No, Liberalism ISN'T to Blame.
Liberalism ≠ the status quo...
Part 1: The liberalism haters are all over
I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines.
They say the same thing a thousand different ways:
“Modern Liberalism Has Become a Defense of Hierarchy and Deference to Elites.”
“The liberal order is already dead.”
The message over and over again? Things suck, and liberalism is to blame.
Part 2: Dumb definitions are to blame
My theory is that this message is so prevalent because of the common yet endless irritating habit of defining the status quo as liberalism (or alternatively “neoliberalism”), and thus, any issue with the status quo as an issue with liberalism.
While this might be satisfying for folks looking to centralize blame for our problems on one specific ideology, it’s an incredibly dumb way to use words. There are many things about the status quo that are not liberal.
Is it liberal to highly restrictive anti-market zoning restrictions, which were created to exclude people on the basis of race and class?
That seems pretty textbook illiberal.
Are trade restrictions and protectionism liberal?
That would definitely be news to Adam Smith.
Are unnecessary state monopolies liberal? What about the incarceration of people on marijuana charges? What about qualified immunity for law enforcement?
Obviously, none of these things are liberal.
What is liberal about our society is freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and thought. What is liberal is a constitutionally constrained government with a division of powers and democratic accountability. What is liberal is private property rights.
None of these things are the cause of our problems.
Part 3: Illiberalism solves nothing
It’s this extraordinarily lazy conflation of liberalism with whatever the status quo is that has fueled the resurgence of history’s old failed ideologies. Resurgent political forces on both the left and right have utilized the smearing of liberalism as justification for moving in an illiberal, authoritarian direction.
Socialists have called for ending private property rights and creating huge state monopolies. National Conservatives have called for government-backed religion, legislated religious morality, and ending immigration as we know it.
Yet all of these dramatic changes answer problems we don’t have. America’s issues are not because of private property rights or lack of government monopolies. They also aren’t because of the separation of church and state and immigration.
Part 4: What actually is to blame
America’s problems are caused by broken political institutions that fail to incentivize politicians to pursue good policy and instead suffer from gridlock, interest group capture, and short-term popularism. They are because we have drowned our market economy with bureaucracy, red tape, and proceduralism and failed to build an adequate social safety net capable of fostering widespread prosperity. They are because the government has become too keen on invading people’s personal lives and not keen enough on guaranteeing basic public safety.
The cold, hard fact is that politics is hard. The world is complicated. Things are nuanced. No one set of ideas is at fault, nor any one group.
Rather, the issue of modern politics is to answer the same questions that have plagued our species since the dawn of human society.
How do we change our institutions to better align individuals' incentives with that of the common good?
How can we overcome our ignorance and come to understand the real nature of the world?
How can we rise above our natural prejudices and selfishness in order to become more open-minded, rational, tolerant, ethical, and compassionate neighbors to our fellow beings?
It’s these questions that we must continually find answers to in order to continue making our society better, and often those answers entail making things more liberal, not less.