Folks who want to accelerate their learning journey here would do well to pick up Helena Rosenblatt’s excellent recent history of liberalism.
Far from a novel problem for contemporary liberals, contestation over precisely what it means to be liberal and worries about that meaning getting “lost” have been there almost from the start.
Personally, I find this comforting. Part of the liberal tradition is to go through cycles of forgetting and reinheritance. We’ve done this before, we can do it again 💪💪
Looking forward to hearing more. One thing that isn't clear to me - perhaps it's obvious - is the connection between liberalism and the liberal arts - can you spell it out?
I look forward to reading more. It's hard to understand that anyone in 2025 would consider "socialism" liberal. Of course, socialism (like Trump and MAGA) seems to be a Rohrschach test - it is whatever the observer wants it to be. I look forward to more exposition on the liberal search for balance between forced collectivism and extreme individualism.
There is certainly overlap between social democrats and classical liberals. Indeed, in 2025, it seems that the nuts have taken over the nuthouse and some of the differences between "social democrats" and "classical liberals" are not as important as rejecting ideology and demagogues. Personally, I think everybody, all over the world, should re-read Federalist 51. In my view liberals are less dogmatic and more informed by empirical data than social democrats, but perhaps that's just me. In any case, I look forward to reading about liberal topics beyond economics.
Socialism isn’t just one thing. To say otherwise is has contributed to the shifting of the Overton Window in the past decades to the point where if someone says people should have access to free healthcare or education they get described as raging communists. To put mamdani in the same sentence as Trump and Farage is to engage in similar obfuscation. There is social democracy which is different from democratic socialism. The word democracy has some idea of freedom built into it.
A key aim of this substack is to make distinctions between liberal political options and the alternatives -- including variants of socialism. This is the opposite of obfuscation.. And including the word 'democratic' in the name of something doesn't entail that it's not illiberal (or indeed that it is democratic -- see GDR and DPRK!) Anyway, again, these are exactly the kinds of issues we'll be discussing, so thanks for engaging!
Self-described liberal democracies are not always liberal either ( Israel). On the other hand, many polities are/were liberal even they don’t loudly proclaim themselves as such (Austria Hungary). Many social democracies of the last century were flowers of liberalism. Your revival project is DOA if so hollow and childish is your defense of liberalism.
But you could say the same (and I expect you are going to) about liberalism. Look at all those people giving out to people simply for protesting a full on genocide because it meant they weren’t backing the cause of their supposedly liberal candidate who was full on part of the administration supporting and funding it? And the way states like Israel use supposed freedoms like lgbtq rights to argue that certain people deserve to live without freedom and be slaughtered? Freedom for whom? I don’t particularly call this a good moment to be alive and I think it’s our western sense of entitlement to freedom over responsibility to our fellow man that got us here. That said I’m looking forward to reading an examination of the liberal tradition.
Appreciate the thought you have been putting into this, and I’m relieved I’m not the only reader who found the sentence lumping Mamdani and Trump provocative. Eager to see more of the authors thinking on this without negative judgment about those of us asking!
Glad to see there are a few classical liberals left
Subscribed :) I'm excited to see what you have in store.
insta-subscribed!
I'm here for this.
This is wonderful! Subscribed!
yay!
Folks who want to accelerate their learning journey here would do well to pick up Helena Rosenblatt’s excellent recent history of liberalism.
Far from a novel problem for contemporary liberals, contestation over precisely what it means to be liberal and worries about that meaning getting “lost” have been there almost from the start.
Personally, I find this comforting. Part of the liberal tradition is to go through cycles of forgetting and reinheritance. We’ve done this before, we can do it again 💪💪
Subscribed, excited to see what comes of this.
Nailed it! How to make these principles obvious agian?
Looking forward to hearing more. One thing that isn't clear to me - perhaps it's obvious - is the connection between liberalism and the liberal arts - can you spell it out?
How on earth is Mamdani illiberal? 🤯 And put in the same sentence as Trump & Nigel Farage?
He’s not a classical liberal.
His policies are hardly repressive. Or similar in anyway to Trump or Farage.
you can expect that a common theme of this substack will be why and how socialism is illiberal (in practice, as well as definitionally) :)
I look forward to reading more. It's hard to understand that anyone in 2025 would consider "socialism" liberal. Of course, socialism (like Trump and MAGA) seems to be a Rohrschach test - it is whatever the observer wants it to be. I look forward to more exposition on the liberal search for balance between forced collectivism and extreme individualism.
But is that not social democracy?
There is certainly overlap between social democrats and classical liberals. Indeed, in 2025, it seems that the nuts have taken over the nuthouse and some of the differences between "social democrats" and "classical liberals" are not as important as rejecting ideology and demagogues. Personally, I think everybody, all over the world, should re-read Federalist 51. In my view liberals are less dogmatic and more informed by empirical data than social democrats, but perhaps that's just me. In any case, I look forward to reading about liberal topics beyond economics.
Socialism isn’t just one thing. To say otherwise is has contributed to the shifting of the Overton Window in the past decades to the point where if someone says people should have access to free healthcare or education they get described as raging communists. To put mamdani in the same sentence as Trump and Farage is to engage in similar obfuscation. There is social democracy which is different from democratic socialism. The word democracy has some idea of freedom built into it.
A key aim of this substack is to make distinctions between liberal political options and the alternatives -- including variants of socialism. This is the opposite of obfuscation.. And including the word 'democratic' in the name of something doesn't entail that it's not illiberal (or indeed that it is democratic -- see GDR and DPRK!) Anyway, again, these are exactly the kinds of issues we'll be discussing, so thanks for engaging!
See Carlo Rosselli, _Liberal Socialism_, ed. Nadia Urbinati (Princeton U.P.).
Self-described liberal democracies are not always liberal either ( Israel). On the other hand, many polities are/were liberal even they don’t loudly proclaim themselves as such (Austria Hungary). Many social democracies of the last century were flowers of liberalism. Your revival project is DOA if so hollow and childish is your defense of liberalism.
But you could say the same (and I expect you are going to) about liberalism. Look at all those people giving out to people simply for protesting a full on genocide because it meant they weren’t backing the cause of their supposedly liberal candidate who was full on part of the administration supporting and funding it? And the way states like Israel use supposed freedoms like lgbtq rights to argue that certain people deserve to live without freedom and be slaughtered? Freedom for whom? I don’t particularly call this a good moment to be alive and I think it’s our western sense of entitlement to freedom over responsibility to our fellow man that got us here. That said I’m looking forward to reading an examination of the liberal tradition.
Appreciate the thought you have been putting into this, and I’m relieved I’m not the only reader who found the sentence lumping Mamdani and Trump provocative. Eager to see more of the authors thinking on this without negative judgment about those of us asking!