The Evolution of Liberalism

Navigating the tensions

For Upstream this week, I spoke with Andrew Yang about why our political system is broken and his plan to fix it:

For Moment of Zen this week, we talked to Ben Smith about the past, present, and future of media:

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This is the fourth piece in our series on liberalism

Liberalism has a radically different notion of human nature than what had come before it.

As Paul Klingsnorth put it, “Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception…. The sovereign human person, disembedded from community, history and nature, would utilise reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live…. The rational individual, making her choices in a marketplace, overseen by a government committed to ‘liberty’ and guarding her ‘rights’ through a ‘social contract’: this was the basis of a wholly new world.

What is crucial to understand here - and this is what makes liberalism an ideology - is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialize, so liberalism did not naturally ‘evolve’ from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the ‘sovereign individual’ from new cloth.”

OK, so how did this version of human nature get created? 

Let’s segment liberalism into a few different phases.

The first phase of liberalism tried to free people from tyranny. This was the revolutionary wars of England and France that freed people from Kings.

The second phase of liberalism tried to free people from tradition. This tried to free people from all attachments and contexts, particularly religious and nationalist ones. The locus of one’s identity became freely chosen belief—not family, country, or God. 

The third phase of liberalism tried to free people from culture. This was the era of mass capitalism promoted by the right, and mass democracy promoted by the left. The voter knows what’s best, the customer is always right.

The fourth phase of liberalism is trying to free people from nature. It’s trying to affirm the individual’s “human right” to make of oneself anything at all and to deny any constraint resulting from the “accident” of birth. Liberalism is based on the protection of autonomy, but with every passing decade, there's been an expansion of the scope of that autonomy, including the realm of human biology. We must consent to everything, including our families, cultures, and bodies. The latter has concluded in transhumanism, which attempts to transcend all brute facts of identity and to transcend the human altogether.

At no stage do we find a rejection of what came before, only a recognition that it did not go far enough. The history of liberalism is the history of an idea taking itself ever more seriously. Become what you are is the mandate not only for men, but also for ideas.

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It’s worth looking at the differences between English and French liberalism, since that’s where many of the schisms and tensions lie.

John Locke said we sacrifice a portion of our natural rights in order to enter society and protect our private property. God gave us these rights and the state was created by us merely to protect them.

Well, Rousseau said, no, we’re going to exchange our natural rights for civil rights. And so civil rights are a complete and wholesale replacement of your natural rights. So you don't have your natural rights anymore. You've given them up once you enter in society, but you get whatever rights the state is prepared to give you. And that's how we end up with civil rights. You see this in the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen—it sounds Lockean in the first two-thirds, then it veers off and suggests enforcing labor to provide these rights. That’s the only place where it could go of course.

You see this tension between natural and civil rights in America hundreds of years later. 

Chris Caldwell wrote a book that illuminated this tension. His main thesis is that we have two irreconcilable constitutions, and our country is split over which constitution they subscribe to, the one of 1789 or 1964

The basic TLDR is that civil rights laws were sold to the public on the principle of non discrimination, and then immediately resulted in a gigantic expansion of administrative and bureaucratic power and a redefinition of non discrimination to affirmative action.

The civil rights movement, which started with/for black people but rapidly moved on to encompass every other category of allegedly marginalized group, was/is sold on the basis of nondiscrimination and equality of opportunity. And then it immediately turned to equal outcomes. This happened with the original civil rights legislation in the mid 60's and with every new round for each new group since.

Even just within race, it was never meant to expand beyond segregation in the south. Hubert Humphrey said, “If this results in affirmative action, I’ll eat the bill”. In the Congressional debate then, you could see people mocking others worried about things that later came to pass.

The distinction some people draw is between individual rights and group rights. People were always "protected" as individuals, but today they're protected as groups. It’s not clear how to determine which groups need extra gov't protection beyond individual rights and in what capacities.

Quoting Caldwell: "The Civil Rights Act became the mechanism through which to spread an entire social agenda that the American people did not necessarily vote for, agree to, or even particularly want in the moment.. served as a precedent for kind of activist government in the in the years that follow.”

What's big wasn't just the outcomes, it was the legal precedent set by the *process* In short, power moved from congress to courts. By moving to the courts, activists could get written into law things that were highly unpopular & would never get legislated otherwise. In light of all this, it's interesting to think about intersectionality and identity politics as not just cultural or intellectual fashions/belief systems, but also, among other things, legal strategies that emerged out the developments starting in 1964.

Concluding Caldwell: Since the 1960s we have effectively lived under two irreconcilable constitutions, and our country is split over which constitution they subscribe to, the one of 1789 or 1964—the one of individual rights, or the one of group rights.

Reconciling the tensions between the two main tenets of liberalism — liberty (individual rights) and equality, later rebranded as equity (group rights) — is something we’ll continue to unpack in future posts.