Damon Linker: How To Be a Liberal Today

What is liberalism?

Damon Linker:

“I first remember “liberal” becoming an epithet back in 1988 when Republican presidential nominee George H. W. Bush mocked his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis for being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Over the next few years, Republicans made a habit of treating “liberal” as an insult. But that’s nothing compared with what’s happened in more recent years, and especially since the right-populist turn with Trump, when conservative intellectuals began to distance themselves (and the Republican future) from even the classical liberal tradition that anchored the conservative movement from the 1950s on down through to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. …

Defining liberalism is notoriously difficult because it can take and has taken different forms in different times and places. That isn’t true about other theories of politics. A monarchy is a monarchy. The trappings of communism change somewhat in different contexts, but when instituted at the scale of a nation-state, it invariably becomes a totalitarian form of tyranny. …

In reality, until the middle of the previous decade, both of America’s parties were primarily liberal, with each emphasizing certain aspects of the country’s liberal inheritance, pushing back against other aspects, and aiming to make relatively minor adjustment to the liberal status quo. But with the populist turn that hit American politics full force in 2016, a large faction of the Republican Party (led by the man who would become its standard bearer that year and then president) began hitting the longstanding liberalism of both parties from the right, while the somewhat smaller (but still quite influential) progressive and socialist factions of the Democratic Party did something analogous from the left. …”

In the United States in 2023, a “liberal” is someone who is defined by their uncritical embrace, defense and celebration of recent fads and trends. “Liberalism” is best understood as a vessel for various fads and trends that have washed over the college-educated population over the last century or so.

What do I mean by this?

After years of studying and thinking about this issue, I think it is a mistake to try to explain contemporary liberalism by trying to trace it back to John Locke or John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith or the American Founders. “Liberalism” as it existed in the late 17th, 18th and 19th centuries differed in all kinds of key ways from “liberalism” as it exists in our times. It is not even really the same tradition. In our times, a “liberal” is more likely to be someone who wants to crush free speech, who condemns the Constitution on the grounds of “white supremacy” and who topples statues of Thomas Jefferson.

Globalism – In the early 20th century, “liberals” who were under the influence of H.G. Wells and who were stung by the World Wars began to reject nationalism in favor of globalism. Previously, liberalism and nationalism had been strongly associated and had traveled together since the French Revolution, but after World War II and down to our times liberalism has been opposed to nationalism.

Progressivism – In the early 20th century, “liberals” reversed their traditional skeptical position of concentrated power, which was seen as a menace to individual liberty and is reflected in the American Constitution, and began to advocate for a strong, centralized, consolidated state that would empower “experts” and technocrats guided by social science to regulate the economy and society. “Liberals” are people who believe that those who have education and expertise should rule.

Antiracism – In the early 20th century, antiracism was absorbed into liberalism and has become one of the core animating forces of modern liberalism in a way that wasn’t true in the past. Previously, liberalism had coexisted and flourished and advanced alongside race realism and “white supremacy,” particularly in the British Empire. This older Victorian era version of liberalism which was coupled with Darwinism and classical free market economics was rejected in the 1920s and 1930s though.

Modernism – In the early 20th century, “liberals” rebelled against Victorianism and embraced a modernist sensibility after World War I. In the 19th century, “liberals” had been champions of free market economics and individual rights and a more prudish morality, but “liberalism” became focused on its current project of liberating the (White) individuals from their traditional culture after World War I. Exotic non-White cultures, however, should be celebrated and preserved because they stimulate and enrich the bland Western culture which liberals are bent on dismantling and hollowing out. This impulse to subvert and tear down traditional European cultural norms ultimately comes from the avant-garde, not from liberal theory, but now it is as central to liberal practice as antiracism and cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitanism – Also in the early 20th century, there was a cosmopolitan turn among liberal elites who developed a habit of disdaining their own people and celebrating everything foreign, which was part of a wider turn away from Romanticism. It is one of the reasons why the electorate has sorted itself on this basis with one party being composed of people psychologically predisposed to favor social stability and the familiar and the other to favor novelty and radical social change.

Atheism – From the early 20th century down to our own times, liberals gradually rejected Christianity in favor of atheism and in doing so accelerated their decoupling from traditional Christian morality. Liberals are now overwhelmingly secular and irreligious.

Freudianism – In the early 20th century, liberals began to lose their religion and Christian morals and gradually over time replaced morality itself with a laundry list of -isms and -phobias which are derived from Freudian psychology. The seven deadly sins of liberalism are racism, sexism, nativism, white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. No one who lived over a century ago would have been familiar with this way of thinking.

Feminism – In the early 20th century, the feminist was known as the “New Woman” or the “Modern” woman and was just emerging in our culture (Victorians had “separate spheres” for the sexes), but a century later feminism and its assumptions about men and the family are now at the core of liberalism. Abortion has been elevated to the status of a sacrament.

Postmodernism – As with the modernist aesthetic which centers the Self and elevates the pursuit of lifestyles above morality, postmodernism became trendy among educated liberal elites in the late 20th century and was another Intellectual fad that was fully incorporated into liberalism, which now holds as dogma that race and sex are social constructs with no biological basis.

LGBTQIAP – In the span of a century, educated liberal elites have rejected Victorian era religion and morality in favor of gay marriage, PRIDE Month and the LGBTQ cult, which is one of the most remarkable transformations that has occurred over this period. It is a total 180 from 19th century liberalism.

Political Correctness / DEI – Cultural Marxism swept over American academia in the 1980s and 1990s and spread from there into the wider culture.

Wokeism and Trans – As we have established, liberals are just people who adopt the latest fads and trends and the explosion of gender dysphoria over the last decade and the craze for toppling states is just the latest example of how “liberalism” has evolved over time. There is no grand theory connecting any of this into an intelligible whole. It didn’t all spring from the hand of John Locke.

In 2023, a good liberal is someone who is hip and who just goes with the flow and who follows the crowd and who always embraces the Current Thing. A good liberal shouts all the correct slogans and shouts down the wrong people in Two Minute Hates on Twitter. Liberalism is nothing more than the sum of recent fads and trends which clung to the vessel like barnacles but which now define its image in the public mind.