Thanks for this essay which relates to a question I've been thinking a lot about. US liberalism (in the general sense) has been brought down from within, by a political party which was once liberal, committed to the standard list of liberal freedoms. This has happened, or been threatened, many times, and almost always the threat has come from the right. In some cases, liberals have resisted, but mostly ineffectually or not at all
* The German liberal and centrists parties voted for Hitler's Enabling Act.
* MAGA parties in Europe like AfD and Fidesz started out as liberal-conservative
I conclude from this that without a critical analysis of power and property, liberalism is always at risk of defeat from within. Liberalism can't survive without socialism or, at least, social democracy.
As the article states, socialism inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines liberalism. Social democracy is a very different system from socialism, although in the long run, they may end up in the same place.
"may" doing a heap of work here. Hayek predicted this in 1944 and 80 years later there are zero examples of this process. For that matter, zero examples of democratically elected socialist governments suppressing liberalism and plenty of such governments being overthrown and replaced by rightwing dictatorships. Chile the lead example which won Hayek's enthusiastic approval;
Discuss with reference to UK Labour government 1945 to 1951. Completely contradicts the article. Democracy alive and well in UK. Whatever else you may think about UK.
The article is conflicted about liberal socialism. My comment targets the statements “And you cannot be a liberal socialist in the traditional sense, because socialism's commitment to collective ownership of the means of production requires a level of economic control that tends to undermine the institutional independence and distributed power that liberal democracy requires.” The UK Labour government, and various others across mid 20th C nationalised a significant proportion of industry - ‘collective ownership’. But this did not undermine institutions nor lead to any dimunition of democratic forms (which is what the article is actually about, not liberalism).
The article later allows that socialism in a liberal form - ie one that works within democratic institutions - is possible.
In terms of the current day the UK actions mid last century would be considered ‘socialism’ and sit way in advance of anything say that the Democrat candidate for NYC mayor has proposed - there has never been a serious socialist party in the US. The response of people at the time was that the Labour party was pursing socialist objectives, with respective levels of horror and praise depending on view point.
If you want to hypothise some set of ‘perfect socialism’ outcomes go ahead.
I think an issue here is that history shows, at least to me, that many of the reforms that led to the establishment of liberal democracies, or major reforms within liberal democracies, were accomplished through illiberal means.
Take my own country. The rebellions of 1837-1838 were violent uprisings against British colonial rule, sparked in part by the perception that it was oligarchic and not democratic. Reforms eventually occurred over the following decade or so, with responsible government (the fancy term for the Westminster parliamentary system, where the executive is answerable, or responsible, to, and can be summarily dismissed by, the legislature) being implemented in most of the colonies by 1850. But without the revolution it is unlikely to have happened.
Thirty years later, the Red River Rebellion in 1869 would result in the creation of the Province of Manitoba. Almost eighty years after that, in 1948, the colony of Newfoundland voted on whether to remain a colony, become an independent dominion, or become part of Canada (not offered on the ballot was the option to become part of the United States, which had significant support in the colony at the time); after no option gained majority support, a second round was controversially held in which the British administrators announced that provincial status had won over dominion status, and then burned the ballots so nobody could double-check whether they were telling the truth.
Other violent upheavals, or threats of violence, or other illiberal periods, have preceded the establishment of liberal democracies, or some of their biggest reforms; among those that come to mind are the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War, the Irish War of Independence, de Gaulle's dictatorship in France preceding the Fifth Republic, and the Yugoslav Wars. Indian independence was accomplished in part because of threats of violent uprising from anti-British (in some cases, pro-Nazi) militias; the civil rights reforms of the 1960s in the US happened because it was preferable to enact them than face a full-blown race war from Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and against the backdrop of ongoing race riots; the modern gay rights movement began with the riot at the Stonewall Inn. Germany and Japan's current constitutions were in effect imposed upon them by military occupiers in the wake of the Second World War; Greece faced civil wars and at least one military coup in the years following that conflict; going further back in history, the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom had a faction that engaged in what they themselves described as terrorism for a few years; more recently apartheid in South Africa was ended through a combination of domestic violent resistance from groups like uMkhonto weSizwe and extensive foreign boycotts (if tariffs are, as Warren Buffett recently noted, "an act of war, to some degree", then what is a full economic boycott? And just witness the reaction to groups that seek to boycott companies that do business in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or in some cases Israel generally).
"And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity." (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warning that a failure to implement peaceful, meaningful reform would result in violent uprising out of frustration at intolerable economic and social conditions)
The promise of liberalism may be a means to order society in which decisions and reforms (of whatever sort) can be made and differences worked out peacefully, but very often history shows us that its establishment, and many notable enactments within it, came about only because of the threat of a more wholesale, often violent, overturning of existing power structures, be that illiberal ones becoming more liberal institutions, or existing liberal institutions changing just enough to prevent their own violent overthrow.
Perhaps I have misunderstood what you mean by "liberalism", but my own knowledge of history tells me that violence, or the threat thereof, is all too often the most effective means of bringing about reform, whether to establish a liberal order or to effect change within it.
There was a lot i agreed with in this essay but something kept niggling at the back of my mind.
While it may require more contemplation, I think it’s similar to your point: in the final analysis people do not want liberalism it mist be enforced and that requires the foundation of a liberal society to be based on illiberalism.
I think the most recent American presidential election succinctly demonstrated this: the choice was between flavors of authoritarianism not liberals vs illiberals.
But, by contrast, look at whether people actually liked those candidates. They didn't! 2016 was an especially stark illustration of this; as I recall, to that point, Hillary Clinton was the least popular Presidential nominee by a major party in the history of the United States... except for Donald Trump. (I'd have to find the data for 2020 and 2024, but somehow I doubt Biden or Harris was that much more popular.)
Part of the issue is that the partisan primary system (even when it's formally a caucus system, it functions in many important ways as a primary) ends up selecting for candidates who appeal to (some sufficiently large segment of) the party's committed base, and not for candidates who appeal to the electorate as a whole. Thus you get candidates who are representative of party bases which are far from the mainstream of politics and a bunch of people who are not particularly committed being forced to hold their noses (if they vote at all). This has only been exacerbated as the two parties have sorted along ideological lines on an ever-increasing number of issues. (Where does a US voter who supports both abortion to viability and broad gun ownership go, or the opposite, a voter who wants heartbeat bills and firearm bans? You could layer more issues onto this but that should serve to illustrate the point.) You end up in a situation where many people feel like they're voting for whoever makes them throw up in their mouth less, and a lot of them give it a miss entirely.
EDIT: This is an elaboration and adaptation of the problem of "lizard democracy" that Douglas Adams noted in "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish", where Ford Prefect notes that a world of humans who elect lizards as their leaders assume that because they can all vote, the government they have is more or less the government they want, even as they hate the lizards. But they don't kick the lizards out because if you try, the wrong lizard might get in. The further comment on this is that even though the humans all agree that they hate the lizards, the humans can't agree on which particular humans should replace the lizards. Thus any votes not cast for the less-bad lizard functionally end up helping elect the worse lizard. (See also Duverger's Law.) End edit.
It's not, I think, that people broadly don't want liberalism. It's that liberalism gets in the way of committed ideologues of any stripe from fully imposing their vision of society onto everyone. (There's one person with whom I have had passionate disagreements on issues that are very important to both of us. He and I would never, ever vote for the same candidate in an election in either of our countries, given the standard options on the ballot. Nonetheless we have still managed to find common ground on a number of issues through respectful debate and rational analysis even as we each support policies on other issues that are utterly anathema to the other and that in all likelihood each of us would gleefully impose in a "king-for-a-day" scenario, counting on the game-theoretic concept of "the privileged position of the status quo" to keep said imposed policies in effect even after our dictatorship ended and democratic rule was restored.)
If your answer to this is "ban political parties", incidentally, then I would point you to, one, the fact that political parties in some form are almost inevitable (Nebraska's legislature is formally nonpartisan but everyone knows the actual partisan breakdown of its members, for instance) as they are a useful organising principle, and two, that a standard civil freedom, freedom of peaceful association, must obviously encompass political parties, and therefore the challenge is how to regulate political parties so that their useful effects are amplified and their negative effects are diminished. (A large part of the problems with the US Constitution in particular is that the Framers thought it was so obvious that political parties had corrosive effects on democracy and liberalism that nobody would be stupid enough to form them, and when they promptly formed anyway, sometimes involving those same Framers, the entire system started to break down and has been in slow-motion collapse for over two centuries.)
Establishing liberalism in the first place, though, meant challenging existing illiberal power structures, often through violence or the threat thereof, a highly illiberal means. And further liberalisation has often taken the same, because the illiberal parts of what might otherwise be a liberal system will still resist that liberalisation. (Again I bring up the civil rights reforms of the 1960s in the United States, particularly the Voting Rights Act, which came about in an atmosphere of race riots and threatened race war even as peaceful reformers like Bayard Rustin advocated nonviolent change. Go back a century and the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th, were enacted essentially by browbeating the militarily defeated ex-Confederate states into ratifying them by denying them representation in Congress until they did. Japan's current Constitution was enacted through the Meiji Constitution's formal amending process as a full repeal and replacement with the new text but it was mostly written by the victorious Americans in the wake of the Second World War at a time when the Imperial Diet and the Emperor would ask "how high" whenever MacArthur said "jump" because the Americans had all the guns.) But it's the illiberality that serves the interests of the ideologues who have managed to gain power in the system as it exists and, holding that power, which includes with it the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, can use it to suppress liberal reformers unless the liberals are willing to use their own illiberal means to resist the entrenched illiberality.
That, I think, is the fundamental contradiction of liberalism: because of preexisting illiberal systems that resist liberal change, liberal ends, that is, the establishment of liberal systems or the further liberalisation of existing partially liberal systems, cannot be brought about purely by liberal means, nor can liberal systems, due to illiberalising forces within them, be maintained purely by liberal means.
I have come to appreciate liberalism much more in the last decade with the rise of so many anti-liberal voices on the net (and now in power). Liberalism used to just be something default, in the background, but reading Yarvin and Thiel made me realize it has enemies and needs to be defended.
Anti-liberalism has been defeated previously, that's what WW2 was - it wasn't just a defeat of opposing systems, but of internal enemies, much of it through attempts at imprisonment (see sedition trial of 1944 and dozens of other trials around the same time - I wrote about this btw!), or deplatforming (like Charles Coughlin, whom they threatened w/ indictment, and who had a massive audience), often with the help of "independent institutions" like referenced in the OP (such as ADL, which operated mass-spying network across America) and journalists (like Walter Winchell, who was being fed propaganda by FBI, ADL, and the British). And such success has led to (beyond dropping two nukes on Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians):
Endless wars, coups, color revolutions, imposition of capitalism across the world to impose democracy and in defense of human rights
Endless immigration, internal and international, with the former leading to separation from family, friends, and relatives, and the latter making the country resemble 3rd world
NSSM-200, that is promotion of abortion, education, and contraceptives in effort to exploit countries across the globe
Mass sterilization policies (India, pressured by US)
Social engineering through "Integration," bussing, and mass propaganda through education/media in effort to defend the consequences of other liberal policies, such as immigration
Outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries
Mass rape of white girls across UK (grooming gangs)
And so on and so forth - the point being is that reality of liberalism speaks for itself, and its reality is vastly different to the way liberalism exists in fantasy - and it's precisely why people are opposing it.
Certainly, liberals would much more prefer to treat it as a mere idea, not reality with which we live in and suffer under. The main reason why liberalism won over in WW2, both domestically and internationally, is primarily because it's much more psychotic than any other system or ideology - and that's certainly pretty difficult to achieve when your opponents are Nazis and Communists - but is true nonetheless. Currently, as I'm writing this, liberals and those aiming to "conserve" liberalism, are supporting slaughter in Ukraine and Palestine, including mass murder of children. In my view, it can't be defeated soon enough. The sooner it's crushed, the better off everyone in this world will be.
Great piece, but I do think you gloss over the genuine illiberal nature of the left in America over the last 15 years. From progressive billionaires funding causes to universities restricting speech and becoming ideologically illiberal the left has been increasingly dogmatic
I think this is a level of detail that could be added that would not change the key points at all. There are many other things that can erode liberalism from within.
Not an unfair critique—there’s no question the piece places some added emphasis on tech oligarchs, and that focus might overshadow other threats. That said, it clearly identifies illiberalism as a broader phenomenon, pointing to authoritarians, fundamentalists, and ideologues across the spectrum. It’s a long and dense article, so it’s easy to miss those qualifiers. I took the core point to be that any force—left, right, or libertarian—that seeks to escape democratic accountability is a threat to liberalism. The tech examples just happen to be the most vivid and current.
Oh sweet democracy, you chaotic, maddening miracle. You let fools speak freely, which is both your greatest flaw and your saving grace.
This post is the rare sermon that actually deserves a pulpit. Because let’s be honest—most folks yelling “liberal” today couldn’t explain liberalism if John Locke himself sat on their face and recited the Second Treatise.
Liberalism isn’t a vibe. It’s a covenant. A fragile, holy agreement that says, “Even if I think your ideas are trash, I won’t burn down the temple while you’re inside.” It’s institutionalized humility—rules built on the divine recognition that none of us knows jack with certainty, so we better create a system that lets us be wrong safely.
And yet, here come the crypto-kings and techno-Tsar wannabes, mistaking their server farms for Sinai and declaring efficiency holier than justice. They don’t want to win the debate. They want to erase the debate. And once you do that, you're not a reformer. You're a priest of the algorithmic inquisition.
So yes, liberalism is a mess. But it’s a mess that makes room for heretics, prophets, weirdos, and saints. It’s not the answer to every question. It’s the space where we’re allowed to ask them.
Brilliant! Your view on liberalism is clear and convincing. Not a particular political stance but the acceptance of some basic rules before even confronting ideas.
BTW, in Europe, we make a clear distinction between socialism and communism.
Communists say that collective property of the production apparatus will free the working class.
Socialists reject that idea and promote private property as much as the conservatives. Of course, they differ on taxes and regulations, etc.
Your essay helps clarify that socialism is liberal at its core. While communism, with its messianic program, is not designed to accept contradiction. It is illiberal by nature (and has never produced enviable results)
As I said, Liberalism is the hegemonic political ideology. Your liberalism is just a wishy-washy definition that completely ignores history. Arms for Ukrainians (white), but genocide for Palestinians (colonial subjects). A perfect illustration of Liberalism. And as for liberals, all we get is hand-wringing.
One can hold up the ideal of philosophical liberalism while also being critical of how imperfectly said ideal has been implemented in reality in regimes that claim to be "liberal".
People should read Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter History to really understand how Liberalism was the conjoined twin of racism. It has always defined to world into two zones: the 'sacred' zone of those who rule and their allies, and the 'profane", that is, everyone else who were considered less than human, and so could be killed, exploited, impoverished and genocided. Liberalism has only modernized as neo-Liberalism, but its essence has never changed.
Losurdo's critique conflates the historical practice of liberal societies with liberal principles themselves. Yes, many societies that called themselves liberal practiced slavery, colonialism, and exclusion—but this represents a failure to implement liberal principles, not the principles themselves. This is a form of moral puritanism that I have very little time for, quite frankly. It leaves us nowhere, except the demand to constantly self-flagellate and a demand to be in a constant mode of reckoning with our past, making the present a miserable existence for all.
Bullshit. Liberalism is duly manifest by Europe and America in their treatment of Palestinians. Israel is a perfect example of the practice of the sacred versus the profane, otherwise known as apartheid and genocide. This is not a question of moral puritanism, but the recognition of how the very idea of a universalist humanity is dismissed by liberals.
You're still conflating the actions of particular governments with liberal principles themselves. It seems to me, from casual observation, that most committed liberals in the world are highly critical of Israel, no?
Liberalism (capital L) is the hegemonic political ideology of the state. Small l liberalism can mean all kinds of things, a “moveable feast”. Nearly half of USA population are supporters of Trump, and a good 30% in addition who are followers of Democrats, are also part of those same folk that I would not describe as little l liberal.
How deliciously you've managed to demonstrate my entire thesis about epistemic collapse in a single paragraph. When 'liberalism can mean all kinds of things, a moveable feast,' you've essentially argued that words have no stable meaning—which makes rational discourse impossible and democratic deliberation a farce.
If liberalism is simultaneously the "hegemonic political ideology of the state" AND something that 70% of Americans reject, then perhaps the problem isn't liberalism but your capacity for coherent analysis. You can't have it both ways: either liberalism dominates everything or it's rejected by most people. Pick a lane.
The fact that you classify both Trump supporters AND Democrats as non-liberal while claiming liberalism is hegemonic suggests you've created a perfectly unfalsifiable theory where liberalism is simultaneously all-powerful and practically non-existent. Quite the intellectual achievement—you've managed to make your critique immune to evidence by making it immune to meaning.
I largely agree with you. The term “Liberalism” often concatenates two very different views:
1) The rules of the game, which you advocate for. This places Liberals in the role of being referee in the political game.
2) A large group of related policy stands for what the government should do, which are typically “progressive” in the American use of the term “Liberal” and something closer to libertarianism in the European use of the term.
Does this not , however, lead to a conundrum? How does one really advocate for Liberalism in day-to-day politics if it does not consist of policy stands? It is the policy stands that most people care about, not the rules of the game or the referee who enforces the rules.
I don't think it leads to a conundrum at all. Instead, it should lead one to recognize political activities that are compatible with self-government and those that aren't.
Liberalism isn't neutral about everything—it's specifically committed to defending the conditions that make democratic choice possible. When movements explicitly reject constitutional constraints, democratic accountability, or the basic framework of self-government, they've placed themselves outside legitimate political debate entirely.
If a large group believes government should trample over basic liberal commitments—whether that's refusing to accept election results, operating federal agencies outside constitutional constraint, or building parallel systems to escape democratic accountability—then that group has made itself incompatible with liberal democracy. They're not offering policy alternatives within the framework; they're attacking the framework itself.
The practical challenge isn't staying neutral between competing policy visions—progressives and conservatives can both be liberal. The challenge is recognizing when movements have abandoned liberalism entirely and responding accordingly. You can't defend self-government by treating its enemies as legitimate participants in democratic debate. This is my charge.
I think you exaggerate the extent to which individual policy conflicts involve actual violations of Liberalism (as you define it). Serious threats to liberalism comes up in very few policy issues.
Very few political movements in wealthy Western nations “explicitly reject constitutional constraints, democratic accountability, or the basic framework of self-government.” Even fewer of them “abandon liberalism entirely.”
It is particularly troubling if you define others who disagree with your policy stands as “enemies of self-government” and therefore not “as legitimate participants in democratic debate”.
Your entire line of reasoning in this reply seems to rationalize illiberalism by defining your opponents as illiberal.
You seem to be debating a straw man, here. Could you give me an example of something or someone I am characterizing as illiberal, by implication, in your opinion?
No, I am not debating a straw man. I am responding to your point.
I don’t know who you have in mind when you define people as “enemies of self-government” and therefore not “as legitimate participants in democratic debate”.
Frankly, it seems quite illiberal and contrary to the main point of your article (which I enjoyed and agreed with).
I notice you're still not providing any examples of what I've supposedly characterized as illiberal, so I'll do your work for you.
Consider Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, which involved forced expropriation and was vigorously defended by much of the socialist left—I remember the 'Hands Off Venezuela' protests across Western university campuses well.
This was clearly an illiberal project, not because of its economic goals, but because comprehensive expropriation concentrated power to the degree that independent institutions became impossible to maintain. As many liberal critics suspected at the time, the project was headed toward totalitarianism—and that's exactly where it landed.
This demonstrates how my framework actually works: it's not about opposing wealth redistribution or public ownership per se—many liberal democracies have extensive public sectors. It's about recognizing when economic arrangements become so concentrated that they undermine the institutional independence necessary for democratic accountability.
If you want to critique my reasoning, please point to specific examples of what I've written that you object to. Otherwise, you're arguing against positions I haven't taken.
No, I agree with you that Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution is both illiberal and very bad. And anyone in the West who is in favor of it is likely not a Liberal.
I thought you were referring to illiberal political movements in wealthy Western nations. My mistake.
He had me until he started conflating socialism with authoritarianism. “Socialists believe in collective ownership and democratic control of economic resources. But when socialist movements try to implement their vision through revolutionary violence or authoritarian control, they abandon liberal principles. Democratic socialism can be liberal; revolutionary socialism cannot.” So far so good. But he also claims you cannot have liberalism with collective ownership even if these are democratic decisions. Why cannot a society own natural resources and contract out their exploitation. Or own the railways and hospitals? There’s an unnecessary anti socialist bias in this outline of liberalism.
I completely agree that collective ownership, as implemented through democratic mechanisms (e.g., the USPS, public healthcare, public transportation), can be fully compatible with liberal democracy. My concern isn’t with these specific cases. Rather, it’s with the classical socialist theory that advocates the wholesale abolition of private property and seeks to replace market mechanisms entirely with democratic deliberation.
Such a vision runs into profound epistemic and practical challenges. Economically, it encounters the well-documented calculation problem—the difficulty in allocating resources efficiently without price signals. Politically, it risks the tyranny of the majority, where democratic deliberation can easily devolve into the imposition of majority preferences without adequate protections for individual rights or minority interests. Epistemically, it assumes that collective deliberation can effectively manage the vast complexity of economic life, which history and experience suggest is extraordinarily challenging.
So, while collective ownership in certain domains—implemented within democratic accountability and constitutional protections—can be perfectly liberal and reasonable, the traditional socialist ideal of abolishing private property entirely is epistemically untenable and practically dangerous. It’s not a bias against socialism per se, but a recognition of liberalism’s commitment to institutional humility and pragmatic constraint.
This is brilliant, thank you! I wonder if social media might be a fatal monkey wrench for the liberal project. In my neck of the New England woods, the illiberal avalanche from the left has been the most flagrant in the past decade or so, coming from the younger cohorts of the college educated managerial class and imposed on everyone else. They're obsessed with controlling language, in particular, which is a very effective way to manipulate thought, as Orwell described so vividly. I was struck by the idea here of humility being key to liberalism because that is what these young neo Puritans sorely lack, but arrogance is a perennial folly of youth, isn't it? Now social media adds a new kerosene, fueled by the profit motive that rewards hostility and passion with every click, so that the most emotional arguments, rather than the most rational, have a disproportionate influence on the marketplace of ideas. It's hard to imagine what could turn the tide when academia and so many institutions are pandering to popular dogma rather than seeking truth. Thanks again for an excellent argument in defense of reason!
I don't think you're using the correct definition of private property to describe communist and socialist ideology. Private property is in the domain of capital: the means of production. This is what communists and by extension socialists seek to collectivise. You seem to be conflating that with personal property, which communists are not saying you can't have.
You're also ignoring the fact that in the US today, and elsewhere, huge swaths of the economy are centralized and controlled by a small group. Amazon for consumer goods and web services. Blackstone for housing. Glencore for minerals. ExxonMobil for oil. How is zero democratic control over these critical sectors better than placing them under the control of the public? How is the legally mandated objective to bring short-term profits for shareholders better than a system which mandates a benefit to all stakeholders (i.e. the public)?
Excellent essay! Thank you!
Thanks for this essay which relates to a question I've been thinking a lot about. US liberalism (in the general sense) has been brought down from within, by a political party which was once liberal, committed to the standard list of liberal freedoms. This has happened, or been threatened, many times, and almost always the threat has come from the right. In some cases, liberals have resisted, but mostly ineffectually or not at all
* The German liberal and centrists parties voted for Hitler's Enabling Act.
* MAGA parties in Europe like AfD and Fidesz started out as liberal-conservative
I conclude from this that without a critical analysis of power and property, liberalism is always at risk of defeat from within. Liberalism can't survive without socialism or, at least, social democracy.
The idea that the only threats to liberalism come from the right is laughable.
Brock is clear that threats to liberalism can come from the left as well as the right.
Wherever a society, or group within that society, bypasses reaching consensus and tramples on minority viewpoints is such a threat.
An incisive critique !
As the article states, socialism inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines liberalism. Social democracy is a very different system from socialism, although in the long run, they may end up in the same place.
"may" doing a heap of work here. Hayek predicted this in 1944 and 80 years later there are zero examples of this process. For that matter, zero examples of democratically elected socialist governments suppressing liberalism and plenty of such governments being overthrown and replaced by rightwing dictatorships. Chile the lead example which won Hayek's enthusiastic approval;
My main point is that:
1) “ socialism inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines liberalism” and
2) “Social democracy is a very different system from socialism.”
You can ignore the last phrase if you like.
Discuss with reference to UK Labour government 1945 to 1951. Completely contradicts the article. Democracy alive and well in UK. Whatever else you may think about UK.
The UK Labour Party 1945 to 1951 never established socialism. Maybe that was their long-term goal, but if so, they failed.
The article is conflicted about liberal socialism. My comment targets the statements “And you cannot be a liberal socialist in the traditional sense, because socialism's commitment to collective ownership of the means of production requires a level of economic control that tends to undermine the institutional independence and distributed power that liberal democracy requires.” The UK Labour government, and various others across mid 20th C nationalised a significant proportion of industry - ‘collective ownership’. But this did not undermine institutions nor lead to any dimunition of democratic forms (which is what the article is actually about, not liberalism).
The article later allows that socialism in a liberal form - ie one that works within democratic institutions - is possible.
In terms of the current day the UK actions mid last century would be considered ‘socialism’ and sit way in advance of anything say that the Democrat candidate for NYC mayor has proposed - there has never been a serious socialist party in the US. The response of people at the time was that the Labour party was pursing socialist objectives, with respective levels of horror and praise depending on view point.
If you want to hypothise some set of ‘perfect socialism’ outcomes go ahead.
Yes I think this is correct.
I think an issue here is that history shows, at least to me, that many of the reforms that led to the establishment of liberal democracies, or major reforms within liberal democracies, were accomplished through illiberal means.
Take my own country. The rebellions of 1837-1838 were violent uprisings against British colonial rule, sparked in part by the perception that it was oligarchic and not democratic. Reforms eventually occurred over the following decade or so, with responsible government (the fancy term for the Westminster parliamentary system, where the executive is answerable, or responsible, to, and can be summarily dismissed by, the legislature) being implemented in most of the colonies by 1850. But without the revolution it is unlikely to have happened.
Thirty years later, the Red River Rebellion in 1869 would result in the creation of the Province of Manitoba. Almost eighty years after that, in 1948, the colony of Newfoundland voted on whether to remain a colony, become an independent dominion, or become part of Canada (not offered on the ballot was the option to become part of the United States, which had significant support in the colony at the time); after no option gained majority support, a second round was controversially held in which the British administrators announced that provincial status had won over dominion status, and then burned the ballots so nobody could double-check whether they were telling the truth.
Other violent upheavals, or threats of violence, or other illiberal periods, have preceded the establishment of liberal democracies, or some of their biggest reforms; among those that come to mind are the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War, the Irish War of Independence, de Gaulle's dictatorship in France preceding the Fifth Republic, and the Yugoslav Wars. Indian independence was accomplished in part because of threats of violent uprising from anti-British (in some cases, pro-Nazi) militias; the civil rights reforms of the 1960s in the US happened because it was preferable to enact them than face a full-blown race war from Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and against the backdrop of ongoing race riots; the modern gay rights movement began with the riot at the Stonewall Inn. Germany and Japan's current constitutions were in effect imposed upon them by military occupiers in the wake of the Second World War; Greece faced civil wars and at least one military coup in the years following that conflict; going further back in history, the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom had a faction that engaged in what they themselves described as terrorism for a few years; more recently apartheid in South Africa was ended through a combination of domestic violent resistance from groups like uMkhonto weSizwe and extensive foreign boycotts (if tariffs are, as Warren Buffett recently noted, "an act of war, to some degree", then what is a full economic boycott? And just witness the reaction to groups that seek to boycott companies that do business in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or in some cases Israel generally).
"And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity." (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warning that a failure to implement peaceful, meaningful reform would result in violent uprising out of frustration at intolerable economic and social conditions)
The promise of liberalism may be a means to order society in which decisions and reforms (of whatever sort) can be made and differences worked out peacefully, but very often history shows us that its establishment, and many notable enactments within it, came about only because of the threat of a more wholesale, often violent, overturning of existing power structures, be that illiberal ones becoming more liberal institutions, or existing liberal institutions changing just enough to prevent their own violent overthrow.
Perhaps I have misunderstood what you mean by "liberalism", but my own knowledge of history tells me that violence, or the threat thereof, is all too often the most effective means of bringing about reform, whether to establish a liberal order or to effect change within it.
There was a lot i agreed with in this essay but something kept niggling at the back of my mind.
While it may require more contemplation, I think it’s similar to your point: in the final analysis people do not want liberalism it mist be enforced and that requires the foundation of a liberal society to be based on illiberalism.
I think the most recent American presidential election succinctly demonstrated this: the choice was between flavors of authoritarianism not liberals vs illiberals.
Hmm…gotta chew on it some more.
But, by contrast, look at whether people actually liked those candidates. They didn't! 2016 was an especially stark illustration of this; as I recall, to that point, Hillary Clinton was the least popular Presidential nominee by a major party in the history of the United States... except for Donald Trump. (I'd have to find the data for 2020 and 2024, but somehow I doubt Biden or Harris was that much more popular.)
Part of the issue is that the partisan primary system (even when it's formally a caucus system, it functions in many important ways as a primary) ends up selecting for candidates who appeal to (some sufficiently large segment of) the party's committed base, and not for candidates who appeal to the electorate as a whole. Thus you get candidates who are representative of party bases which are far from the mainstream of politics and a bunch of people who are not particularly committed being forced to hold their noses (if they vote at all). This has only been exacerbated as the two parties have sorted along ideological lines on an ever-increasing number of issues. (Where does a US voter who supports both abortion to viability and broad gun ownership go, or the opposite, a voter who wants heartbeat bills and firearm bans? You could layer more issues onto this but that should serve to illustrate the point.) You end up in a situation where many people feel like they're voting for whoever makes them throw up in their mouth less, and a lot of them give it a miss entirely.
EDIT: This is an elaboration and adaptation of the problem of "lizard democracy" that Douglas Adams noted in "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish", where Ford Prefect notes that a world of humans who elect lizards as their leaders assume that because they can all vote, the government they have is more or less the government they want, even as they hate the lizards. But they don't kick the lizards out because if you try, the wrong lizard might get in. The further comment on this is that even though the humans all agree that they hate the lizards, the humans can't agree on which particular humans should replace the lizards. Thus any votes not cast for the less-bad lizard functionally end up helping elect the worse lizard. (See also Duverger's Law.) End edit.
It's not, I think, that people broadly don't want liberalism. It's that liberalism gets in the way of committed ideologues of any stripe from fully imposing their vision of society onto everyone. (There's one person with whom I have had passionate disagreements on issues that are very important to both of us. He and I would never, ever vote for the same candidate in an election in either of our countries, given the standard options on the ballot. Nonetheless we have still managed to find common ground on a number of issues through respectful debate and rational analysis even as we each support policies on other issues that are utterly anathema to the other and that in all likelihood each of us would gleefully impose in a "king-for-a-day" scenario, counting on the game-theoretic concept of "the privileged position of the status quo" to keep said imposed policies in effect even after our dictatorship ended and democratic rule was restored.)
If your answer to this is "ban political parties", incidentally, then I would point you to, one, the fact that political parties in some form are almost inevitable (Nebraska's legislature is formally nonpartisan but everyone knows the actual partisan breakdown of its members, for instance) as they are a useful organising principle, and two, that a standard civil freedom, freedom of peaceful association, must obviously encompass political parties, and therefore the challenge is how to regulate political parties so that their useful effects are amplified and their negative effects are diminished. (A large part of the problems with the US Constitution in particular is that the Framers thought it was so obvious that political parties had corrosive effects on democracy and liberalism that nobody would be stupid enough to form them, and when they promptly formed anyway, sometimes involving those same Framers, the entire system started to break down and has been in slow-motion collapse for over two centuries.)
Establishing liberalism in the first place, though, meant challenging existing illiberal power structures, often through violence or the threat thereof, a highly illiberal means. And further liberalisation has often taken the same, because the illiberal parts of what might otherwise be a liberal system will still resist that liberalisation. (Again I bring up the civil rights reforms of the 1960s in the United States, particularly the Voting Rights Act, which came about in an atmosphere of race riots and threatened race war even as peaceful reformers like Bayard Rustin advocated nonviolent change. Go back a century and the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th, were enacted essentially by browbeating the militarily defeated ex-Confederate states into ratifying them by denying them representation in Congress until they did. Japan's current Constitution was enacted through the Meiji Constitution's formal amending process as a full repeal and replacement with the new text but it was mostly written by the victorious Americans in the wake of the Second World War at a time when the Imperial Diet and the Emperor would ask "how high" whenever MacArthur said "jump" because the Americans had all the guns.) But it's the illiberality that serves the interests of the ideologues who have managed to gain power in the system as it exists and, holding that power, which includes with it the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, can use it to suppress liberal reformers unless the liberals are willing to use their own illiberal means to resist the entrenched illiberality.
That, I think, is the fundamental contradiction of liberalism: because of preexisting illiberal systems that resist liberal change, liberal ends, that is, the establishment of liberal systems or the further liberalisation of existing partially liberal systems, cannot be brought about purely by liberal means, nor can liberal systems, due to illiberalising forces within them, be maintained purely by liberal means.
Possibly related: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation/
Excellent, thanks for writing this.
I have come to appreciate liberalism much more in the last decade with the rise of so many anti-liberal voices on the net (and now in power). Liberalism used to just be something default, in the background, but reading Yarvin and Thiel made me realize it has enemies and needs to be defended.
Anti-liberalism has been defeated previously, that's what WW2 was - it wasn't just a defeat of opposing systems, but of internal enemies, much of it through attempts at imprisonment (see sedition trial of 1944 and dozens of other trials around the same time - I wrote about this btw!), or deplatforming (like Charles Coughlin, whom they threatened w/ indictment, and who had a massive audience), often with the help of "independent institutions" like referenced in the OP (such as ADL, which operated mass-spying network across America) and journalists (like Walter Winchell, who was being fed propaganda by FBI, ADL, and the British). And such success has led to (beyond dropping two nukes on Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians):
Endless wars, coups, color revolutions, imposition of capitalism across the world to impose democracy and in defense of human rights
Endless immigration, internal and international, with the former leading to separation from family, friends, and relatives, and the latter making the country resemble 3rd world
NSSM-200, that is promotion of abortion, education, and contraceptives in effort to exploit countries across the globe
Mass sterilization policies (India, pressured by US)
Social engineering through "Integration," bussing, and mass propaganda through education/media in effort to defend the consequences of other liberal policies, such as immigration
Outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries
Mass rape of white girls across UK (grooming gangs)
And so on and so forth - the point being is that reality of liberalism speaks for itself, and its reality is vastly different to the way liberalism exists in fantasy - and it's precisely why people are opposing it.
Certainly, liberals would much more prefer to treat it as a mere idea, not reality with which we live in and suffer under. The main reason why liberalism won over in WW2, both domestically and internationally, is primarily because it's much more psychotic than any other system or ideology - and that's certainly pretty difficult to achieve when your opponents are Nazis and Communists - but is true nonetheless. Currently, as I'm writing this, liberals and those aiming to "conserve" liberalism, are supporting slaughter in Ukraine and Palestine, including mass murder of children. In my view, it can't be defeated soon enough. The sooner it's crushed, the better off everyone in this world will be.
I’ve stopped reading most commentators. However your essays are providing much needed grounding and deep insights. Thank you
Equal rights and Equal laws. Did men ever die for a holier cause?!
God and Liberty! 26 NY Inf. USCT
Great piece, but I do think you gloss over the genuine illiberal nature of the left in America over the last 15 years. From progressive billionaires funding causes to universities restricting speech and becoming ideologically illiberal the left has been increasingly dogmatic
I think this is a level of detail that could be added that would not change the key points at all. There are many other things that can erode liberalism from within.
Wouldn’t change the key point, but framing illiberalism as just the tech oligarchs is a pretty big blind spot
Not an unfair critique—there’s no question the piece places some added emphasis on tech oligarchs, and that focus might overshadow other threats. That said, it clearly identifies illiberalism as a broader phenomenon, pointing to authoritarians, fundamentalists, and ideologues across the spectrum. It’s a long and dense article, so it’s easy to miss those qualifiers. I took the core point to be that any force—left, right, or libertarian—that seeks to escape democratic accountability is a threat to liberalism. The tech examples just happen to be the most vivid and current.
Wonderful piece!
Oh sweet democracy, you chaotic, maddening miracle. You let fools speak freely, which is both your greatest flaw and your saving grace.
This post is the rare sermon that actually deserves a pulpit. Because let’s be honest—most folks yelling “liberal” today couldn’t explain liberalism if John Locke himself sat on their face and recited the Second Treatise.
Liberalism isn’t a vibe. It’s a covenant. A fragile, holy agreement that says, “Even if I think your ideas are trash, I won’t burn down the temple while you’re inside.” It’s institutionalized humility—rules built on the divine recognition that none of us knows jack with certainty, so we better create a system that lets us be wrong safely.
And yet, here come the crypto-kings and techno-Tsar wannabes, mistaking their server farms for Sinai and declaring efficiency holier than justice. They don’t want to win the debate. They want to erase the debate. And once you do that, you're not a reformer. You're a priest of the algorithmic inquisition.
So yes, liberalism is a mess. But it’s a mess that makes room for heretics, prophets, weirdos, and saints. It’s not the answer to every question. It’s the space where we’re allowed to ask them.
Brilliant! Your view on liberalism is clear and convincing. Not a particular political stance but the acceptance of some basic rules before even confronting ideas.
BTW, in Europe, we make a clear distinction between socialism and communism.
Communists say that collective property of the production apparatus will free the working class.
Socialists reject that idea and promote private property as much as the conservatives. Of course, they differ on taxes and regulations, etc.
Your essay helps clarify that socialism is liberal at its core. While communism, with its messianic program, is not designed to accept contradiction. It is illiberal by nature (and has never produced enviable results)
I truly enjoyed your work today on liberalism. It explained in simple terms just what liberalism is. Maybe it can be brought to fruition.
As I said, Liberalism is the hegemonic political ideology. Your liberalism is just a wishy-washy definition that completely ignores history. Arms for Ukrainians (white), but genocide for Palestinians (colonial subjects). A perfect illustration of Liberalism. And as for liberals, all we get is hand-wringing.
One can hold up the ideal of philosophical liberalism while also being critical of how imperfectly said ideal has been implemented in reality in regimes that claim to be "liberal".
Thank you, from my heart and soul, for articulating this so clearly. I’m going to be quoting you a LOT.
People should read Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter History to really understand how Liberalism was the conjoined twin of racism. It has always defined to world into two zones: the 'sacred' zone of those who rule and their allies, and the 'profane", that is, everyone else who were considered less than human, and so could be killed, exploited, impoverished and genocided. Liberalism has only modernized as neo-Liberalism, but its essence has never changed.
Losurdo's critique conflates the historical practice of liberal societies with liberal principles themselves. Yes, many societies that called themselves liberal practiced slavery, colonialism, and exclusion—but this represents a failure to implement liberal principles, not the principles themselves. This is a form of moral puritanism that I have very little time for, quite frankly. It leaves us nowhere, except the demand to constantly self-flagellate and a demand to be in a constant mode of reckoning with our past, making the present a miserable existence for all.
Bullshit. Liberalism is duly manifest by Europe and America in their treatment of Palestinians. Israel is a perfect example of the practice of the sacred versus the profane, otherwise known as apartheid and genocide. This is not a question of moral puritanism, but the recognition of how the very idea of a universalist humanity is dismissed by liberals.
You're still conflating the actions of particular governments with liberal principles themselves. It seems to me, from casual observation, that most committed liberals in the world are highly critical of Israel, no?
Liberalism (capital L) is the hegemonic political ideology of the state. Small l liberalism can mean all kinds of things, a “moveable feast”. Nearly half of USA population are supporters of Trump, and a good 30% in addition who are followers of Democrats, are also part of those same folk that I would not describe as little l liberal.
How deliciously you've managed to demonstrate my entire thesis about epistemic collapse in a single paragraph. When 'liberalism can mean all kinds of things, a moveable feast,' you've essentially argued that words have no stable meaning—which makes rational discourse impossible and democratic deliberation a farce.
If liberalism is simultaneously the "hegemonic political ideology of the state" AND something that 70% of Americans reject, then perhaps the problem isn't liberalism but your capacity for coherent analysis. You can't have it both ways: either liberalism dominates everything or it's rejected by most people. Pick a lane.
The fact that you classify both Trump supporters AND Democrats as non-liberal while claiming liberalism is hegemonic suggests you've created a perfectly unfalsifiable theory where liberalism is simultaneously all-powerful and practically non-existent. Quite the intellectual achievement—you've managed to make your critique immune to evidence by making it immune to meaning.
no true liberalism fallacy
I largely agree with you. The term “Liberalism” often concatenates two very different views:
1) The rules of the game, which you advocate for. This places Liberals in the role of being referee in the political game.
2) A large group of related policy stands for what the government should do, which are typically “progressive” in the American use of the term “Liberal” and something closer to libertarianism in the European use of the term.
Does this not , however, lead to a conundrum? How does one really advocate for Liberalism in day-to-day politics if it does not consist of policy stands? It is the policy stands that most people care about, not the rules of the game or the referee who enforces the rules.
I don't think it leads to a conundrum at all. Instead, it should lead one to recognize political activities that are compatible with self-government and those that aren't.
Liberalism isn't neutral about everything—it's specifically committed to defending the conditions that make democratic choice possible. When movements explicitly reject constitutional constraints, democratic accountability, or the basic framework of self-government, they've placed themselves outside legitimate political debate entirely.
If a large group believes government should trample over basic liberal commitments—whether that's refusing to accept election results, operating federal agencies outside constitutional constraint, or building parallel systems to escape democratic accountability—then that group has made itself incompatible with liberal democracy. They're not offering policy alternatives within the framework; they're attacking the framework itself.
The practical challenge isn't staying neutral between competing policy visions—progressives and conservatives can both be liberal. The challenge is recognizing when movements have abandoned liberalism entirely and responding accordingly. You can't defend self-government by treating its enemies as legitimate participants in democratic debate. This is my charge.
I think you exaggerate the extent to which individual policy conflicts involve actual violations of Liberalism (as you define it). Serious threats to liberalism comes up in very few policy issues.
Very few political movements in wealthy Western nations “explicitly reject constitutional constraints, democratic accountability, or the basic framework of self-government.” Even fewer of them “abandon liberalism entirely.”
It is particularly troubling if you define others who disagree with your policy stands as “enemies of self-government” and therefore not “as legitimate participants in democratic debate”.
Your entire line of reasoning in this reply seems to rationalize illiberalism by defining your opponents as illiberal.
You seem to be debating a straw man, here. Could you give me an example of something or someone I am characterizing as illiberal, by implication, in your opinion?
No, I am not debating a straw man. I am responding to your point.
I don’t know who you have in mind when you define people as “enemies of self-government” and therefore not “as legitimate participants in democratic debate”.
Frankly, it seems quite illiberal and contrary to the main point of your article (which I enjoyed and agreed with).
I notice you're still not providing any examples of what I've supposedly characterized as illiberal, so I'll do your work for you.
Consider Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, which involved forced expropriation and was vigorously defended by much of the socialist left—I remember the 'Hands Off Venezuela' protests across Western university campuses well.
This was clearly an illiberal project, not because of its economic goals, but because comprehensive expropriation concentrated power to the degree that independent institutions became impossible to maintain. As many liberal critics suspected at the time, the project was headed toward totalitarianism—and that's exactly where it landed.
This demonstrates how my framework actually works: it's not about opposing wealth redistribution or public ownership per se—many liberal democracies have extensive public sectors. It's about recognizing when economic arrangements become so concentrated that they undermine the institutional independence necessary for democratic accountability.
If you want to critique my reasoning, please point to specific examples of what I've written that you object to. Otherwise, you're arguing against positions I haven't taken.
No, I agree with you that Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution is both illiberal and very bad. And anyone in the West who is in favor of it is likely not a Liberal.
I thought you were referring to illiberal political movements in wealthy Western nations. My mistake.
He had me until he started conflating socialism with authoritarianism. “Socialists believe in collective ownership and democratic control of economic resources. But when socialist movements try to implement their vision through revolutionary violence or authoritarian control, they abandon liberal principles. Democratic socialism can be liberal; revolutionary socialism cannot.” So far so good. But he also claims you cannot have liberalism with collective ownership even if these are democratic decisions. Why cannot a society own natural resources and contract out their exploitation. Or own the railways and hospitals? There’s an unnecessary anti socialist bias in this outline of liberalism.
I completely agree that collective ownership, as implemented through democratic mechanisms (e.g., the USPS, public healthcare, public transportation), can be fully compatible with liberal democracy. My concern isn’t with these specific cases. Rather, it’s with the classical socialist theory that advocates the wholesale abolition of private property and seeks to replace market mechanisms entirely with democratic deliberation.
Such a vision runs into profound epistemic and practical challenges. Economically, it encounters the well-documented calculation problem—the difficulty in allocating resources efficiently without price signals. Politically, it risks the tyranny of the majority, where democratic deliberation can easily devolve into the imposition of majority preferences without adequate protections for individual rights or minority interests. Epistemically, it assumes that collective deliberation can effectively manage the vast complexity of economic life, which history and experience suggest is extraordinarily challenging.
So, while collective ownership in certain domains—implemented within democratic accountability and constitutional protections—can be perfectly liberal and reasonable, the traditional socialist ideal of abolishing private property entirely is epistemically untenable and practically dangerous. It’s not a bias against socialism per se, but a recognition of liberalism’s commitment to institutional humility and pragmatic constraint.
This is brilliant, thank you! I wonder if social media might be a fatal monkey wrench for the liberal project. In my neck of the New England woods, the illiberal avalanche from the left has been the most flagrant in the past decade or so, coming from the younger cohorts of the college educated managerial class and imposed on everyone else. They're obsessed with controlling language, in particular, which is a very effective way to manipulate thought, as Orwell described so vividly. I was struck by the idea here of humility being key to liberalism because that is what these young neo Puritans sorely lack, but arrogance is a perennial folly of youth, isn't it? Now social media adds a new kerosene, fueled by the profit motive that rewards hostility and passion with every click, so that the most emotional arguments, rather than the most rational, have a disproportionate influence on the marketplace of ideas. It's hard to imagine what could turn the tide when academia and so many institutions are pandering to popular dogma rather than seeking truth. Thanks again for an excellent argument in defense of reason!
I don't think you're using the correct definition of private property to describe communist and socialist ideology. Private property is in the domain of capital: the means of production. This is what communists and by extension socialists seek to collectivise. You seem to be conflating that with personal property, which communists are not saying you can't have.
You're also ignoring the fact that in the US today, and elsewhere, huge swaths of the economy are centralized and controlled by a small group. Amazon for consumer goods and web services. Blackstone for housing. Glencore for minerals. ExxonMobil for oil. How is zero democratic control over these critical sectors better than placing them under the control of the public? How is the legally mandated objective to bring short-term profits for shareholders better than a system which mandates a benefit to all stakeholders (i.e. the public)?