by Joe Miller
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama penned a book titled The End of History and the Last Man in which he argued that Western-style liberal democracy had triumphed over the forces of illiberalism.
For a few years, it seemed that Fukuyama might be right.
Countries across Eastern Europe overthrew their authoritarian dictators and began holding free and fair elections. Central and South American nations embraced free markets and (eventually) free elections. The Arab Spring pointed to liberalizing in the Middle East. China joined the World Trade Organization and American officials assumed that political liberalism would follow soon after.
Alas, it seems that Fukuyama’s declaration may have been premature.
China remained stubbornly totalitarian, even as its citizens got richer through freer markets. The Arab Spring faltered. Old-school autocrats seized power in Russia, Hungary and Turkey. Venezuela embraced Soviet-style authoritarian Marxism.
In America, no less a figure than Vice President J.D. Vance openly proclaims himself a member “of the post-liberal right.”
It’s important to understand here that Fukuyama isn’t using “liberal” in the same way you might hear it used on talk radio or Facebook—the one that conflates “liberal” with support for an FDR/LBJ-style expansive welfare state.
Fukuyama is using an older meaning of liberal, one that traces its origins back to figures like John Locke, Thomas Paine, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. It’s an Enlightenment idea, one that sits at the heart of the American experiment.
In this broader sense, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are both liberals.
Liberalism in this older sense has three main tenets.
1. The primacy of the individual.
2. Equal treatment under the law.
3. State neutrality.
I’ll explain each briefly in the remainder of this column. In the next few weeks, I’ll look more closely at arguments for each.
The primacy of the individual is the bedrock of liberalism. For a liberal like Jefferson or Locke, what the thing that matters most is that each individual is allowed to make their own choices.
A trait or a relationship that an individual chooses – for example, dressing sharply or joining a specific church – is morally relevant. We can make our own choices and our own judgements about people based on the choices that they have made.
Conversely, traits or relationships that are not freely chosen are not an appropriate basis for making judgments about people. Your skin color and your parents are not things you have chosen and are therefore not appropriate factors for making judgements about you.
Equal treatment under the law sounds pretty straightforward, though in practice, it took a civil war, a suffrage movement and a series of Civil Rights movements before we got this one implemented correctly.
A country’s laws have to treat individuals the same. No one gets to be exempt. No one gets special treatment. Whatever public goods a country provides (e.g., schools or roads or parks or police) have to be equally available to all citizens.
Figuring out exactly what it means to treat people equally under the law can be tricky business. More often than not, policy disagreements between Republicans and Democrats boil down to differing interpretations of this principle.
Broadly speaking, Republicans tend to hold that the equal treatment standard is met as long as the laws don’t formally discriminate against anyone. Democrats tend to hold that formal equality now doesn’t account for decades of historic inequality. Much of our politics is downstream from that divide.
The third principle, state neutrality, is a corollary of the first two.
If an individual’s choices are what matter most and if we are to treat all individuals equally under the law, then we shouldn’t use the power of the state to promote any particular set of choices.
People should be allowed to choose whatever they think of as a good life and the state shouldn’t push any particular conception of a good life as better than others.
That means the laws shouldn’t favor any specific religion. It shouldn’t favor homeowners over renters or driving over public transit or rural areas over cities.
This is the part of liberalism that Americans are most prone to ignoring. We’re pretty good about freedom of religion. But we also offer tax breaks for mortgage interest, but not for renters. We build way more roads than train tracks. And we tax farmland less than apartment buildings.
Now there may well be good reasons for the state to nudge people in particular directions sometime and about some things. But do-ing so is a tricky matter precisely because people disagree (often very strongly) about the things that deserve a nudge and about the direction of said nudge.
Most of the things that fall under the heading of “culture war” boil down to disagreements about when and how the state should cease to be neutral.
