by liberal japonicus
I’d start off by noting that depending on the way you read the title, you can fit any perspective.
The jumping off point for this is Ezra Klein’s podcast with Helena Rosenblatt, the author of The Lost History of Liberalism. (transcript here)The book is quite interesting and is a general audience book drawn from her academic works, including Thinking with Rousseau : From Machiavelli to Schmitt (co-authored with Paul Schweigert), Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to The Social Contract and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion. She helps redirect the discussion of liberalism from an Anglocentric view to one related more to Europe. This New York Review of Books piece by David Bell is nice if you don’t have time to read the original, in that he juxtaposes 3 books which echo the same theme. (And I’m finding this site to be helpful getting around paywalls)
So I’m all in, I’m a Europhile and get a bit sick of the Anglo-American centric nature of a lot of political discussion (on one podcast, someone observed how US conservatives go to Europe and marvel at the infrastructure and order and wonder why this sort of order doesn’t happen in the states, oblivious to the fact that the people actually pay for that shit in the form of taxes)
And I’ll try to not make this bash Ezra episode #infinity, but reading Rosenblatt, it’s pretty clear that she is a historian, but towards the end, Klein directly challenges the moral track record of liberalism and suggests that its core philosophy has been deeply intertwined with some of society’s historic and modern problems.
That’s a very glittering answer, but I think a critic of liberalism would say: What good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its founding constitution? Or in the European case: What good is your liberalism if it is so interwoven with colonialism? There were many people who certainly believed in many liberal ideas we’re talking about here, who made space for both of those practices within their liberalism.
How typical of Klein to haul a historian on to his podcast and have her answer for the things she is trying to describe. ‘In your book about Genghis Khan, why didn’t you denounce him more strongly? Don’t you think he was evil incarnate?’ Christ on a crutch.
In another section, Klein opines:
Another crisis is that individualism has gone very far. And I think the internet and social media and algorithmic media and the fracturing of what we know — and our bonds from each other — and the weakening of civic institutions and religions and labor unions… There is a crisis of individualism that has become, partially, a crisis of meaning. … [Liberalism] also has left it with very little language in which to talk about something that is not just individualism.
Yes, liberalism, totally separate from our capitalist culture and consumerism, neoliberalism and commodification, is all to blame. If liberalism were all that people said it was, why does it let that shit happen?
Rosenblatt doesn’t seem to be prepared for this, but my answer would be that liberalism, like the scientific method, has built in to it a mechanism to question itself. Liberalism arose in a time of slavery and colonialism, patriarchalism and nationalism, yet it has provided. and continues to provide us with the tools to attack those problems. Like the scientific method, the people who are against it simply ape it (yes, I did my own research) to try and generate a conclusion that satisfies their own prejudices.
Steel man that, Klein.
Zing! nous scores! 😁 👍 !
Yet another liberal bona fide…
At the risk of sounding a bit snippy, I didn’t see any of the earlier qualifications. Something like believing in the common good, the commons (be it environmental, knowledge, creative, or public infrastructure), early adoption of social causes, accepting non-violent protest and free speech, recognizing the strength of diversity, etc etc.
I’d edit that the liberal bona fide you mention to be
liberals know there are things that all people need and know that we all need to take steps to make sure that they have them.
but that doesn’t have that salty taste.
“Just for openers, conservatism is a check on fads with shaky to no basis in the real world.”
LOL! You mean like cutting taxes will raise revenue? Tariffs will revise domestic manufacturing? The Voting Rights Act is “reverse discrimination” or can be dismissed as simply a “fad”?
You can’t be serious. Given your idiosyncratic definition of “conservatism” I guess I could just as well argue that Mao, Stalin, Lenin, et al weren’t “real (small c) communists. Indeed, there are no True Scotsmen.
But thanks for the retort. It’s good to be back.
“Yet another liberal bona fide: liberals know what people want and need better than they know themselves.”
As opposed to conservatives whose overriding political beliefs amount to the position that people acceed to what conservatives demand, and don’t really care what people want or need.
LOL….can we call this a “fad”? It’s been a conservative attribute since the French Revolution.
“I have yet to see a single “conservative” political group do anything of the sort.”
Nobody wants to get on a bandwagon that might just turn out to be a fad, ya’ know, because being tainted with something deemed “liberal” would simply be unforgivable, and that is the most important thing in politics!
I’ve hesitated to wade into this one, because I’m uncertain what “liberalism” (or “conservatism”) mean in American English. But this is the internet, so…
wjca seems to be defining “conservative” as a follower of the principle of Chesterton’s fence. But there must be more to it than that, or there’d be no difference between a conservative and a Fabian gradualist.
I suggest that, aside from being reluctant in general to change things, a conservative believes that the distribution of wealth resulting from the operation of the somewhat free market we’ve got is proper and just. The economically unfortunate may be helped by the government, but that’s essentially a collective act of charity. Indeed, so deeply held is this belief about wealth distribution that conservatives hold redistributive taxation to be no more than the government helping itself to their money.
Whereas a liberal sees the distribution of wealth resulting from the operation of the somewhat free market we’ve got as partly arbitrary. We are not socialists, in that we want an economic system which encourages private production, but we believe that when that system produces great inequality of wealth, that is a defect to be ameliorated. We see redistributive taxation as a proper attempt to make good that defect.
That is, liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views of the proper role of government.
Honestly, 90% of the artists I know are either in a relationship with a more stably employed SO
This is a recurring theme among the authors who occasionally hang out a Charlie Stross’s blog. They pretty much all believe that novel-length fiction in the future will be done by a relative handful of people with enough reputation to have an agent, hired editors, and advances big enough to live on. Then a larger group who are supported (including pensioners). Then mostly self-publishers who do it on their own, sans things like copy editors. I tend to avoid those because I don’t enjoy being a copy editor while I read for enjoyment.
I can’t speak for how UK conservatives (or Conservatives, which I understand may be rather different) may understand things. But here is how I would view conservatism regarding the distribution of wealth:
If someone acquires wealth (stipulating legal means), then they are entitled to enjoy that wealth. However, there is a limit — which I would label “Enough”. At some point, you have all of the necessities of life covered, and also (in no rigid order) you have funds set aside for emergencies, you have made reasonable progress (for your age) towards funding your retirement, and you have some number of luxuries. At some point, you reach a pkace where you are limited by the one thing you cannot buy: time. That is, you can’t acutally enjoy an addditional luxury without ceasing to have time for one you have already.**
At that point (if not before), you have Enough. There is no financial reason to acquire more wealth. The only “benefit” is to be able to say, to those with no clue what you do or why it matters, “I must be better / more important than you because I am richer / get paid more.” To be blunt, it’s nothing but a dick measuring contest. Which can be done just as well, for those who care, even if income beyond that is taxed at 100%.
If a country finds it has people who have wealth beyond that, they have a problem. One which needs to be addressed, for the common good. (But also, although they likely won’t recognize it, for the good of the wealthy. Otherwise torches and pitchforks, possible not even metaphoric ones, are probably in their future.) Exactly how best to go about that effectively and equitably is an open question. That it should be done is not.
** Stipulating the “enjoy” does not encompass just being happy to own something, even though it is somewhere where you never even see it.
It’s hard to know where to jump into this discussion.
FIrst, I think Pro Bono’s take on wj’s conservatism is correct. Chesterton’s fence captures it pretty well. From his writing here, wj’s conservatism appears essentially to call for considering the consequences of any changes you want to make before making the change. Not assuming you are the smartest person in the room with all the answers to a given problem. Circumspection and modesty.
These are good things, actually.
The problem actual conservatives – people like wj, if I may speak for him – have is that the brand has been taken over by reactionaries and irresponsible greedheads.
It’s really hard to talk about liberalism because the word has meant so many different things. Everything from the Manchester School to FDR’s New Deal and the Great Society of the 60’s. Now, in this country, it basically means an expansive role for government – and the federal government in particular – in addressing social and economic issues, and a focus on extending civil rights to more marginal demographics.
So much crap has been loaded onto both terms that it’s hard to boil it all down, but I think the above is reasonably accurate.
I see the “elite” thing as more of a regional issue than a left-right one. The majority of public media is generated in larger cities, and in particular larger cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. And it reflects the perspective of people there, with the occasional condescending “common man diner interview” a la the NYT.
People who don’t live in those places feel under-represented and talked down to. Not just conservative people, a highly educated raging liberal gay friend who lives in Cincinnati feels this way.
And they have a point.
Public policy at the federal level is also set in Washington, which is an in-the-general-area-of-coastal big city. And a disproportionate number of folks setting policy (both liberal and conservative) were educated in institutions in coastal areas.
So, the perception is not completely imaginary.
Regarding hippy-ish artists, the many working musicians I know work incredibly hard for not a lot of money. Some have spouses or partners with day jobs, which among things makes health insurance available. Many of them achieve something like a middle-class life, but it often takes them well into middle age to get there. Some never do.
I probably get 6 to 10 requests a year to chip in on a GoFundMe program for a musician who got sick.
I’m somewhat skeptical of Platner – I wonder if he’s gonna be another Fetterman – but I think his perception that the true class divide is between people whose income comes from their work, and people whose income comes from there money, is pretty accurate.
What I really wish we could get to is a model where ownership of productive enterprises was more widely distributed. More or less something like employee ownership. That, and a recognition that there are essential goods that the market does not – and in some cases can not and never will – provide in a fair and equitable way, and that providing those goods should be the job of the public sector, i.e. government.
And yes, Klein seemed oddly intent on catching Rosenblatt out during the interview. I guess he feels a need to be “edgy”. I thought she handled herself pretty well – it seemed like he put her on her back foot a bit, but she didn’t really take the bait.
Very well put. I’m clear that, at this pount, I’m probably fighting a losing battle in trying to reclaim the brand. But I haven’t come up with a better label. If someone has suggestions, I’d definitely be interested.
I’m inclined to agree. With a couple of caveats.
First, I’d include people whose work involves playing with other people’s money (bankers, brokers, etc.) in with the second group. Perhaps phrase it simply as “income from money” rather than just those with “income from their money.”
Second, I think a bit of nuance may be required when looking at people who are retired. A lot of us are living on income from money (i.e. our savings, investments, and IRAs), even though we earned that originally from work. Some of those remain in the money-from-work group, and others morph (psychologically and politically) into the money-from-money group — without actually being perceived as joining the moneyed class.
“But I haven’t come up with a better label.”
I’d vote for “sane”. 😉
And agreed as to folks who have retired and are living, in part or completely, from investments made during a life of work. : raises hand :
“paelo-con” and “neo-con” are both out of the question.
proto-con, ur-con ?
Now that others have weighed in on their experience with the artists they know, I’d note that wj took “solidly middle class” as some kind of tell. What I meant was that my artist friends are far from “elite.” They live in modest homes in small towns – old small towns with old modest homes. Cool older homes because they made them that way with their talents, but homes that aren’t close to selling for seven figures.
So artists? – yes. Coastal? – yes. Cosmopolitan? – well, close to a large city, but in a small town, so whatever that means to you. Educated – varies, but few, if any, advanced degrees from private schools. Monied – no, unless being somewhere in the middle of middle class, which is what I meant by “solidly middle class,” is a marker of being elite.
Some have other jobs (or spouses with regular jobs). One friend’s other job is teaching kids art at an art school. He used to teach at a Montessori school before that. And other things before that. Another friend dog sits, as she did for us when we went on a vacation a couple years ago. She likes to paint dog portraits, among other things.
These are my liberals.
I understand that the history of ideas is interesting. (IMHO, there’s a lot of Great Chain of Being in contemporary American conservativism and especially in the Ayn Rand kind with its worship of wealthy people). BUT, apart from the fun of learning and discussing, how important are historical understandings of words like “liberal” or “conservative”? It seems to me that we serve the challenges of today better if we figure out what those words mean now.
Here’s an example of why I think we need to focus on what words mean now: I have the impression that there is a certain kind of self-identified progressive who hates Democrats because of equating the party with the liberalism of oh, say, two hundred years ago? They see liberalism as aligned with unregulated capitalism and capital. From that perspective, any Democrat who has any connection, no matter how remote, to a business is a corporate sell out and they start paraphrasing Marx. Actually, they don’t need to know of a corporate connection. They just assume that all Dems are sell outs due to not being whatever they are. I’ve learned from convos that some of these people are actually dumb enough to be communists. I don’t think most are. They speak in catch phrases they picked up somewhere. Many of the catch phrases are about liberalism as it existed historically in the context of a time when slavery existed and unions didn’t.
So, I’d rather we figured out what “liberal” and “conservative” mean now. I’d also like to know what the fuck “progressive” means that’s substantially different from just plain old “Democrat”. I’ve read the party platforms of both the Democrats and the Democratic Socialists and there really isn’t a substantive difference in terms of domestic policies. There’s a style difference; the Dem platform is detailed and extensive, while the DSA platform reads like it was written by a college sophomore who is trying to sound like a member of the IWW. The Dem platform has more specifics while the DSAs platform doesn’t get past the slogan stage.
The Dem platform has more specifics while the DSAs platform doesn’t get past the slogan stage.
my (aggressively-cynical) take on a lot of the very-online-left is that it’s a pose that allows one to participate in political discussion without running the chance of ever having to be responsible for anything any elected politician will ever do – because nobody is ever going to get elected on that platform. can’t be a sell-out if there’s no market for what you’re offering!
Given wj’s reflex to defend “true” conservatives and conservatism from some of the worst accusations that can be and have been made against them, and the rough consensus here that the GOP, MAGA and maybe most Republicans these days are “reactionaries and irresponsible greedheads”, I’d be interested to know when wj thinks the switch happened between most conservatives being roughly like him, and now. When last, under which presidency, did you feel wj that people like you were part of the conservative mainstream? And do you think that your views have changed somewhat as a reaction to the changes you have perceived developing in today’s GOP?
Tangentially, gift link:
Barney Frank, in Hospice, Has Advice for Democrats
Mr. Frank speaks about the missteps of the Democratic Party and his hope for its future. “Frankly, if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/us/barney-frank-congress-democrats-advice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j1A.PqtU.8Yyt0B_H6GEI&smid=url-share
great article GFtNC.
The American context has it’s, um, peculiarities. For most of the 20th century a large block of people who could be classified as “conservative” or even self-described that way would be your white Southern Democrats, with Klan members/fellow travelers as your once and future reactionaries. So it’s not new, it’s just that their political descendants are now situated in the Republican party. I don’t think those are the “conservatives” that wj is intending to associate himself with, but they were there.
If someone asked me to taxonomize the Liberal vs. Progressive divide as it exists in the US today…
Historically the difference between a liberal and a progressive would arise out of class differences understood through a more UK class-based view of these things – liberals are bourgeoise reformers and progressives are proletarian disrupters.
But bourgeoise and proletariat don’t work all that well for mapping the dividing lines in the US.
In current US conversation I’d still say that the reformer/disrupter distinction holds – albeit with a great, fuzzy overlap, but the class distinction is less of a thing. Instead it is an imprecise alchemy of age, region, and identity.
A liberal could be an older black lady who fought through civil rights and canvases for Democrats. It could be an older gay veteran who served before gays were allowed to serve openly. It could be a younger moderate. It could be a rural midwesterner of any age who doesn’t know any at-risk minorities and is primarily concerned with economics. It might be a college-educated wonk who believes in incrementalism, compromise, and living to fight another day.
Self-described liberals in the US tend to worry about capturing the swing vote, believing that those further to the left should accept that winning requires tacking to center and letting go of fights that cannot be won in this current round, and they resent anyone further to the left who refuses to compromise.
A progressive could be a younger voter who sees climate change as an existential threat, and the current strategy of compromise and incrementalism as a path to extinction. It could be a trans-person or a parent of a trans-child who will not stand for having their health care taken away in their state in order to placate a scared voter in another state who doesn’t know a single trans-person. It could be younger minority voters who see all of the civil rights victories being rolled back and think that the system itself needs to be replaced, rather than that the same battles need to be refought for a tenuous victory no more secure than the last one. It could be an anti-capitalist. It could be a moderate anti-capitalist who wants something more like the Nordic model. It could be a person with loved ones trapped in a foreign conflict zone who are being told that the Democrats will not say or do anything because doing so will be too electorally costly.
Self-described progressives in the US tend to worry about selling out the marginalized in the name of electoral pragmatism. They focus on turning out the youth vote and energizing the left fringe to overcome any squeamishness from the middle, and they resent being abandoned by their compatriots to the center left whenever those compatriots see more electoral gain in disavowing the progressives’ core priorities.
Something like that, anyway.
I’m sure the conversation will slide towards straw-man justifications of why one side is right and the other side is [fill in your favorite flavor of wrong, weak principled, and destined to lose], but I think these work as descriptions.
I think it was more of a gradual change than a switch. There were glimmers with Barry Goldwater, although he wouldn’t be accounted one of their own by today’s “conservatives.” Well, he was far more libertarian than conservative. Nixon’s Southern Strategy took a big step, by bringing southern white racist reactionaries in and labeling them “conservative.” Their views weren’t, then, the norm, but they were accepted into the fold.
I’ve been anti-Reagan since he was Governor of California. (Might have something to do with his hostility to the University of California while I was a student there.) As President he seemed more libertarian than conservative or reactionary; less so than Goldwater, but in that mold. And he would be absolutely unacceptable to today’s “conservatives” — not nasty enough. And probably view them with utter contempt, too.
The last time I felt that I was anywhere near the conservative mainstream? Probably the mid-1990s. (Bob Dole was the last Republican Presidential candidate I voted for. Since then, with the exception of Romney, they’ve seemed more like Dixiecrats.)
I’m sure my views have changed some over the years. (One of my favorite quotes when it comes to politics: “When the known facts change, I change my views accordingly. What do you do?”) But I feel like it’s more a matter of my views becoming more vehement as some things I care about come under increased threat from the insanities self-proclaimed conservatives.
Hope that helps.
Just FYI, the Presidents (in my lifetime) I would consider conservatives as I understand the term: Eisenhower, Bush I, Obama. With Nixon and maybe Clinton as close but not really there.
YMMV
Thanks, wj, very interesting.
I’m sure the conversation will slide towards straw-man justifications of why one side is right and the other side is [fill in your favorite flavor of wrong, weak principled, and destined to lose], but I think these work as descriptions.
It’s a tough one, particularly with people (on both sides) who are determined to vilify the views of the other side, and ostracise those who hold them. This is where I particularly sympathise with Barney Frank when he talks about the litmus tests. To look at people who share very many of one’s basic values and aims, but who disagree on one or two issues, and immediately write them off as the devil’s spawn, is regrettable and counter-productive; it lowers the chances of achieving much in the generally desired direction of travel. You could categorise this as “destined to lose”, but I think that is a simplistic way of looking at it, and essentially a different mindset regarding strategy v tactics.
“They live in modest homes in small towns”
Many of the working musicians I know, likewise.
Re: Barney Frank – I appreciate what he’s saying and generally agree, more or less. But the incremental acceptance of gay rights would not have happened without Stonewall.
Similarly, women getting the vote would not have happened without all the suffragettes who took beatings and spent time in jail. Basic legal equality for black people would not have happened without Selma, to say nothing of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. The 8 hour day and the weekend would not have happened without the radical and often violent labor activities of the late 19th and early 20th C. Blair Mountain, y’all.
As far as the DSA vs the Democrats, the DSA is in the position of not having to actually govern. So they can make relatively more extreme demands. And if nobody does that, the needle doesn’t move.
The Overton Window opens in more than one direction.
As a kind of sidebar, I’m about to start reading Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays”. The whole distributivist / personalist perspective is one I don’t fully understand, and am curious about. And it’s one that had a pretty broad consituency once upon a time, but seems to have been forgotten.
With all respect to the Democrats, who consistently get my vote and my money such as it is, what we have now is not working.
“what we have now isn’t working”
You get no argument from me on that. And despite my comments on litmus tests, that should in no way be taken as opposition to certain kinds of extreme protest and activism; what i think is so counterproductive is the necessity for every box of the ideological checklist having to be ticked before allies can be accepted.
As fun as it is to whale on wj, I’ll take a stab at addressing wonkie’s comment. I don’t know if it is because I’m here in Japan, but I find I cannot anticipate objections and alternate proposals if I don’t know the history of the constructs that are being discussed. Pro bono notes the divergence between the UK and the US in terms of ‘liberal’, and I do think that a lot of play in the term. It’s not as funny as Brits, when they first got CNN, were horrified when talking heads were discussing IRA contributions, but it’s second.
So understanding what the words mean now is important, but I don’t think we can unless we think about the history. I remember Charles Bird complaining that liberal came from the idea of liberty i.e. freedom, so he couldn’t understand how us perfidious liberals could be so hypocritical about it. I think I replied to him (and I may be enhancing my response in my mind) that it was ‘free’ but it was related to a social class of people, i.e. non-slaves, so it wasn’t that warmed over bullshit libertarianism that he liked to run up the flag pole from time to time. Again, I may be misremembering this, so take that with salt. But over at LGM, there was this post with a tweet quoting Massie saying
“All this time,” Massie explained, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
Maybe I’m making too much of a stretch, but Massie sounds like a person who really didn’t think what libertarian entailed. I don’t know how the world would be different if he had some awareness about that, but if it took Trump to play who’s your daddy with him to figure it out, why is anyone surprised about this dumpster fire?
But the incremental acceptance of gay rights would not have happened without Stonewall.
there is definitely a need for both approaches. the trick is in the balance. and only hindsight can tell us what the right blend was.
possibly related: the evil DNC has released the long-withheld “autopsy”
every page has this disclaimer at the top:
and the text is heavily annotated with “citation needed” notes. the “Conclusion” section is empty, as is the appendix.
i can see why they didn’t want to release it. it’s more of a rough draft.
possibly related: the evil DNC has released the long-withheld “autopsy”
Here’s Grok’s 67 cents on it.
“Overall Assessment: The report is a relatively constructive, data-oriented party document that avoids pure denialism and admits execution flaws. It provides useful granular metrics on contacts, spending allocation, and tech performance. However, its partisan lens, focus on delivery over potential ideological or policy mismatches, selective framing of “narrow” losses, and recommendations that largely double down on existing ecosystems limit its diagnostic depth. External critiques (e.g., on omissions around Gaza, Biden approval, or consultant bloat) highlight what it under-emphasizes. It is more a blueprint for renewed investment than a radical rethink. Minor factual slips exist, but the core data tracks with public records; the primary weaknesses are interpretive and structural biases.”
Democratic Report Analysis