From Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), which was published last month by the University of Chicago Press.
In February 1949, Bill Atwood, a young journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, took to the streets of New York City to quell a nagging query. A single word seemed to be on everyone’s lips. The Second World War had ended (Atwood had been a paratrooper), the Cold War was heating up, and lots of people in the United States seemed to be talking about how great it was to be “liberal.” The “liberal” form of government was the sweet spot between Communism and fascism, a vital center. “Liberals” were defending “the American way of life,” protecting the virtues of “the common man.” “Liberals” were using the government to enact reforms that were improving the lives of many Americans. “Be liberal.” “He’s a liberal.” “The liberal form of government is best.” Et cetera, et cetera. The trouble was, no one seemed to know what the word meant. Most words with such a long and contested history have no single settled meaning. Still, despite all the variety, Atwood felt comfortable saying that, in 1949 at least, “just about everybody thought that a liberal was a pretty good thing to be.”
Fast forward sixty years. In 2009, James A. Stimson, a political scientist, and his onetime student Christopher Ellis wanted to understand how the opposite had become true. “The American public, in the aggregate, supported ‘liberal’ public policies of redistribution, intervention in the economy, and aggressive governmental action to solve social problems,” they wrote, “while at the same time identifying with the symbols—and ideological label—that rejects these policies.” Why, in short, did Americans prefer conservative symbols and liberal policy? Why did Americans now refuse to say they were liberal?
Ellis and Stimson surveyed nearly a century’s worth of polling data. They went back to when reliable national polling first began, in the Thirties, a time when Franklin D. Roosevelt portrayed his New Deal as “liberal” and his opponents as “conservative.” The politically savvy FDR was suggesting that it was the backward-looking policies of “conservatives” that had provoked the Great Depression and that his “liberalism” was the only way forward. It worked. Nearly half of Americans surveyed from the late Thirties to the early Sixties claimed to be liberal. Then, from the mid-Sixties onward, those numbers trended downward. And as more and more Americans stopped defending liberalism, its fate grew worse and worse. One group and then another, then yet still another, disparaged liberals. First the right, then the left, then the leaders of the civil-rights movement, which provoked many Americans to narrow their ire to just “white liberals.” Many Americans came to believe that liberals no longer worked on behalf of the common American. They no longer defended the rights of all people.
How did this happen? Perhaps there is something inherent in the philosophy of liberalism that has invited so many people to pile on. After all, liberalism is a philosophy premised on protecting individual freedom from those who might try to steal it (its origins derive from the Latin word for “free”), while also recognizing that some level of equality is required to ensure that freedom can be broadly distributed. The battle between freedom and equality has been liberalism’s central tension: How much freedom? How much equality?
Liberalism doesn’t give concrete answers. Sometimes liberals have appeared to be protecting rich people’s property too much, downplaying calls for greater equality. Sometimes liberals have appeared to favor egalitarian policies like affirmative action that challenge some people’s sense of fairness. Perhaps because of this squishy boundary between freedom and equality, liberals have traditionally favored slow change over radical change, a preference that has made them appear weak or only halfway invested in correcting whatever wrong supposedly needs fixing. And perhaps because the sorts of people who have held power have changed over time (from kings and popes to capitalists and bureaucrats), liberalism’s focus has changed, making it seem as though liberals lack deep roots. Compared with people who find their principles in religious faith or utopian certainty or die-hard nationalism, liberals, in their attempts to balance freedom with equality amid changing circumstances, have considered all people’s opinions, making them appear indecisive, uncommitted, and unmoored.
There is no single agreed-upon understanding of what makes someone liberal. If you think liberals are quasi-Communists, eager to indoctrinate your children into predatory sex schemes and turn social services into mechanisms of perpetual dependency, then you’re likely a conservative who respects Tucker Carlson and watches Fox News or One America News Network. If you think liberals are mostly fronts for the corporate order, too wimpy to advocate for real change, and NIMBYs cloaked in progressive verbiage, then you’re likely a progressive who thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president and David Graeber was one of America’s great thinkers.
The word “liberal” is sullied. The nearly inescapable conclusion is that ultimately the country would be better off turning in another direction.
Liberals had a good run. Now it’s time to imagine a future without them.
By perpetually defending something they call “the liberal tradition,” which historians have determined was a Cold War invention, liberalism’s advocates have held on to a word that has run its course. And by fighting to save a debased word, they have left the country’s centrist philosophy vulnerable. Now the extremes have taken over.
Americans need a new word to describe the country’s amorphous tradition. Some have tried “progressive.” Some have tried “the Third Way.” Others have tried the “Unity Party.” None have worked. But the efforts have merit. We know that hardly anyone in the United States referred to themselves as a liberal before the Thirties. Nearly one hundred years later, it’s time to start imagining what might come next. In 1995, the historian and theorist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote a book called After Liberalism, in which he struggled to do just that. The best he could come up with was for liberals to figure out “to which shore you want to swim” and to “make sure that your immediate efforts seem to be moving in that direction.” Then he threw his hands up: “If you want greater precision than that, you will not find it, and you will drown while you are looking for it.” Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the influential 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, put it similarly in 2022 when he said, “The thing about moderates today is I don’t think they have a worldview. . . . ‘Don’t do dumb stuff’ is not a worldview.” For all these efforts, Donald Trump still recognized the utility of the word in mobilizing the right wing. In 2024, one of his television ads defined Kamala Harris as “failed, weak, dangerously liberal.”
There is a profound impoverishment in our language. Is there a phrase that signifies how the government performs a good to society? Is there a new language to capture, as Eleanor Roosevelt’s Americans for Democratic Action described it, an American’s “high sense of individual responsibility for oneself and one’s neighbor, a conviction that the best society is a brotherhood that enables the great number of its members to develop their potentialities to the utmost”? Nothing has yet captured the national imagination. When in 2012 President Barack Obama tried to make a case for the importance of the general welfare, he told a group of entrepreneurs they should respect the infrastructure built by the government. “Somebody invested in roads and bridges,” he said. “You didn’t build that.” But he didn’t give the underlying philosophy a label.
There are no obvious contenders. From the moment liberals were given that moniker, they fought mightily to stave off radicalism, to find a balance between freedom and equality. Those seeking to reclaim this tradition in American life may have something venerable to uphold—but it will have to be done under another name.
