concern with exploitation, its solidarity with workers, its emphasis on class. That heritage shapes his priorities. But the structure of his process is liberal: using the framework institutions to pursue democratically-chosen economic arrangements.

The test isn’t the label but the logic: Do you treat political democracy as real enough to be a means of transformation? Then you’re accepting the framework priority even if you’re advocating radical content within it. Do you treat political democracy as necessarily illusory until the economic base is transformed? Then you’re making economics prior, which is the materialism I’m rejecting.

When I look at oligarchic capture—billionaires buying political influence, concentrated wealth determining outcomes—I see threat to the framework itself. Socialists and liberals should converge here: concentrated material power destroys democratic self-governance.

The difference is in remedy. Historical socialism said: you can’t constrain private power sufficiently without eliminating it—ownership transformation is necessary. I say: you can constrain concentrated power (public or private) through democratic means—progressive taxation, land value taxes, antitrust, labor rights, campaign finance reform—without requiring ownership transformation as a logical prerequisite.

These aren’t just practical differences. They reflect different theories about relationship between material conditions and political possibilities:

Socialists (traditionally): Economic base determines political superstructure. Transform ownership, enable genuine democracy.

Liberals: Political framework enables democratic deliberation about economic arrangements. Constrain power concentration, allow experimentation with different forms.

But many democratic socialists in practice: Use political democracy to pursue economic democracy. Which looks like liberalism with socialist moral emphasis.

This distinction matters for coalition politics:

When socialists advocate worker ownership achieved through democratic process—voting for corporate governance reforms, creating public options, incentivizing cooperatives—that’s framework-preserving. We’re allies—at least, about the framework.

When they advocate for vanguard party rule, suppression of markets without democratic consent, mandatory transformation treating political democracy as illusory—that violates the framework. We’re opponents—and we’re probably going to draw swords.

When they work within democratic institutions while maintaining socialist identity for its moral tradition—we should recognize they’re operating as liberals practically even if maintaining different rhetorical tradition.

The framework is non-negotiable. The content is subject to democratic debate. If you accept that structure, you’re liberal in the sense I mean—even if you call yourself socialist for the moral emphasis, historical solidarity, or analytical focus the tradition provides.

Some arrangements still threaten the framework regardless of how they’re pursued:

• Concentration of wealth sufficient to capture democratic process (whether private capital or party bureaucracy)

• Concentration of state power sufficient to prevent democratic accountability

• Economic systems requiring authoritarian enforcement to maintain

• Treating economic relations as having normative force beyond democratic deliberation

These threaten the framework whether they emerge from markets or planning, private or public ownership. Both liberals and democratic socialists should oppose them—which is why we can be allies in framework defense even while disagreeing about optimal content.

What Classical Liberalism Allows

This anti-materialist classical liberalism allows more economic diversity than either Marxism or neoliberalism:

You can have: Worker cooperatives, public ownership of natural monopolies, strong labor unions, progressive taxation, land value taxes capturing community-created wealth while exempting individually-created improvements, robust social safety net, universal public goods, significant market regulation—all within the liberal framework.

You can also have: Extensive private ownership, relatively free markets, lower taxation, less regulation—also within the liberal framework.

What you cannot have: Authoritarian decision-making (whether by party vanguard or corporate CEOs), rejection of democratic accountability, concentration of power (public or private) that destroys capacity for self-governance, treating economic arrangements as having normative force beyond what democratic deliberation grants them.

The framework is non-negotiable. The content within it is subject to democratic debate and experimentation.

This is why one can:

• Recognize Mamdani as a legitimate democratic actor while disagreeing on distributive policies

• Critique oligarchy while not opposing markets in principle

• Defend property rights while demanding progressive taxation

• Support robust public goods while opposing central planning

• Ally with democratic socialists on framework defense while remaining classical liberal

We converge on framework defense even though we might disagree about the optimal arrangements within it.

Think about what this means practically. When we face rising housing costs, different frameworks produce different responses:

A socialist might say: housing is a human need that shouldn’t be commodified. We need public housing, rent control, eventual social ownership of housing stock.

A neoliberal might say: housing shortage results from supply restrictions. Deregulate zoning, let markets build, prices will fall through competition.

A classical liberal evaluates both proposals through the framework lens: Do they preserve democratic accountability? Do they prevent power concentration? Do they allow policy experimentation and revision? .

But classical liberalism also has its own housing tradition—one we’ve largely forgotten, and worse, actively inverted in ways that demonstrate how liberal materialism displaced classical liberal principles.

Henry George, writing during the Gilded Age alongside the Progressive Era reformers, identified how land monopoly creates precisely the economic royalism that threatens democratic self-governance.

George made a crucial philosophical distinction that classical liberals had intuited but hadn’t fully articulated: land (fixed natural resource no one created) versus improvements (buildings created through labor and investment).

You have property rights in what you create through your labor—in the Lockean sense. But land value doesn’t come from owner’s efforts. It comes from community: the location, surrounding infrastructure, neighbors, economic activity. A vacant lot in Manhattan is valuable not because the owner did anything but because millions of people created valuable location through collective activity.

Standard property taxes treat land and improvements identically. This creates perverse incentives: building increases your tax burden (penalizing creation), while holding valuable land vacant incurs only modest costs (subsidizing speculation). We tax labor to subsidize land monopoly.

George’s solution: A land value tax—tax the unimproved value of land at rates based on current market value, while exempting or minimizing taxes on improvements. Make holding valuable land underused expensive enough that owners either develop it or sell to someone who will.

Not only did we abandon—and never seriously pursue—George’s intervention—we implemented its inverse. American property taxation does exactly backwards what the tradition recommended. And nowhere is this perversion more complete, or more destructive, than in California.

Proposition 13, passed in 1978 right as the inchoate neoliberal movement had captured the heart of Ronald Reagan, who championed it as California’s then governor—inverts every Georgist principle while using the language of “property rights” to do it.

The Georgist principle: Community-created land value should be captured for community benefit through regular reassessment at current market rates.

Prop 13’s inversion: Lock in assessment at purchase price, limit increases to 2% annually regardless of actual appreciation, transfer locked-in basis to heirs.

The result is systematic extraction dressed as property protection. Someone who bought a house in 1980 for $100,000 (now worth $2 million) pays taxes on roughly $200,000 assessment—about $2,500 annually. Someone who bought an identical house next door in 2020 for $2 million pays taxes on full $2 million assessment—about $25,000 annually. The long-term owner captured $1.8 million in community-created appreciation while paying almost nothing back.

This is extractive materialism in pure form—treating accumulated wealth as conferring natural right to extract from community, making material position determinative of civic obligation, creating two-tier citizenship based on purchase timing.

And it’s destroying California’s capacity for democratic self-governance: Schools chronically underfunded despite California being wealthiest state. Infrastructure crumbles while tax base erodes. Housing crisis accelerates because owners face no tax pressure to develop valuable land. Young people get priced out entirely. Economic dynamism flows to those who bought before 1980 rather than those creating new value.

This isn’t neutral policy—it’s a framework-threatening concentration of wealth through systematic extraction. It makes democratic citizenship economically impossible for entire generations while those who got in early capture community-created value without contributing back.

The political economy of Prop 13’s persistence reveals exactly how material power captures democracy: those who benefit can calculate their tax savings to the dollar, while those harmed face diffuse costs. Older voters who benefit vote more reliably than younger voters who pay. Wealthy landowners fund campaigns defending their extraction rights.

Prop 13 must be repealed. Not reformed, not modified, not grandfathered—overturned entirely and replaced with proper Georgist taxation.

This isn’t radical departure from classical liberalism—it’s recovery of abandoned principles. Tax land at full current market value. Exempt or minimize taxes on improvements. Capture community-created appreciation for community benefit. Make land speculation expensive and development profitable.

This is framework-preserving policy addressing framework-threatening extraction. It respects property rights where legitimate (in what you build through your labor) while rejecting extraction rights in what the community creates. It uses democratic means to prevent material arrangements from destroying political equality.

John Stuart Mill endorsed land value taxation late in his life. Louis Brandeis and the Progressive Era reformers understood it as essential to preventing concentrated wealth from destroying democracy. It was a classical liberal position—not fringe theory but practical policy for constraining the economic royalism that Madison feared.

The neoliberal response to housing crisis—just deregulate and build—ignores how Prop 13 and similar policies make speculation cheap and hoarding profitable. The socialist response—decommodify through public ownership—requires massive state capacity and creates new allocation problems.

The classical liberal response recognizes the problem (land monopoly as concentrated power) and addresses it through democratic tax policy. No ownership transformation required. No authoritarian enforcement needed. Just proper recognition that community-created value belongs to community.

This is what anti-materialist liberalism looks like in practice: treating land tenure as an instrumental arrangement serving democratic citizenship, not as an ultimate right that can destroy the framework.

The Spiritual Core

At root, this is about what ultimately matters. Materialists—whether Marxist or neoliberal—treat economic conditions as primary. Get material arrangements right, spiritual goods follow.

Classical liberalism reverses this: spiritual values are primary. Human dignity, democratic participation, meaning-making, solidarity—these aren’t products of correct economic arrangements. They’re what economic arrangements should serve.

This requires different epistemology. You can’t resolve value questions through economic analysis. You can’t derive what we should care about from facts about productive efficiency or ownership structures. Values emerge from democratic deliberation among people who disagree, not from technical expertise about optimal arrangements.

This is what Hume understood: you cannot derive “ought” from “is.” No amount of observation about how economies function tells you what you should value. Facts about efficiency don’t determine whether efficiency should be prioritized over equality, security, community, or autonomy. Those are value judgments requiring democratic deliberation, not technical questions admitting expert solutions.

Materialists—both Marxist and neoliberal—make the same error: treating normative questions as if they could be resolved through analysis of material conditions. Marxists think correct understanding of economic relations reveals what we should do. Neoliberals think market outcomes have normative force beyond just measuring preferences. Both collapse the distinction between facts and values that liberal philosophy must maintain.

This has practical implications. When technocrats tell you “the data shows” what policy we should pursue, they’re committing a category error. Data can show what different policies would achieve, but choosing what to achieve requires value judgments that expertise can inform but never replace.

When economists tell you we should maximize efficiency, they’re smuggling in a normative claim disguised as a technical analysis. Efficiency is one value among many. Whether it should be prioritized over equity, stability, community, or autonomy is a political question, not a technical one.

When Marxists tell you that class analysis reveals workers’ objective interests, they’re making a similar mistake. Understanding economic position might illuminate certain interests, but determining what we collectively should do requires negotiation among people with different values, not merely rational analysis of material relations.

George’s distinction between land and improvements exemplifies anti-materialist reasoning. He doesn’t treat property rights as ultimate values that economic analysis reveals. He treats them as social arrangements serving human flourishing—and insists the distinction between created and uncreated wealth matters morally. You have rights in what your labor creates; you don’t have rights to monopolize what no one created and extract from community indefinitely. This is precisely the reasoning materialism cannot accommodate: treating economic relations as instrumental to democratically-chosen values rather than as foundations determining what we can value.

The spiritual crisis of modern society isn’t material scarcity but meaning scarcity—the sense that prosperity alone isn’t enough, that optimization doesn’t satisfy, that something essential is missing when material comfort becomes the highest good.

Classical liberalism, properly understood, was always about this—creating a political framework where people can collectively pursue spiritual goods (dignity, meaning, solidarity, democratic participation) through self-governance rather than having those goods provided by economic managers or revolutionary vanguards.

This is why reducing politics to resource allocation misses the point. Politics is how we collectively determine what kind of people we want to be, what kind of society we want to build, what values we will honor in our collective life. These are irreducibly normative questions that material analysis cannot resolve.

The materialist believes that understanding economic conditions tells you what politics should be. The classical liberal believes that the political framework enables collective deliberation about what economic arrangements should serve.

Framework and Content

Let me be more explicit about this distinction because it’s philosophically important and practically clarifying.

Framework questions are about the conditions making collective choice possible:

• Who has voice in decisions?

• What protections exist against power concentration?

• How do we handle disagreement without force?

• What institutions enable reasoning together when no one has privileged access to truth?

Content questions are about what to choose within the framework:

• What tax rates?

• Which goods publicly provided?

• How much regulation?

• What level of redistribution?

Liberalism operates at the framework level. It’s not a position on content questions but a commitment to deciding content through democratic deliberation within constitutional constraints.

This is why classical liberals can disagree radically about policy while sharing the framework commitment. You can be liberal progressive wanting extensive public goods and redistribution. You can be liberal conservative wanting limited government and maximum market freedom. You can be liberal social democrat wanting workers’ councils and codetermination. These are different content positions within the shared framework.

What you cannot be is a liberal authoritarian. Because authoritarianism destroys the framework—it substitutes command for deliberation, force for persuasion, power for reason. It treats some people as lacking capacity or right to participate in collective self-governance.

This is what distinguishes democratic alliances from authoritarian ones. However much I might disagree with Mamdani about optimal economic arrangements, we share commitment to the framework itself—to democratic deliberation, constitutional constraints, pluralism, accountability. That makes him a legitimate participant in democratic process and ally against those who would destroy that process, even if we’re not allies on content.

I cannot ally with those who reject the framework itself—whether they’re neo-reactionaries arguing democracy is impossible, oligarchs treating wealth as natural right to rule, or vanguardists believing their consciousness grants them authority over others.

The framework isn’t just procedures. It’s built on substantive commitments: that ordinary people can govern themselves, that no one has a natural right to rule others, that political legitimacy comes from democratic consent not from wealth or birth or superior insight, that human dignity requires capacity to participate in collective self-determination.

These are philosophical commitments, not just institutional arrangements. You can’t be liberal while rejecting them, regardless of what economic policies you support.

The Task Before Us

We face a civilizational choice between incompatible visions. One side: liberalism—the belief that ordinary people can govern themselves through reason, deliberation, and democratic institutions. The other side: neo-feudalism—the conviction that most people lack capacity for self-governance and should accept subordinate roles under those claiming superior qualification.

This plays out through the two materialisms. Market fundamentalists argue economic freedom is primary and political freedom derivative—leading toward oligarchy where wealth concentrates upward and buys political power. Revolutionary socialists argue economic transformation is a prerequisite for genuine democracy—leading toward vanguardism where those with correct consciousness rule others.

Both are materialist errors. Both make economic relations primary. Both treat the political framework as derivative from the economic base.

Classical liberalism offers a different path: the political framework enabling democratic self-governance is primary. Within it, we pursue economic arrangements serving human dignity, meaning-making, and solidarity. We constrain concentrated power (public or private) that threatens the framework. We protect pluralism enabling people with different values to reason together. We maintain institutions making collective choice possible across disagreement.

This isn’t a utopian vision promising to resolve all conflicts. It’s the framework for managing conflict without force, for building partial provisional settlements among people who will continue to disagree. It’s the hard work of remaining human together—conscious beings trying to create meaning collectively despite permanent uncertainty and inevitable disagreement.

The task is recovery. Recovering the critical classical liberal insight that material prosperity serves spiritual values rather than merely constituting them. Recovering the Progressive Era understanding that concentrated wealth threatens democracy as surely as concentrated political power. Recovering FDR’s recognition that economic security is a condition for meaningful democratic citizenship rather than a substitute for it. Recovering the philosophical clarity that facts and values operate in different registers requiring different forms of reasoning.

This isn’t nostalgia for some imagined golden age. The past was deeply flawed—shot through with exclusion, racism, patriarchy. But here’s what matters: the classical liberal framework is what enabled the moral progress that confronted those failures.

The abolitionist movement didn’t need new philosophy—it needed liberalism taken seriously. When Frederick Douglass argued that the Constitution’s promise of equality must include Black Americans, he was invoking the liberal framework against its imperfect implementation. When he said “what to the slave is the Fourth of July?” he wasn’t rejecting American founding principles—he was demanding they be applied universally instead of selectively.

The suffragettes didn’t abandon liberal principles—they insisted liberalism live up to its own commitments. If human dignity requires capacity to participate in collective self-determination, if political legitimacy comes from democratic consent, then excluding half of humanity was a betrayal of liberalism, not its application.

The civil rights movement used liberal arguments to dismantle Jim Crow. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech invoked the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence—equal creation, unalienable rights. He was holding America to its own liberal principles, not importing foreign philosophy.

Marriage equality followed the same pattern: if human dignity is universal, if government can’t privilege some citizens over others without justification, then excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage violated liberal principles that conservatives claimed to defend.

That’s why I’m damn proud of this tradition. Not because it was always applied correctly—it wasn’t. Not because every self-proclaimed liberal lived up to the principles—they didn’t. But because the framework’s very commitment to universal human dignity and equal capacity for self-governance contained the tools for its own correction.

Unlike materialisms that treat some people as historically determined to rule and others to follow, unlike authoritarianisms that require conformity to leader’s vision, the liberal framework makes moral progress possible by insisting no one has natural right to exclude others from democratic participation.

The resources for addressing exclusion existed within the tradition precisely because the tradition insists on universal human dignity rather than on economic determinism or rule by superior consciousness. Extending democratic participation to those previously excluded isn’t concession to critics—it’s fulfillment of what liberalism always claimed to be about.

When we say the framework commits to human dignity and democratic participation, we’re not just describing procedural arrangements. We’re making a substantive moral claim that applies universally or not at all. That universality is what made moral progress possible. That universality is what makes the tradition worth defending. It is the liberal struggle. And in the American political tradition—towards a more perfect union.

The alternative—abandoning the framework because it was imperfectly implemented—leads either to materialism (whether Marxist or neoliberal) or to authoritarianism (whether fascist or technocratic). Neither offers genuine liberation. Both make a similar error: treating humans as means to material ends rather than as ends in themselves.

The Wire Still Holds

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And classical liberalism is anti-materialist political philosophy making spiritual values primary and economic arrangements instrumental.

Both Marxist and neoliberal materialism invert this hierarchy—treating economic conditions as determining what we should value rather than as means serving values we choose through democratic deliberation.

Recovering classical liberalism means recovering its insistence that material prosperity serves higher purposes: human dignity, democratic participation, meaning-making, solidarity. That economic arrangements—however important—are content to be debated within the framework rather than foundations determining whether the framework is possible.

That’s why I’m a liberal, not a socialist. Not because I oppose public goods or worker power or constraining concentrated wealth. But because I think the political framework enabling democratic self-governance is primary, and economic questions—important as they are—must remain subject to democratic choice rather than being treated as prerequisites for democracy itself.

The classical liberal tradition offers resources neither materialism provides. Henry George’s land value taxation shows how to constrain concentrated wealth through democratic means without requiring ownership transformation. The Progressive Era reformers show how to fight economic royalism within the constitutional framework. FDR shows how to expand federal power to check concentrated private power—application of Madisonian principle, not contradiction of it.

And the tradition offers moral vocabulary adequate to our moment. Franklin Roosevelt, speaking on Flag Day 1942 as America fought fascism abroad, articulated what was ultimately at stake—not economic systems but human freedom itself:

“The four freedoms of common humanity are as much elements of man’s needs as air and sunlight, bread and salt. Deprive him of all these freedoms and he dies—deprive him of a part of them and a part of him withers. Give them to him in full and abundant measure and he will cross the threshold of a new age, the greatest age of man.”

Notice what Roosevelt did: he made freedom primary—freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear. Material security (freedom from want) is essential, but it’s essential as the condition for freedom, not as a substitute for it. Economic arrangements should serve human freedom, not determine whether freedom is possible.

This is the classical liberal insight both materialisms obscure: spiritual values are primary. Human dignity, democratic participation, the capacity to create meaning together despite permanent disagreement—these aren’t products of correct economic arrangements. They’re what economic arrangements should serve.

The task before us is recovery. Recovering the philosophical clarity that material prosperity serves spiritual values rather than constituting them. Recovering the Progressive Era understanding that concentrated wealth threatens democracy as surely as concentrated political power. Recovering FDR’s recognition that economic security is condition for democratic citizenship rather than substitute for it. Recovering the tradition that California abandoned when it passed Proposition 13 and inverted every Georgist principle while claiming to defend property rights.

The alternative—choosing between materialisms, between treating economic transformation as liberation or economic prosperity as freedom—leads to the same error: making material conditions primary and treating human dignity as derivative.

Roosevelt closed his Flag Day address with a prayer that captures what’s ultimately at stake:

“Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years—a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds. We are all of us children of earth—grant us that simple knowledge. If our brothers are oppressed, then we are oppressed. If they hunger, we hunger. If their freedom is taken away, our freedom is not secure. Grant us a common faith that man shall know bread and peace—that he shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do his best, not only in our own lands, but throughout the world.”

This is an anti-materialist vision: recognizing that bread and peace, justice and freedom must be held together. That material security serves human solidarity rather than substituting for it. That our brothers’ oppression diminishes our own freedom—not because of economic interdependence but because of moral interdependence, because human dignity is indivisible.

The classical liberal framework—however battered, however threatened, however obscured by Cold War materialism—remains the best available answer to the fundamental question: how do fallible humans with profound disagreements about spiritual values live together in dignity while pursuing material prosperity without making prosperity itself the ultimate good?

That’s the project. That’s what the classical liberal tradition offers. And that’s what’s worth defending against both materialisms—whether they promise liberation through economic transformation or freedom through market fundamentalism.

And this, to you dear friends, is my Note. From the Circus. Making very clear that I’m not a socialist. And very much a liberal.

May love carry us home. Not as escape from material concerns but as reminder that material arrangements serve spiritual values we choose through democratic deliberation, not the reverse.

The circus continues. But we know what we’re defending, why it matters, and what resources our tradition provides for the struggle ahead.

Two plus two equals four. The wire still holds. And the center—that framework enabling fallible humans to reason together across disagreement—holds because we choose to hold it.

A note for philosophically-engaged readers: This essay applies commitments I develop more fully in my philosophical framework essay—particularly about coherentist epistemology, the relationship between reason and passion, and complementarity as ontological principle. You can read this essay without that background, but the deeper foundations are there if you want them.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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