The liberal-progressive mindset, a sociopolitical temperament that inspired people to join causes, vote for candidates and advocate policies that they believed would change the world for the better and sustain continuous progress towards greater liberty, justice and equality for all, has lost much of its former coherency and energy just at the moment when its adherents—and the wider society—are facing enormous danger from a resurgent authoritarian disposition.
Before I talk about the mistakes we’ve all made along the way that have led to this pass, we have to recall that this moment is also the product of a struggle: there are people who have hated or opposed everything about the liberal-progressive mindset since it first began to coalesce. Many of them have been trying to undo everything that mindset produced and to contain its ability to act further. Our mistakes are only half the story. The other half is the story of a counter-revolution, of the moves made against us. And perhaps also, of people who have become estranged from what they once supported, of people who left the mindset in regret and anger, and in any estrangement, there is always fault to go around. Still, if we are driven into the abyss, the responsibility for that will lie with the people who drove us there. The fault, if darker times still are ahead, will lie with those who darkened them, not with the light that failed.
That said, here is how a vague, shifting and complex ‘we’ failed to cultivate, conserve and evolve the mindset after it coalesced into its most influential and widespread assemblage in the 1970s and early 1980s. The value of a reckoning is that it may remind us of what we had and could remake.
The first error comes straight out of this opening point: the mindset, as I’ve been terming it, was formed out of multiple streams and periods of seeming victories. Liberals and radicals alike came out of the 19th Century with an assured sense that they were aligned with human progress, which many of them took to be inevitable. They associated themselves with the expansion of democracy to women and working men. They took credit for the triumphs of 19th Century science and medicine, for the accomplishments of new technologies. They claimed the end of the slave trade, the establishment of public education, the restriction of child labor, the amelioration of industrial poverty. They saw themselves as the children of Enlightenment, the foot soldiers of a better future.
World War I shook that confidence, but the establishment of the post-1945 world order reconstituted it for many. “Never again” felt (briefly) like a real promise, and the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and decolonization felt as if they were the down payment on long-overdue promises. “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice” for a short while lost the qualifiers and caution that King attached to it.
What this confidence of alignment with progress led to was an inability to assess the disposition of power, to audit any given moment of struggle. The rivalry of radicals and liberals was sometimes not an internal engine powering their joint confrontation with reactionaries but instead became the only confrontation that mattered. Precisely because reactionaries were increasingly well-armored against shame and fear, people picked fights more and more ardently with the only people who would pay attention to them. Soft targets and the narcissism of small differences drove more of what we did, from all sides while still feeling that somehow we were the inevitable future. Any sense of a strategic perspective on our real adversaries and our serious limitations became harder and harder to achieve.
A second major mistake derived from the instruments that liberals and progressives increasingly favored within liberal democracies starting in the 1970s. Particularly in the United States, the court system began to rule in favor of what seemed like more just and equitable interpretations of underlying principles faster than majoritarian legislatures and executive power had been able to provide. Brown v. Board of Education looked like a kind of magic key to many stubborn locks.
In my last installment, my good friend and scholarly colleague Misty Bastian observed in response that a growing attachment of liberals and progressives alike to the regulatory state was thus intertwined with a turn to legalism and a reliance on lawyers. The mindset became naively procedural. This turn was essentially the driver behind critical legal studies, which sought to call out exactly this point: that liberal and progressive thinkers increasingly thought that the law was protection against reactionaries, that law could be both the shield and mirror of liberal-progressive aspirations, that thinking legalistically was a requirement for advancing important goals. This was a mistake. Critical legal theorists pointed out that the outcomes of legal processes continued to be disconnected from the promises of liberal principles and legal guarantees, and that by the 1980s, that disconnection was if anything accelerating. Liberals were here particularly guilty of believing that not only should law be impartial and restrained by precedent but that it was intrinsically so, and thus were completely blind to a determined and deliberate campaign by reactionaries to capture legal institutions and practices, or at least to inhibit and constrict their uses. Justice, among other things, turned out to be blind not only to the brutally instrumental campaign to seize its institutions, but also to the basic animating principles of the regulations and legal rulings that developed from liberal-progressive ideas. A lawyerly inclination drove us all into debates about how to apply the micro-specifics of environmental law to particular use cases rather than to dwell on the principles behind environmentalism.
A third shortcoming that is closely related is that many of us hitched our wagons too closely to a kind of economism. Increasingly from the 1970s on, if we talked about remedies for the harm of a particular practice, institution, or problem, we increasingly accepted that the harm was best defined by measurements of lost or minimized productivity, in terms of the loss of potential to the economy. Many of us, including progressives, advocated policies and reforms through the citation of academic studies or think-tank white papers that showed that our preferred approaches would produce efficiencies, increase revenues, properly value human capital, and incentivize working harder and better. Even when many of us worked to retain a sense that we valued reform for moral and ethical reasons that preceded and superceded this kind of economistic yardstick, we reached for these sorts of claims when our advocacy came inside the circle of actual policy-making. If you lived on a commune in Vermont that had solar power, no-flush toilets, shared child-care and home-schooling for all members, holistic medicine clinics, and that produced heirloom vegetables for nearby restaurants, all of those practices would have one kind of philosophical and emotional coherency inside the space of communal life (and be argued about or reshaped within that moral and emotional worldview) but if members of the commune joined in advocacy for policies from the state or federal governments that favored their chosen commitments, they generally had to do more than “we think this is the right way to live and be and we think you should help us rather than hinder us in our choices.” In that arena, increasingly the only way to talk about a policy preference was that incentivizing no-flush installations reduced environmental burdens of water treatment by an estimated amount, that home-schooled children had higher incomes on average by the age of 30, and that heirloom vegetables were 2% less vulnerable to blights and insect infestation and thus achieved greater efficiencies at medium-scale production.
It’s not that this was a completely invalid kind of argument—in many cases, it provided empirical rigor and precision to what was otherwise implicit in a more values-driven commitment. No-flush toilets do not have ethical virtue in and of themselves: if you call for them, it’s because of the way they change a complex infrastructure for supplying water and managing waste. At least some things that a liberal-progressive disposition has viewed over time as productive or preferred practices have turned out on rigorous examination to lack the value imputed to them. But the metastasizing of this kind of thinking about why we should do what we do, or why we believe our society should move in a particular direction, impoverished the overall mindset. It’s not how we individually think about and feel our way through what is right and wrong, what makes the world a better or worse place. Economistic language deprived us of other languages of value: public investment in art and culture, for example, should first and foremost simply be a thing that a wealthy, successful society does because it reflects a commitment to truth, beauty and imagination, not because it raises the average value of property in a central business district or stimulates tourism. Similarly, some of what a liberal-progressive mindset values isn’t readily measurable in the first place, and to evaluate it economistically requires creating clumsy data proxies or making simplified models that eventually get mistaken for being one-to-one maps of social reality. Perhaps more importantly, using economistic criteria bottlenecks general participation in democratic processes or conversations about values, because it obliges everyone to competently evaluate and rely upon specialized research outputs and pushes more widely shared feelings and intuitions to the outer edges of public reason and collective action. Reactionaries retained a more elemental, everyday language about what they deemed good and evil (in fact, one notoriously immunized against most measurable or empirical data and analysis) while liberals and progressives became more and more unable to tap into widely distributed feelings about right and wrong.
The flip side of this conceptual bottleneck, a fourth mistake, is that paradoxically the liberal-progressive mindset also has had a deeply-situated strain of anti-intellectualism and anti-scientism embedded within it that has surged forth at inopportune times. To a significant extent, this strain is just continuation of a dialectical tension between 19th Century romanticism and Enlightenment rationalism. There are real reasons to be suspicious of intellectuals as a dominant presence within liberal-progressive thought (more on that shortly) and there are many ways in which naive reliance on scientific authority or technological progress have been serious dangers for anyone who wants to make human life more just, equal and free. But since the 1980s, this long-running tension has oscillated wildly, producing either a fervent political embrace of some claims articulated as scientific (climate change, covid vaccination) or an opposite disdain for the possibility of technological resolutions to ongoing material and ethical problems. Perhaps more pressingly, the general liberal mindset whipsaws between demanding that political and social change be mediated through bodies of formal knowledge on one hand to regarding the insistence on formal knowledge as a sinister form of diversion or entrapment intended to retard moral and political progress on the other. I’ve encountered activists (both radicals and centrist liberals) who have moved between those poles within a single year or two based on the specific issue at hand and whether or not their own advocacy. Again, it’s not that this distinction is always invalid: sometimes the person sitting across the table from you is using a reference to expertise or science as a cynical way of burying an urgent demand for change in a morass. But the answer in those cases shouldn’t be some kind of expansive anti-foundationalism, it should be to directly question the intentionality and goodwill of the opposing group. Or if the issue is that appeals to science and technological progress are too subordinated to phony profit-seeking and capitalist messianism, again, the issue is not the science, it’s the capitalism. The liberal-progressive mindset has been far too entangled with a belief in the value of knowledge production and scientific inquiry to discard it entirely.
In the first part of this series, I mentioned the importance of the crusade against censorship and the cultivation of artistic freedom to creating the liberal-progressive structure of feeling. Somewhere in the 1980s, we started to lose a clear grasp on that impulse: a fifth error. You could argue that this slipping away was the result of actually winning the battle against censorship in the legal and political arena. The limits on representation in mainstream culture are now primarily about markets, about a sense of what audiences are willing to watch, or about the implicit rules of genres, in a cultural marketplace that has fragmented into a thousand niches in every medium. No institution or law is forcing Hallmark movies to conform to a formula. But the end of strong governmental controls over the content of culture in the United States exposed the liberal-progressive viewpoint to problem that has always been waiting in the wings: when you are free to say anything and make any art, you are not required to say everything. Particularly if you also think, as you should, that art and speech are consequential, that they do both good and bad work in the world. It is hard from any perspective to understand the kind of dispassionate liberalism that argued that speech was only a neutral conveyor of information, that semantics were an aftermarket add-on, that it was your own fault if you chose to hear speech or view culture as harmful. Why were we fighting for freedom from censorship if speech and art were only information?
But the mistake here, as the ground shifted, was that at least one fraction of liberal-left thinking lost its taste for the experimental and imaginative in culture, for the transgressive and outrageous, but perhaps even more deeply, its respect for the intrinsic slippages involved in speaking, imagining, and creating. Some of us did drift into temperamental censoriousness, into maintaining a vision of cultural propriety, into a new secular moralism that sometimes began to resemble civil religion. Not only did that rob the mindset of the primal energy involved in transgression against the powers-that-be, it entangled it with the pseudo-hegemonic maintenance of an increasingly class-bound kind of propriety as inequality widened, which increasingly fit the glass slipper of transgression to a different kind of foot. Suddenly it wasn’t the Yippies throwing money onto the floor of the NYSE or nominating a pig for President: the situationists who were in it for the lulz were recoding their provocations into reactionary tropes and discourses because that was the reliable way to cause a ruckus. And as Angela Nagle has argued, in time, the provocateurs started forgetting that they were just code-switching to get a rise out of the left-liberal moralists, not the least because they started to actually get major pay-offs for doing so.
This wrong turn also stemmed from the curdling of a body of thought that was valid and important at its core: another part of the fifth error. In my discipline, we often call it “the linguistic turn”—it was a new kind of attention to the elusiveness of language, but also to the constitutive power of representation. Suddenly historians found themselves reading their archives far more imaginatively: a given document might mean many things at once, its presence in an archive was subject to all sorts of new questioning (as was the absence of many other documents and testimonies), and we began to think in new ways about how forms, genres and styles of writing associated with governments, institutions, and individuals were doing things to people, with people, for people. But as time wore on, a lot of this dazzling new fashion of making knowledge and critiquing the world lost its nuance and complexity. By the time ideas like “knowledge is power”, “there is no thought outside of language”, or “speech is action” ended up translated into two-minute explainer videos on TikTok and YouTube, we ended up with a kind of perverse new credentialism, where knowing just enough about something became an entitlement to tell everyone else what words to say and not say, where huge projects of social reform were too easily re-imagined as a struggle to control the valid lexical range of the subreddit devoted to My Little Pony. I don’t think the academic left were intentionally seeking to create this shift, but we were invoked and used by some of our students, readers and fellow travellers to reorient social movements towards the linguistic, towards seeking—and disputing—the proper labels, names and descriptors of the social world around us. This didn’t just feed energy into reactionary culture, it often created cleavages between the people being described in new liberal-progressive languages and the people doing the description. The most painful kind of liberal-progressive mistake I’ve witnessed over and over again in the last twenty years—and likely committed on occasion—is seeing a well-educated person telling someone else what they ought to be called, or insisting that the conversation that was happening had to be respoken through a code that the well-educated in the discussion commanded and that everyone else had to listen to passively. Often, to make it worse, within a framing structure that pretended that the recoders were there to listen to the experiences and testimonies of the people whose vocabulary was slated for imminent re-mapping.
That kind of unforced error has a queasy simultaneity with another sort of losing-our-way tendency that pulls in the opposite direction, a sixth sort of mistake. I think you could loosely but fairly suggest that the overemphasis on language and representation as the cause of lingering inequality and injustice has some connection with what is called “identity politics”. Liberals and radicals in other intellectual and political traditions have been stuck to conceptual frames that have the opposite problem, which is reading out everything in terms of interests. For radicals, that’s essentially a brand-x version of vulgar Marxist distinguishing the base from the superstructure; for liberals, it’s more or less “follow the money” in a more individualist way. E.g., in one case, interestedness is the product of some sort of structured social relation, in the other, a failing of particular people who ought to be behaving differently, or perhaps a conscious conspiracy of a number of such individuals.
In practice, these differences have frequently converged. They amount to a quick back-of-the-envelope interpretation of opposition to any reform program, any policy proposal, any institutional project as being “in the last instance” a product of self-interest. For radicals, this assumption has sometimes presented a disquieting question about how radical politics is even possible in the first place if and when it is located within social groups or communities where it is transparently not in their self-interest, but most folks have some flexible and smart ways out of that problem. Liberals are often less prone to that kind of self-reflexive anxiety and more inclined to simply compliment their own rationality and morality: self-interestedness is the failing of other people. But in both cases, tracing the anatomy of interest in bad outcomes, in the frustration of projects of social reform, is both a causal explanation of why bad things happen to good people and the central problem that needs solving. That’s where the liberal turns to the regulatory state and legalism, the radical to projects of community empowerment and redistribution—to police and punish the corrupting influence of self-interest or to inflict some form of defeat on groups and classes defined by it.
The problem here is that if one tendency in the liberal-progressive mindset became overly obsessed with controlling how semantics makes the world, this tendency didn’t pay nearly enough attention to meaning, to consciousness, to identity. Again and again, activists and political thinkers working from this tendency have blinked and rubbed their eyes in disbelief at the spectacle of people acting in reactionary ways against their own interests. Or they’ve confronted blatantly corrupt oligarchs who nevertheless seem more obsessed by far with social, cultural and religious projects that seem very far separated from the defense of their interests. That in turn leads either to incredibly convoluted forms of reading those cultural and social projects as actually, really, efficiently about the maintenance of self-interest if only you squint and look at them correctly, or we end up searching for some suspected agent of hegemony that has diverted people from their real self-interest and inflicted false consciousness on them. In that quest, it becomes impossible to understand people in Kansas (in Thomas Frank’s formulation) for what they are, for what they mean to be; they can only be imagined as people who have been diverted from the state of nature by masterfully instrumental programs of reshaping their intimacies and subjectivities.
In both cases, the liberal-progressive mindset has ended up unable to engage or understand any community, place or people who are not already in the mindset—a terrible weakness given that the mindset itself was fragmenting for all sorts of reasons by the beginning of the 21st Century. Hence we were suddenly soaking in well-meaning calls to rejoin bowling leagues from liberal thinkers who themselves did not belong to any clubs, in voyages into Trumplandia that were narrated with the same breathlessness of Thor Heyerdahl pushing Kon-Tiki off into the vast ocean. The mindset had been confident at its height that it was the shared consciousness of people across many walks of life who together had a vision of a better future, and suddenly all it could see was a world of strangers who weren’t saying or doing what they ought.
Finally, as a seventh major point, I think liberals and progressives have long been locked into mobilizing for fighting the last battle rather than living in the moment, and along with that, afflicted with a kind of generational hubris. This is not just the specific baleful impact of the Boomers but a repeated tendency to tell the next generation that they’re doing it all wrong when actually it’s the older generations who misunderstand what the “it” of the moment really is. By the time liberals and progressives were ready for a showdown with the profit-seeking behavior of old-style corporate capitalism, the upper reaches of the American political economy had moved onto shareholder capitalism, where it mattered less and less what a company sold or whether it made a profit and more whether it had fired enough workers to impress shareholders who wanted to believe that the financials were good. By the time people had grasped the implications of this shift, the global political economy had undergone a vast new wave of financialization and a small number of almost completely invulnerable hedge funds, investment firms, private equity companies and mega-consultancies owned and managed almost the entirety of the visible economy, and at the same time a vast shadow economy of hidden wealth vomited itself up in the built forms of new mega-cities, in untouchable kinds of off-shored hedonism, and in a kind of mafiosi ideology that casually ordered inconvenient people murdered and poisoned in plain sight. It’s forgiveable that we are slow to catch up, because the old targets actually seemed to have vulnerabilities and tractabilities and the new forms of oppressive power and corruption seem so overwhelmingly far from any possibility of resistance that it hardly seems worth trying. But something is driving billionaires to imagine fiefdoms on Mars with a serfdom created from their sperm donation, or to build bunkers in Hawaii, so perhaps thinking in the present might uncover sources of strength and possibility that account for the odd fearfulness and anxiety of people who seem untouchable.
In all things, what we need to reinvent—or perhaps fashion in new ways for the first time—is the looser sense of shared virtue, a sense that for all the productive dialogic and dialectical tensions that do and should attend on the work of making a more democratic, more open, more pluralistic society, we can consciously cultivate an all-embracing and sustaining solidarity that is more than a chant or a sign at a protest march. Most of what I diagnose here as error involved the opposite kind of work—losing a mindset devoted to living in a better possible future by diverting it into arid and stony grounds where it could not possibly flourish. Or, in the pessimistic reading of this series, survive at all. There are a lot of people out there still prepared to believe that a better world is possible, a lot of people who would like to think of themselves as good people who are choosing to bring that world into being. It would be a shame to waste those impulses.
Part of the situation is that that the regulatory state can be astonishingly cruel.
https://www.wired.com/story/priscila-queen-of-the-rideshare-mafia/
Long article about a woman who came illegally to the US and made it easier for other illegal immigrants to make a living with fake IDs. As she says, she didn't steal anything, and she's finally free and in the US, but are the regulations, regulations we're supposed to respect because they're regulations, actually accomplishing something worthwhile?
I think the move to legalism in law and the move to language control could be part of the same problem-- it begins to seem like the real world is too hard to deal with, but at least you can be precise about language. Not that language is such an easy problem, but it seems easier.
Please write something about how young people should confront the world were living in-not necessarily the specific politics but the attitudes and historical reference point we can look at to think about the kind of agency we have in these times