You’re a liberal and you don’t even know it

In 1955, the philosopher Charles Frankel was troubled. A committed civil libertarian, he had come to believe that the prevailing winds of public life had turned against his beloved liberalism. He wrote a book, The Case for Modern Man, defending it from critics on the left and right alike.

His concluding chapter, titled “The Revolution of Modernity,” argued that liberalism had succeeded on a more fundamental level than most appreciated. Liberal modernity has not only been the era of technological progress and rapid economic growth, but also “a moral revolution of extraordinary scope, a radical alteration in what the human imagination is prepared to envisage and demand.”

One contemporary reviewer urged Frankel to expand on these concluding remarks at book length — to explain how this moral revolution worked and how it would shape our world. But Frankel never did. In fairness, he was quite busy: He left his post at Columbia University to join the State Department, only to quit in 1967 in protest of the Vietnam War. He spent the rest of his shortened life advocating for civil liberties and the humanities, murdered in 1979 during a robbery at his New York home.

Frankel lived just long enough to see his optimism vindicated by events. The rise of the civil rights movement, feminism, and LGBT activism proved that liberalism had indeed altered the kinds of moral equality that Americans were prepared to demand. Liberalism’s central idea, that society should allow all people to live their lives as free and equal citizens, had never come closer to reality in all of human history.

Our moment, like Frankel’s, is a seemingly dire time for liberalism: a moment where it faces an extinction-level threat from the rise of authoritarian movements inside its historical bastions. Intellectuals are once again predicting liberalism’s imminent doom. Is there any hope that they are as wrong as the obituaries penned during Frankel’s time?

The answer, I believe is yes. To understand why, we should turn to a new book that finally delivers on the promise of Frankel’s concluding chapter — and, in the process, helps us understand what a future liberal revival might look.

Liberalism as a Way of Life, by Canadian political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre, is an unusual work of philosophy — pairing exposition of John Rawls’ theory of moral psychology with analyses of The Good Place and headlines in The Onion.

The goal is to illustrate something Lefebvre believes has been lost: the idea that liberalism is not merely a political philosophy, but rather a set of implicitly shared values and norms that define social life in advanced democratic societies.

“Written into our foundational institutions, and underlying so much of the culture we daily live and breathe, liberalism has seeped into our pores so as to profoundly and personally shape who we are,” Lefebvre writes.

Think about what you believe about the world, on a really elementary level. Does it start with the idea that all people deserve to be treated equally? That no one person is fundamentally better than any other? That each person should be free to live life in the way that they want, and still be treated with kindness and respect?

These, Lefebvre argues, are liberal beliefs — ones that have spread only recently and to only some parts of the world. But in those parts, these liberal values are so widely and commonly accepted that most people consider them nothing more than common sense. We are liberals and we don’t even know it.

One of Lefebvre’s most vivid illustrations is his discussion of English-language swear words.

It used to be that the worst curses focused on hygiene, religion, and sexual morality. But words like “shit,” “fuck,” and “damn” have lost their sting, now considered more impolite than offensive. We print them in Vox without much pushback from either readers or editors.

The words that actually cause offense nowadays are slurs — especially ones that target minorities and marginalized groups. These are the words that truly shock people today, language that could blow up a dinner party or give cause for a hostile workplace lawsuit. I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would publish an article with uncensored versions of them.

For Lefebvre, this shift in linguistic norms reflects a deeper moral regime change.

Swear words derive their power from transgression, a kind of verbal shorthand that communicates disregard for prevailing social norms. The classic four-letter words transgressed against Victorian ideals of sexual morality and purity; their declining power represents the declining hold of those ideas on our collective morality. Slurs have taken their place because they transgress against liberalism — specifically, the liberal idea that all humans deserve equal respect regardless of their identity.

“A slur is a missile aimed at self-respect. It diminishes a person’s value, dismisses their goals, and undermines their confidence,” he writes. “If you condemn slurs no matter who they are aimed at … and if you are provoked by them in a way no other word has the power to do, then you are liberal in at least this respect.”

The slurs example, and many others, illustrate how liberalism has become more than a political doctrine about rights and democracy: It is, in liberal countries, the invisible source of many of our most basic ways of living. Liberal ideas shape the way we think about everything from government to religion to sports to friendship.

It is, as Lefebvre writes, “the water in which we swim:” as omnipresent and taken-for-granted as the ocean is for its fish.

Lefebvre’s analysis raises an obvious question. If liberal ideas about equality and freedom are so dominant in places like the United States, how come our country is so unequal and unfree?

To explain the gap, Lefebvre borrows a concept from the 19th-century Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, true Christianity was a radical moral doctrine that preached total devotion to others and the renunciation of worldly pleasures. This was, of course, at odds with the way nominally Christian societies — including their churches — operated at the time.

Thus, Kierkegaard distinguished between Christianity, on the one hand, and “Christendom” on the other. In Christendom, church leaders said the right things and performed the right rituals, but flagrantly violated Christian ethics in their actual lives. In Christendom, Kierkegaard wrote, the pastor is “a royal office holder, advancing steadily, making a career—and now he dramatically plays at Christianity, in short, he is performing comedy.”

Today, Lefebvre argues, we are living in liberaldom — a liberalism as compromised, infected and diluted by other forces as Christianity was in Kierkegaard’s time. “Liberaldom, we could say, is the craven capitulation to unliberal values that threaten to destroy your and my spirit,” he writes.

Lefebvre doesn’t offer a macro-solution to the problem of liberaldom. His task isn’t to theorize about politics traditionally conceived, like mass movements and elections. Instead, he aspires to write something like self-help: instructing liberals on how they can live a good life even when faced with the reality of liberaldom, detailing a list of “spiritual exercises” that can help us be more authentic liberals.

“Liberaldom is not something ‘out there’ in the world but rather anchored in a pattern of wants, aspirations, and habits built up over a lifetime. Unlearning it takes work and effort,” he writes.

It’s a novel idea (most of Lefebvre’s ideas are). But it also can feel a bit unsatisfying at a moment of liberal crisis. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, for example, writes that Lefebvre’s idea of spiritual exercise “seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day.”

Surely that’s an unfair standard. But it’s also a misunderstanding of Lefebvre’s project. His aim is not merely to help liberals be happier or calmer, but to rescue them from liberaldom. His goal is for readers to think through where their values and lives conflict, and figure out how to bring them in line. It is to create ways for people to confront the contradictions inherent to their lives and, ultimately, to resolve them in favor of their values.

The clearest pathway forward can be found in Lefebvre’s treatment of “reflective equilibrium,” a tool of moral reasoning developed by Lefebvre’s intellectual hero (and mine): John Rawls. The greatest liberal philosopher of the 20th century, Rawls is best known for his book A Theory of Justice — which almost single-handedly revived political philosophy in the Anglophone world.

“Reflective equilibrium” is one of Rawls’ less well-known concepts (at least outside of academic philosophy). It is a deliberate process where people start with a basic thing they believe to be true, draw out its implications, and see whether there are any contradictions that must be resolved. You repeat this process until you’re satisfied that everything is consistent — in equilibrium, so to speak.

Take an example: thinking through the morality of killing.

If you start from the premise that killing is always wrong, you’re quickly led to the conclusion that killing in self-defense is also wrong. But most people don’t think that it seems like if someone is trying to murder you, you should be able to fight back. Therefore, upon reflection, you should probably modify the original principle: instead of saying that killing is always wrong, you probably want to say that killing is almost always wrong. You keep testing and probing, figuring out what conditions should count as exceptions to the “no killing” rule. When you think you’re done, and that all your beliefs about killing are consistent, you’ve arrived at reflective equilibrium.

For Lefebvre, reflective equilibrium can be a means of testing whether our lives actually live up to our liberal values — and for refining our beliefs, and even everyday practices, to better fit with what we profess.

“The person who achieves such an equilibrium will be less susceptible to hypocrisy,” he says. “They will have brought their ideas, feelings, principles, and desires into alignment. Fluency and candor, grace and self-command, will be theirs.”

If he is right — and I believe he is — then the implications are not merely individual. If human beings are creatures who can reflect on our ideas and, when confronted with contradiction, believe that we need to change, then that creates a potential pathway for broader social change. Even in liberaldom, many people genuinely believe in liberal ideas; they get angry when they’re flouted by the state and its agents. Under such circumstances, identifying a gap between liberal belief and liberaldom’s reality can be a potentially radical act.

In the United States, this is the history of successful movements for social change. In his famous address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the contradictions between the liberalism of America’s founding and the liberaldom of the slaveholding South a central theme.

“Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it,” Douglass said. “For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

But “notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, I do not despair of this country,” he added. “There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.” No modern society, in Douglass’ view, could long survive the ruinous tension between slavery and freedom. Eventually, something had to give — and Douglass was convinced that, given the “obvious tendencies of the age,” liberalism would win out over liberaldom.

Ultimately, he was right: The rising popularity of the abolitionist cause led to Abraham Lincoln’s election. While the motivating power of America’s liberal ideas was hardly the only reason for slavery’s doom, it was a vital one.

This holds true in the grand contest for liberalism today. In my own forthcoming book, The Reactionary Spirit, I argue that elected authoritarians — like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán — are vulnerable precisely because they claim to stand for democracy.

The contradiction between their stated beliefs and actions creates fertile ground for their opponents to appeal to the pro-democracy consensus in their societies. And indeed, there is substantial evidence from recent elections in the United States, Brazil, Poland, and India that this can be a winning tactic.

But this tactic is not merely useful in defending liberalism from its enemies. It has also proven effective in improving our liberal societies: enacting reforms that bring them closer to their stated ideals.

Take, for example, the pro-housing YIMBY movement. The very name, Yes in My Backyard, is a play on the older term NIMBY — referring to the kind of faux-liberals who like the idea of wind power or affordable housing but won’t support such projects if they affect local property values. YIMBYs argue that, if you take the beliefs of liberal urban dwellers seriously, you must support building more and building faster to deal with America’s catastrophic housing crisis.

And guess what? It’s working!

“I used to keep track of individual YIMBY policy wins, but at a certain point I stopped because there were just too many,” Matt Yglesias writes at Slow Boring. “I have met actual human beings living in Arlington who read Richard Rothstein’s ‘The Color of Law,’ found that it genuinely changed their mind, and now are eager to fight the legacy of white supremacy by opening the door to expanding housing supply.”

Back in 1955, Charles Frankel called on his comrades to “reconstruct the liberal tradition to make it applicable to an age of technical specialization, bureaucratized power, and mass movements.” Today, liberals like the YIMBYs are doing just that by acting on the insights embedded in Lefebvre’s book. Their successes should give us hope that contemporary liberaldom is no more inevitable than the liberaldoms of 1854 or 1954 — and that liberalism’s reigning status as dominant moral doctrine provides resources to beat back illiberal challenges.