When liberals think about institutions, we usually think of markets and governments, the big structures where our policy debates play out. But these conversations skip over a prior question: where do we find the people who make markets and governments work? What kind of institution produces adults capable of self-governance, voluntary exchange, peaceful disagreement, and the long-term thinking that sustains free societies?

The answer is the family, and yet liberals have had very little to say about it.

This is not a small oversight. The family challenges some of liberalism’s favorite categories. It is neither purely individual nor purely collective. It is not chosen the way we choose market transactions, and it is not imposed the way states impose law. It is pre-political, rooted in natural affections and biological realities that do not map neatly onto the frameworks liberals prefer. The result is that liberals have tended either to ignore the family, treat it as just another voluntary association, or view it with suspicion. More libertarian strands may reduce family bonds to a species of contract; more progressive strands may see the family as a source of inequality demanding public correction. In both cases, the family becomes a problem to be solved rather than an institution to be understood.

This essay is an attempt to correct that blind spot and to highlight some of the liberal thinkers who have seen more clearly. My claim here is not merely that liberals should tolerate the family, or that family policy is one issue among many. Rather, strong family life is absolutely critical to the success of the liberal project, across all four of its major pillars: economic, political, cultural, and epistemic. Understanding why requires looking at the family not through the lens of ideology, but through the lens of what families actually do.

Economic Liberalism: The Family as Spontaneous Order

Liberals who take markets seriously should take families seriously for the same reasons. The Hayekian insight about the dispersal of knowledge in society—that no central planner can access or process the particular, local information that individuals possess—applies with special force to families. Parents hold precisely the kind of intimate, particular knowledge about their children that bureaucratic systems cannot replicate: what motivates a specific child, what frightens her, where she is developmentally ready to be pushed, and where she needs patience. This is not sentimental; it is epistemic. Families are knowledge-processing institutions of extraordinary sophistication. Like all human institutions, they’re far from perfect. But they’re much better than centralized alternatives.

Hayek himself recognized that the spontaneous orders he championed in the market depend on smaller-scale social orders operating by different rules. The family is the most important of these, and not just because it operates by different rules. The family is where humans learn about rules and rule-making in the first place. As the economist Steve Horwitz argued, families function as a kind of “institutional playground” where children first encounter the give-and-take of social life, with its negotiation, rule-following, and fairness. Those lessons begin long before they ever enter a market or a voting booth. The skills that make free markets work—delayed gratification, reciprocity, and trust—are not natural endowments. They are cultivated, and the family is where that cultivation overwhelmingly happens.

Families also manage distributional problems that markets and states handle poorly. They provide safety nets for the very young, the very old, and the disabled, with a motivational intensity that no public program can match. Centralizing these functions confronts the same knowledge and incentive problems that economic liberals have always identified in more conventional centralized planning.

Political Liberalism: Subsidiarity and the Buffer between Individual and State

Limited government requires more than constitutional design. It needs intermediate institutions. And the family is the most fundamental of these.

Montesquieu understood this better than anyone. In The Persian Letters, his protagonist Usbek leaves behind a seraglio full of wives as he travels to Paris. In his absence, jealousies and intrigues rage out of control. Usbek responds with escalating coercion, surveillance, and punishment, and the novel ends in suicide and bloodshed. The tragedy is not simply a statement about polygamy. It is about what happens when domestic and political life are organized around coercion and power rather than consent and mutual affection. The seraglio is a household governed the way despotic states are governed: through fear, secrecy, and the absolute power of a single ruler. And like a despotic state, it cannot hold.

The causal connection runs both ways. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that by training men to be despotic in the home, societies raise men who only know how to rule through fear. Authoritarian families produce authoritarian citizens. But the reverse is also true: More egalitarian family structures create the habits of self-governance essential to moderate political life. The family is not just shaped by the regime it lives under. It shapes the regime in turn.

The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest level of institutional organization competent to address the matter at hand. That principle finds its most natural expression in the family. Edmund Burke understood this from the other direction: our affections begin at home and extend outward, and political orders that respect this natural structure tend to be more stable than those that try to override it. Parents making decisions about their children’s education, health, and moral formation are exercising a form of self-governance prior to any political institution. When the state assumes these functions, it does not merely substitute one set of decisionmakers for another; it eliminates a layer of governance that buffers against centralized power.

None of this means that family autonomy is absolute. The family can be a site of genuine harm, and liberalism cannot wish that tension away. But the answer is not to choose, once and for all, between family freedom and state intervention. It is to recognize that this balance will always require ongoing contestation. That kind of iterative, community-level negotiation is itself a liberal practice.

Cultural Liberalism: Pluralism Starts at Home

Liberals committed to cultural pluralism and tolerance should recognize the family as one of the primary engines of the diversity they value. Families transmit culture—language, religion, moral sensibility, aesthetic taste, ways of being in the world—with a specificity and depth that no public institution can replicate. A pluralistic society is, at bottom, a society of diverse families passing on diverse traditions.

This cuts against the instincts of some cultural liberals, who may see the family as a site of conformity or parochialism. Those concerns are real. As Judith Butler has argued, building on Montesquieu’s argument, family structures can undergird deep inequality and sustain coercive systems. But the solution most consistent with liberal principles is not to homogenize family life through state intervention. It is to support a pluralistic ecosystem of family forms. The variation in family structures across cultures and throughout history is not a bug; it is the social equivalent of biodiversity, producing the same kind of resilience. Attempts to impose a single model of family life—whether from the traditionalist right or the progressive left—threaten the very diversity that makes liberal societies adaptive. And the existence of various kinds of family forms allows for the tradeoffs of each to be compared. Competition exists between kinds of family forms, just as it does in other areas of human life. 

Cultural liberalism also needs the family for a more basic reason: tolerance is a learned disposition, and families are where it is first learned. Children who grow up negotiating differences within their own households—between siblings with different temperaments, between the desires of the individual and the needs of the group—develop the habits of compromise that a pluralistic society requires.

But even toleration has its limits, and the family is no exception. Every liberal society will have to make hard calls about which kinds of family life are tolerable and which are not. This is not a challenge to liberal principles, but the expression of them: the need for constant and iterative dialogue and contestation about values, goals, human goods, and the purpose of human institutions.

Epistemic Liberalism: The Family as a Teacher of Humility

Perhaps the least appreciated (but maybe most important) liberal argument for the family is epistemic. Liberals who care about the open exchange of ideas, intellectual humility, and the decentralization of knowledge should recognize the family as a critical institution for all three.

Knowledge in society is dispersed across time and place, and much of it is particular rather than general: how to farm a specific piece of land, navigate a specific community, or run a specific business built over generations. Families preserve and transmit this knowledge through intergenerational contact. It cannot be captured in policy manuals or standardized curricula, and when families are disrupted, this knowledge is lost.

More broadly, the family embodies, and demands, the epistemic humility that the best liberal thinkers have always championed. Family life is humbling. It forces us into contact with people we did not choose, whose needs compete with our own, and whose development we cannot fully control. It teaches that the world is more complex than any single theory can capture, which is the foundation of the epistemic modesty that makes liberal societies possible.

This humility, in turn, challenges the more extreme individualism of some strands of liberalism. None of us are fully self-made. We all enter adulthood with baggage, not just emotional and psychological, but linguistic, cultural, and developmental. The very shape of our brains and the networks of our neural pathways were formed well before we had any rational capacity to choose. We enter liberal society not as agentic individuals, but as humans whose personalities, impulses, goals, and values were shaped by other people’s choices, sometimes generations before we were born. In an era of ideological certainty and epistemic bubbles, the family is one of the few remaining institutions that forces us to reckon with perspectives we didn’t select.

Setting the Table

If the family is so critical to liberal thought, why have liberals neglected it? Partly it’s because social conservatives have so aggressively claimed the family for their own; it seems that some liberals may assume any serious engagement concedes ground to traditionalism. This is a mistake. Defending the importance of family life is not the same as defending any particular family form, nor does it require grounding family autonomy in religious tradition. The case I am making rests on empirical grounds: on what developmental science, evolutionary psychology, and institutional analysis tell us about how children develop and how societies sustain themselves.

The family is a pre-political institution that does not fit neatly into any ideological bucket. It challenges libertarian individualism just as it challenges progressive egalitarianism. It is messy, concrete, idiosyncratic, and resistant to theoretical tidiness. But that messiness is precisely what makes it so valuable. The family table is where the balance between individual and community is first struck, where freedom and obligation are first navigated, and where the next generation of free citizens is formed.

Liberals have ceded the family to other political traditions for too long. But the family does not belong to the traditionalist right any more than it belongs to the progressive left. It belongs to anyone willing to look honestly at how human beings actually develop. Every free society depends on people who can govern themselves, cooperate with strangers, tolerate disagreement, and think beyond the present moment. Those capacities are not innate. They are built, slowly and imperfectly, in the daily life of families, by people navigating exactly the kind of messy, unchosen, untheorizable relationships that liberalism has never been comfortable with. If we are serious about epistemic humility, about the limits of what any single institution can know or accomplish, we should start by taking seriously the one institution that teaches it first. The liberal project does not begin at the voting booth or the marketplace. It begins at home.

When walking to an American Political Science Association (APSA) panel in 2022, I remarked to a colleague that the subject of discussion was “liberalism in crisis.” Their response was “when isn’t it?” Although it was said in a joking voice as we traversed the conference center halls, the sentiment identified something true. This was not the first time such a panel appeared at this conference, nor would it be the last.   

The precarious state of liberalism today is at once unprecedented and yet deeply familiar to historians of political thought. The European age of revolutions, from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, presented a time when values like human freedom and equality were getting a public hearing, and were in need of defense. The twentieth century saw the rise of totalitarianism and the worst excesses of cruelty. Democratic backsliding today suggests that individuals would rather support authoritarian governments than defend political rights for those with whom they disagree. It makes a person want to hide away at home and watch sitcoms.

One might do worse.

Liberalism, of course, is more than just a set of principles, or formal, institutional, or legal rules. It is a habit of character, and it requires cultivating an orientation toward those values which form the basis of liberal institutions. From this perspective, liberalism can be understood as a practice. It is not enough that we merely believe in the principles of freedom, fairness, and equality—we have to enact them in our personal lives. Rather than being merely an abstract theory, liberalism as an ideology informs who we are as members of a political community—indeed, the survival of liberal institutions requires that at least some of us adopt and adhere to this outlook. 

One way to cultivate these values is through an engagement with works of popular culture. Even sitcoms—or so I hope to convince you. I take popular culture to be a set of cultural artifacts that are known and understood by a significant group of a culture’s individuals. What even shows like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched can offer that John Rawls or NPR on their own cannot is a creative and affective way to engage with political questions and concerns, on terms that are immediately understood by the general public, but without the risks and emotional hardship that so often accompany serious discussions of current events. They also ground our reflections in the ordinary lives of individuals. As Judith Shklar reminds readers in considering Orwell’s 1984, the novel’s themes “are surely matters that have always been important to political theory, and by recapturing them imaginatively, we may avert theory’s worst fault: that is, to talk in a vacuum and about nothing at all, to heap words upon words that have no bearing on anything or anyone who has ever lived and spoken in the actual world.” 

By taking their audiences out of themselves, these works can more effectively ground them in the real world. Even if all that we want from them is an escape, they still reflect on the tangible concerns, thoughts, and feelings, which, by virtue of merely being a human, one can relate to and understand. This expands our capacity to relate to others. For any art to be popular, it has to appeal to aspects of life that are already shared. It can then produce and reproduce a shared discursive sphere of references that enable us to engage with political problems from a safe ground, one where we can walk away and disconnect at any time.

A Brief and Selective History of Pop-Culture Liberalism

The relationship between liberal values and popular culture isn’t new; it’s an essential feature of the history of the liberal tradition. This link has been especially pronounced in satirical writings, which offer a way to playfully but seriously criticize politics. Baron de Montesquieu, the acclaimed Enlightenment author best known for his philosophical treatise The Spirit of the Laws, in fact began his career as a popular novelist. In his Persian Letters, Usbek and Rica find themselves immersed in Paris’s distinctive cultural and political milieu. Their status as outsiders lets them critically view and assess the customs and traditions of the country, and they are not impressed. Reflecting on Parisian coffee shops, Usbek muses: “But what shocks me about these wits is that they give no service to their country, but fritter away their talents on childish things.” When viewed through their eyes, these “wits,” or the self-professed intellectual elite, are wasting their time with vapid conversations rather than actually contributing to society. Through his vivid descriptions, Montesquieu transports readers into the beautiful, lush, and ultimately shallow state that he takes Parisian intellectual culture to be. 

At first, French authorities banned The Persian Letters, proving its success in not only poking fun at the French, but more seriously in exposing the flaws of the French state under Louis XIV. Montesquieu had touched on a sensitive topic. The fictional nature of the work allowed Montesquieu an avenue in which to explore his ideological commitments in a different conceptual space; the value of such a space is that it can connect with readers on an emotional level. The ways in which laws, customs, and mores are intrinsic to the public sphere, and serve as the foundation of a political community (a foundation deeper than and essential to its formal rules), are found in the biting portrayals of the Parisian salons just as much as in the formal diagnosis of the French situation in The Spirit of the Laws. Although the form of writing and the nature of appeal differ, the principles are the same. One scholar observes this continuity directly, and notes of Montesquieu that “the principles, the forms, and the assumptions remained the same in his mind from the beginning to the end of his life.” 

The tradition of satirical novels continued into the twentieth century, perhaps best exemplified by texts like George Orwell’s admittedly bleak 1984. Here, government surveillance appears in its most extreme form. Every neighbor is a potential agent of the Party, watching and observing one another’s actions. “Thoughtcrime”  is a serious offense, and individuals are forced to convince themselves of a false version of the truth or risk state punishment. Readers of The Persian Letters and 1984 encounter imaginative environments where a healthy skepticism government is not only well-founded but appropriate. Although these forms are fictional, their function is not. There is an ideology, as well as a moral, to the story. 

But it is not only within novels that liberal principles have been put forward and explored. The literary critic Paul Cantor, writing about the popularity of television shows in the twentieth century, discusses how The Simpsons serves to simultaneously mock fundamental American institutions whilst recognizing their importance; The X-Files’s depiction of the government as secretive and worthy of suspicion raises awareness of what the state fails to disclose; and Star Trek portrays the end of history, the universality of liberal values, and a profound appreciation for humanism. Children’s films also capture these ideals, with Monsters, Inc. providing another instance where there is a glorification of the liberal consensus, with the film’s happy ending being achieved when “individual ingenuity advanced energy production, increased profits, and adhered to an ethical code of conduct.”

Alexandre Lefebvre has continued in Cantor’s tradition of writing about liberal values within popular culture, with his recent book Liberalism as a Way of Life. In it, he notes how Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope is “the most vibrant, relevant, relatable, and just generally awesome—representative of the spirit of early liberalism.” The principles at the heart of Parks and Recreation are “the need to keep public land, resources, and institutions free,” a political value harkening to the seventeenth century and liberal author John Locke. Or consider The Good Place, where Lefebvre finds a meditation on how liberals, and indeed all people, ought to focus on the way we treat one another, rather than the comprehensive, conflicting, and incommensurable beliefs that we hold. By setting things aside, we create the opportunity to bond with individuals we otherwise might never have spoken to. Consider, for instance, the close relationship that forms between Jacksonville Jaguars fan and petty criminal Jason, and the wealthy, excessive, party-planning Tahani. Of particular importance here is that Lefebvre uses these examples to advance his idea of what it means to be a liberal; their function lies in their capacity to tap into these values and explore them in a novel way. 

How Popular Culture Functions

Popular culture draws on a background imaginative capacity, one that the members of a community can find intuitive and use as a vehicle for making sense of liberal values and principles. Popular culture can simultaneously create and reinforce our identity as individuals, reflecting on our values and principles, and can orient us outward, toward other members of a political community. Watching films or television shows can provide a resource for personal inspiration, delivering a value that matters to us in an entirely different context that we would not or could not typically experience directly. In this way, even sitcoms are akin to a thousand small philosophical thought experiments. They encourage viewers to discuss scenarios in ways that we might like philosophers to do, but they’re without the analytic jargon that typically accompanies such discussions. They bring ordinary people to talk to one another about imagined but accessible scenarios—most of which rather crucially focus on other ordinary people.

The historian Benedict Anderson has argued that artifacts like the novel are an essential mechanism for nation-building. These works provide a way to conceive of oneself as part of the “imagined community” of strangers—the co-nationals whom we cannot possibly meet, but with whom we share a common identity. The Simpsons was the quintessential American television show precisely because there is a character for every individual to sympathize with and relate to—even if they are cast in an absurd and hyperbolic form. City dwellers and small-town folk alike are familiar with staples like the local bar and convenience store, and the inept city hall that fails to finish municipal projects. Popular culture thus deepens our collective and individual self-understanding, provides a medium for connecting with others, and extends our capacity to recognize similarities with a broader group of individuals.  

But it is not enough to show that there exist liberal forms of popular culture, or that pop culture and liberalism are compatible. Any ideology will have popular works and genres that are especially its own—conservatives, for example, are particularly fond of spy novels. Nor is it enough to discuss the value that popular culture has in general for a political community. What is the distinct value of popular culture for liberal viewers? One illustrative example, foreshadowed in the introduction, is the way that these works facilitate an appreciation for diversity, essential to the liberal belief in pluralism. Sitcoms provide a helpful illustration of this point, in the way they engage our sense of humor, remind us to laugh at ourselves, and provide new perspectives for us to think about. 

Consider for instance popular sitcoms from the 60s, like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched, both of which pushed against traditional conceptions of the family. The Brady family came together at a time when both divorce and remarriage were socially and legally stigmatized in the United States. It was the nuclear family, of one wife and one husband married eternally, that was deemed the ideal form, toward which all of humanity was aspiring. The idea of kids from different parental backgrounds, coming together and forming a new family, might have been a strange thought to the American viewer. This is what the Brady bunch is, though—a blended family that redefines and questions what society thought at the time. The stereotypical struggles of the siblings, and the other difficulties that both parents and children have, these are the common and identifiable elements that relate the show to a broader audience who is able to see the constitutive elements of family life in the Bradys’ dynamics. The new styles of family formation then arising pushed against older norms, and as they did, popular art, like sitcoms, encouraged social acceptance across differences.     

Bewitched particularly challenged and took to task the traditional role of the housewife. Samantha, raised by witches, never learned the required etiquette for the home life that she and Darrin set out to pursue in their marriage. She cannot cook or clean, and she is terrible at charming Darrin’s boss. She has none of the traits that a proper wife at the time ought to have. In fact, she actively resists those traits, with her strong sense of independence and a willingness to speak frankly and openly. Yet the show does not tell a narrative of how she learned her proper place in the world; rather, it tells how the world changes around her. Darrin is frustrated and irritated at times, but the episodes end consistently on a note of two people coming together and accepting one another. He does not force her to change, nor does she want to. Rather, their home is a different kind of home from the others they know. This again pushes against an established idealized version of society, to offer a different narrative about what it is possible for individuals to be. 

Judith Shklar reminds us that it is not enough to note the fact of pluralism; we must celebrate it. Watching sitcoms is one way of doing so. They can broaden our horizons and challenge the way that we think about the world. Exposure to new ideas fosters a sense of epistemic humility, reminding us of how little we know about the lives of others. The familiarity of sitcoms additionally provides a resource for bonding and relating to others. Although we may not know much, there are things we all share in common. If the people matter, so does what they are watching. We should therefore not relinquish our pop culture references for discourse about endless news cycles or constant and intractable philosophical debates about the meaning of freedom. Being a liberal in practice requires living a life in the real world with others, and this, in turn, involves taking time to watch sitcoms.

One of my formative experiences was to have been introduced to three things almost simultaneously: economics, cultural anthropology, and the raging late twentieth century panic about where gay boys come from. As a gay boy myself, I’ll admit to having had a bit of a stake in the matter.

The theories abounded. Was it a lack of physical discipline? A lack of strong male role models? Too much contact between the boy and the mother? Was the mother overbearing? Was there childhood trauma, like sexual abuse? 

Such were the 90s; such were the views we had to take seriously. And I did: I thought carefully about these scenarios, absolutely none of which I’d experienced. I was undeniably gay, but with no idea how to account for it. A lot of people feared that contemporary social changes, like gay marriage, might yield many more gay people. That would lower the fertility rate, which could threaten civilization itself.

At the same time, I was doing my first independent historical research projects, and several of them were cross-cultural. I learned about societies that were organized on very different plans from our own, like the seventeenth-century Iroquois people of what’s now eastern Canada. Every year, the adult men all left the village for a lengthy hunting expedition. The mothers stayed in the longhouses, tended the crops, and raised the children. The women and children often didn’t see the men for months. Iroquois villages were organized around matrilineal and matrilocal kinship, with women having a great deal of social power, especially over their children. They also picked the chiefs.

Here, I thought, was a natural experiment: If, relative to American norms, too much contact between a boy and his mother was really the issue, or if the blame lay with relatively overbearing moms or absent male role models, then the boys in this society should very often grow up gay—but the sources didn’t seem to say that. Seventeenth-century French Jesuit missionaries lived side by side with the Iroquois, and the missionaries had no compunctions whatsoever about narrating what they considered morally abhorrent events. If homosexuality were especially notable, they would have recorded it; what they found were only a few incidental cases. 

Sodom and Gomorrah it was not. Weirdly, figures on the far right today may use the longhouse as a racially pejorative term for a feminized society. Iroquois men impressed the French missionaries in just the opposite direction; they were feared warriors whose prowess was legendary. Iroquois men simply occupied a somewhat different gender role in their society than any we have in our own—neither feminized boys failing to launch, nor American-conventional masculine heads of household. Somehow, for them, it worked. A sentence that cultural anthropologists must say a lot.

That natural experiment sits beside thousands of others. Kinship, childrearing, and work can all be organized in what are, to contemporary Americans, a panoply of mind-boggling and gender-bending ways. I won’t say that these differences can have absolutely no effect on sexual orientation, but if a pattern of cultural practices reliably produced lots more of any sort of LGBT people, we’d almost certainly know about it by now.

And we don’t: Ancient Greece and Rome were more open to talking about (some forms of) homosexuality, but that wasn’t why Rome fell, and it won’t be why we do, either. After Rome fell, the Middle Ages most certainly had plenty of both straight and queer people. Life goes on, for all of us. It’s punctuated by panics, which regularly target some of us—for fear that if we’re not dealt with, life will not go on. Yet life does go on, and here we all are again, and life will go on again.

Ethnographies usually emphasize the differences across societies, but the general layout of human sexual orientation is a surprisingly stable phenomenon, even while the ways that we integrate it into our societies can and do differ extravagantly. Whatever we try, almost everyone still seems to end up straight, or almost entirely so, and some of us still end up otherwise. Variations from one society to another are more easily explained by hiding in response to repression, a hypothesis with a causal mechanism that we know happens all the time. The competing hypothesis, that interventions can successfully change many individuals’ orientations across an entire society, is something that we can’t even reliably establish for individuals in a clinical setting. 

There’s a lesson there. Whenever you see a claim about how society is in imminent danger from something that’s probably always existed at a low level everywhere, it’s good to ask about why the collapse hasn’t already happened. There are deep foundations to almost everything human, and we still understand many of them only dimly. But we’ve been taking notes about social setups for thousands of years, and some things—like both hetero- and homosexuality, and like the tendency of some people to cross gender boundaries—seem always to be with us. The inference I’d offer is that there’s an equilibrium to sexuality in general, a self-regulation that we manifestly can’t easily affect, and that it reliably creates, not just straight people, but all of us. 

When an equilibrium seems especially hard to disrupt, it’s often because it rests on many different factors, all of which cooperate to bring it about. If one or even several factors fail, the equilibrium of many factors may still survive in some form. The stability of such an equilibrium, always coordinating on a pattern that yields lots of fertility, would contribute to the fitness of the species, even if not every individual were maximally fertile. Adam Smith memorably quipped that there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but this is different: a system that stably yields several outputs, none of which are the system’s ruin.

The system’s overall stability might even depend on not hitting optimal fertility in any particular generation, or ever. It makes sense that evolution might land in territory like this—a situation of many factors, all of which contribute to a stability that’s not fully maximizing fertility in any one moment, but that’s very hard to disrupt over the long term. If there’s a price to be paid for that stability, in the form of some individuals who aren’t as fertile as the rest, that might be a fair trade from an evolutionary perspective. The reward is that, across a wide range of behaviors, the species always stays very fertile. We may worry, but we don’t have to.

A multifactor causal structure for human sexual orientation also makes sense in light of one of the great scientific disconfirmations we’ve had since the 90s: the failure to find any specific human genes that alone determine someone’s orientation. That we’d one day find such genes used to be an article of faith among liberals, who expected that science would soon close up this gap in our knowledge and establish the naturalness of the less common orientations.

In some circles today, the fact that no gay gene has ever been found may still be used to deny that gayness is natural. But that’s a hasty conclusion. Nature has many paths to its ends. Concluding against one theory doesn't necessarily prove another. In the face of doubt, liberalism still says to avoid cruelty, and to affirm the dignity of all. That’s also a safe heuristic when it’s not quite clear what’s going on, and when we might be tempted to panic.

Physicists tell of a theoretical phenomenon called false vacuum decay. The claim’s something like this: Space itself has an energy state. It’s not actually nothingness; on this theory, space bears an exotic potential energy that might be able to exert various dramatic effects. If something discharged that energy, the space of the universe would revert to a true vacuum state, which we’ve never experienced before. What that would look like is unknown, but suggestions at Wikipedia include everything from “complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with the survival of structures like galaxies, stars, and even biological life, while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe.” At any time, and with no warning, all that we value might end in an instant.

Physicists don’t know as much as they’d like about false vacuums, but they do know that if they exist at all, they must be incredibly rare. We’re still around, and existence as we know it appears to have been stable for billions of years. Granting that nothing is simple in modern cosmology, the physical properties of the universe nonetheless seem safely uniform; they aren’t changing dramatically across any frontiers in the observed universe. If sudden changes in physical constants were anything near a common event, we would already know about it.

This isn’t to say that the physical properties of the universe derive their stability from a deep equilibrium. It’s to introduce a heuristic: We shouldn’t assume that enduring but poorly understood phenomena—like sexual orientation, or the stability of empty space—stand ready to crumple before the terrors that our minds all too easily imagine. The mind comes up with all kinds of stuff, and a lot of it’s not very helpful. And so life goes on, punctuated by panics.

Now, anyone putting this kind of quiet confidence out in public is likely to be met by a well-meaning interlocutor, who may note that some disasters really do occur. He’ll add that one can never be too careful, a note of socially acceptable worry that seems to end a lot of the conversations that happen right at the edge of our knowledge.

As for me, I’ll grant that disasters do occur—but I’ll add that time and resources are finite, and not all feared disasters are real. Hypervigilance is no answer here, so let’s turn to another example.

Food production is an area where we can definitely cause an equilibrium to collapse through the conscious design of our institutions. It’s even happened in this decade, in Sri Lanka, whose economy collapsed after a deeply unwise attempt to ban all inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. It also happened in the Terror Famine of the Soviet Union, and it happened in the Irish Potato Famine. Relative to what we’ve been discussing above, the equilibria of food production are much easier to disturb—and we know it because history is full of famines. 

We need a theory of equilibria, and we have one, in the form of economics. Many economists thought the Sri Lankan experiment was especially foolish, and they said so at the time. They knew the country was in trouble by looking at the factors that create and show the endangered equilibrium—consumer demand, the inputs needed to meet that demand, their prices, and the contributions of the various factors to agricultural productivity. Equilibria don’t always hold, and this one didn’t.

Yet the phenomena of economics are in some ways a poor model for the phenomena of the natural world. Whatever keeps the vacuum of space stable, it’s not responding to anything we’ve done so far,  and it also seems to have been stable over billions of years with respect to nonhuman disturbances. Human society, on the other hand, takes constant work to enact; individuals must be convinced to do that work, day in and day out; and each one may be subject to private ideas that pull them away from it. Some specific humans are tasked with actively maintaining the background conditions that allow the rest of us to behave in ways that yield an economic equilibrium. We call the background conditions “law,” and we call the people who look after the laws “legislators.” The universe might have such a person, but if so, he doesn’t seem persuadable.

On Earth, though, our legislators’ private ideas are pliable, and when they change, the people who write our laws may change the conditions by which we seek our economic goals, perhaps making the resulting equilibrium drastically worse. That’s certainly something to be on guard for. We may know it when the prices change, and we hope that we don’t discover it only when the shelves are empty.

But both the stars and our bodies are in states more robust than that. They’re less responsive to what our minds may have to say about them. Steady regularities like those are common in the foundations of human experience. Common in everyday life, unfortunately, are the people who would profit by saying that everything is about to fall apart. And so life goes on.

In 2017, six counties in North Carolina changed how they paid their public defenders. Previously, the counties paid private attorneys an hourly rate to represent indigent people charged with crimes. Under the new system, indigent defense would be handled with flat-fee contracts—an attorney would agree to represent a given percentage of a county’s indigent cases in exchange for a set amount of money. Five years later, a study documented the results: People represented under the flat-fee system were more likely to be convicted, far more likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to plead guilty without a trial. Flat-fee lawyers spent less time on each case and were significantly more likely to dispose of a case on the same day they met their clients. A similar study in South Carolina produced similar results. On average, flat-fee attorneys spent 50 percent less time on each case.

Those outcomes were entirely predictable. States first started moving to flat-fee contracts in the 1980s and 1990s, as soaring crime rates overwhelmed already-inadequate public defense systems. State legislatures then exacerbated the problem with new laws that created new crimes, lengthened sentences for existing crimes, and created new death-eligible crimes, which take considerably more person-hours for investigation and preparation. Flat-fee contracts were cheaper and more predictable than other methods of delivering indigent defense.

Setting up a full-time public defender office required start-up costs and added expenses like office space, overhead, and benefits for staff. Paying private attorneys by the hour was expensive, and a nightmare for anticipating a reliable budget. Fixed fee contracts create a competitive system in which cities and counties award contracts to attorneys and firms willing to take on the most cases for the least amount of money. So they quickly became the most common way of providing indigent defense. In 1986, about one in ten indigent defendants were represented by an attorney operating on a fixed fee. By 2013, it was more than half.

But if the goal is to provide a zealous, constitutional defense, flat-fee contracts have been a catastrophic failure. They provide an incentive for attorneys to offer the barest of bare-bones defenses. They reward efficiency over quality. In some jurisdictions, including Houston and most of Mississippi, contracts are awarded by judges themselves. So any defense attorney with a flat-fee contract who bogs down a judge’s docket with motions or appeals a judge’s ruling risks offending the person with significant control over their livelihood. Before Idaho revamped its system a few years ago, some prosecutors could wield influence over which private attorneys were given contracts.

It isn’t as if these problems hadn’t been anticipated. As early as 1985, the American Bar Association issued a scathing report about how flat-fee contracts had undermined public defense in San Diego. That same year, the California State Bar called for such contracts to be banned. In a damning study in the 1990s, one contractor boasted to researchers that he generally spent all of 30 seconds with clients before persuading them to plead guilty. A study from the U.S. Department of Justice warned of the perils of flat-fee contracts in 2000, and the California State Bar issued yet another warning in 2006. In 2001, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about a rural attorney in Georgia who was handling more than 400 felony cases per year for a flat $30,000 fee. Between those cases and the attorney’s private practice, he often had 40 or more hearings per day. He typically met with his clients outside the courtroom for just minutes before persuading them to plead guilty. A 2003 report found that attorneys paid with flat-fee contracts in Pennsylvania “are not taking the time to visit clients in jail, file motions, conduct effective investigations, or respond to mail from clients.” 

None of this seemed to deter elected officials. A 2013 Sixth Amendment Center study found that five California counties had contracted indigent defense to a law firm that had earned the nickname the “Walmart of public defense.” A 2025 Wren Collective study of 24 California counties still using flat-fee contracts found that “private contractors attempt to undercut each other in a bidding war because they know that the county will award the contract to the lowest bidder.” In one of those counties, contract attorneys averaged 500–600 felony cases per year. Current ABA recommendations put the maximum number of low-level felonies an attorney can ethically handle per year at 59. Those counties also have some of the highest incarceration rates in the state.

Flat-fee contracts also typically don’t come with added funds to hire investigators or expert witnesses. The ABA recommends hiring investigators for nearly all serious crimes. Many dedicated public defender offices use them even for misdemeanors. But if the money for an investigator has to come out of a flat-fee contract, there’s little incentive for those attorneys to use one. In 2017 the ACLU sued 11 rural counties in Nevada that used flat-fee contracts. The organization found that contract attorneys in those counties rarely used investigators. One attorney used an investigator just once in 109 felony cases. Another used one in just seven of 453 cases. Still another had 333 cases in the first 8 months of 2016, but hadn’t used an investigator or expert witness in any of them. A 2023 study found that more than half the counties in Texas—where flat-fee contracts are common—had no expenditures for investigators in 2020 at all.

Some jurisdictions have even used flat-fee contracts for death penalty cases. The combination of profoundly high stakes and lowest common denominator attorneys produced some jaw-dropping stories that are now part of the lore of the mass incarceration era. Texas attorney Joe Frank Cannon, for example, boasted to the Wall Street Journal in 1994 that he was able to tear through his trials “like greased lightning.” At the time, ten men he’d represented were already on Texas’s death row. Cannon would later make national headlines for sleeping through significant portions of two clients’ death penalty trials. Ron Mock represented 19 clients in capital cases, and 16 were sentenced to die. When asked by the New York Times about allegations that he often showed up for trials smelling of booze, Mock replied, “I drank a lot of whiskey. I drank whiskey with judges. I drank whiskey in the best bars. But it never affected my ability.” 

In a 2010 article about another notorious lawyer, the New York Times wrote, “A good way to end up on death row in Texas is to have Jerry Guerinot represent you.” In one case, Guerinot had met with his client just one time, and for all of 15 minutes, before her trial. She was convicted and sentenced to death. For most attorneys, preparing for and trying a single death penalty case should take up nearly all of their time. In 1996, Guerinot tried four death penalty cases in seven months. He tried those cases while also trying hundreds of other felony cases, and while serving as the part-time prosecutor in another town. All of those clients were convicted and sentenced to death.

Finally, there’s Jerome Godinich, whose obscene caseloads have provided fodder for journalists for two decades. In 2009, Godinich attracted national media attention after two of his clients were executed before they had exhausted their appeals because Godinich missed the filing deadline. Between 2006 and 2009, Harris County judges paid Godinich over $713,000 to handle 1,638 cases for 1,400 defendants, including 21 capital cases. In 2017 alone, he handled more than 600 felonies. He has continued to get referrals despite accumulating dozens of complaints from clients, some of whom said they waited months or even years in jail as their cases dragged on, rarely if ever hearing from their attorney. In 2022, he made more than a half million dollars from indigent cases.

A 2024 study by the Wren Collective found that of the 40 lawyers appointed to handle death penalty cases in Houston in 2022, 12 were simultaneously carrying at least 100 other felony cases.

Public choice theory posits that we shouldn’t assume that elected officials and people in public service will necessarily act in the public interest. It isn’t that people in public service are more corrupt or uniquely selfish, it’s that we’re all biased toward our own interests, and there’s nothing about public service that insulates us from those biases. To put it more simply, incentives matter, so our incentives should reflect our priorities. 

And the problem isn't just with public defenders. The system is rife with misaligned incentives.

In 2010, a Raleigh News & Observer investigation found a video from the North Carolina state crime lab in which two blood-spatter specialists ran through multiple experiments, but weren’t getting the results they wanted. After several tries, they finally got a result that mimicked the blood patterns on a defendant’s shorts, bolstering the prosecution’s case. The two analysts then high-fived. The broader investigation found that analysts at the lab repeatedly botched or faked test results, and failed to inform defense attorneys of tests that were exculpatory for their clients. 

The problem was that the crime lab fell under the auspices of the state’s Department of Justice. So analysts were trained, not to be impartial and deliver publicly credible analysis, but to be team players for prosecutors, and to be uncooperative and hostile to defense attorneys. Prosecutors even weighed in on the analysts’ performance reviews.

The scholar Roger Koppl has found in recent years that dozens of crime labs around the country are funded by fees collected from criminal defendants, but only if they’re convicted. This means that these labs’ funding—the money for their equipment, their overhead, their salaries—it’s contingent on producing results and testimony that get convictions.

In Mississippi, the peripatetic medical examiner Steven Hayne was able to monopolize the state’s criminal autopsies for the better part of two decades because the state’s coroners and prosecutors contracted those autopsies out to private doctors. Any medical examiner who didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear jeopardized future contracts. Hayne kept prosecutors happy with damning testimony that at times could be preposterous. In one of his more notorious cases, for example, prosecutors claimed that a brother and sister simultaneously held a gun and killed the sister’s husband as he slept. Hayne claimed that he could tell by the bullet wounds and bullet pattern that there were two people holding the gun. At least 11 people he helped convict have been exonerated, including several who had been sentenced to death.

Probation and parole are another area where misplaced incentives have been destructive. In both cases, the goal should be to help people who have been convicted graduate out of state custody and resume their normal lives. But many states have privatized these services, with fees paid by those on probation or parole themselves. This means that every successful completion of those programs is one less paying customer for those companies. The companies have a strong incentive to “violate” those on probation or parole, and prevent them from completing their sentences. Studies of privatized probation in Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia have found that under private probation systems, people found guilty of misdemeanor offenses like traffic violations can be sentenced to probation if they’re unable to pay, with additional fines and fees due to the probation companies. Though those offenses aren’t punishable with incarceration, failure to complete the probation programs can result in incarceration. 

Other public defender systems can be problematic too. Louisiana has mostly moved to full-time public defender offices, but most get significant funding from fees paid by their own clients. This means that not only do public defenders lose money for their offices if they get an acquittal, they’ve been told by the state to act like a debt collection agency to recoup fees from clients who were already too poor to hire a private attorney.

Well-intended funding for law enforcement can also go awry. The federal government has long given out drug enforcement grants based in whole or in part on raw arrest numbers. This incentivizes police agencies to rack up arrest figures by rounding up low level offenders. Building a case against a major supplier takes time and resources, and may only result in a few arrests. Even assuming it was possible to eradicate illicit drugs—and a half century of the modern drug war provides strong evidence that it isn’t—any narcotics unit that managed to do so would lose the funding that pays their salaries. There are similar problems with any grants that are tied to eradicating any specific type of crime, be it gambling, prostitution, or gangs.

Even high-minded reforms aimed at reducing incineration can be shot through with poor incentives. Drug courts were supposed to be a way to treat addiction without incarceration. But drug courts are also under pressure to prove their effectiveness. And because most addicts fail at quitting many times before they succeed, drug courts often take only first-time or second-time offenders, or people with no other convictions. These are often people who may not even be addicted, but were merely caught with an illicit drug and might otherwise get off with a fine or warning. So in an effort to demonstrate their “success,” drug courts can mean people who aren’t actually addicted are forced to go through treatment, while actual addicts who need help are turned away. Studies have shown that drug courts have largely failed to reduce incarceration. 

The liberal argument here isn’t necessarily about state versus private. It’s just about properly aligning incentives. A better approach to forensic analysis for example, would be to periodically send evidence to private crime labs to analyze independently. If state analysts know that their work could be scrutinized at any time, but don’t know exactly which time, we mitigate the cognitive bias that can infect even the most conscientious analysts. The incentives shift from wanting to please the prosecutors or police to whom they report to not wanting to be caught in an embarrassing mistake.

An even better approach would be to make crime labs independent of law enforcement entirely. At the innovative crime lab in Houston, director Peter Stout periodically tests his own analysts with fake cases for which he knows the “correct” result. He also rewards analysts who spot fake cases, which helps him better disguise them. This system not only keeps his analysts on their toes, it serves as a sort of filter for which areas of forensics are credible and which aren’t. If analysts in a given specialty repeatedly fail the test cases, perhaps they shouldn’t be testifying in court. But it also shows how some fields can’t be tested, and thus probably shouldn’t be used to put people in prison. For example, Stout points out that one can't recreate “blood spatter patterns” from a murder without hitting someone with a murder weapon. So there's no way to establish a ground truth on what the pattern fitting the state’s theory of the crime would look like. And there's also no way to test analysts on their accuracy. 

There are similar problems with fields that can’t establish a margin for error. DNA is legitimate science. We can say with precision what percentage of the population has a given DNA marker, so we can then calculate the odds that someone other than the suspect could have left a sample with the same number of markers. But for more subjective fields, we can’t calculate a margin for error. We don’t know what percentage of pry bars or screwdrivers could have created the precise marks left on a door frame. We don’t know what percentage of people could have left the vague bite marks on a murder victim’s skin. We can’t say for certain that no other gun could possibly have left the same microscopic marks on a bullet that the suspected murder weapon did. In some cases, this sort of analysis can exclude a suspect or a gun, but this sort of analysis is often used to say only this person could have left these marks, or only this gun could have fired this bullet.

As for probation or parole, cities and states could still opt for public or private systems, but the officers or companies shouldn’t be paid or rewarded based on how many cases they have. Ideally, they’d be rewarded or paid based on how many people successfully complete their sentences and don’t reoffend in a given period of time. But even a flat fee would make more sense than a model that incentivizes perpetual probation.

Research suggests that the best model for indigent defense is a full-time office staffed with attorneys who only do criminal defense, along with investigators, support staff, and social workers. Such offices should be funded with public money, and overseen by an appointed board with enough independence to ensure clients are getting a zealous defense, but also to advocate on behalf of public defenders when it comes to funding, pending legislation, and other policies.

Some of the incentive-driven problems in the criminal justice system are the product of unintended consequences—of lawmakers not fully grasping how incentives have been misaligned, followed by a general lack of political will to fix them. But many of these problems were entirely intentional—they reflect the values and priorities of the people who created the policies, and of those who have the power to change them. 

Flat-fee public defense contracts are popular because they benefit the people who award them. Judges get defense attorneys who persuade clients to plead guilty early and don’t slow down their dockets with motions and challenges. Prosecutors get token opponents who don’t force them to prove their cases in front of a jury. County and city leaders get a system that efficiently incarcerates people for a fraction of the cost of a more robust public defender system. The same is true of putting crime labs under the auspices of a law enforcement organization, or systems in which prosecutors or police contract forensic analysis to private actors. They get the “expertise” that helps them win convictions.

None of this makes for a just or fair or constitutional system. It doesn’t provide for objective, science-based expertise, ensure a fair defense for the poor, or even improve public safety. The good news is that many of these problems are fixable. We just need to make sure that the system’s incentives are aligned with the values we want to prioritize. The hard part is convincing the people who hold power that they should value fairness, justice, and equality under the law over tough-on-crime platitudes, mass incarceration, and easy convictions.

Though it might be hard to spot amid all their other challenges, liberals in the United States have a foreign policy problem. With a growing populist backlash and the re-election of Donald Trump, liberals, particularly in the Democratic Party, are keen to find an agenda that can kickstart American growth and prosperity and repair the democratic injuries of recent years. But groups such as the abundance movement have largely ignored foreign policy, preferring instead to leave that to existing foreign policy elites, whose invocations of liberal values and democracy sound like an ideal fit for a democratic rejuvenation at home. 

This is misleading. The last thirty years have been a period of pronounced overextension in U.S. foreign policy, and it has upset the balance between promoting liberal values overseas and protecting liberalism at home. Worse, the two primary camps in today’s foreign policy debates—Trump’s America-First nationalism and Biden’s global democracy-vs-autocracy framework—are simultaneously protectionist and militarily interventionist. If liberals are to build an effective domestic agenda, they instead need to tether it to a more modest, realist foreign policy capable of protecting American democracy and prosperity at home. This need has only been heightened by the Trump administration’s disastrous war with Iran, which looks increasingly likely to seriously strain the American economy.  

Liberalism has a long and contested relationship with foreign policy, with which we do not have time to engage fully here. For classical liberals, the notion that international engagement and economic intercourse can promote greater harmony is obvious; the spread of liberal values and democracy around the world is laudable. At the same time, libertarians are correct in their long running concern that “war is the health of the state.” An activist, interventionist, military-heavy foreign policy inevitably produces greater taxation and threats to civil liberties. The result is an intrinsic tension between the kind of interventionist foreign policy some claim is necessary to promote liberal values globally, and the health of liberty and democracy here at home. 

There is also—as many Cold War battles over U.S. foreign policy highlighted—a tension between the “national interest” and the universalizing tendencies of liberal thought. From debates in the nascent American republic over whether the United States should intervene to promote the French Revolution, there have always been times when the prosperity or survival of the nation conflicts with liberal values. As Hans Morgenthau has put it, “The individual may say for himself: ‘Fiat justia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)’, but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care.” Eisenhower, for example, declined to support Hungarians in their anti-Soviet uprising in 1956 due to fears of nuclear conflict.

Throughout U.S. history, policymakers have tried to blend liberal idealism and realist prudence into a workable compromise. The last three decades, however, have been a time of idealist excess. Since 1991, the United States has been ensconced in a “unipolar moment,” a period of pronounced U.S. power and dominance created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. With no great power competitors to oppose it, policymakers took the opportunity to pursue grand liberal crusades, described by the scholar Barry Posen as liberal hegemony—a bipartisan marriage of unmatched military power with radical policy aims. Realist prudence has been largely absent. 

Indeed, “radical” understates the case; U.S. foreign policy since 1991 has been profoundly transformational, including attempts to maintain American military primacy; to liberalize both international trade and domestic markets around the world; to enforce liberal norms through international institutions; to spread democracy by the sword; and to prevent atrocities globally by rewriting the norms of sovereignty. Though U.S. policymakers themselves often portrayed these choices in terms of an existing liberal order, they were in practice trying to reshape the world in a deeply revisionist way. 

Some of these policies produced good outcomes. Globalization, for example, helped to lift at least a billion people around the world out of poverty. In the post-Soviet space, a number of countries successfully navigated a reform process to become stable democracies with appropriate rule of law, integrated into European markets. Others, however, failed or backfired. The War on Terror yielded blowback and the rise of new terror groups like ISIS, and the U.S. failed to transform either Iraq or Afghanistan into vibrant democracies, or even stable ones. NATO expansion contributed to Russia’s territorial aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, and trade liberalization with China has come to be perceived in Washington as a mistake. Despite liberal justifications, too, it was all too often the case that in practice U.S. foreign policy was illiberal, from sanctions to drone strikes. 

The post–Cold War period represents the zenith of American power and ambition. It also reflects the limits of our ability to use that power to export liberal values globally. In large part because of these failures, the last ten years have seen a period of foreign policy debate. Opposition to endless wars helped both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to beat the electoral odds and become president—even if both ultimately continued an expansive foreign policy while in office. The global geopolitical shifts of recent years have added to this ferment, creating a messy debate among those who seek retrenchment from the War on Terror, those who seek to pivot the U.S. to face China, and those who want to build a new liberal order focused on tech, AI, or other emerging technologies. Almost everyone engaged in this discussion believes that the United States made mistakes during the unipolar moment, but they differ in how they understand those failures and want to reform U.S. foreign policy. 

The most visible of these emerging worldviews today is seen in the Trump administration: a conservative, nationalist worldview that privileges the national interest and regularly employs military force. For those of a liberal persuasion, it’s hardly an ideal vision; some have even described it as “illiberal hegemony.” The Trump approach is nonetheless not all bad; it has pushed European states to contribute more to allied defense, and pursued peace talks in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere. But it is also profoundly protectionist, supportive of illiberal regimes around the world, and willing to use the tools of state coercion against American citizens. It is also all too easy—as the current war in Iran shows—for these quick, sharp uses of military force to slide into something bigger and more destructive. 

The other foreign policy worldviews on offer are not particularly attractive to liberals, either. Progressive criticisms of Trump, for example, are often equally protectionist and redistributive; they often take opposition to capitalism or global trade as a core principle. Traditional Republican neoconservatives give voice to liberal values but are still wedded to deeply illiberal policies, supporting regime change in Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere. Many, though not all, of the “Never Trump” neoconservatives who have been welcomed into the liberal fold since 2016 are openly supportive of the current war in Iran, and of blank-check support for Israel. 

Perhaps the most problematic worldview, however, is that of mainstream Democrats, who seem increasingly to endorse Joe Biden’s view that the United States must remain the world’s indispensable nation, standing as the bulwark of a new liberal order against autocracy.

This might sound counterintuitive: surely the appropriate place for liberalism at the current moment is in opposition to illiberal tendencies at home, and in opposition to Russia, China, and other autocracies abroad. But this returns us to the tradeoff between universalizing liberal values and the health of American democracy and prosperity. The Biden administration approach effectively endorsed an open-ended competition against China, Russia, and other autocracies, using U.S. military and financial coercion. Such an approach was unsuccessful during the peak of U.S. power during the 1990s and 2000s. Liberal internationalists cannot explain how similar goals can be accomplished under today’s constraints, when they were not accomplished without them.

This approach to the world is also expensive. The Commission on the National Defense Strategy recommended in 2024 that the United States would need to spend an additional $10 trillion (on top of the existing projected defense budget) to sustain America’s vast existing global commitments. The Trump administration is today asking congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget. Such spending would be a drag on economic growth, hobbling available funding for all kinds of other projects and requiring both cuts to entitlements and tax increases. 

This approach is also increasingly illiberal in an economic sense, with protectionist export controls, trade restrictions, and even industrial policy masquerading as necessary for great power competition. In practical terms—whether it is decoupling from foreign trade or the growing marriage between foreign policy and domestic industrial policy—the Biden administration and the Trump administration are far more alike than not in the economic space. 

Despite these downsides, there is remarkably little contention on foreign policy within the Democratic Party. Unlike domestic policy, where new approaches like the abundance agenda are pushing forward liberal-infused notions of how to remedy the flaws of the post–Cold War moment, the foreign policy community remains far less open to new ideas. This absence is all the more notable considering that splits within the party over Gaza appear to have been detrimental to Kamala Harris’s electoral chances, according to a suppressed post-election post-mortem conducted by the party. Democrats’ response to the current war in Iran is another case in point. Though many have openly criticized the White House’s choices (i.e., Sen. Chris Murphy), others have focused primarily on procedural criticisms. Former Biden Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, for example, has argued that Trump is failing by not building an allied coalition to protect shipping during the war. Michael McFaul, an influential Democratic foreign policy hand, has argued against the war while supporting the killing of Iran’s supreme leader and expressing his support for regime change. 

The implicit message is clear: regime change and war are fine, but they should be coordinated with allies and managed more efficiently. There are even suggestions that Democrats in Congress should vote for a $200 billion war supplemental—so long as they can get matching funding for Ukraine. If the party is to succeed in building an appealing post-Trump politics, they will need a better foreign policy than this. 

Luckily, there are other foreign policy approaches available. The United States could return to a more pragmatic, realist set of strategic principles—righting the balance between realism and idealism that has become so lopsided since 1991. U.S. policymakers have most often returned to their realist roots in times of significant international turmoil. Two examples stand out: Dwight Eisenhower’s realism enabled the United States to navigate the difficult and dangerous days of the early Cold War, and Richard Nixon embraced the realism of hard choices in the 1970s, when global financial upheavals, energy crises, wars, and anti-colonial movements threatened to undermine the foundations of U.S. power.

These policymakers’ decisions were guided by practicality and a view of the world as it is, rather than by grand proclamations of the world as we wish it to be. Their approach differs strongly from the transformational way policymakers since 1991 have thought about the world. America can reclaim that realism, engaging with the world on its own terms, navigating this period of shifting geopolitical winds while prioritizing the security and interests of the American people. 

For liberals, it is this last point that is most important. For thirty years, U.S. policymakers have prioritized the spread of liberal values around the world, but often at the cost of domestic liberalism. Today’s policymakers must prioritize American democracy and prosperity at home. 

Economic strength, for example, depends on access to global markets and resources. Our policy actions in Iran today may be destabilizing, but disconnecting America from the world in economic terms would leave it substantially poorer. Prosperity cannot supersede all other national security concerns; some limited exceptions should be made to build resilient supply chains and maintain the defense industrial base. Yet to remain prosperous, America must retain access to a variety of critical resources and inputs for manufacturing, and the American population should be able to benefit from foreign trade. Unlike the Trump administration or the Biden administration, a defense of free trade should be at the core of any liberal foreign policy. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any domestic abundance agenda succeeding without it. 

The health of American liberalism and democracy at home is harder to link directly to foreign policy. We know now that America’s expansive post–Cold War foreign policy—most notably the War on Terror—has served to undermine core rights at home in the realms of privacy and press freedom, and contributed to the populist authoritarian turn in right-wing politics at home.  But hindsight offers no easy answers for how to avoid such consequences in the future, other than perhaps to suggest that policymakers should be very wary of developing the kinds of tools that can be used to undermine democracy at home and abroad, from warrantless wiretapping to economic sanctions. Without the War on Terror, it seems likely that ICE would not be nearly as well equipped for their current excesses; policymakers going forward should ask themselves what ills future governments will do with the tools we may develop to guard against Chinese trade or Russian disinformation. 

Liberalism’s foreign policy problem is one of inertia. Americans face a choice in the next few years: can the country reconceptualize its role in the world, from global hegemon to a more constructive, shared leadership role? Can policymakers right the balance between liberalism and realism in foreign policy without falling headfirst into protectionism or callous militarism? Liberals have largely focused in recent years on domestic visions for U.S. prosperity in this new era. But in doing so, they have effectively ceded the foreign policy space to existing elites and their overly expansive foreign policy crusades. Liberals need to think more about the international dimensions of their policies, and how foreign policy could help or hinder these domestic visions. They could do worse than look to a more realist foreign policy, one that accepts that foreign policy is meant to safeguard the body politic, not to transform the world.

It’s sometimes said that a liberal is someone who doesn’t know how to take their own side in a fight. Yet a fight has come to us. Forces opposed to the liberal vision of peace, prosperity, and dignity for all have risen across the world and have been undoing, day by day, advancements toward that vision made by previous generations of liberals. Those who hope to reverse this slide now face the desperate question: What is to be done? 

There is emerging in the public sphere a sense that the friends of liberal democracy need to adopt a much tougher and more combative orientation to our political present. Liberals, it is said, need to fight. Samantha Hancox-Li argues that liberals should adopt a “war mindset”; Joseph O’Neill calls for Democrats in Washington to adopt a “politics of raw power”; and M. Steven Fish makes a case for liberals to adopt a nationalist “politics of dominance.” These examples could be endlessly replicated. In short, we see everywhere calls for liberals to harden themselves and do politics in a more assertive way. 

My concern here is with how this fight agenda, whatever its specific content, is likely to reshape the kind of people liberals are, or imagine themselves to be. “Hardening” oneself has profound implications for the virtues and habits that liberals have long identified as necessary for bringing about a less violent, more prosperous, and freer world. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, emphasizes empathy as a core liberal virtue that consists in the cognitive habit of entering imaginatively into the perspectives and lives of others. Yet this is exactly the kind of capacity we would expect the fight agenda to attenuate. How, then, can liberals fight—and yet remain liberals? 

Consider, first, an ancient bit of wisdom that says how we do things constitutes us as agents or actors of a particular kind, with a particular character. If we act bravely, we gain the habits and instincts that make us brave people. Doing brave things makes future bravery come to us more naturally—it becomes familiar to us, and we come to enjoy it. That familiarity and enjoyment close a habituation loop, whereby virtuous action begets yet further virtuous action. However, the same process operates for vices. If we act greedily, we become greedy people, and greed comes to us more easily by the same mechanisms. What we’re talking about here is the making of character by habituation—the self-reinforcing sum of acting consistently in a certain way. 

Since virtues are positive habits of character, and vices are negative ones, habituation is the font of virtue and vice. What we do makes us, over time, better or worse people by accustoming us to those ways of acting, making them instinctual, even automatic. A virtuous person does good things largely because they come to them easily and naturally, perhaps even without thinking about them. Bad or evil actions come naturally to a vicious person, who must by contrast act against their character if they are to behave well. Habituation carves grooves or ruts in our ways of navigating the world, like a well-worn road, leading us to make better or worse contributions to it. 

What does all this have to do with liberals fighting? Because of habituation, the fight agenda will not remain a simple matter of political strategy, picked up instrumentally for the needs of the moment and as easily discarded when its usefulness has subsided. If liberals fight, it will make them different people, at least insofar as they have not been fighting the same way before. They will become different sorts of political actors, with different virtues and different vices. 

This likelihood of character change should concern us, but it should not give us pause about the fight agenda. I assume that the fight agenda—whatever goes into it or comes out of it specifically—is necessary for the present moment. The question is how it is going to affect us. Consider Democratic efforts in states like California, Virginia, and New York to imitate the one-sided gerrymandering Republicans have deployed with gusto since at least 2010. Though the leaders of these efforts, like Gavin Newsom, articulate a strong case for it in terms of defending democracy from an increasingly autocratic administration, none could deny that its ruthlessness feeds a ravening demand among the anti-Trump coalition for moves from Democrats that make Republicans hurt. That imperative must have been a considerable part of its attraction for many of the sixty-four percent of Californian voters who approved Proposition 50 in 2025. As such edifying fights like these proliferate, it is likely that more liberals will come to take delight in them, closing a perverse habituation loop between their enjoyment and inflicting harm on their political opponents. 

So, what I want to examine is what the fight agenda is likely to do to the liberals who pursue it: what will happen to their character? A careful assessment of this question can perhaps help us prepare to sidestep obvious pitfalls and, hopefully, remain versions of ourselves we can recognize and be proud of. 

Although liberals disagree among themselves about which virtues are required for bringing about the world of peace and justice they aspire to, there is a small core over which rival accounts overlap. This core can be comprehensively summarized by two virtues: toleration of social plurality and mutual forbearance in politics. Together, these core virtues constitute the beating heart of what it means to be a liberal, and it is these that I fear are threatened by adopting the fight agenda. 

Toleration of social plurality does not mean celebrating difference or accepting a relativism about the truth of one’s own fundamental commitments, but rather only a rejection of imposing one’s own perceived superiority on others by force. So long as we possess the habits of body and mind that move us to favor getting along even with perceived inferiors and coexisting amidst wide social differences, we have the core liberal virtue of tolerance.

Mutual forbearance encompasses both a rejection of violence and a willingness to shoulder costs or losses rather than escalate political conflict endlessly. Although actors with this quality may press their advantages hard in ordinary politics, they will forbear to press them to their utmost, to the point of violence or the extinction of political opposition, in the expectation that other players of the political game will do likewise. Liberals try to be good neighbors, in other words, and are willing to accept occasional rudeness from those around them out of a general compassion for others, rather than inflating their sense of self by cutting others down. They will be prepared to lose rather than unleash a spiral of intensifying conflict, and they will expect the same from others. 

Toleration of plurality entails a moderation in one’s sensitivity to offensive forms of social difference. This moderation means we do not habitually respond with violence, harassment, or extreme anger to the mere existence of people living or acting in ways we find abhorrent (barring violent abuse of others, of course). We ought not fly into a murderous rage when someone appears in public wearing distinctive religious, ethnic, or political garb, for example. Such moderation allows us to share public spaces even with those we strongly dislike. 

Mutual forbearance also entails a kind of moderation. This is not as much a matter of our passions, however, as of our rational responses. Mutual forbearance calls less for justice—the virtue of rendering to people, more or less strictly, what they’re owed—than for compassion, equity, liberality, grace, or charity—virtues which yield to others somewhat more than they strictly deserve. It requires us to be able to be open-handed with those we differ from politically, even intensely so. Enthusiasm for justice (in the narrow sense) may, in other words, need to be moderated for liberal politics to proceed. 

The fight agenda threatens to flatten both these virtues and transmute them into something quite different. Fighting entails identifying an enemy against whom one fights—here, we can simply call them the enemies of liberalism. Liberalism’s enemies will tend to clump up among certain social groups and are to be found in certain specific political movements. To fight them will almost certainly involve weakening one’s habits of toleration toward these groups and movements. 

What might that look like? A glance at social media—often better avoided—suffices to populate one’s imagination. Dehumanizing rhetoric toward the enemy is to be expected, as well as stoking emotions of anger and reactions of disgust to social symbols and institutions associated with them. Once habituated to these reactions, they become automatic and obstruct the sharing of the public sphere; it is, after all, hard to share public spaces comfortably with those you have learned to hate. 

Members of these groups and movements may also be held up for ridicule and singled out for abuse. A public outpouring of cruelty is thus very likely to follow adoption of the fight agenda among liberals. Such practices, particularly when public, blunt the empathic or sympathetic feelings that liberals often otherwise deploy to reinforce toleration. 

The publicness of this behavior is key. People mostly learn what norms they should follow by observing what other people like them are doing. If prominent liberals come to publicly adopt rhetorical practices that reflect attitudes of contempt and disgust for enemies, it must be expected to set off a cascade of shifting attitudes in that direction as liberals update their sense of how people like them think and talk about their political rivals. 

Once that cascade is initiated, and the virtue of tolerance against liberalism’s enemies weakens, mutual forbearance is not far behind. Once the enemy is named and sentiments of intense animosity are mobilized against them, it simply will not make sense to forbear to escalate conflict with them. Even if liberals hold out hope for reconciliation and defection from the ranks of the enemy, such hope must not obstruct the imperative of victory. This is what the fight agenda is all about.  If they are truly enemies of liberalism—if their success has come to count as liberalism’s defeat—then of course liberals should do all that’s in their power to obstruct and combat them. 

An escalatory logic is thereby unlocked that mutual forbearance would ordinarily negate. Liberals are no longer willing to absorb losses in political fights with their enemies toward the reaching of compromises—compromises with the enemy are mistakes, perhaps signaling disloyalty or even treason. Intolerance among the liberal coalition for some of its own members would then be expected to rise, targeted at those who hold onto tolerance and forbearance toward the enemy. Though those erstwhile allies may practice politics as good liberals ordinarily should, in a political moment when the fight agenda is appropriate, their persistence in the old ways is foolish, even dangerous—and so good fighting liberals cannot tolerate it. As Andrew Sabl argues, a wartime mentality flattens pluralism and narrows tolerance.¹

The fight agenda may thus turn liberals, characterized at minimum by tolerance and forbearance, into something else. Having been pulled toward the abyss, they are now poised to fall into it. Optimistically, in place of tolerance and forbearance, we would expect to find in fighting liberals virtues associated with combat: courage, loyalty, ironclad commitment, and fortitude or persistence. 

Yet, as I’ve just emphasized, we would also see vices among fighting liberals: intolerance, at least of liberalism’s enemies, and perhaps those who fail to fight them hard enough; severity and relentlessness in their conduct of politics, at least against those enemies and their fellow-travelers; cruelty, perhaps, to that enemy and, probably inevitably, toward those who fail to recognize the enemy for what they are (in the eyes of the fighting liberal). These vices, and more, are likely to be taken into the hearts and inculcated into the habits of those liberals who adopt the fight agenda. 

A common objection to the kind of concern for character, virtue, and vice that I’ve shown here is that it is self-absorbed and fails to take seriously the stakes of morality and politics. Worrying about what kind of person the political moment requires us to be, when that moment is dire, seems on this view indulgent, irresponsible, and inappropriately self-concerned. This sort of virtue ethical approach appears to turn weighty or even life-or-death questions of how we should live together into a matter of one’s own personal moral purity. It switches the focus from how one’s actions affect others and the world to how they affect one’s own moral character—and it doesn’t get more self-involved than that. 

Yet it’s still worth taking stock of these matters, if only because they bear on whether we’ll be able to successfully pursue the fight agenda. If its pursuit is too ugly or if those prosecuting it become strange (or “deranged”) to their would-be allies because of a transformation of their character—and so of their outward tendencies and manners of speech—the effort may falter. Indeed, liberal devotees of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear,” which elevates cruelty as the highest evil against which liberalism rebels, may be especially put off by the transformations likely to follow from the fight agenda. Fighting liberals will nonetheless need the support of such liberals, as well as of those who haven’t yet fully gotten the message about the need for a fight. 

If we imagine a spectrum of change from the status quo ante of liberal virtue discussed above to the virtues needed for a fighting liberalism, actual liberals themselves will almost certainly be found clumped up at different levels of development along it. To keep them all moving along together in politics, at these different levels of “fightingness,” will require some appreciation for possible lines of fracture. 

The conduct associated with the fight agenda is likely to be highly visceral, evoking immediate reactions of gratification or disgust. Consider two examples: the conduct of Representative Al Green (D-TX) and anti-Trump protests like the Women’s March and No Kings rallies. Green captured headlines by heckling Trump at his 2025 State of the Union speech, for which he was subsequently censured by the Republican-controlled House. Liberal reactions to Green’s disruptive speech split between those attracted to his fighting spirit and those turned off by its incivility and lack of decorum, reflecting a potential fissure the fight agenda might widen. A similar divide could be seen among those attracted to the popular antics on display at both the Women’s March in 2017 and the No Kings rallies in 2025 and those who cringed in embarrassment at their earnestness. 

Liberals and their potential allies will be attracted or repulsed by the fight agenda in ways like this before they can even think about it. The last thing fighting liberals need is other liberals turning away from the fight agenda just because it offends their sense of political aesthetics—that is, of what they think an attractive politics should look like. 

So, even as liberals turn to fight, they should attend to how the fighting is likely to appear, including to outsiders, while avoiding the trap of respectability politics. Activists, particularly in the Black freedom struggle, have long been told they must eschew tactics and modes of self-expression that would alienate mainstream audiences. Yet maintaining such “respectability” can come at the price of effectively signaling the seriousness or stakes of the struggle and leaving potentially effective tactics untried. Fighting liberals should therefore be at pains to highlight, and reiterate, why they fight. When choosing tactics, especially escalations, they must be careful to match their justifications to their actions. But this should not be done to assuage popular opinion or to instantiate fairness for its own sake—nor even to forestall retaliation—but rather mainly to keep liberals and their allies together and on the same page in the fight. 

It might be that habits of tolerance and forbearance are sufficiently deep in the liberal character that the dire consequences I suggest here will not come to pass. I certainly hope that’s so. I hope that liberals can pursue a fight against the enemies of liberalism without ceasing to be recognizable to themselves and others. In becoming the kind of liberals who know how to take their own side in a fight, we must endeavor never to lose sight of the possibility of a return to a politics of tolerance and mutual forbearance. It would surely be perverse for liberals to fight and win, only to find that they themselves ended up casualties of the conflict.

The biggest victims of immigration restrictions are the would-be migrants, who are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression simply because they were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents. But the horrific experience of the second Trump administration highlights how restrictionism also poses a grave threat to the liberty and welfare of native-born citizens. While some of the harms caused to natives are specific to the policies of this administration, many are inherent in the very nature of exclusion and deportation, and they occur even under more conventional presidents. The ultimate solution is to end all or most immigration restrictions, or at least to severely curb them.

Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration enforcement officers have killed at least three U.S. citizens (two in Minnesota and one in Texas), wounded numerous others, and detained hundreds illegally, after mistaking them for undocumented immigrants. ProPublica found some 170 cases of illegal detention of citizens through October 2025, but that is almost certainly a severe underestimate, given that the federal government does not keep statistics on such cases, and ProPublica could only include those they were able to track down. ICE and other agencies also make extensive use of racial profiling, which leads to detention and harassment of numerous U.S. citizens who look like they may be Hispanic or belong to other nonwhite groups, and thus potentially suspect. The enormous extent of racial and ethnic profiling by ICE is shown by the fact that immigration arrests in Los Angeles County declined by 66 percent after a federal court order barring the use of such tactics; the ruling was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court decision blocking this lower court ruling was a “shadow docket” decision issued without any majority opinion for the Court; it may have been based on purely procedural considerations. But, in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that immigration enforcement agents should be permitted to use race and ethnicity in determining which people to stop or detain, so long as it was just one of several factors considered. Kavanaugh assured readers that “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” As critics (including myself) pointed out, this is not true. There are numerous cases of U.S. citizens illegally detained by ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies for long periods of time. Perhaps stung by the criticism of what came to be called “Kavanaugh stops,” in a later concurring opinion in Trump v. Illinois, Kavanaugh appeared to walk back his earlier endorsement of racial profiling, avowing that immigration enforcement “officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”

A federal district court decision by a Trump-appointed judge recently cited Kavanaugh’s later opinion as part of the justification for a ruling that racial profiling by immigration enforcers is unconstitutional. But even if lower courts hold the line on this issue and the Supreme Court backs them, it will be extremely difficult to prevent large-scale deportation efforts from resulting in extensive racial and ethnic profiling. Many cases will never get to court, and it is often difficult to tell whether a given stop was based on profiling or not.

Racial discrimination is far from the only way in which deportation efforts victimize U.S. citizens. A recent court ruling in a legal challenge to the federal enforcement “surge” in Minnesota found that “Operation Metro Surge has had… profound and even heartbreaking, consequences on the State of Minnesota, the Twin Cities, and Minnesotans,” including the killing of two citizens by federal agents, large-scale “racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other harmful actions,” and  “negative impacts… in almost every arena of daily life.” In Minneapolis alone, the “surge” inflicted some $200 million in losses to the local economy. Less extreme, but still similar, effects happen in other areas where federal agencies engage in large-scale deportation operations.

These highly publicized outrages are just some of the more egregious and visible harmful effects of immigration restrictions on U.S. citizens in the Trump II era. Less well-known and less visible policies actually have much larger harmful effects. 

Trump’s massive new travel bans—barring almost all migration from forty nations—will separate hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens from noncitizen family members in those countries. It does grave harm to separate parents from children, spouses from one another, or—in many cases—even just to separate friends or business partners. Trump’s policy of speech-based deportation of noncitizen students and academics threatens the free speech and academic freedom of native-born U.S. citizens, as well as immigrants. A U.S. citizen academic, researcher, or student must either avoid raising sensitive issues whenever noncitizen colleagues and students are present, or risk having the latter deported, thereby also disrupting their own work. Such exclusions and deportations are also likely to deter U.S. universities and research institutes from conducting projects with foreign academics and scientists to begin with, thereby slowing the pace of innovation. 

In a 2023 Public Affairs Quarterly article, I described how immigration restrictions undermine the economic freedom of native-born U.S. citizens more than any other government policy. That’s true for both the “negative” economic freedom most valued by libertarians and the “positive” liberty championed by left-liberals. In his classic book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the great libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick famously described economic liberty as “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” Immigration restrictions block literally millions of such acts every year. They massively restrict native-born citizens from hiring immigrant workers, buying products created by immigrants, working for immigrant-established businesses—immigrants found businesses at higher rates than natives—and more. 

Immigrants also contribute disproportionately to a vast range of commercial, scientific, and medical innovations, which likewise create opportunities for natives. Immigration restrictions block many such opportunities. For example, since the year 2000, immigrants have accounted for some 40 percent of U.S. science Nobel Prize winners, despite being less than 15 percent of the population. Restrictions prevent many more such achievements from coming to fruition. 

All of this translates into an enormous deleterious impact on the positive economic liberty of U.S. citizens. As understood by prominent left-liberal political theorists, positive liberty focuses on enhancing individuals’ access to important goods and services, and enabling them to obtain the resources necessary to live an autonomous life. By blocking the economic growth, scientific progress, and medical innovation caused by migration, restrictionist policies massively reduce such opportunities. As discussed in my 2023 article, the impact is particularly severe for poor and disadvantaged natives, as they have the most to gain from most new innovations and growth.

For all too many natives, immigration restrictions are literally a matter of life and death. The disproportionate role of immigrants in scientific and medical innovation indicates that large-scale exclusion prevents or at least postpones a wide range of life-saving innovations, thereby costing many American lives. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that a 25 percent increase in immigration rates would likely save about 5,000 lives per year simply by virtue of the fact that immigrants are disproportionately employed in the healthcare and elder care industries, and increased immigration would provide elderly people with more of the care they desperately need, in a society with an aging population.

Obviously, some migrants compete with natives for jobs, thereby reducing the economic opportunities and positive liberties of the latter. But, on net, studies show that restrictions and deportations destroy more jobs for native-born workers than they create. The key reason is that, while deporting immigrants often does open up some jobs for natives who directly compete with them, it destroys more elsewhere in the economy. Immigrant workers produce goods that are used by other enterprises, thereby creating jobs there. Immigrants start new businesses at higher rates than natives. That, in turn, creates new jobs for both natives and immigrants.

One helpful way to think about the issue is to ask whether the twentieth-century expansion of job market opportunities for women and Blacks helped white male workers, on net, or harmed them. Some white men likely were net losers. If you were a marginal white Major League Baseball player displaced by Jackie Robinson or another Black baseball star after MLB was integrated, it’s possible that you would never find another job you liked as much as that one. But the vast majority of white men were almost certainly net beneficiaries by virtue of the fact that opening up opportunities for women and Blacks greatly increased the overall wealth and productivity of society, thus creating numerous new opportunities for white men, as well as others. 

Native-born citizens also benefit from the fiscal effects of immigration. A 2026 Cato Institute study finds that immigration massively reduces budget deficits, by some $14.5 trillion from 1994 to 2023. Conversely, immigration restrictions exacerbate our already severe fiscal crisis, and U.S. citizens will bear most of the burden from that.

The immigration restrictions of the second Trump administration have inflicted even greater harm on U.S. citizens because they have been so egregious, including ramping up mass deportation efforts, greatly increasing the number of ICE agents (from 10,000 to 22,000) and expanding detention facilities. But it’s important to recognize that grave damage is inflicted even under more conventional presidents, even if it is less visible and garners fewer headlines. Illegal detention and deportation of U.S. citizens long predates Trump. Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens estimates that the federal government detained or deported more than 20,000 U.S. citizens from 2003 to 2010, at a time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama—two relatively pro-immigration presidents—occupied the White House.

Racial profiling by immigration enforcers is also not unique to the Trump era. In 2014, the Obama administration decided to perpetuate the use of racial profiling by federal immigration enforcers in areas within 100 miles of a “border,” a designation that covers areas where some two-thirds of the population lives, as well as several entire states, including New Jersey, Michigan, and Florida. Obama officials reasoned that large-scale immigration enforcement could not work without such racial and ethnic discrimination. 

They weren’t entirely wrong. It is impossible to engage in mass deportation efforts covering any large-scale proportion of the estimated 13.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States without arresting and detaining many people with little or no due process. And, in most cases, authorities will not have individualized data on most of the supposedly illegal migrants, thereby incentivizing use of crude proxies, including racial and ethnic profiling. 

Conservatives and others who rightly want a color-blind government must also support ending racial profiling in immigration enforcement, one of the most extensive remaining types of racial discrimination by government in the United States today. And that, in turn, cannot be accomplished without ending or at least greatly reducing immigration restrictions. The same holds for illegal detention and deportation of U.S. citizens.

The harmful effects of immigration restrictions on the welfare and economic liberty of natives are also far from limited to the Trump era. It is an unavoidable byproduct of any large-scale immigration restrictions. By their very nature, they require extensive intrusions on the civil liberties of natives. Likewise, they necessarily block a vast range of economic transactions between immigrants and natives, thereby undermining both negative and positive economic liberty. And they unavoidably destroy the economic growth and innovation that excluded migrants would have created, had they not been kept out.

Some of these negative effects can be mitigated by limiting immigration restrictions, rather than ending them completely. For example, we can abolish ICE and bar all or most interior deportations, limiting federal deportation operations to actual border areas near the Canadian and Mexican frontiers. This would significantly reduce the threat deportation poses to natives’ civil liberties. But those effects would still be present in border areas, where millions of native-born citizens live, including many who are vulnerable to racial profiling and other abuses. 

We can also try to reduce negative economic and fiscal impacts of immigration restrictions by letting in those migrants most likely to contribute to growth and innovation, while keeping out others. But governments are unlikely to do a good job with such selection. Many of the biggest immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs arrive as children or young adults, making it difficult or impossible to predict their impact in advance. More generally, government central planning of the labor supply is unlikely to succeed, because markets are inherently far better at this task. If central planning of labor were efficient, the Soviet Union and other communist states would have been vastly more successful than was actually the case.

 Moreover, even if governments can actively identify which groups are statistically more likely to make great contributions to growth and innovation than others, excluding large numbers of the (on average) less-promising migrants can still have major deleterious effects. Imagine a group of potential migrants in which only 1 in 10,000 would make significant entrepreneurial or scientific innovations. Still, if we exclude one million such migrants, that means depriving ourselves of one hundred major innovators. And that number rises with time, such that ten years of keeping out one million migrants per year will deprive the United States of one thousand major innovators, and so on.

These realities don’t mean that incremental immigration policy improvements are useless. Incrementally reducing immigration restrictions can still diminish the economic and social damage they cause. And incremental cutbacks to the apparatus of exclusion and deportation, such as abolishing ICE, can reduce the threat to U.S. citizens’ civil liberties. We should not let the best be the enemy of the good. But we should also not forget that the best should be our ultimate objective. 

Obviously, immigration restrictionists argue that migration has a wide range of negative effects on natives, such as spreading harmful cultural values, overburdening the welfare state, increasing crime, and damaging political institutions. In Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I explain why these objections are overblown, and—in most cases—can be addressed by “keyhole solutions” that don’t require excluding migrants. For example, as the fiscal data described above indicates, immigrants contribute far more to the public fisc than they take out; if they did overburden the welfare state, the obvious keyhole solution would be to limit their access to welfare benefits, which we already do to a significant degree, under the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and other policies.

Here, I emphasize that any negative effects of immigration on natives must be weighed against the enormous harm caused by immigration restrictions to natives’ liberty and well-being. The depredations of the Trump era have highlighted these effects as never before. But they remain underappreciated. In combination with the even greater harm immigration restrictions inflict on would-be immigrants, they make an overwhelming case for abolishing most, if not all, such constraints.

Liberalism has two mutually reinforcing aspects. The first is humility: I can’t assume I’m right. The second is toleration: I can’t assume you’re wrong. 

The practice of liberalism therefore rests on a strong, but rebuttable, deference to individual agency. That practice requires a deep skepticism of concentrations of power. Historically, the different flavors of liberalism have privileged some kinds of power and handicapped others. Left liberals have been concerned about corporate power, but optimistic about the state; classical or right liberals downplay concentrations of market power but want sharply to limit the state.

I work and write in the field known as public choice. Public choice began as an antidote to the naïve application of the “market failure” paradigm, in which deviations from perfectly competitive markets always led directly to inefficiencies that markets themselves could never solve. This view was unchallenged in the 1950s and 1960s, and it worked to identify (mostly legitimate) problems with private, decentralized commercial processes. Markets are not perfect, so state action is required.

What was missing was any theory of government failure. Under what circumstances—if ever—would state action likely be counterproductive? Government policy results from the digestion of imperfect inputs: the rational ignorance of voters, the concentrated interests of organized groups, and the principal-agent failures of unaccountable bureaucracies. Why would we expect imperfect government control and direction to be better than imperfect markets? This concern extended worries about market power to concentrations of power more generally.

That critique also extended earlier Austrian economics critiques of socialism. But there were differences. Any system of social coordination must “see with two I’s”: information and incentives. The Austrian response to socialism had focused on the “knowledge problem,” or the difficulty of knowing the best opportunity use of resources in a setting where prices are not available. Public choice accepted this argument, but it focused more on incentive problems. In the right circumstances, commerce can reconcile self-interest and group success, but political processes often pit groups against each other in a zero-sum contest for power. In politics, if one side wins, the other often loses. Public choice raised strong objections to the “markets fail, therefore state action” view of public policy, especially when combined with the powerful gravitational forces of corruption and bureaucratic empire-building.

But “government failure,” alone, is likewise problematic. True, public choice has been a valuable counterweight to a naïve optimism about the state. But it is tempting to go too far in the other direction, inverting the earlier error: the state fails, and therefore everything should be done by markets. As I have argued elsewhere, this “competing unicorns” view of society is misleading, and ultimately destructive. “Markets” are not the same as “business.” In fact, scholars going back at least to Adam Smith have lamented this tension. Markets require competition; business hates it. Organized business interests will use any means at their disposal to suppress competition, either domestically or from abroad. Public choice scholars need to be humble and tolerant, just like everybody else.

I will be posting essays that take a public choice perspective, or rather what I take to be the public choice perspective, in future months. For this introductory effort, I will lay out the foundation of public choice in liberalism, and show how liberalism needs public choice. The tl;dr version of my position is this: To survive, liberalism must accept a new, syncretic formulation. The avatars of that synthesis are Adam Smith and Michel Foucault. Seriously.

Smith and Foucault: A New Liberalism

In the The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith famously described the “man of system,” a powerful person “apt to be very wise in his own conceit.” But such persons are neither humble nor tolerant, actively stretching their efforts at control of others beyond their expertise, arranging groups in society like players arrange the pieces on a chess board. 

The problem is that “every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it,” as Smith puts it. This is why pure systems fail; the insistence that the system must be established “completely and in all its parts” requires us to suspend humility and toleration, and often simply to abandon them. In opposition to the aspiration to “system,” Smith urged the minimalist approach of “natural liberty.”

This idea of system, though at an even more encompassing level, came to concern Michel Foucault also. Foucault never met Smith, of course; they lived most of two centuries apart. But towards the end of his life Foucault increasingly focused on the problem of power, cutting across the traditional state vs. private dichotomy and considering systems that he called “dispositifs.” These deployments of practices, rules, norms, and accepted techniques shape and circumscribe what can be done, and delimit how problems and actions can be conceived and represented, across both state and private actors. A school’s dean of discipline may be a private actor in a private institution, but they also have the ear of the police, and with good reason; the same may be said of a clinical psychiatrist, or even a prominent member of the clergy.

Political philosopher Eugene Heath explicitly frames the sovereign tempted to pursue a totality of outcome as exemplifying Smith’s “man of system.” The man of system, though, is not personally a party to, or even knowledgeable about, all of the myriad dispositifs of his own society. Heath then uses that notion to sharpen what’s at stake in Foucault’s reading of Smith (especially the “invisible hand” and the limits of sovereign knowledge). As Foucault wrote,

Mark Pennington has rightly connected Foucault’s “invisibility” leitmotif to F.A. Hayek’s knowledge problem. Pennington points out that the notion of dispositifs is likely a more representative, and more general, instance of Smith’s idea of “system,” since it is rare that any single planner or even an organized group of planners is consciously in charge of the economy. 

I want to extend Pennington’s useful connection to Austrian economics, so that it connects with public choice also. Foucault had a perspective on the state that is quite close to the core assumptions of public choice:

That’s radical, for someone mostly of the political left. The left usually calls markets and commerce “greed” and politics and the state “altruism.” Foucault made the argument, buttressed by empirical evidence, that this was just not true, and moreover could not be true, because the interests of other individuals could not be perceived, much less acted on, by those in centralized authority. The state cannot (because of incentives) and should not (because of information limitations) direct private action and individual choices.

I find it interesting that Smith and Foucault connected in this regard; still, their approaches and understandings of the problem were different. Smith criticizes the hubris of intentional system design; Foucault anatomizes the unintended (and semi-intended) systematic effects of power/knowledge apparatuses. They converge on the danger of “totalizing” reason, but they diagnose it at different levels; Smith criticizes the hubris of individual architects; Foucault looks to agents who act within a given apparatus. What Foucault does, especially in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures, is to treat classical political economy (including Smith) as a key moment in liberal “governmentality,” where the state is told it cannot (and should not pretend to) “see” or totalize the economic order. 

My Starting Point: The “Pretty Pig” Problem

Pennington (and Foucault!) suggest that the tools of public choice have a big role to play in a well-functioning liberal political economy. Their work points us to an inherent difficulty of policymaking, namely that decisionmaking takes place in a peculiar information environment, one that always leaves much of the social world invisible. Studying the information environment where public policy gets made is an important aspect of public choice, and it’ll be a theme of my columns here.

Public choice relentlessly calls our attention back to imperfect information in policymaking. That’s useful because it helps us think about a dilemma that’s sometimes been called “the Pretty Pig problem,” a homely restatement of Buchanan and Tullock’s “Emperor’s Dilemma.” My “Pretty Pig” contest has only two entrants, because (let’s be honest) adult pigs just aren’t pretty. The first pig is led out, and the judges grimace at the sight of the ill-favored beast. Quickly, they call off the pageant and give the award to the second pig, sight unseen.

Many arguments for replacing decentralized commercial action with regulation, planning, or public production are like that. They begin sensibly, but then go full “Pretty Pig.” Analysts carefully document genuine flaws in market processes—externalities, imperfect information, monopoly power, inequality, corruption—and then, having established that markets are ugly, they simply give the prize to the state, sight unseen. A genuine real-world situation differs from an ideal they can imagine, and the winner is always the unseen ideal.

If that were the whole story, all that would be necessary would be to spread the public choice model of “government failure” as a corrective. But it’s not that easy, because many people on the libertarian side suffer from the “Pretty Pig” fallacy in the other direction. Focusing on the (many, and real) flaws of state action, they give the prize, sight unseen, to private action. Unfortunately, free and competitive markets are not what happens when there is no state, or when the state that does exist does nothing. Concerns about concentrations of power are legitimately used to argue for limiting the state, but private enterprise is also capable of concentrating power. As Foucault put it, “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.” That is the public choice view, also. 

Adam Smith was militant in arguing for a presumption in favor of liberty, and private action, but he was very aware of the willingness of private actors to try to insulate themselves from competition. It is fair to say that these efforts will be most effective when private actors can commandeer the coercive powers of the state, but even without the aid of the state, concentrated power centers can be created and exploited.

The parts of this argument will be fleshed out in my future posts. It is useful for now to offer a brief rehearsal of the claims made here. First, liberalism—if it is to be sustainable—is best understood as a discipline of restraint grounded in humility and toleration. Accepting that claim entails a rebuttable presumption in favor of individual agency and a deep skepticism toward concentrated power—whether state or corporate.

Public choice, my particular branch of academic work, is liberalism’s necessary corrective to the market failure paradigm’s habit of contrasting real markets with ideal governments. Recall that any legitimate analysis of institutions in a liberal society must insist on a comparative approach, seeing “with two I’s”: information and incentives. This allows us to recognize and address government failure without falling into the mirror-image error of treating markets as the idealized alternative.

Finally, I have proposed, and in future essays will expand, the strong claim that liberalism’s survival requires a syncretic reformulation—linking Smith’s critique of the “man of system” with Foucault’s analysis of “invisibility” and dispositifs—to warn against “totalizing” claims of governance. Evaluating the two major forms of liberal organization on a case-by-case basis, and using the standard of Pareto optimality as a benchmark, we can compare the dangers of concentrations of power without focusing so much on the false “markets vs. state” dichotomy. 

F.A. Hayek famously dedicated his book The Road to Serfdom “To the Socialists of All Parties.” My goal is to address “The Liberals of All Parties,” to offer a unifying comparative vision. This vision is not original to me, and in fact I have little of importance to add to what others have said. But I have noticed that liberals of the left and of the right all seem to dismiss the concerns and contributions of those who should by all rights be close allies; we need to be reminded of some things that I believe I can explain. Given the forces of illiberalism now arrayed against us, each of us needs all the allies we can get.

My kids call it the Mini Taco Incident of 2014. It is a sordid tale that displays neither of them at their best, but they have given me permission to share it now for the edification of my readers. 

I had made a tray full of Trader Joe’s mini tacos for dinner that night. These were highly desirable treats for the kids, and I picked up a box or two every time I went to Trader Joe’s. At some point (no camera footage exists) my older child asked permission to get a second helping. Everyone agrees that said permission was granted and said second helping was obtained. Shortly thereafter, the younger child made the same request and was also given permission for a second helping. When this child arrived in the kitchen, however, the tacos had all been eaten.

If you do not have children, it will be hard to convey to you the weeping, the vitriol, and the storms of bitterness and outrage that followed this discovery. Despite the abundance of alternate foodstuffs available, all that mattered that night were the mini tacos. And they were gone. To this day, even as both the children involved approach legal drinking age, any time there is a particularly delicious and somewhat scarce treat in the house, we all warn one another not to repeat the Mini Taco Incident of 2014. And we are only sort of joking.

While this is a fine warning for anyone who might seek to come between my kids and the nearest mini taco, it is a much better way to begin thinking about scarcity—real and imagined—and how we respond to it. That subject has been on my mind lately since I’ve been reading Marisa Kashino’s new thriller Best Offer Wins.

Best Offer Wins is the story of Margo Miyake, who has been house hunting in the DC suburbs for eighteen months. She and her husband Ian have made eleven offers and have been outbid, often in cash, on every single one. Currently living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment that they rented as a temporary bridge between selling their previous home and buying something new, Margo and Ian are increasingly getting on one another’s nerves. When Margo hears about the perfect home two weeks before it lists for sale, the situation begins to boil over.

Without spoiling the remainder of the novel, Margo’s fixation on this single perfect house begins to spiral out of control. She wants the Instagram-worthy decoration. She wants the life lived by the family that owns it. She wants a child like the child who lives there. She even—in a detail that I found particularly unsettling—buys new house numbers for the dream house, before it’s on the market.

There’s long been plenty of literature about greed: Frank Norris’s great American naturalist novel McTeague (which became Stroheim’s classic silent film Greed) begins as a young woman wins $5,000 from a lottery ticket. Her current suitor, McTeague, and former suitor, Marcus, clash over who has the right to her and her new wealth. The windfall becomes a miser’s hoard and devolves into a curse. The final scene of the novel leaves us with a vision of McTeague handcuffed to Marcus’s corpse, dying of thirst in Death Valley, with the useless gold coins in a sack beside him. In Bleak House, Dickens details the wreckage of the lives of everyone involved in the endless legal wrangling over the Jarndyce estate. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair offers us the ghoulish picture of an entire family jockeying for favor with their wealthy matriarch as she dies slowly. As Austen’s Sense and Sensibility opens, we watch John Dashwood’s wife talk him down from leaving his impoverished, widowed sister and her children three thousand pounds to helping them move and sending them an occasional basket of food, in order to preserve intact his own son’s very large inheritance. And Donald Westlake’s The Axe explores a murderous way to solve the problem of a tight job market. Fiction turns out to be a good way to think about scarcity and the greed it inspires, perhaps because these things do not bring out the best in human behavior. Scarce resources (like mini tacos) will always inspire greedy squabbling and discontent. And that conflict will always inspire novelists.

But Margo’s targeted, specific, obsessive desire strikes me as importantly different and possibly even more damaging than greed alone as a simple and instinctive response to scarcity. Scarcity lies at the back of it, of course. There wouldn’t be anything for Margo to obsess about if DC was full of renovated 1940s colonials that look “like they peered inside my mind and extracted the perfect backdrop for the perfect future.” The absurd and violent lengths that Margo is willing to go to in order to get her perfect house are driven by her experiences with poverty and insecure housing as a child, and her recent revisiting of those fears and frustrations in the intensely competitive DC house market. But Margo’s error of judgment (aside from her criminal activities) is to fall into the trap of transforming a scarce good—high quality housing in a desirable DC neighborhood—into a non-substitutable good—the only house that can satisfy her. 

We humans are driven by our preferences, of course. We prefer particular neighborhoods because they offer us things we want—good schools, good restaurants, easy access to downtown, proximity to friends and family, or short commutes. We prefer particular styles of homes because they align with our aesthetic sense of what is beautiful, or they offer us features we love, like fireplaces and screened-in porches, or they accommodate desires we have for ease of living—extra bathrooms, laundry rooms that aren’t in the basement, or a home office. And we cannot help but be drawn to particular decorative choices—whether paint colors or marble countertops. 

We like what we like. That is part of what makes us human. And being able to express those preferences is part of what makes us free, and part of what makes freedom so enjoyable. We are not animals, doomed to always build the same types of shelters as the generations before us. We express ourselves through our choices. Mass-produced Soviet housing, and the American housing developments that inspired Malvina Reynolds to write “Little Boxes,” were bleak experiments in a kind of standardization. They flew in the face of the delight we take in making choices and customizing our options. The recent vogues for tiny homes and home renovation shows both reveal us leaning into customizations and choices of all kinds.

But living among such an abundance of choices, with so many ways to express our many preferences, can make it tempting to dismiss instantly any option that doesn’t fulfill every one of our preferences at the same time. In search of the perfect house, in other words, we may well refuse to consider houses that are perfectly good. Margo narrows her preferences down with such precision that there is one single house that can satisfy her. She takes a tight housing market and turns it into a trap. And she takes a scarce good (nice housing in a good neighborhood of DC) and narrows her vision until she can see only a single unsubstitutable good: The House. In The Neighborhood. 

Margo, in a very real way, creates a scarcity trap for herself. 

Now consider the world of dating. Justin Garcia, director of the Kinsey Institute, reminds us that “both online and off, we tend to reduce potential partners to a list of ‘composite traits’ that aren’t always a reflection of our true desires. And we tend to date aspirationally; research shows that we tend to punch 25 percent ‘above our own weight,’ seeking partners of much higher mate-value than ourselves, which reduces the odds of a successful outcome.” But Wharton professor Pinar Yildirim argues that expanding the pool of potential partners as widely and rapidly as dating apps do actually produces fewer matches. 

Perhaps dating apps haven’t caused a sudden epidemic of narrowed vision and self-inflicted scarcity, but they certainly haven’t done anything to solve it. Dating apps encourage window shopping for partners, but they still want you to believe that the perfect partner (6’2” with marble countertops and a screened porch!) could always be just one more swipe away. Why would you ever settle for less when perfection could be on the next screen? Maybe a seemingly infinite set of choices inspires infinite pickiness. Making the haystack bigger doesn’t make it easier to find that one shiny needle you’re longing for.

Once you start to think about self-inflicted scarcity, you’ll see it everywhere. The college search? Think of the “Varsity Blues Scandal” where parents spent millions of dollars to bribe officials and create fraudulent test scores in order to get their kids into Ivy League universities. Like Margo, they narrowed their vision until they could only see the Perfect School, then became willing to do whatever it took to get it.

Consider, as well, the viral holiday toy. 1996’s “Tickle Me Elmo” insanity may be the most memorable, but every year brings a new frenzy over some toy or another. And not just at Christmas: I once drove myself nearly mad trying to find a “Blue Wind Ninja Storm Ranger” Halloween costume for one of my taco-loving hellions. 

We do it to ourselves. Maybe living with abundance is a new kind of strain for human beings. I would never echo Bernie Sanders’s famous comment about how “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” But I do wonder if we should start thinking harder about when things are actually scarce, and when we are making ourselves believe that they are, and when we have persuaded ourselves that something is unsubstitutable.

And I know—for certain—that we should guard against those who try to make us panic about scarcity for political reasons. The X feed of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is currently filled with posts saying things like “Want affordable housing? Help report illegal aliens in your area. Call 866-XXX-XXXX.” And this one, with its grim but factually dubious call and response:

Now, there are not tens of millions of criminal illegal aliens in the country; there are about 14 million undocumented immigrants, and the vast majority of them have no criminal convictions. The goal is to ignore those facts, and to make us into Margo, so fixated on the dream of what we want, need, and deserve, and so terrified of the possibility of doing without it, that we are willing to wade into a pool of blood to get it. We don’t have to do that.

There are more mini tacos in the freezer. 

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. 

Liberalism.org is a new project of the Institute for Humane Studies. We hope you’ve noticed our name: Liberalism. 

That’s a choice. We know.

No single word is ever perfect; it’s why books exist. But as a community, we see in liberalism a future that we want to inhabit. With Liberalism.org, we recommit to that future.

Political tendencies come and go, and other ways of envisioning politics can be just as ambitious as liberalism. They can be just as mobilizing. They, too, can revolutionize whole societies. But among them, liberalism stands out for its credible, durable results. When a country turns liberal, civil society flourishes, and things change for the better: Literacy and liberalism reinforce each other. So do liberalism and rising living standards. Liberalism furthers public health and nutrition. In liberalism, religions find peace with each other, and likewise nations. Women and minorities enjoy more choice in their lives. Liberals throw out evil institutions like serfdom and slavery. Science and technology make great advances, and liberal popular culture has always been better than the authoritarian copycats. If we could bottle and sell all that… well, we’d sooner give it away. Unlike a lot of other ideologies, liberalism prizes voluntary, positive-sum encounters—exchanges or gifts that leave all participants better off. We see such encounters and the people within them as the fundamental particles of a social order that’s dispersed, spontaneous, and free.

IHS President Emily Chamlee-Wright has written of the Four Corners of Liberalism—political, economic, epistemic, and cultural. All liberals agree that all four of the corners are important, despite the differences in the big liberal tent. We all know about the differences. You don’t have to remind us. We’re here, under the single word “liberalism,” because what unites us is crucial, and it’s worth insisting upon.

We liberals embrace constitutional democracy, and we value the related liberties that make democracy credible and meaningful. We prize intellectual freedom, so we value academic, journalistic, and other professional independence from politicians and the political process. Liberals see value in open markets and the innovation and wealth they create, even if we might disagree among ourselves about how open is the optimal amount. All Liberals want to live in a world where markets work, where consumer choice is still meaningful, and where the state is not in the business of picking winners and losers.

As to the cultural stuff, the answer is simple: It’s your life. You’ve only got one, it belongs to you, and we aren’t here to get in the way. A liberal society makes good laws; good laws make good people, and good people make righteously weird and wonderful communities—all without hurting anyone. We’re all different, and we’re all in this together. American culture itself is an assembly of the many, many sub-communities that we build, and its life depends on our constant (re)construction. On matters of culture, liberalism once again doesn’t mean meeting illiberals halfway. It means articulating a vision of a diverse and thriving civil society that’s open to people of all races, every ethnicity, every gender identity, people of all religions, people of no religion, and more. 

At Liberalism.org, we aim to find shared problems—and shared solutions that are ready to be implemented at all levels of government. We’ll encourage experts to study and advocate these solutions, perhaps in surprising new partnerships. We’ll uncover the areas of similarity and work constructively on our differences. We trust that the current, illiberal turn in the United States will be temporary, and that the future is undecided. We intend to plan for what comes next.

And let’s face it, this is a time of need. In recent years, load-bearing parts of America’s liberal foundations have been corroded or knocked away. The United States—once the envy of the world—has fallen considerably by international measures of political and economic freedom. Lately, we hear political scientists trying out unfamiliar words for the society we’ve been living in, terms like “hybrid regime,” “personalism,” and “competitive authoritarianism.” More and more, they opt for a word that’s entirely too familiar—fascism.

We think it behooves all liberals to listen.

​We hope to revitalize the liberal tradition. We understand liberalism to be under threat today, not just in the United States, but globally. Its defense could not be more urgent. Liberalism underwrites many of the good things that all Americans, and all people of goodwill, take for granted. In response to the growth of illiberalism at home and abroad, we aim to illuminate, preserve, develop, and expand what liberalism brings to the world. 

We begin this project at a high water mark for American illiberalism, and for illiberalism worldwide. The president has lately advanced a range of policies that aren’t just illiberal, but from a time before liberalism: Can the executive start a war of conquest? Can he do it at will? Can he levy taxes all by himself? Can he withhold or spend public money in ways Congress didn’t authorize? Does the president advance the national interest when he uses the state to get personally wealthy? What if he wants to take bribes, or give them, or protect other corrupt politicians? Is the president simply above the law? 

When the American founders lay dying, they thought they’d given a firm and final no to every one of these questions. The executive must answer only to the will of the people, as expressed in the duly enacted laws of the land, and not to personal interests or flattery. The law of the land is written by the people’s representatives, not by cronies hoping to cash in on their connections. War and taxation are powers that belong with the people’s representatives, and never in the hands of one person alone. Bribery is illegal—or, I suppose, it should be illegal—because bribery turns representative democracy into a lie. 

We don’t share everything with the founders, but we do share their conclusions on all of that. And when the executive differs, we agree that he acts like the worst of the pre-liberal kings. In place of a king, liberals have the law. When it comes to making honest money, the steady, relatively predictable action of an impersonal legal system is always the better deal for ordinary people. A market with fair rules for entry and doing business helps society in a general sense by bringing business opportunities and cheaper goods to the masses. There are, of course, lots of different ways to implement a system of written, impersonal, impartial law, and the policy choices that flow from it can be many. But a good legal system always needs the trust and good faith of those who are enforcing and living by it. It’s no good to have a written legal system that everyone knows to be bogus, and yet the system always roars to life whenever an abusive cop needs qualified immunity. That just makes people give up on the law.

On issues like free trade and free immigration, we will continue to take a liberal and principled view. We know that the free movement of goods and people isn’t the threat that some fear. We also look forward to sincere, big-picture discussions on the future of the republic. We invite all Americans to join us.

There’s a fundamental difference here, one that will guide us forward: We at Liberalism.org seek conversations with people who still care about and believe in the idea of public policy as an instrument of the public good. We think the public’s trust is worth winning, and that public concerns are worth taking seriously. We think earnestness pays. 

Liberalism.org will draw on both empirical and theoretical work to start productive, public conversations about the future of liberalism, and of America. We’ll feature essays from a lineup of regular writers on culture, philosophy, public policy, and economics. There will be podcasts and videos, and we welcome your article pitches.

The difference between liberal democracy and the alternatives is crucial. We can’t say what the future holds, of course, but the path just ahead is clear enough, and the work is rarely so important. We intend to do what we can, and we invite you to join us.

A president takes office in the middle of an economic crisis, claiming a sweeping mandate to act. Almost immediately, the executive branch begins asserting direct control over vast sectors of economic life—setting prices, dictating production levels, and determining who can enter which industries and on what terms. Hundreds of regulatory codes are issued in a matter of months. Businesses that don’t comply face public pressure campaigns and boycotts. The justification is always the same: the emergency demands action, action demands centralized authority, and the old constraints no longer apply.

This was Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, launched in 1933. So sweeping was the NRA in its concentration of economic power that the Supreme Court struck it down unanimously two years later, finding that Congress had impermissibly delegated legislative authority to the president.

I bring this up not to draw facile parallels to our own moment, but because the NRA provoked one of the most searching responses to the problem of concentrated power that the liberal tradition has ever produced. In 1934, a young economist at the University of Chicago named Henry Simons published a pamphlet called A Positive Program for Laissez Faire. The title sounds like a defense of the status quo. It was anything but. Simons argued that the crisis demanded reform, but reform aimed at dispersing power, not concentrating it further. He called for breaking up corporate monopolies, steeply progressive taxation to reduce inequality, the abolition of tariffs, and, where competition was truly impossible, government ownership. He called inequality “evil.” And he organized his entire intellectual project around a single conviction: “A cardinal tenet of libertarians is that no one may be trusted with much power—no leader, no faction, no party, no ‘class,’ no majority, no government, no church, no corporation, no trade association, no labour union, no grange, no professional association, no university, no large organization of any kind.”

Simons was Milton Friedman’s teacher and a founding figure of the Chicago School. If he doesn’t sound like the free-market fundamentalist you’ve been taught to associate with that tradition, I’d suggest that’s worth pausing over. Because the conceptual tools Simons developed—tools for thinking about how power concentrates, why that’s dangerous, and what kinds of institutions prevent it—are precisely the tools we need right now. Not because classical liberals got everything right. But because the problem Simons was grappling with in 1934 is, in its essentials, our problem too.

The left has long understood the dangers of private power, like corporate monopoly, landlord exploitation, financial sector dominance, the translation of concentrated wealth into concentrated political influence. These are real and serious concerns. Some on the post-liberal right have started raising similar worries, in their own idiom.

But the current moment is revealing something else: the dangers of unchecked public power. When an executive branch can impose sweeping tariffs by decree, seize control of federal payment systems, fire inspectors general, and defy court orders, we are watching the power problem in its public form. And the alarm this provokes, the deep conviction that power needs to be checked, that the rules have to mean something independent of who’s in charge, is the animating insight of the classical liberal tradition.

What I want to suggest in this essay is that this tradition offers some genuinely useful conceptual tools for thinking about the problem of power. My hope is that those on the left can see these tools as useful complements to the concerns progressives have long brought to the table. Let me sketch two of the most important.

The first tool is the more familiar. Public choice theory—developed by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and others—applies economic reasoning to political actors. The core insight is simple: politicians, bureaucrats, and regulators are not philosopher-kings. They are (largely) self-interested agents operating within institutional incentive structures, just like everyone else. They respond to concentrated lobbying, seek to expand their own authority, and design programs that tend to deliver concentrated benefits to organized interest groups while dispersing costs across an inattentive public.

This is not cynicism about government. It is realism about power. And it helps explain something progressives are learning painfully right now: the regulatory infrastructure may have been built to protect consumers, workers, and the environment, but it doesn’t come with a guarantee that it will always be operated by people who share those liberal values. Every grant of discretionary authority to the executive is a tool that can be seized and redirected by the next administration. Institutional design choices—checks, constraints, distributed authority, transparency—matter more than the intentions of whoever happens to hold power at any given moment.

The second tool is deeper, less familiar, and I think more important. It’s the idea that competitive markets can be a form of decentralized countervailing power.

Return to Simons. In 1941, building on the framework of his earlier pamphlet, he wrote an essay called “For a Free-Market Liberalism” that contains what I think is one of the most important and least appreciated passages in the classical liberal tradition. Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, Simons argued, understood that 

There is a lot packed into this passage, so let me unpack it.

First, it frames competitive markets not primarily as engines of efficiency—though they are that—but as political institutions for dispersing power. When economic decisions are spread across millions of actors, no single entity, including the state, can effectually dictate the terms of economic life. The merchant who can take her business elsewhere, the worker who has outside options, the consumer who can choose among suppliers—these people have exit power. And exit power is political power.

Second, the passage gives the state an active role. The government’s job is not to stand back and let markets happen. It’s to maintain the competitive conditions that prevent power from concentrating. This is the opposite of the caricature of classical liberalism as laissez-faire passivity.

Third, notice who the enemy is. Not “government” in the abstract. “Organized minorities” who usurp economic power “against the common interest.” Rent-seekers. Monopolists. Insiders who rig the rules. That should resonate with anyone who has worried about regulatory capture, corporate lobbying, or the revolving door between industry and government.

This insight has deep roots. As the political theorist Eric Schliesser has argued in his work on Adam Smith, the classical liberal tradition from its origins understood commercial society not merely as an engine of wealth but as a structural counterweight to concentrated political authority. Free trade and competitive markets didn’t just produce prosperity. They produced a dispersal of power that made domination harder to sustain. This is also why the current administration’s embrace of tariffs should concern us in ways that go beyond their considerable economic costs. When the executive branch imposes sweeping tariffs by decree, it is re-concentrating millions of dispersed economic decisions into the hands of a single political actor. It is mercantilism reborn—and the classical liberal tradition has been fighting mercantilism since Adam Smith.

Here’s the bridge I want to build: when progressives worry about corporate monopoly, about concentrated wealth translating into political power, about regulatory capture—they’re making a version of this same argument from the other direction. They’re recognizing that when economic power concentrates, it threatens the dispersal on which freedom depends. The classical liberal tradition agrees entirely. The insight cuts both ways: concentration is dangerous wherever it occurs. And competitive markets, properly maintained, are one of the most powerful mechanisms we have for preventing both kinds.

But markets can’t solve everything. And here is what I most want progressives to understand: classical liberals have always known this. This is not a grudging concession. It is a direct implication of the tradition’s own deepest commitments.

Return one last time to Simons. The same thinker who made the case for markets as dispersed power also advocated steeply progressive income taxation—because he believed that extreme inequality is, in his words, something “evil” that should be “tolerated only so far as the dictates of expediency are clear.” He supported government ownership of industries where technology required a scale incompatible with genuine competition. He called for active monetary policy to stabilize the economy. He insisted that “a merely negative, ‘hands-off’ policy of government is not sufficient to maintain the free economic order.” And he acknowledged, remarkably for a founder of Chicago economics, that socialism and libertarianism share their most fundamental concerns: “Modern socialism is avowedly concerned mainly about inequalities of wealth and power and about industrial monopoly—both major concerns of libertarians.”

If your central commitment is the dispersal of power, then you must oppose its concentration wherever you find it. In the state, yes—but also in private monopoly, in financial oligarchy, in any institution that grows powerful enough to dictate terms to those who depend on it. The classical liberal who waves away corporate concentration, or who treats every call for collective action as creeping socialism, is betraying this tradition, not defending it.

So when progressives raise real concerns—about healthcare access, about climate externalities, about people who are suffering right now—the question the classical liberal tradition asks is not whether to act but how: how do we structure collective action so that it addresses the genuine problem without creating new concentrations of power that will be captured, redirected, or abused by the next person who seizes the executive? After the last few years, that should strike progressives not as an evasion but as perhaps the most practical question in politics.

The shared enemy is not “big government” or “the free market.” The shared enemy is concentrated, unchecked power, wherever it lives. Classical liberals bring tools for understanding how power concentrates and how institutions can be designed to prevent it. Progressives bring moral urgency about the people who are harmed when power goes unchecked, and a willingness to act collectively to address real suffering. Neither tradition has the complete picture. But together, they have the resources for a liberalism that is serious about both freedom and justice—which is to say, serious about power.

In future essays, I want to explore what this alliance looks like when it gets concrete—starting with the “abundance agenda” and the ways in which housing deregulation, permitting reform, and occupational licensing reduction represent exactly the kind of power-dispersing, opportunity-expanding policies that both traditions should embrace. For now, I’ll close with Simons, writing in 1934, in the depths of the Depression, when the temptation to centralize was at its strongest:

“The great enemy of democracy is monopoly, in all its forms.”

He was right. And the sooner we recognize that this enemy has no fixed address, the sooner we can start fighting it together.

Welcome to Liberalism.org. It has been almost exactly a year since we first started kicking around plans for this new journal of liberal ideas, and it’s wonderful to finally have it out in the world. At the Institute for Humane Studies, we’ve spent 65 years building and supporting an extraordinary network of scholars pushing liberal argument and research forward in their work. Liberalism.org gives us a way to share those ideas with you.

Liberalism is a conversation. It has been for centuries, and it will be for centuries more. It is an ongoing process of debate, discovery, and negotiation. At its core, it is a family of ideas, doctrines, principles, and values that share a common grounding in equal dignity, the rule of law, and constrained government. It is a commitment to human flourishing—not as a single, imposed vision dictated by the few, but as the tremendous and diverse dynamism of free people pursuing their interests in a culture of mutual support and respect, guarded by institutions aimed at enabling and protecting that freedom.

And that conversation has delivered. The liberal tradition has produced the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative societies in human history. It has lifted billions out of poverty. It has expanded the circle of dignity to include those once excluded from it—women, religious minorities, the enslaved and their descendants, people persecuted for whom they love. It has created the conditions for scientific revolutions, artistic flourishing, and the everyday miracle of strangers cooperating peacefully across vast differences. None of this happened by accident. It happened because liberal institutions—markets, constitutions, norms of toleration and open inquiry—channeled human energy toward mutual benefit rather than zero-sum domination. The story of liberalism is, overwhelmingly, a story of things getting better.

It’s common in our illiberal moment, however, to hear claims that the liberal conversation has failed. Critics claim it failed in constraining populist urges. They argue it failed in providing the kind of community and meaning—and meaning in community—that people desperately desire and need. Feeling atomized and adrift, the argument goes, people have naturally turned to authoritarians, strongmen, and totalizing ideologies promising to restore order and bestow that missing meaning, if only they are granted the power to use force to do so. Illiberal ideologies have ultimately risen to the commanding heights of politics and culture, the argument goes, because of these failures.

This pessimistic view gets liberalism wrong, however. It fails to understand liberalism not just as a set of rules for political institutions, but as an inspiring vision of how we live well together. And not just inspiring, but one with a proven track record of working, contrasted with the track record of illiberalism failing every time.

The reason liberalism succeeds where illiberalism doesn’t is that it recognizes a fundamental and unavoidable truth about our world: It is always changing. It is never static. As the philosopher Robert Nozick noted, liberty upsets patterns. When free people are allowed to make autonomous choices—to innovate, to move, to create, to challenge or ignore orthodoxies—the static patterns of the past inevitably shift. Yes, we are deeply embedded in communities, families, cultures, and societies, and we are profoundly shaped by them. But a liberal society recognizes that robust meaning and authentic identity aren’t imposed on us from the top down. They are dynamically forged from the bottom up through free association, personal interest, evolving tastes, and shared endeavors. When individually unique people live together peacefully, trade peacefully, and seek out happiness and flourishing peacefully, the world around us today won’t look like it did yesterday, and it won’t look the same tomorrow.

Our current illiberal moment isn’t about a failure in liberalism. Liberalism has, though inconsistently and in fits and starts, been wildly successful. And the illiberal moment is a reaction to that success, and a reaction to the way that liberalism succeeds. It is a rejection of liberalism’s inherent dynamism. The political theorist Patrick Deneen has argued that liberalism’s achievements are in fact its undoing—that the liberty it promises “requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community.” Taking that academic case and sharpening it into a political program, a future United States senator from Missouri put it this way while working out the ideas underpinning his illiberalism: liberalism “is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice” and this freedom “denigrates the common affections and common loves that make our way of life possible.” Both Deneen and Hawley ultimately want a politics where today looks as it did yesterday, and tomorrow will, as well. That’s not liberalism, and cannot be, but the liberal vision is clearly a better one, and one not just more at peace with the unavoidable nature of the world, but which embraces it to the benefit of all.

None of this means that liberals have gotten everything right, or that the reaction we face is entirely exogenous. The liberal tradition has real failures to reckon with—places where its institutions haven’t delivered on their promises, where the benefits of openness have been unevenly shared, where liberals have been better at defending abstract principles than at addressing the lived concerns of their fellow citizens. Liberalism.org exists in part because we believe the liberal tradition has the intellectual resources to meet these challenges—but only if we’re honest about them. Renewal requires self-examination, not just self-congratulation.

Illiberalism is ultimately a demand that a specific pattern—economic, cultural, or social—be artificially preserved against the free choices of others. It’s almost always about preserving someone’s place in an existing social hierarchy, or else about setting up some new hierarchy, one that can supposedly last forever. But we cannot make permanent what is inevitably impermanent. Insisting otherwise requires coercion and brings widespread distress, impoverishment, and governing failure. Illiberalism is, at its root, a profound discomfort with the openness and diversity of a changing world, leading illiberals to demand that strong leaders step in and forcibly put a stop to it.

At Liberalism.org, we reject the fear of a changing world. We recognize that an open society does not leave us adrift. Rather, it creates a positive feedback loop that actively rewards the very traits—tolerance, curiosity, mutual respect, delight in others’ success—that lead to ethical, happy, and flourishing lives. Our liberalism is open. Open societies, open markets, open minds, open hearts.

We believe the path forward isn’t found in reactionary nostalgia or angry polemics, but in reimagining and actively building a robust liberal future. As our President, Emily Chamlee-Wright, notes in her introductory essay, we are making a wager that a serious, principled coalition can bend the hinge of history toward liberty, equality, and justice.

We aim to show a future worth wanting, one that is achievable, and one that can inspire. We want to outline a vision that promises a better world and, with your help, delivers it. Whether you are a scholar, a student, a policymaker, or simply a citizen looking for serious, constructive solutions and fruitful ways of thinking about your world, we invite you to join this conversation.

We’re thrilled to announce that Liberalism.org is live.

So what is Liberalism.org? It’s a new journal of liberal ideas, published by the Institute for Humane Studies. We launched it because we believe this moment—with the institutions of a free society under direct assault and illiberalism ascendant—demands a publication like this. It demands a place where liberalism is taken seriously as a living, evolving tradition: one grounded in equal dignity, constrained government, open markets, and the conviction that free people cooperating across deep differences is not just possible but the proven path to human flourishing.

• Read our president Emily Chamlee-Wright’s introduction, “At a Hinge Moment in History, We Must Build a Liberal Future,” a powerful case for why this work matters now.

• Read Aaron Ross Powell’s director’s introduction, “Liberalism: A Future Worth Wanting,” about liberalism as an ongoing conversation, and Liberalism.org as a home for it.

• We’ve launched two new podcasts. Ideas in Progress, hosted by Jason S. Canon, engages the scholars working at the frontiers of liberal thought. And The Liberalism.org Show, hosted by Aaron Ross Powell, goes deep on essays and ideas from the magazine. You can find both here.

In the weeks ahead, expect three articles a week, new podcast episodes every other week from each show, and a growing community of writers, scholars, and thinkers committed to building a liberal future worth wanting.

Welcome aboard.

I am fascinated by hinge moments in history. I like to cast my imagination into the minds of key players at a point when they know the stakes are high, but the outcome is radically uncertain. In hinge moments, courageous defenders of a cause have no idea how it will all turn out, or how their efforts will be remembered by later generations. 

It is our habit to think of America’s declaration of its independence from Britain as the beginning of a journey destined to succeed. It was nothing of the sort. Loyalists were not enemies, at least not at first. They were friends and neighbors—people whose doubts must have given patriots pause about the righteousness of their cause. The founders argued bitterly, not only about means, but about whether the cause itself could survive. Long stretches passed when alliances were fragile, military victory seemed remote, and the future of a self-governing republic was an open question, not a promised end.

So it was with Lincoln. He governed through years when the Union appeared more likely to fracture permanently than to be preserved. Though morally clear about slavery’s injustice, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation knowing it might worsen the very rupture he was sworn to prevent. And so too with the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. famously expressed his confidence that the arc of the moral universe would eventually bend toward justice. But he knew that it wouldn’t bend itself. And as white backlash became increasingly fierce, he worried that white moderates would passively stand by as racial hatred defined the course of America’s future, rather than liberty, equality, and justice. 

Hinge moments are those when the stakes are high, the future is radically undetermined, and capable but flawed human beings have to act decisively—even when the better world we’re aiming to achieve doesn’t give up its instructions easily.

We are living through such a moment now.

We certainly know the stakes are high. The constitutional principles required by a free, liberal, and democratic society are under direct assault from people who took an oath to protect and defend them. Executive power is exercised as though constraint were optional. Congress, rather than jealously guarding its Article I responsibilities, too often proves complicit in the very overreach it is meant to check. In the name of urgency, the administration has bent or bypassed core due process protections that are essential to the legitimate use of authority. Federal law enforcement agencies have frequently manufactured the “urgency” themselves. We’ve become accustomed to daily violations of the democratic norms that once quietly governed political behavior. When adherence to the rule of law is treated as an obstacle rather than an obligation, when brutality is normalized, the future of a self-governing republic is no longer a settled inheritance. It is once again an open question.

But in the midst of these ascendant threats also lies an opportunity: the building of a robustly liberal future. And it can be all the more resilient for its recent trials. 

Through all the present chaos, we’re relearning some important lessons. We’re learning that we can’t take constitutional guarantees, such as our First Amendment freedoms of the press, of speech, expression, and assembly, for granted. Those paying close attention are learning that failure to defend such freedoms plays into the hands of political opportunists eager to turn the tables. We are gaining a deeper appreciation for federalism, for the free flow of trade, and for an independent judiciary and Federal Reserve. 

I say this with eyes wide open. While we’re learning, it’s not at all clear that the right lessons will be sticky enough to secure a liberal future. No matter who prevails in upcoming political contests, players at either extreme of the ideological divide will relish the expanded executive authority they’ve inherited. And after years of discord and disruption, an exhausted public may find counterintuitive the liberal principles that invite innovation, economic dynamism, and cultural change.

In other words, the opportunity to build a liberal future is real, but that future will not build itself. Liberal principles must be defended, yes—but also applied. That means strengthening constitutional guardrails against concentrated power. It means applying liberal policy insights to remove the barriers that make ordinary life harder than it needs to be. It means renewing liberal values of decency and integrity in public life, habits of mind that have us welcoming new insights and discoveries, and the moral intuitions that lead to open and open-hearted civic spaces, in which a robust liberal pluralism can thrive. 

Such work requires spaces where a broad liberal coalition can find one another and collaborate in the shared conviction that every person is the dignified equal of every other. This is not sentiment. A universal recognition of human dignity is the moral core of the liberal project. Constitutional governance, market dynamism, intellectual openness, and a vibrant cultural and civic life all rest upon it.

This coalition will surface tensions. It will argue. It will test its own assumptions. That contestation is a feature, not a bug. After all, it’s contestation—in our intellectual pursuits, and in our political, commercial, and civic lives—that allows a liberal society to experiment, learn, and adapt. 

As the president of the Institute for Humane Studies, I am proud that IHS is home to Liberalism.org. In launching this magazine, we’re making a wager that a serious, principled liberal coalition can bend the hinge away from strongmen, away from unconstrained power, and toward liberty, equality, and justice.

Whether as a reader, contributor, or supporter, you are part of the community that wins that future. And for that, I could not be more grateful.