The first thing liberals need to recognize in order to find a path out of despair is that the people of today are the people of tomorrow. There will always be momentary changes in public opinion that raise or dash liberal hopes, but we should recognize them as just that. There is no reason to expect the emergence of a permanent liberal majority, much less a 99.4% pure liberal public. The utility of pessimism is that it moderates hopes that might otherwise be ruinous. In order to avoid despair, liberals have to stop imagining that a 100%—or even 75%—liberal society is the way things are supposed to be, because with that expectation, reality becomes an unbearably gloomy prospect, and optimism becomes impossible. Real pessimism is in order if optimism requires achieving utopia.
The second thing liberals need to recognize is how well-off we actually are. This is ironic, in a sense. Liberals have been losing elections for years by telling people they didn’t realize how well-off liberalism had made them—the defeat of Joe Biden in the United States is only one example of this. But liberals are doing much better than one might think from all the gloom and doom headlines. The socio-economic-intellectual and even popular basis of liberalism today is wider and deeper than it has ever been in the past.
In Kant’s time the number of people whom he would have considered enlightened, critical thinkers probably did not attain 5% of the population. Today they are perhaps 25%. That is the percentage of the British population that David Goodhart identifies as “Anywheres”: people who place a high value on autonomy and mobility, are generally highly educated, tend to support meritocracy and expertise, are comfortable with immigrants and human rights talk, etc. The Anywheres are not exactly identical with liberals as such, nor are they the only critical thinkers, but the overlap is roughly good enough. Maybe there are fewer of them in some countries than in the UK, but they number far more than 5% of the population. Throughout the Western world, and beyond. Kant would have been astonished and delighted.
Liberalism has not made the enormous progress the liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries confidently expected. But at the price of the immense holocausts of the twentieth century, and alongside the amazing progress of technology, wealth, and education that have taken place since Kant and Tocqueville wrote, it has made progress, perhaps even more progress than most Enlightenment writers expected. The cup is not half full, but it is not down to the last few drops, either. Twenty-five percent is a lot of people. Having one out of four voters committed to liberalism is actually a solid foundation for building a majority—provided one is capable of speaking a language that makes sense to those not already members of the tribe.
Liberals therefore need to shake off the inclination to retreat into their citadels and reinforce the gates. They need to leave their rhetorical comfort zone, and engage with questions they have preferred not to discuss. This means being able to use not just political and economic but also moral and religious language, and furthermore moral language that makes sense to people who are not already liberals. I have made the case for liberalism’s need to return to the three-pillared (freedom, markets, and morals—or politics, economics and morality/religion) arguments of the nineteenth century. For all its misplaced optimism, the nineteenth century remains in many respects the pattern for the strongest moral (and other) arguments for liberalism.
The liberalism of the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries cannot simply be cut and pasted onto the twenty-first, however. Today’s fears are different, and they call for different responses. Liberals need to find new moral, political, and economic vocabulary. They cannot simply repeat the mantras of John Stuart Mill, the Ordo-Liberals, Isaiah Berlin, or John Rawls, to name a few names commonly invoked in contemporary efforts to reconstruct liberalism. They were all, with the partial exception of Berlin, too optimistic by far. Below I will briefly outline what an appropriately pessimistic language of liberalism might look like. By “appropriately pessimistic” I mean one whose goals are more achievable than those of the nineteenth and twentieth-century liberal optimists, but are nonetheless utopian. Liberals must still aim to create a society which has never yet existed, that is, one in which all people are free from fear. But they must not aim at a society which cannot and will not exist, which was the goal of so many nineteenth and twentieth-century liberals who placed what turned out to be unwarranted hopes in property and education.
A longstanding weakness of liberalism has been its vulnerability to being outbid by its opponents, both right and left. This has put liberals at a severe disadvantage in the political game. You liberals say you are for equality? Well, we socialists will match your equality before the law and raise you an egalitarian redistribution of wealth. You offer the people a social safety net? Well, see the enormous welfare state we propose! You liberals may claim to be nationalists, as was the case in nineteenth-century Poland, Italy, and Germany, or patriots, as some liberals like to say today—well, we anti-semites/fascists/populists will offer far more nationalism than you liberals can stomach. In rebuttal, the language of the juste milieu adopted by nineteenth-century liberals, like the vocabulary of moderation, pragmatism, universalism, and professional expertise offered by liberals today, looks like a watered-down substitute for the unadulterated measures offered by illiberals of all sorts. All honor to the moderate and pragmatic among us, but without a certain amount of theoretical backbone, moderation and pragmatism appear illogical or timid, not to say cowardly. Liberals need a convincing vocabulary—and policy proposals that match—that can be applied politically, economically, and morally, one that has built into it a rejection of the illiberalism of right and left.
The theoretical keyword of such a liberal vocabulary and policy agenda is sufficiency. People need enough, not the same. Sufficient money; sufficient education; sufficient opportunity; sufficient access to political power; sufficient freedom of speech; sufficient community; sufficient status; a sufficient feeling of national pride. In all these areas, “having less [than others] is compatible, after all, with having quite a bit.” When people judge their own well-being, “with respect to none of these considerations… is it essential for [a person] to measure his circumstances against the circumstances of anyone else.” If a person has enough resources to satisfy their needs, they have enough money, and “the same goes for rights, for respect, for consideration, and for concern.”
This is the case for UBI.
