Debates about artificial intelligence and writing tend to begin with authorship. Is a student cheating if she uses a language model to draft a paper? Should a scholar disclose that a model rewrote a paragraph? Is an author less of an author if a machine suggested the words? These are reasonable questions, and institutions will have to answer them. But I increasingly think they focus on the wrong end of the exchange.

My claim in this essay is twofold. First, AI’s capacity to lower the cost of producing language is, on balance, a good thing. It can open the collective intellectual conversation to people whom the old costs of writing kept out. Second, precisely because production is becoming cheap, the pressing question is no longer who writes, but who reads. What is at stake is not just the flow of information, but our participation in a shared human conversation. Writing that no one reads isn’t in a conversation at all. Adapting to AI will require changes in how we write, but it will require even larger changes in how we read.

Language as Collective Cognition

Start with what language is for. Other animals communicate, but human language differs in scale and kind. We describe people who aren’t present, recount events none of us witnessed, formulate rules and abstractions, and, most importantly, pass all of this onward. Language lets an idea move from one mind into another. Writing helps it outlive the mind that produced it.

The result is that human intelligence is cumulative rather than merely individual. The reach of its transmission is astonishing. A story told and retold for generations millennia ago can become a Christopher Nolan summer blockbuster, seen, discussed, and debated by millions, in 2026. Plato began a conversation we are still having. Scientists build on experiments run by strangers. Lawyers argue with judges long dead. No individual holds more than a sliver of what humanity knows; most of it lives outside any single head, in books, archives, legal systems, and institutions.

The value of language, on this view, lies not in the existence of text but in the connections text creates among minds. I read what you wrote; your thought becomes part of mine; I respond; I extend or reject it; someone else carries part of my response onward. The value lies in the loop, and a loop has two ends.

Language does at least two things. It preserves what earlier people thought, building up a collective memory. And it also lets people think with and against one another, which is something closer to collective cognition. Books, archives, databases, and now language models can store or reconstruct a static collective memory. Only our collective cognition requires people to encounter one another’s thought: to interpret it, answer it, revise it, and pass it on. A library is a memory; a living intellectual culture is a conversation. Illiberal societies may have books and libraries—even though they’re not necessarily open to the public. What they lack is candid conversation among political equals—the signal intellectual product of a liberal society. In the age of AI, liberals need to rededicate themselves to the health of those kinds of conversations, and to consider how both their inputs and outputs will change. The rest of this essay is about what happens to that conversational loop, at both ends, when producing language becomes nearly free.

The Unseen Costs of the Old Way

For most of history, producing language was expensive. A book took years of drafting, revision, and review. A serious article took months or more. Before the age of blogs, Substack, and Kindle Direct Publishing, publication required editors, presses, and journals. These production costs forced selection: an author who could write only a few books had to decide which ones were worth writing; a journal with twenty slots a year had to decide which articles deserved them. As a result, products from reputable publishers also carried information. Because producing a substantial work was costly, the existence of the work signaled, however imperfectly, that its author had invested time and judgment. It is the cost of a signal that makes it informative.

These costs, though, were borne unevenly. High production costs create gatekeepers, and gatekeepers were often biased, set in their ways, and self-interested. More subtly, the costs also privileged a particular skill. Access to the written conversation went disproportionately to people who were good at writing, and especially at writing persuasively. That skill correlates with depth of thought, but only loosely. The signal that a reputable publication conveyed was partly a signal of insight and partly a signal of fluency, and the two were never easy to disentangle.

Meanwhile, the costs excluded people who had something valuable to say but struggled to translate it into written form. Some thinkers are slow writers. Some are awkward on the page. Some are working in a second or third language, or have learning differences that make composition laborious, or simply lack the training that elite institutions provide. The historical record of ideas is, in part, a record of who could write well enough to be heard.

AI can change that. A person with a genuine insight and limited facility with prose can now produce a clear, well-organized articulation of that insight. That is potentially a large expansion of the conversation. More people with something to say can now join in, and the conversation is richer for it. Much of the anxiety about AI-assisted writing implicitly treats the old skill barrier as a quality filter. It was partly that. It was also a filter on background, temperament, and training that had little to do with the quality of anyone’s ideas.

None of this is to deny that AI-assisted writing has costs. Critics argue that writing is itself a form of thinking, so that outsourcing the writing hollows out the thought; that reliance on these tools reduces cognitive engagement; and that AI-assisted work tends toward sameness. I don’t contest those concerns. But the existence of costs is not an argument that the costs outweigh the benefits. The old regime had costs, too. We simply stopped noticing them, because they fell mostly on people who never made it into the conversation.

Who Reads?

The trouble is that lowering the cost of writing does nothing to increase the supply of reading.

Human attention does not scale with the production of language. Herbert Simon observed that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and AI is about to test that observation at a scale Simon couldn’t have imagined. If every author can produce more, and new authors can produce for the first time, the volume of language entering the conversation will grow far faster than anyone’s capacity to receive it.

Reading is not simply consumption. It is the receptive half of the loop, the moment when a mind enters into relation with another. An argument that no one encounters doesn’t move from one mind into another. It sits in the archive, contributing to collective memory, perhaps, but not to collective thought. So the question every author now faces is not only “what should I say?” but “who is going to receive this?” If the answer is no one, then producing it, however easy, is not really a contribution. Legal scholars should find this uncomfortably familiar: one study of nearly 250,000 law review articles found that 82 percent had not been cited even once within five years of publication.

The Republic of Letters and the Problem of Scale

Consider the Republic of Letters, the network of scholars who corresponded across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its intellectual productivity came not only from the brilliance of its members but from the structure of their exchange. A relatively small number of people wrote in shared venues and a shared style, at a volume their peers could actually absorb. Some people, like the Catholic priest and mathematician Marin Mersenne, acted as hubs and relayed letters among correspondents, including major intellectual figures like Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes; early journals like Henry Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions gave the community a common place to read one another. Participants could plausibly keep up with the work that mattered to them, respond to it, and expect responses in return.

Now imagine that each of those scholars had been able to multiply their output tenfold. One might think the result would have been ten times the intellectual progress. I suspect it could just as easily have destroyed the community. The problem would not simply have been that the best letters were harder to find. It would have been a breakdown of reciprocity. Correspondents would have stopped reading and answering one another. Shared reference points would have failed to emerge. The expectation that a letter would be read and answered, which is what turned private writing into a public conversation, would have collapsed.

The intuition of any individual author in that scenario might be that more production means more chances to be read, more influence, and more engagement. But that intuition doesn’t work for a large aggregate of authors. When everyone produces more against a limited pool of attention, each contribution is less likely to be received, and the shared conversation that made writing worthwhile in the first place begins to dissolve. It is a collective action problem. Individually rational increases in output can produce a collectively worse outcome: a community whose members no longer hear one another.

That, I think, is the real risk of cheap production. An explosion of volume, with no corresponding change in how we receive and sort it, could dissolve the reciprocal attention that turns writing into conversation.

Novelty Is Not the Coin of the Realm

It would be easy to draw a wrong lesson from all this: that the solution to overproduction is to demand novelty, and that anything that has been said before is noise. That lesson badly misunderstands how scholarship works, especially in the humanities and law.

Most scholarship in these fields does not produce new knowledge in the way a laboratory finding does. The questions law professors debate in law review articles, such as the choice between rules and standards, the proper role of courts, or the relationship between law and morality, have often been debated by previous generations, sometimes in strikingly similar terms. That does not make asking these questions unimportant today. We return to some questions again and again precisely because they are important, and because they apply differently as circumstances change. A debate about administrative discretion reads differently in an era of algorithmic decisionmaking than it did in the New Deal. Nolan’s film is not a new Odyssey; its value lies in what the old story means to the people watching it now.

The point of reexamining and republishing these ideas, generation after generation, is to keep them alive in our collective memory. In these fields, relevance to the current discussion, not novelty, is the coin of the realm.

Seen this way, repetition is not waste. A shared intellectual conversation cannot be reduced to a database of unique propositions. Communities keep ideas alive by restating, reinterpreting, contesting, rediscovering, and applying them, and an inherited idea acquires its meaning for each generation through that work.

This sharpens the question of who reads. A genuinely new discovery retains its value even if it sits unread for years; someone can find it later, and it will still be true. A restatement of an enduring idea has no such reserve. Its entire value lies in reaching a present audience and bringing an old idea into a live conversation. 

This cuts somewhat in favor of AI-assisted writing. Rearticulating an established idea for a new context is exactly the kind of work AI can help more people do well, including people who understand why an old argument matters now but would have struggled to write it up. The danger lies on the reading side, once AI is doing the filtering. For an information-retrieval system, “this argument has been made before” is sensible evidence of redundancy. For a conversational culture, it is not. A filter built to deduplicate will systematically discount the very work through which ideas stay alive, and a summary reporting that an argument “has been made before” will miss its importance in the current moment.

This is not hypothetical. In late 2025, arXiv, the leading preprint server in computer science, stopped accepting review articles and position papers in that field unless they had already passed peer review. It explained that generative AI had made papers “not introducing new research results” fast and easy to write, and its volunteer moderators could not keep up. Given the volume, the response was understandable—but it may have obscured a lot of conversationally valuable contributions. 

Changing How We Write

Part of the response has to come from authors. If the cost of production no longer signals the value of what we say, we need better signals. That might mean writing less, not more, and treating AI’s efficiency as a way to improve the work we produce rather than multiply it. The measure is not whether an idea is new, but whether a piece connects it to a conversation that is actually happening, with readers who are actually in it. And it will likely mean rethinking the forms we write in. Much of our inherited genre structure (the article, the white paper, the monograph) assumed scarcity. It is not obvious those forms remain the right units of contribution when anyone can generate them on demand.

The status incentives surrounding publication make this harder. Academia’s “publish or perish” norms already rewarded volume, and AI makes volume cheaper. An institution that counts outputs will get more outputs. Whether it gets more thought is another matter.

Changing How We Read

The larger adjustment, though, falls on the reception side. If the volume of language is going to grow dramatically, and I think it will, then the practices and institutions through which we find, evaluate, and engage with ideas have to evolve with it.

Some of that filtering will inevitably be done by AI. That is not in itself a problem. Intellectual culture has always depended on mediators: teachers, editors, librarians, reviewers, indexes, and trusted colleagues. No one reads everything, and mediation is how nearly anyone finds nearly anything. The question is not whether we rely on intermediaries, but what kind of intermediaries we are building.

There is a meaningful difference between tools that route readers into a conversation and tools that substitute for it. A system that helps me find the three papers I most need to read, and then sends me to read them, strengthens my participation. A system that summarizes a thousand papers so that I never read any of them does something quite different.

And language models can go well beyond summaries. An LLM can tell me what another scholar argued, lay out the strongest objections, draft my response, and then carry on the discussion with me, playing every other side. The result can be a sophisticated representation of the human conversation, one I engage with fluently while rarely entering the conversation itself. I never have to encounter the other people in it, and they never encounter me. That is a distinctive risk: not that the intermediary fails, but that it becomes good enough that encountering one another stops seeming necessary. A liberal should ask some tough questions about this state of affairs: Who made that LLM representation of the conversation? To what end? What does it include, and what does it leave out? What’s easy to access, and what’s harder? And why does it do that?

This is where the distinction between collective memory and collective cognition matters most. AI can give extraordinary access to the products of collective human thought while quietly withdrawing the user from the conversation that produced them. It can make the user better informed about the collective mind while making them less a part of it. A slightly different technology might bring them into that conversation instead, and which one we build and adopt is a choice.

The reception side will also need renewed human institutions: editors, curators, and communities of peers willing to do the hard work of directing attention to what matters. The Republic of Letters worked because it had shared venues and shared habits of reading. A world of abundant language needs its own equivalents, and it doesn’t yet have them.

Conclusion

The debate over AI and writing has been framed largely as a debate about authorship: who wrote the words, and whether it matters. The more important question is at the other end. AI can make the collective conversation more open than it has ever been, admitting people whose ideas were previously filtered out by the cost and skill of writing. 

But the conversation is the point, and a conversation needs listeners as well as speakers. Reading matters because it has long been one of the principal ways we encounter other minds. If we respond to cheap production by producing more in the forms we always have, and if we meet the resulting flood by letting machines read for us, we risk a conversation with more people speaking, but with too few listening. The question is not whether AI will write, or even whether it will read. It will certainly continue to do both. What liberals must ask is whether AI will mediate and enlarge upon the shared human conversation, or whether it will gradually become our preferred substitute for taking part.

Image: Reading by the Sea (1910), by Vittorio Matteo Corcos, via Wikimedia Commons.

[Editor’s note: This essay is excerpted from chapter six of Eric Liu’s forthcoming book LIVE LIKE A CITIZEN: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country, published this month by Simon & Schuster, LLC.]

Civic life is full of change and the discomfort of change. That’s because life is full of change and the discomfort of change. In politics, change talk is ubiquitous. Elections are called “change elections” when enough people are in enough pain to oust the incumbents. Local fights over housing and zoning are all about change: NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) activists resist it, YIMBY (yes-in-my-backyard) ones welcome it. Demographic changes in the United States have led to a surge in white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism. Climate change, of course, is the meta-change upending markets and politics everywhere. Yet we don’t talk so much about the one kind of change that is elemental in a healthy democratic culture: changing your mind. When we do talk about changing minds, it’s often critically.

We mock politicians who switch positions because we assume they have no core beliefs and are just gravitating opportunistically to power. But politicians have no monopoly on opportunism.

The way you and I build followings and get likes on social media is to project certitude, to shame dissenters, to banish doubt. We, like politicians, are often just following incentives.

Knowing how to change—your opinions and beliefs, your mental models for making sense of the world, all of which I am going to abbreviate here as “changing your mind”—is core to living like a citizen. Why? Because citizens in a liberal democracy are not meant to be preprogrammed automatons. We are meant to use our freedom to take in the world, to learn from experience and interactions with each other, and to adapt. 

If you are unwilling or unable to change your mind—in response to the environment or evidence, new arguments or insights—then you are wasting our democratic system of self-government.

Let me tell you about one way I’ve changed my mind. 

I used to scorn libertarianism—the political philosophy that prizes individual liberty, natural rights, and private property above all and opposes most government intervention in markets and personal life. I thought it was a fancy justification for raw selfishness and was profoundly naive in its underlying assumption that individuals can do without state or society. I cowrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg mocking libertarians, saying they were as blinkered in their understanding of reality as the communists of old.

I wouldn’t write that piece today. What changed? First, I read the rebuttals that came in and thought about them. The most perceptive ones named what I knew were weaknesses in our argument. The biggest weakness was the oldest and perhaps laziest rhetorical trick in the book: we treated the most extreme and objectionable version of libertarianism as a stand-in for all libertarianism.

Second, then, I started taking libertarianism and classical liberalism more seriously—not as the cartoon version voiced by some politicians on the right but as a complex explanation for how societies thrive. I read more than John Locke and John Stuart Mill or the insufferable novels of Ayn Rand. I read modern thinkers like Robert Nozick and Friedrich Hayek, James Scott and Elinor Ostrom. I realized I often agreed with them about the benefits of change emerging from citizens bottom-up rather than from states top-down. I learned that many classical liberals valued a civic culture of mutuality and responsibility as much as I did. And in the age of Trump, like many progressives, I’ve come to appreciate more the benefits of limited government and decentralization and the dangers of concentrated federal power.

Finally, maybe most important, I talked to actual libertarians. 

One was Matt Kibbe, who at the time was the head of FreedomWorks, the think tank and political operation that helped feed the Tea Party and birth the Freedom Caucus in Congress. Matt and I met because we were on opposing teams in a PBS debate about the role of government. He’s the author of Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff, a manifesto whose title seemed to me to beg the deepest question: Is taxation taking people’s stuff or is it creating a system where we can safely have stuff? We argued over that question. But I noticed that, for all our disagreements, Matt and I kept breaking the binary of the debate. We kept agreeing on a meta-level: on the limits of left-right framing, on the way the party duopoly and mass media snuff out nuance.

We continued talking after the debate and we’ve been friends ever since. He’s a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory. He left FreedomWorks in 2015 and, after a stint running a super PAC for Rand Paul, he and his wife, Terry, founded Free the People, a media company that makes documentaries and other story-driven content to make abstract issues of liberty more relatable. He had me on his YouTube show called Speaking with the Enemy. He’s introduced me to other principled right-of-center leaders.

To be clear: we still disagree on so many things, from vaccine mandates to income taxes to the war in Ukraine. But I’ve come to appreciate the intellectual depth of his approach to freedom and the state. We’ve added each other to our social and professional networks. And he’s been a part of the changing of my mind. Which is to say, he’s now part of the ever-changing composite system of sense making that is my mind.

The point of this single instance of a mind shift is not that right or left is right or wrong or that shades of gray is always better than black-and-white. The point is that no mind is an island. Your worldview is shaped by your experiences and your relationships. The source material for both is other people.

At the same time, we are not drones with a hive mind. Humans are not bees. The individual mind and heart matter because the individual in a liberal democracy is the core unit of dignity. Not the race, not the class, not the gender, not the party. The pursuit of happiness is an individual search for purpose and recognition. [...]

In this essay, I describe three steps to changing your mind. First, know your own mind. Second, learn and know minds that are different from yours. Third, honestly assess what you’ve got invested in your current mindset—and diversify your investments.

These three steps constitute a climb. Each step requires curiosity. Each requires successively more courage. So, as always, begin the journey not in isolation—not in your own head—but in continuous conversation and interaction with others.

Know Your Own Mind

Most of us have opinions or “takes” on things in the news or in our communities. If I ask you what you think about the encampment of homeless people in the church parking lot in your neighborhood, you’ll likely have an answer. But you also likely haven’t thought much about where opinions like that come from.

All of us have mental models for explaining the world. Your opinion on the homeless encampment is a product of a background set of assumptions, beliefs, intuitions, and dispositions. Those moral and explanatory frameworks are about poverty, addiction, and mental health, yes, but also at a more general level about compassion and permissiveness, personal and collective responsibility, order and disorder, good intentions and unintended consequences.

You have a theory about how people, given the chance, will always do X or how governments are good at Y but not Z. Maybe that theory was formed by your parents. Maybe it was the product of a stressful experience in your life. Maybe it is the result of your inborn wiring for a certain kind of moral response to things. Maybe it is what you’ve digested from your media diet. Maybe it’s the cultural norms of your ethnic or religious community. Maybe it’s just what you heard someone say the other day. 

Step back and examine the contents of your own mental models: what you think, how you think, and why. It will make you a more effective citizen.

I first started collaborating with my friend Nick Hanauer back in late 2006. We were both involved in politics in Washington State, I as someone with experience in national politics and Nick as a venture capitalist who had started several civic organizations. (He was my coauthor on that piece mocking libertarians.) As Democrats, we were frustrated with the uninspired campaign the national party had run in the recent midterms. Party leaders had decided to boil down their message to the acronym MMEE: Medicare, Medicaid, education, environment. TV ads and door hangers were made to emphasize that Republicans would threaten those four things.

On the one hand, you could say the message worked: Democrats made great gains in Congress that election. On the other hand, the message was not a message; it was a policy list. It showed that the Democratic Party had forgotten how to speak a language of values. Party leaders no longer could state clearly what they believed and why.

We realized at that moment that neither could we. 

Sure, we had broadly progressive views on various policy issues. I could tell you I was pro-choice or against tax cuts for the rich. But I’d never truly examined why I believed these things and how or whether these beliefs hung together in a “belief system.”

So Nick and I began a conversation that turned into scribbles on a pad that turned into grids on a whiteboard that turned into a Word document that turned into a short book we published in 2007 called The True Patriot. It argued that true patriotism isn’t jingoistic bombast; it’s closing the gap between our nation’s creed and deeds. Four years later we wrote another book called The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government. It argued that a democracy, economy, and community are gardens, not machines—complex ecosystems that, left alone, will be overrun by noxious weeds—and that citizens must weed, seed, and feed them. Gardens require gardeners.

Both projects had an impact, shaping debates on patriotism in the 2008 presidential contest and influencing national economic policy and civic renewal work ever since. But their greatest value to us was that they distilled our mental models for how things work or should work. In fact, more than distilled: they forced them into full and systematic articulation. They revealed that we both liked to approach things in an “orthogonal” way—that is, not along a strict left-right axis but often at an angle to it.

I now can state a coherent point of view about the responsibilities of freedom. About how love of country should be measured by contribution, not chest-thumping. About the true source of prosperity. About the proper role of government in the marketplace and in our personal lives. About the power of citizens to remake institutions. I can tell you why I’m more communitarian than libertarian. And I can describe why my views, like a binocular, often mesh elements of left and right. 

Those views have changed in small and larger ways in the decade and a half since we wrote those books: that’s the point of this essay! But now I can map the changes and challenge myself to ask whether they result from the pull of Seattle progressives or the experience of parenthood or anti-Asian racism or something else. And I can have compassion for and curiosity about someone else’s changes in views.

I am not saying you need to write a book to know your own mind. Just make a list. Tear out a piece of notebook paper or open your Notes app and take inventory of the core values and beliefs that shape your civic worldview. Start by answering some broad questions like the following and keep going as you are inspired:

Do you usually trust people or mistrust them?

What kind of power would you say you have?

Do you think poverty is mainly a matter of personal responsibility?

Do you think government protects your freedom or threatens it?

Do you think capitalism is, on balance, good or bad?

Then invite at least one other person to do the same and meet with them to share your lists. While taking turns describing what you think, you will reveal how you think and why. This is the inquiry. It’s important to do this in conversation. Push each other to flesh out or burn off the shorthand to make your reflexive reactions more reflective.

When you say capitalism is evil, do you think it can be reformed?

Do you truly think all government spending is wasteful? 

More wasteful than corporate spending? 

What government rules do you think are necessary?

When you say “Follow the money,” are you more skeptical of the money of one party than that of the other?

When you say you feel small, do you think all giant institutions are suspect or just certain kinds? Which kinds?

Was it your family, your social setting, or something you experienced directly that makes you think this way?

Was there ever a time when you realized what you thought was wrong?

You’re not having a debate. You’re going on an archaeological dig, a joint excavation of the sedimentary layers in your head and heart: slogans, folk beliefs, inherited mantras, hard personal lessons, deeply considered concepts, gems of insight, long-buried trash. Doing this digging does not require special credentials. It requires only a willingness to ask and answer questions. 

And it’s fun! Not just for civic nerds like me but for anyone who wants to feel a sense of civic agency and power. Because whatever the level of sophistication and length of your inventory and your inquiry, you will uncover ways you have been letting others set your direction and make up your mind for you. 

You’ll then be able to apply your increased self-knowledge not only in the kind of intentional study I have just described but in the unpredictable flow of life in your community.

Akhil Amar is a constitutional law professor at Yale. Friends and fellow sons of immigrants, we call each other “brothers from another mother.” As a scholar and a public intellectual, he’s always had a heterodox profile. His policy views are generally liberal. At the same time, he calls himself an originalist—an approach to interpreting the Constitution favored by conservatives. He participates in the activities of both the American Constitution Society on the left and the Federalist Society on the right.

He once told me that the most important question he puts to his students is Do you know your own mind? The implication is that even at (maybe especially at) elite educational institutions, many people have never stress-tested their intuitions about how society and law operate.

Akhil practices what he preaches. His writings about the Constitution and American political history are a decades-long articulation of his nuanced mental models for what our country is and could be. They are admired and critiqued by readers on the left, on the right, and in the center. But it’s in his classroom teaching that his practice really shows.

In 2019 he was teaching his Intro Con Law course for undergraduates when two students entered the hall to disrupt the lecture with a piece of protest-as-performance-art. They suggested that Akhil condoned ethnic cleansing because the Constitution enabled the dispossession of Native Americans. They implied he was complicit in attacks on women’s autonomy because he had testified to the judicial and intellectual qualifications of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court nominee. (This was before Kavanaugh was publicly accused of sexual misconduct.) The protestors criticized his affiliation with the Federalist Society. Then they said they had a pamphlet to share.

Akhil defied every expectation, especially that of the protestors, when he gamely welcomed them and invited them to the stage to speak about their pamphlet. They did. They shared copies with the students. Akhil didn’t rebut or argue or try to control. He stayed off to the side, listening. When the protestors finished a few minutes later, he thanked them and invited them to stay. The protestors declined and left. Then he continued that day’s lecture on civil rights. Along the way, he noted the points the protestors had raised about how the Constitution has been used to deny rights to nonwhite people. He added that a university education should equip people to reflect on the meaning of a protest.

His behavior in that unexpected moment spoke volumes about what he believes, how he thinks, and why: he trusts profoundly in the clash of ideas and in the benefits of having that clash happen face-to-face. He believes it is the Constitution’s genius that makes the clash possible and its failings that make it necessary. He thinks beyond the binary. He is entirely comfortable having his mindset and worldview challenged. And of course he knew he supported neither ethnic cleansing nor the oppression of women.

Later, Akhil told reporters for the school paper that even though this was the kind of classroom disruption that university speech rules don’t protect, he judged that the disruption was minor and had created a teachable moment. Perhaps as remarkably, the protestors later publicly expressed appreciation for his grace. 

Getting to know your own mind makes you more open and less defensive, which makes others that way too. And it makes you ready, even eager, to get to know other minds.

Learn Other Minds

Having named your mental models, you now must do something a little harder. You must resist falling in love with them. As the saying goes, “Don’t believe everything you think.” Maintaining a critical distance from your own civic mind, questioning from time to time whether the frameworks you’ve used are still useful explanations and tools for living, is called epistemic humility. It is a crucial part of living like a citizen.

To cultivate such humility, get to know other minds that hold differing views. Ask every day: Am I being too pure? Too single-source and party-line in my politics and media? Too homogenous in my social network, my sources of inspiration, my cultural tastes and styles? Too righteous and binary in my values? Too hostile to ambiguity? Too flattening of other people’s complexity? Too showy in my signaling of virtue? Too moralistic in my condemnation of error? Too willing to shut down my own mind for the favor of a clique or a cult? 

The first and easiest thing to do is broaden your media and ideas diet. I don’t mean just to read, watch, or listen to voices and opinions of people who see the world differently from you. Do that, absolutely. I mean particularly to search out people living and dead who themselves have done some work of civic self-excavation and change.

When my daughter Olivia was a college student, I gave her an unusual birthday present. I curated for her a “right-of-center-on-race book club.” She was on a very progressive campus, minoring in REMS (race, ethnicity, migration studies). I realized that at a key moment in her formation she wasn’t going to get much exposure to non-left vantage points. So I gave her my dog-eared copies of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, Jim Sleeper’s Liberal Racism, Stephen L. Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America, and others.

These weren’t right-wing screeds, but they were critiques of what was becoming a more rigid identity-politics left—all by people who’d done some soul-searching and changed. Olivia read the books; we talked about what she liked and didn’t. And they all went into the making up of her mind, which today is progressive and inclusive on race matters but also skeptical of all groupthink, progressive or otherwise.

Mere exposure to unfamiliar minds has its benefits. But the more you read and listen, the more you will be able to check your first reactions of disagreement or disgust or defensiveness. The more you may even be able to practice what Charles Darwin called the principle of charity—putting arguments you don’t like in their most favorable light and assuming that the people making them have the best intentions. This isn’t to be charitable to them; it is to be charitable to you—to give yourself the gift of stepping into someone else’s shoes, head, and heart, even if they challenge your long-held worldview.

Another way to learn other minds is to expand your diet of friends and collaborators. Form relationships with people outside your bubble and consume their way of making sense of the world. Digest it; draw nutrients from it. There are organizations you can join whose express purpose is to make friends across divides. Interfaith America uses the potluck dinner as a literal and metaphorical way to promote pluralism. Braver Angels and Living Room Conversations invite people from left and right to meet in people’s homes to discuss their differences. Rich Tafel—a pastor, social entrepreneur, and conservative thought leader (and Citizen University board member)—has been diversifying his friend network throughout his career. In the 1990s he was the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, the leading advocates for gays and lesbians in the GOP. He pushed for LGBTQ+ rights, expanded the party, and built bipartisan and cross-ideological support for AIDS funding. In that work he sharpened habits that have shaped his career: creating alliances among unlikely partners and learning the different languages spoken by different civic tribes.

More recently, Rich designed a popular workshop series called Cultural Translation, in which he explains what progressives mean and conservatives hear and vice versa when they use words like equity or liberty, belonging or freedom. In a time when the letters D, E, and I have been demonized, he trains people in government, corporate HR departments, and the academy how to make words and values mean something again. 

The third way to learn other minds is perhaps most important: focus on a third thing—not just you and me talking about you and me but both of us working together on a third thing. A shared experience that transcends differences. This is what the military has long provided for our diverse society. 

I experienced this when I spent two of my college summers completing Marine Corps Officer Candidates School. My platoons comprised people from small-town Michigan and Maine and Georgia and Mississippi, inner-city Detroit, working-class New York, posh Connecticut suburbs, state schools, and private colleges. We took turns leading each other in units as small as a four-man fire team and as large as a two-hundred-man company on tasks as mundane as marching to the mess hall and as serious as nighttime tactical exercises. As we focused on all these tasks and challenges, we had side conversations about our upbringings, our political views, our family expectations, our ambitions. Not everyone who made it through was going to choose to take a commission as a second lieutenant—I declined mine to go work in government—but all of us were bonded by this experience of knowing and becoming known via third things.

If I could wave a wand I would make service—civilian or military—mandatory for all young people. Working alongside people who differ from you creates an indirect path to understanding that might be stickier than the direct path. It makes you more willing to change and grow because the change and growth are a by-product of the work and common endeavor. 

This is why David McCullough III started the American Exchange Project. High schools around the United States have foreign exchange programs, in which students go abroad for a stretch to live and learn about a new place with a host family. What struck David is that in these polarized times young people could use a domestic exchange program. So he created one—the first of its kind in the nation. 

In the American Exchange Project pilot in 2021, high school seniors from Kilgore, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, did immersive exchanges with their counterparts in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Palo Alto, California. They got to make friends across ideology, geography, class, race. AEP has since expanded to dozens of communities across the country for weeklong exchanges. There are host families, service projects, distinctively local experiences. It’s all free. The people who experience the exchanges change their narratives and assumptions—about each other, about other parts of the country, about themselves.

Bryce Borders, a participant from Kilgore, put it succinctly after he returned from New York City: “Our country is very divided, and the main reason that’s happening is because we simply don’t know each other.” When eight or ten high schoolers from various towns all converge for an exchange, they have a shared purpose: discovering a seemingly foreign place by doing things together.

The third thing can also be a text or some other object of study. There’s a method in Jewish education called hevruta in which pairs of students analyze a Torah portion together. One day I was talking with Joni Blinderman, who leads the Covenant Foundation and its work to promote innovations in Jewish learning. It hit me as we were chatting that we could create an experiment in “civic hevruta,” where pairs would study pieces of civic scripture like the Declaration or the Gettysburg Address and apply the same methods of close reading and connection making to other texts and ideas.

She liked the idea, and in early 2025 the Covenant Foundation and CU brought together about twenty educators from synagogues, Jewish day schools, and innovative nonprofits across the United States. They ran the gamut from Orthodox to Reform and had a range of views about how to respond to the October 7 Hamas attack. But they were united in their desire to care for their anguished and divided congregations and communities.

Over the next couple of days, we studied Torah alongside the Preamble to the Constitution, Reagan’s farewell address, and Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” We juxtaposed ancient rabbinical teachings about justice with John Lewis’s reflections on moral formation. This allowed participants to talk openly about how to model doubt, when and when not to empathize or compromise, what the uses and limits of outrage are, and how best to serve. There was no consensus; there wasn’t meant to be. We were ostensibly learning a text, but in truth we were learning each other. A collective focus on a single object of study enabled each participant to understand the minds of their colleagues. And become more open to change.

Citizen assemblies operate on the same principle. In these local gatherings participants are chosen by lottery to deliberate on a community issue, whether it’s land use or childcare or climate policy, and provide guidance to policymakers or voters. Citizen assemblies are as old as Athens. But they are percolating now across the United States and globally not just because the guidance of an informed mini-public is more useful than a poll but also because participating in an assembly helps citizens learn, in a nonconfrontational format, how others see the world and approach problems.

Now, some of you might resist the suggestion to broaden your media and friend diets, much less to do something with people from other tribes. This is all nice, you might say, but life is

short. Why should I waste precious time watching Fox or MSNBC or reading about how people I don’t like got to be that way? Why should I seek relationships with people who vote or pray or dress or love in ways that make me deeply uncomfortable?

My quick answer is because life is short.

As a human, you should want to experience life as fully as your circumstances allow. As an American human, you should take full advantage of the fact that we have the full breadth of humanity in our own country. David McCullough III is a young man. He’s also the grandson and namesake of the celebrated American historian, which gives him just this kind of perspective on life and the purpose of life.

My deeper answer is because it is uncomfortable. It is precisely the discomfort, the difficulty, that makes learning other minds worthwhile and worthy.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, says that each of us has an inborn “moral palate” that predisposes us to certain moral tastes. Conservatives tend to favor a pattern of moral reasoning that’s about sanctity and loyalty. Liberals are drawn more to care and fairness. We define what’s right in different ways and that’s an everlasting source of tension and conflict.

In culinary life, I might try something that pleases your palate, but if I don’t like it, I never have to encounter it again. In American civic life, in a pluralistic open self-governing society, we must encounter each other perpetually. Your moral tastes will shape what I consume, and vice versa, like it or not. My palate can’t ever be fully segregated from yours. It behooves us, then, to learn how to integrate in productive ways.

The point isn’t that you should always be trying to change your mind. The point is that you should always be able to change your mind, to add subtlety or complexity or new dimensions to how you take in a person, an issue, a situation in civic life. Learning the views of people who see things in a way that’s perhaps distasteful to you is not an exercise in self-flagellation; it’s an exercise in civic muscle building.

Copyright © 2026 by Eric Liu. From the forthcoming book LIVE LIKE A CITIZEN: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country by Eric Liu to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Printed by permission.

Peace is central to liberalism. It is reported that Adam Smith said, “Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Over a century and a half later, Ludwig von Mises noted that “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.” Given its importance to the liberal project, it makes sense to ask: What is the source of peace? This article considers two alternatives; each offers a different understanding of what constitutes peace and a different path to achieving it.[1]

Peacemaking is often understood as a top-down phenomenon: Peace, defined as the absence of large-scale violence, results from state action. Consider the frequently used terms Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana, which refer to periods of peace, understood as the absence of widespread violence, attributed to economic and military dominance by hegemonic states. From this perspective, peace cannot exist without a sufficiently strong state capable of projecting its influence. I call this view pax imperii (“peace of government”) because it holds that peace and order come from top-down design, intervention, and control by state actors.

A second view emphasizes peacemaking as a bottom-up process. This perspective recognizes that peace is not a one-size-fits-all policy or outcome, but rather an emergent result of exercising diverse micro-level skills. Peace, in this view, must be continually discovered, cultivated, and adapted over time. This view also elevates the individual over the state as the central source of peacemaking. It emphasizes cooperative power through horizontal relationships among equals, rather than the coercive power through vertical relationships that defines top-down peacemaking. It recognizes heterogeneous cultures of peace that empower ordinary people to navigate conflicts without resorting to violence. I call this second view pax hominum (“peace of human beings”) to emphasize that this view centers ordinary people as the main drivers of peacemaking.

But what exactly is peace? Conceptually, we can differentiate between “positive peace”—the conditions, factors, and processes that contribute to peace—and “negative peace”—the absence of violence. As the economist and peace activist Kenneth Boulding noted, “On the positive side, peace signifies a condition of good management, orderly resolution of conflict, harmony associated with mature relationships, gentleness, and love. On the negative side, it is conceived as the absence of something—the absence of turmoil, tension, conflict, and war.” My discussions of pax imperiii and pax hominum will consider both of these dimensions of peace, top-down and bottom-up. Neither can ultimately stand well in isolation. 

Pax Imperii

A Hobbesian image of the world inspires this view of peacemaking. The international order is in a state of anarchy, with life for a nation-state being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For Hobbes, the solution to the state of nature in a single country is Leviathan, a sovereign capable of exerting authority over society’s members. Pax Imperii develops this analogy to international relations. By emphasizing Leviathan as the key source of social order, this view is inherently state-centric. Governments are the fundamental unit of analysis and are assumed to be the primary source of peace and order, both domestically and internationally. Violence and disorder are due to the absence of Leviathan, while peace and order are a result of its presence.

For those who hold this view, the logic applies both domestically and internationally. In his argument for liberal empire, economist Deepak Lal argued that “The definition of order is congenial to an economist, for it deals with the provision of the pure public goods of defense and law, the primary function and duty of every state … The goal of an international order is to preserve the peace. This is an international public good…” It’s standard in economics to say that public goods may be undersupplied absent state intervention. Underlying Lal’s argument is the assumption that a dominant nation-state is not only necessary to bring liberal peace and order to the world, but also possesses the knowledge and incentives to do so.

Similar reasoning appears in contemporary development economics, which views the international community—a mix of government agencies and international organizations entangled with non-governmental organizations and private contractors—as indispensable to creating peace and economic development, also in a top-down manner. Political scientist Séverine Autesserre describes the international community’s dominant approach to peacemaking as “a formulaic, top-down, outsider-led approach.” One consequence is that homogenized expert knowledge replaces local knowledge and decisionmaking. This poses a challenge because, as sociologist Elise Boulding noted, “As societies become more complex and elites become differentiated from ‘common people,’ center-periphery problems based on mutual ignorance develop. Elites not only cease to share locally based knowledge but cease to literally share a common language with locals.” This prevents local peacemaking processes from emerging, while running the risk of imposing ineffective, if not harmful, “solutions” from above.

There are two additional concerns for liberals. One is that top-down efforts to achieve liberal ends may involve embracing illiberal means. For example, Patrick Porter, a political scientist, argues that the post–World War II, U.S.-led international order has not been as liberal as some suggest. “Even America’s most glorious achievements—with liberal ‘ends,’” he writes, “were not clean pluses on a balance sheet, made by liberal ‘means’. They relied on a preponderance of power, a preponderance that has brutal foundations. America’s most beneficial achievements were partly wrought by illiberal means, through dark deals, harsh coercion and wars gone wrong that killed millions.” The tension is that adopting illiberal means to pursue potentially liberal ends threatens the liberal project from the start.

Another concern is that a government capable of influencing the global order requires an expansive and awesome range of discretionary powers over both domestic and foreign economic, legal, political, and social institutions and, hence, the people living within them. These awesome powers place severe pressure on both the formal constitutional constraints and the informal norms intended to constrain government. Activities undertaken in the name of promoting peace to protect and reinforce liberty and freedom may do just the opposite. A narrow focus on top-down peace minimizes these issues and the importance of alternative views of peacemaking, such as pax hominum.

 Pax hominum

The importance of bottom-up peace, though, is evident in the empirics of everyday life. If one pays attention, one sees large numbers of people from different backgrounds, experiences, and identities living in a wide variety of geographic locations, interacting peacefully and resolving conflicts without resorting to violence. These diverse forms of peacemaking are often bottom-up and not planned or imposed by an outside expert or authority. 

To understand this phenomenon, we can again turn to Kenneth Boulding, who noted that human activity can be split into two categories: non-conflict situations, where interests align, and conflict situations, where interests are at odds, and the distribution of resources matters for the parties. Conflict situations can be resolved peacefully or through violence. The boundary between violence and peace is a “taboo line,” which delineates those actions that are physically possible but deemed unacceptable in dealing with other human beings.

The position of the taboo line shapes what parties to the conflict view as feasible reactions. Formal laws can influence the taboo line, but informal norms, expectations, and historical experiences also play a central role. This line, which is not fixed, determines whether people are more inclined to turn to peaceful or violent means to navigate conflicts; it reflects what is considered acceptable behavior and shapes expectations about how others will act in conflict situations. This matters because even when we have the physical capacity to do violence to others, we often refrain from doing so because it falls outside of what is considered an appropriate response. This framing of conflict, peace, and violence applies to all human actions, whether private or public, domestic or international. 

Recognizing this basic point—that each of us is involved in numerous conflicts daily—opens the door to appreciating bottom-up peacemaking. Each of us is involved in numerous arenas of human relations. We are members of family and friend networks, engage in a wide array of business interactions, and participate in various community and political organizations. Each of these settings is unique, both in the types of conflict that arise and in the means of conflict resolution judged appropriate and effective. What works for resolving international conflict peacefully may not work in your workplace. Likewise, what works to resolve conflict in my family may not work in yours. This has two important implications for how we think about peace.

First, there is no single “peace” that is homogeneous and all-encompassing. Instead, numerous and diverse “cultures of peace” allow people to navigate context-specific conflicts across the social spaces they inhabit. Peace techniques that work in one’s family may not work with co-workers or with trading partners. Second, cultures of peace are not exogenously given and fixed; rather, they are endogenous and variable. Elise Boulding used the term “peaceableness” to refer to the active, evolving process by which individuals discover, practice, and promote methods of peace in their daily lives. The term suggests that people have agency to exercise creativity and continually reshape their environments to foster either nonviolence or violence.

Because it is grounded in individual action, bottom-up peace starts locally. But that doesn’t mean that its effects remain local. Roger Mac Ginty, a political scientist, emphasizes that everyday peace actions can be scaled up to contribute to larger-scale peace. As he notes, “Cumulative small acts often can have larger outcomes in terms of preventing conflicts from escalating and in saving or protecting lives. By disrupting the narrative and logic of conflict, small acts of everyday peace can create space for civility, reciprocity, solidarity, and possibly more expansive concepts such as reconciliation.” To understand why this is important, consider two settings where individual behaviors have broader effects.

One is markets—interactions between people we categorize as “buyers” and “sellers”—which serve as an environment for bottom-up peacemaking. Entrepreneurs contribute to peacemaking by offering people space to acquire what they desire peacefully, by establishing commercial links across social and geographic distances, and by cultivating and reinforcing habits of peacefulness. What are often treated as mundane economic interactions and exchanges establish, reinforce, and extend cultures of peace between participants as part of the broader emergent order of the market process. The bottom-up peacemaking aspect of markets is easy to miss if one focuses on market structure, production, efficiency, and distribution rather than on the human-relationship component.

Another example is the global nuclear disarmament movement that emerged in the wake of the U.S. government’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The historian Lawrence Wittner argues that nuclear deterrence alone cannot explain why nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. He points to the rise of the nuclear disarmament movement as an important source of pressure on political elites, contributing to peace in the nuclear era. The global disarmament movement is bottom-up: it comprises people from different backgrounds, professions, ideologies, and organizations, with distinct missions and goals, loosely coordinated around a shared aim of preventing nuclear war. No central entity plans and coordinates the movement as a whole, whether within or across countries. This movement shows how bottom-up dynamics can contribute to peace on a large international scale, without top-down design. It is easy to miss this if one focuses exclusively on standard deterrence theory, grounded in the actions of nation-states, as the source of peace.

Conclusion

Economist James Buchanan concluded his Nobel Prize address by posing the following question—“How can we live together in peace, prosperity, and harmony, while retaining our liberties as autonomous individuals who can, and must, create our own values?” If we hope to answer this question, we need a more nuanced conception of what peace and peacemaking entail.

The pax imperii view treats peace as a top-down object of choice. From this perspective, peace is a public good presumed to be undersupplied because of a collective action problem among individuals. With government presumed to be the corrective, this formulation of peace results in technocratic experts instructing political operatives on how to “fix” societies by delivering more of the right sort of peace. This both invites and necessitates top-down, technocratic control.

The pax hominum view, in contrast, treats peacemaking as a bottom-up, open-ended process spanning multiple margins of human activity. It emphasizes individual choice, diversity in human associations, creativity, experimentation, learning, and adaptation through time. It also stresses discovery and emergence, whereby cultures of peace arise through the purposeful actions of people pursuing their specific goals through interactions with others. Pax hominum locates the power of peacemaking in ordinary people who interact with others to figure things out, rather than in external actors who impose their vision of the world.

To be clear, pax hominum is not a panacea. Bottom-up processes may fail to avert violence or may themselves lead to coercive, illiberal outcomes. I also recognize that aspects of bottom-up and top-down peace can interact and, in some instances, potentially serve as complements. But emphasis matters, and the focus so far has often been on the state’s role in creating and maintaining peace in a top-down manner. Bottom-up peace offers the possibility of achieving liberal ends through liberal means. Top-down peacemaking efforts, by contrast, risk achieving liberal ends through illiberal means, thereby undermining the liberal project.

Appreciating pax hominum is valuable for three reasons. First, given the ubiquity of bottom-up peacemaking across time and geography, it matters for understanding the world as it is, regardless of one’s normative commitments. Second, for those concerned with the liberal project, understanding bottom-up peacemaking is important because it contrasts with the illiberalism of top-down peacemaking. Finally, appreciating the nuances of bottom-up peacemaking has implications for how scholars think about their role as students of society. If bottom-up cultures of peace are important, then ordinary people need elbow room to exercise and develop their self-governing muscles.

Perhaps, then, the focus of scholars and practitioners should not be on how they think they might bring peace to the world through top-down state planning and control. That  approach, noted F.A. Hayek, will make the practitioner “a tyrant over his fellows.” Instead, we might focus on finding opportunities to remove barriers and empower ordinary people to participate in bottom-up peacemaking in our shared pursuit of peace.

Note

[1] This article draws on “Peacemaking: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up,” Markets & Society, forthcoming, and the associated keynote address at the 2023 Markets and Society Conference.

Ask someone what a classical liberal believes, and you’ll get a familiar list. Classical liberals stand for private property. They stand for free markets and limited government. They believe in the rule of law, free trade, free speech, and religious toleration. Give or take an item or two, you’ll find something like this list in any textbook summary, or on the “about” page of most classical liberal think tanks. And it’s a good list, as far as it goes. Each of those commitments has a long history in the tradition, and each has been defended by some of its best minds.

The problem with the list is what’s not on it: democracy. It’s not that classical liberals oppose democracy, exactly. Most of us don’t. And almost none of us would trade it for any of the alternatives actually on offer. But democracy isn’t what classical liberals are known for. It’s not part of the brand. Indeed, if you spend much time in classical liberal circles, you’re much more likely to hear about democracy’s defects than about its accomplishments. We might tolerate democracy, but we rarely sing its praises.

My goal in this essay is to argue that democracy belongs on the list, and that it belongs there for the same reason the other items do: because it is a way of keeping power in check. Democracy’s distinctive function is to keep power contestable, so that the people who hold it can be removed without violence. Recognizing this function is especially important today given the specific ways in which illiberal, anti-democratic regimes have operated. For the most part, those regimes aren’t abolishing elections. The elections still run, but they are tilted so heavily against challengers that removing the people in charge becomes very difficult. Political scientists have names for this. Nancy Bermeo calls the process “executive aggrandizement.” Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call the resulting type of regime, in which elections are real but unfair, “competitive authoritarianism.” The problem they identify is real and growing. By the latest count from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, thirty-two countries, nearly a fifth of those it tracks, saw the credibility of their elections decline between 2020 and 2025.

In regimes of this sort, the democratic form survives even while its function is quietly hollowed out. A tradition that keeps democracy off its list is poorly placed to notice. Unless we understand that function, and see how it goes hand in hand with the things that are on the list, we may not recognize the loss while it’s happening.

***

John Stuart Mill once wrote an entire book arguing that representative democracy was the best form of government, and he was hardly alone in his time. How, for classical liberals, did democracy fall off the list of core values? Part of the answer, I think, is a conflation. Classical liberals have a well-developed critique of what we might call the over-politicization of society. Simply put, the state has taken on too many tasks that markets and civil society ought to perform instead. That critique points to a claim about the proper scope of government. Somewhere along the way, though, that claim about the proper scope of government turned into a claim about democratic control itself. Skepticism about how much the state should do came to be felt as skepticism about letting the public decide what it does.

Jacob Levy has diagnosed the confusion clearly. The distrust of democracy among those sympathetic to markets, he observes, “typically juxtaposes democratic decision-making to market decision-making, as if ‘democracy’ were just a synonym for ‘politics’ or ‘the state,’ as if the contrast to ‘democratic’ were ‘economic’ rather than ‘autocratic.’” 

But that’s a hasty move. One can be a radical about reducing the scope of the state and still insist that its agents must be answerable to the people they govern. Or, as Levy puts it, “We should sharply distinguish the question of how much the state ought to do from the question of how much democratic control of the state there ought to be, and thereby stop allowing market-liberal critiques of too much politics to be used as any kind of intellectual cover for the erosion of democratic government.” Once these two questions come apart, the position that most classical liberals already hold becomes both understandable and coherent. 

***

There’s a deeper point here too. Classical liberals tend to treat depoliticized markets as a kind of natural starting point or baseline that bad policy disturbs. But this gets the sequencing backwards. For most of history, doing business on any significant scale meant having friends in power. To get things done, you needed a charter from the crown, a guild’s license, or the protection of the right patron. The ability of businesses in a free society to survive without political favors is the product of a particular kind of political order. To see what kind, and where democracy fits into it, it helps to start with what democracy is for.

The classical liberal tradition itself offers an answer. In 1927, Ludwig von Mises defined democracy as “that form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles.” Democracy, on this view, isn’t about political equality or the general will. It’s about violence and about how power changes hands. Or, as Jason Kuznicki puts the underlying question, if one ruler must sooner or later give way to another, how should it be done? “By a bloody and opportunistic palace coup? By the rising of an angry mob? Or by counting a stack of papers on a duly appointed day?”

The conception of democracy at work here is a minimalist one, according to which democracy is understood as a system in which people gain and lose power through competitive elections. Some democratic theorists argue that democracy involves much more than this. Others stop right here. Adam Przeworski’s influential definition holds that democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” What else it requires depends on which theorist you ask, but typical candidates include good-faith deliberation, political equality, and even limits on economic inequality. My point isn’t that these claims about democracy are mistaken. My point is that even if we set them aside, democracy still performs a function that classical liberals have reason to care about. It makes rulers answerable to a public that can remove them without violence.

Understood in this way, democracy is a vital complement to the other items on the classical liberal list. Courts, federalism, a free press, and the freedom to leave all constrain the people who hold power. But elections are what give ordinary citizens a regular, routine way of removing them.

Still, they can’t do this by themselves. Voting can remove a ruler only if voters are free to organize, able to find out what the government has been doing, and able to have their votes counted honestly. Even Joseph Schumpeter, the founder of the minimalist view of democracy, recognized that free competition for votes would normally require “a considerable amount of freedom of discussion for all.” This is why democratic backsliding rarely targets elections in isolation. It goes after the press, the opposition, the courts, and the whole machinery of electoral administration. Would-be tyrants fear those institutions because they make the threat of removal real. And, as we’ll see, democracy helps keep them secure in turn.

***

Why should it matter so much that power can be lost? One answer can be found in the work of the economic historians Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast. In their sweeping and ambitious book, Violence and Social Orders, they argue that for most of human history, communities have solved the problem of social violence by means of what they call a “limited access order.” A coalition of elites agrees not to fight, and that agreement is held together by privilege. Only members of the coalition may hold certain kinds of property, enter certain trades, or form certain kinds of organizations. “The creation of rents through limiting access,” they write, “provides the glue that holds the coalition together.”

This is precisely the world of chartered monopolies and guild privileges that Adam Smith attacked in The Wealth of Nations. But it wasn’t just the economic logic of Smith’s critique that brought that world to an end. In the countries that made the transition to “open access,” economic and political openness arrived together, “within relatively narrow windows of historical time.” General incorporation laws replaced corporate charters that had required “an explicit grant by the legislature [or] the crown.” The reform occurred during the same era that competitive political parties formed and the franchise began to widen. This was no accident. On North, Wallis, and Weingast’s account, the two kinds of openness depend on each other. Closed economies and closed political systems propped each other up, and economic openness could be sustained only alongside political openness.

There’s more to political openness than the right to vote. Openness requires the freedom to form parties, to organize opposition, and to compete for power on impersonal terms. But all of this overlaps heavily with the contestability that democratic elections are meant to secure. A political order in which power can be challenged and lost is one in which privilege is much harder to lock in, in politics and in markets alike.

* * *

Political scientists have identified a mechanism that helps explain why. In The Logic of Political Survival, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his coauthors argue that rulers who depend on a large coalition have to buy its support with goods that benefit many people. Rulers who depend on a small coalition, in contrast, can get by on private favors. 

Coalition size isn’t quite the same thing as electorate size. But they are related, and studies of what happens when the franchise widens demonstrate the same logic at work. After American states gave women the vote, Grant Miller finds, legislators quickly changed their behavior. Local public health spending rose sharply, and child mortality fell by eight to fifteen percent. Similarly, when Brazil’s switch to electronic voting effectively enfranchised large numbers of less-educated citizens, Thomas Fujiwara finds that public spending shifted toward health care in a way that produced real health benefits for the newborns of less-educated mothers.

This doesn’t mean that a wider franchise always produces better policy, or worse. The historical record is more complicated than that. The point is simply that who a government has to answer to shapes what it does, and a government that must answer to a broad electorate has less room to govern for the benefit of a favored few. Electoral breadth is thus a constraint on precisely the kind of rent-seeking and predation that classical liberals abhor. Women’s suffrage widens the coalition needed for victory and makes a closed economic or political order more difficult to achieve.

All of this is rather different from the arguments for democracy typically made by modern liberals. The most familiar of those arguments are based on ideals of political equality or collective self-government. The classical liberal case, in contrast, focuses on accountability and the containment of power. Yet there is nothing mutually exclusive in these arguments. Both arrive at the same institution, albeit for different reasons. This redundancy is a strength in the case for democracy. Even if you doubt that your vote does much for you, and even if the act of voting doesn’t leave you feeling all that dignified, the accountability argument still goes through.

* * *

None of this requires pretending that democracy’s critics have been wrong about everything. Voter ignorance is real and well documented. Rent-seeking is real. And, of course, there are some questions that shouldn’t be put to a vote at all, a fact recognized by anybody who supports the idea of constitutionally protected rights. Proposals to improve on existing democratic institutions, including citizens’ assemblies chosen by lot and expanded opportunities for what Ilya Somin calls “foot voting,” deserve a serious hearing.

The problem isn’t the criticisms themselves. It’s that, over time, opposition to democracy has become for many in our tradition less a set of arguments than a kind of identity. You can see it in the titles of what libertarians and classical liberals write about democracy. Somin’s thoughtful essay on this site is called “Liberalism’s Uneasy Relationship with Democracy.” Jason Brennan, apparently less conflicted, called his book simply Against Democracy, even though it concedes that “existing democratic countries tend to do a better job protecting citizens’ civil and economic liberty than nondemocratic ones,” and its practical conclusion is a call to experiment. Farther to the fringes lies Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, which sets out the advantages of monarchy, and which Curtis Yarvin credits with opening “a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world” for him.

These are very different works, and it would be unfair to lump them together. Somin’s essay is a careful account of democracy’s genuine problems. Hoppe’s book argues that monarchy was better than democracy, even though both are worse than having no state at all. The book has become a founding text for the neoreactionary movement. But that’s exactly the trouble with a brand. What people latch onto is the label, “anti-democracy,” not the reasoning or the qualifications behind it.

The label also obscures Levy’s distinction from earlier in this essay, between who wields political power and how far that power extends. That distinction is one that Hayek often insisted upon, writing for instance that “it is not democracy but unlimited democracy which I regard as no better than any other unlimited government.” Hayek’s objection was to treating a majority’s will as the last word on anything it cared to decide, not to the practice of making rulers answerable to the people they govern. Indeed, on that second point Hayek was willing to go further than most of his readers remember: “the consistent application of liberal principles,” he wrote, “leads to democracy.”

But Hayek’s own example is also a warning about what happens when misgivings about democratic choice harden into a posture. In a 1981 interview with Chile’s El Mercurio, Hayek allowed that “a dictatorship may be a necessary system during a transitional period,” and added: “I personally prefer a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism.” 

In a sense, this is just the same contrast between limited and unlimited democracy that Hayek had been drawing for decades. The obvious problem is that we cannot hope for a benevolent dictator; nothing about a dictatorship ensures that absolute power will be used, as Hayek put it, to “avoid and limit any absolute power in the future.” The expectation that a dictator would limit his own power rests on little more than a hope about the character of the man in charge, precisely the sort of hope Hayek spent his career warning against.

The fact that a thinker as characteristically smart and careful as Hayek could make such an obvious and momentous mistake is deeply troubling. Hayek’s writings over the course of his career demonstrate that he understood the dynamics of political power perfectly well. The lesson is less about Hayek than about the posture. Once suspicion of democracy hardens, it can carry even the best liberal minds somewhere their own arguments would never have taken them.

Michael Munger wrote here recently that liberalism “is sustainable only so long as it is broadly supported by the citizens it protects.” I’d add that it is sustainable only so long as its own advocates are willing to defend it under its own name. If democracy is a liberal achievement, the people who built it ought to be willing to say so out loud, above all while it’s under attack.

***

If we grant that the criticisms of democracy are real, and yet still insist that democracy belongs on the list of core classical liberal commitments, the question becomes one of how we might reform democracy to make it better. The argument I have presented so far suggests a test: Does a proposed reform preserve broad contestation, and with it our ability to discover and correct political mistakes?

The most serious challenge comes from epistocrats like Brennan, who argue that citizens have a right to a competent electorate, and that political power should therefore be tilted toward those who can demonstrate political knowledge. Brennan considers a range of designs, from restricting the franchise to giving extra votes to the well informed. And he is admirably candid about how speculative the case is. Borrowing a thought experiment from Munger, he notes that democracy is an ugly pig. But it’s hard to know if his own epistocracy is any less ugly since, as he concedes, “I don’t have a second pig to look at.”

Pointing out that contested elections are important to prevent the concentration of power is not enough to defeat Brennan’s case. An epistocracy can keep contested elections while still restricting the political power of ordinary voters. The real disagreement is about how widely the power to hold rulers accountable should be shared.

Any attempt to implement a right to competent government through voter qualifications requires someone to decide what counts as competence and how it should be measured. The problem is that this creates a significant new prize worth capturing. If political power is, in Levy’s words, “the key instrumental good in the pursuit of rents,” then control over who gets to exercise it is more valuable still. The history of literacy tests in the American South illustrates the danger. 

On their face, these were neutral tests of reading and constitutional understanding. In practice, of course, local registrars used their discretion to keep Black citizens from voting. Elizabeth Cascio and Ebonya Washington found that when the Voting Rights Act suspended literacy tests, increases in both turnout and state transfers were greater in counties with larger Black population shares. The history shows how a formally neutral qualification can become an instrument of exclusion in the hands of people with something to protect.

Brennan has responded to a version of this worry raised by David Estlund, arguing that literacy tests “were administered in bad faith.” And of course he’s right to note the difference in motivation. Showing that literacy tests were simply racism in epistocratic disguise doesn’t discredit epistocracy itself. Brennan also concedes that a genuine competence test could become an object of partisan manipulation. His answer is comparative: democratic institutions get abused too, so the question is which system performs better once the abuses of each are counted. 

But as Samuel Bagg has argued, the real problem with epistocratic tests is structural, not motivational, and the structure is unusually dangerous. A system that allows incumbents to set epistemic qualifications would let them “entrench their rule by choosing their own voters.” Ordinary gerrymandering is limited by geography and a fixed electorate. This new form “could continuously compound incumbent advantages through ever-more-targeted qualifications,” altering the electorate itself as it goes. Brennan’s own analogy is telling here. He tries to show that epistocratic proposals are no more objectionable than medical licensing. But the most compelling objection against that sort of licensing, one embraced by classical liberals and progressives alike, is that it often functions mainly to protect incumbents from competition.

Other reforms do better by the test of contestability. A citizens’ assembly chosen by lot gives a randomly selected group the time to study a question closely, which the rest of us will never do, and then the assembly reports back. That maintains broad accountability while addressing voter ignorance in a meaningful way. Decentralization and easier exit work differently, by lowering the stakes of political decision making in general, and by lowering the cost of losing in particular. Neither of these reforms takes the vote away from anybody. And given how little any of us knows about how these arrangements would perform, there is a lot to be said for the ones that let us notice our mistakes and undo them.

* * *

Even the most doctrinaire classical liberals already know why private property, free speech, the rule of law, and limited government belong on the list of their core political commitments. Each of these institutions helps to keep political power from becoming too dangerous. My argument is that democracy belongs there for the same reason, as a positive good, and not as an exception to the rule. It gives ordinary citizens a regular way to remove rulers, and it spreads the power of accountability broadly enough that government cannot answer only to a favored few. 

Democracy will not guarantee wise decisions any more than competitive markets guarantee wise investments. As Janet Bufton has argued, criticizing democracy for what it produces is much like criticizing markets for what they produce. What both do, even in failure, is to ensure that the people who get it wrong can be replaced. A liberal tradition concerned with concentrated power has every reason to claim as its own the institution that makes political power contestable. Democracy belongs on the list.

A cornerstone of a liberal society is checking the government’s power before, during, and after it interacts with ordinary people. Let’s take an example of each to show you what a lack of these limits means in practice.

Before: Tony Tan is a San Jose software engineer. He’s attended protests and volunteered to document ICE activity in his city. With his background, he understands the value of privacy. Which is why he’s challenging the city’s use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). In conjunction with the increasingly well-known surveillance services firm Flock Safety, the city has installed almost 500 ALPR cameras around the city. These devices take photos of license plates as cars drive past and upload them to a database where they’re stored for thirty days. Thousands of government workers around California can then access this data and with the help of AI can piece all the individual photos and locations together and recreate the daily movements of San Jose residents, including Tony’s. It’s a real-life panopticon with few rules—and no warrants—governing its use. Before the city has even come into contact with Tony it already knows where he’s gone and what his daily habits are.

During: In 2016, Joe and Russell Marino were running their family’s fourth-generation farm in southern New Jersey when U.S. Department of Labor agents hand-delivered them a citation for $550,000. The fines overwhelmingly related to paperwork violations for their seasonal workers who were fully paid and taken care of. But the reason the U.S. Supreme Court will hear their case this November is not to figure out whether the fines are legitimate or even whether they’re unconstitutionally excessive. It’s to determine whether they have the right to an impartial court to decide that question while they are defending themselves. The “court” they were forced to go through, and which ruled against them below, is itself part of the Department of Labor.

After: Early one morning in her Sandy Springs, Georgia, home, Cathy George heard police banging on her door. Moments later she saw guns directed at her after confusedly letting the officers in. She then helplessly stood nearly naked in the hallway while they ransacked her place, exclaiming they were looking for a man she had never heard of. After a while they admitted he wasn’t in her place. That’s because this man not only had no connection to her but had already been apprehended four months earlier. Negligently not checking the facts, they not only raided the wrong home but tried to find someone who had already been found. Cathy is clearly in the right. So what did the authorities do to compensate her? Nothing. She’s suing for damages and the government claims it has immunity.

In each of these scenarios, many things aren’t working, but one is above all others: the rule of law. The rule of law can be a bit abstract to get a handle on. But in these before, during, and after situations, we can see it concretely. For Tony Tan, it’s the safeguard of a warrant. His local police—not to mention thousands of other people across California—shouldn’t have unbridled discretion to know everywhere we travel without an outside check. That traditionally has come in the form of a warrant approved by an impartial judge. For the Marinos, the rule of law manifests itself as a court that isn’t tied to the very same entity prosecuting them. At a minimum, an impartial trial means the judge doesn’t have the same boss as the prosecutor. And for Cathy George, it’s a chance to have a day in court where the government will be forced to compensate her for the wrong it does not deny it caused. The officers who wrongly tore apart her home will not be above the law but beholden to it.

Each of these situations is a bit different. Similar “before, during, and after” examples would have their own nuances. What ties them all together, though, is an outside check on the state’s power (1) when it prepares to use that power, (2) while it uses it, and (3) after the use is over.

Rights Aren’t Everything

An impartial judiciary—what is often called an “independent” judiciary—is one piece of the bigger puzzle of the rule of law. For years my colleagues and I at the Institute for Justice have advocated that judges should not be afraid to impartially enforce the law against the government. IJ is a public interest law firm and most of what we do is sue the government—federal, state, and local—when it violates people’s rights. We’ve generally done this through championing individual rights that we’ve grouped as “pillars”: free speech, property rights, and economic liberty.

All the while we have seen ourselves as advancing the rule of law. Our philosophy has been that judges cannot simply defer to what our legislative and executive branches want to do. Exercising their duty to say what the law is will further not only the individual rights we specialize in advancing, but a free society that also embodies the rule of law itself.

In the United States, with our system of written constitutions and “higher law constitutionalism,” this often manifests itself through a judge ruling a law is “unconstitutional.” And that has been most of IJ’s work, challenging what we argue are unconstitutional barriers to people pursuing the American Dream, such as earning a living, living in their own home, or speaking out in the public square. But judges checking the government doesn’t have to invoke the glamour of the Constitution. It often functions at a much more basic level where a statute is clear and yet it’s just not being followed. We’ve taken many cases like that too as they intersect with specific liberties. For example, we’ve represented innocent victims of civil forfeiture where police operated outside the law when seizing our clients’ property and trying to keep it for their own departments’ budgets.

In recent years, though, my colleagues have been representing more people like Tony, the Marino brothers, and Cathy. They all have individual liberties that IJ is trying to protect, such as Tony’s Fourth Amendment right to be secure. Yet their stories point toward a shared value greater than the sum of those liberties. Therefore, after seeing so many people ensnared in systems of unaccountable surveillance, or tangled up with self-interested prosecutors and judges, or holding the bag after officials break down their door and are offered no compensation, we’ve reconceptualized some of our work. It’s led us to group a branch of our efforts as not just about the specific liberties we’ve been fighting to protect for decades, but something even broader. That’s why we recently launched a new “Rule of Law” pillar to better focus and highlight these efforts.

The Rule of Law is Big. Really Big.

No one act of Congress, no one lawsuit, and no one organization can comprehensively protect the rule of law. Indeed, what rule of law simply means engenders serial debate among the most enlightened philosophers. Even individual thinkers have changed their minds on that question. Just one example is Friedrich Hayek. At one time, in his The Constitution of Liberty, he placed great emphasis on the preannouncement of legal rules and their general applicability as satisfying the rule of law. Later, however, in Law, Legislation and Liberty, he moved toward a need for laws to be made organically through a common law process. Go beyond Hayek and you will find a never-ending set of essays with their own takes on what is, and what isn’t, the rule of law.

All that being said, there is wide agreement on what constitutes at least the core of the rule of law. I wrote at greater length on what that core is in this essay. To briefly summarize here, the rule of law demands that laws apply generally to everyone, that they be enacted and made public before being enforced, that the society within which the rule of law operates respects freedom of speech and conducts free elections, and that there be checks and balances within the government regulating its exercise of powers. That’s not meant to be a definition but I submit it is a description that is hard to fully disagree with.

All of the criteria in that description are important but it’s the last that we at IJ are most concerned with in our new focus. Different people—not one executive or one legislative body—need to do the making, enforcing, and adjudication of laws. And those different people should be questioning—not rubber-stamping—each other as to whether the law is being followed. For example, when a judge reviews a warrant application, they shouldn’t approve it just because the police asked for it.

When these checks and balances are ignored there are, of course, fewer checks. The potential for abuse and injustice inevitably goes up. Enforcing those checks is a core of the liberal tradition, championed by everyone from Montesquieu to Justice Antonin Scalia.

Guarding Against the Guardians

What does this mean in the context of Flock surveillance, agency courts, and consequence-free police misbehavior? It means someone has not guarded against the guardians. An impartial judiciary that can check what the rest of the government is about to do, is doing, or has done helps keep it within the bounds of the law. Without it the rule of law decays—or falls altogether.

The rule of law has all kinds of problems in today’s world. Much of what we see in the news every day that relates to a lack of the rule of law involves world leaders, national elections, and even armies on the move. But the lack of the rule of law also manifests itself in ordinary people simply trying to live their lives. It’s our hope at the Institute for Justice that by continuing to fight for clients like Tony, the Marinos, and Cathy while organizing them within a wider “rule of law” pillar, we can advance an impartial judiciary and the larger rule of law that ordinary people like them need. It’s a small part of a larger struggle for protecting our liberal society. But we think it’s a necessary one. And we invite you to check out our efforts and join us.

Civilization talk is everywhere these days. Worries of civilizational collapse are often appended to other anxieties—climate change, national security, the birth rate, AI, and immigration, among many others. If there is a problem in 2026, actual or hypothetical, chances are that, somewhere, someone’s saying that civilization is at stake. It’s a rhetorical magnifier. If your societal problem doesn’t seem large enough, just claim that civilization may collapse. The word works its magic.

The idea that civilization is at stake is common among liberalism’s critics. More precisely, they worry that liberalism is the source of the danger. In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre closed After Virtue by claiming the new dark ages were already upon us. Over a generation later, both Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher have taken up the same thread. At the lower end, the argument circulates as an image macro.

This way of thinking ultimately charges that liberalism fails to be generative. It is sterile, emasculating, or enfeebling, and it will, through various hypothesized routes, lead to collapse and ruin. One might wonder, of course, if liberalism is such a pernicious ideology, how it became so prevalent in the first place. Lowbrow critics may resort to alleging a conspiracy.

Illiberal states are also quick to don the mantle of “civilization,” at times in contrast to liberal America. Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept, signed by President Vladimir Putin in March 2023, formally designates the country an original “state-civilization” uniting the peoples of the “Russian World” (Russkiy mir). China’s President Xi Jinping regularly speaks of Chinese civilization—and its indivisibility. Neither state describes itself as merely a government, but rather, as an essence that inheres in the right combination of bloodlines, traditions, and soil. And U.S. President Donald Trump infamously claimed that “a whole civilization will die tonight” with his bombing of Iran. 

“Civilization” has been an anchor for a host of moral panics, outbursts of violence, and dubious state-aggrandizing schemes. Liberalism’s enemies may say that we can’t have it. And yet we must, and we will. Liberalism isn’t just compatible with civilization. Liberalism offers an understanding of civilization that’s worth wanting and defending.

Civilization’s Many Meanings

Liberals have many reasons to be wary of how the word “civilization” has been deployed, even among intellectuals. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order has served as an unfortunate rallying point for those who think a civilization’s main job is to fight with other civilizations. “To civilize” can be a transitive verb, and it means subjecting others to conquest and cultural erasure: “We must civilize them.” To make things worse, civilization has always come packaged with a troublesome antonym—barbarism. In Aristotle’s telling, barbarians, non-Greeks, were thought dispositionally to be natural slaves, suitable to be ruled over by the Greeks, who tended more often to be natural masters. “Civilization” itself is commonly modified by “western,” which may bear implications about those on the other side of the binary. A liberal who would reclaim civilization talk mustn’t sweep in anti-pluralism, ethnocentrism, or other forms of chauvinism. 

Civilization, though, is a broad word; many definitions have been ventured. On almost any of them, it points to a massive aggregate of phenomena, many of them contradictory. In much scholarship, though, it has been used to identify a long-term process that is neither colonialism nor the domination of any specific ethnicity: Civilization is that state of affairs that is marked by increasing technological, material, and cultural complexity and structure. This growth in complexity, though, must be absolutely bounded by the ethical development of the individual. It is no civilizational advance, in this sense, to conquer another and rule over them. The act of conquest itself gives the game away. Material progress must always be built, never stolen.

In these considerations, I follow the philosopher and theologian Albert Schweitzer, who united them in his unfinished 1923 work The Philosophy of Civilization.[1] These two dimensions, moral and material, have each had a long history. On the material side, Leslie White proposed in 1943 that a culture develops in proportion to the energy it harnesses per head and the efficiency of the tools with which it harnesses that energy; Václav Smil has more recently written the history of civilization as a history of energy conversion. The Kardashev scale proposes to extend this analysis to the cosmos, and it bears directly on the search for extraterrestrial civilizations.

Back on earth, the second dimension of civilization is that of moral restraint. Norbert Elias’s 1939 The Civilizing Process tracked a remarkable development across centuries of etiquette manuals: bodily restraint went from being an external rule to an internal disposition. Manners became more demanding, in a sense, but performing them signaled something valuable: The individual at hand had mastered his or her cruder desires. 

The growth of the central state, and its charge to repress violence via law and punishment, played a key role in that shift. But it was also a practical necessity, driven by the increasing dependence of strangers on one another and the removal of violence from private hands. This need for greater self-discipline was noted earlier, in somewhat more lurid and evocative terms, by Sigmund Freud, who saw civilization as the process of taming our internal drives, with our natural aggression turned inward as guilt. It appears from studies of past violence that we are indeed restraining our impulses to harm one another, if fitfully and imperfectly.

Liberalism has a good claim, then, to be civilizational. Throughout its history in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, liberal societies have seen a significant increase in both technological and material progress. Deirdre McCloskey has called it the Great Enrichment, and her image for it is a hockey stick, as shown on just about any graph of per capita world economic output: One sees only millennia of flat subsistence, and then, from around 1800, there’s a steep and durable increase. Real income per head has risen roughly tenfold worldwide, and it continues to rise. We in the present enjoy a civilization that is quantifiably unlike any other, and we should never forget it.

But, as McCloskey is keen to emphasize, this civilizational progress is sustained by a political and moral foundation. Liberalism rests on a respect for the individual dignity of persons. A liberal civilization builds an ever-increasing circle of citizens who enjoy full political, civic, and economic rights. Liberals understand that progress achieved in the material realm can only be genuine if all are able to participate in various spheres of life. Liberalism’s technological and economic dynamism is not disconnected from its ever-expanding scope. The civilization that banishes violence from interpersonal relations may reap the benefits of trade, which won’t materialize when individuals fear of injury or death. But those benefits will be narrower, even for the rulers, if all are not included. Yes, even the lowly.

If I may use the term, a liberal civilization finds its essence in freedom and respect, not in soil or bloodline. On the basis of that freedom and respect, and not on any other, liberal civilization produces healthy, educated, rich, culturally sophisticated, and morally upright people. And a liberal civilization can do all of this without conquest or domination.

A critic might ask: Aren’t I ultimately still describing western civilization? That qualifier can be useful as a historical description, but not as an essence, when applied to liberalism. It’s right and proper to learn from the liberal tradition, which originated as a self-conscious political movement in nineteenth-century Europe. But anyone can practice civilization in the sense that I mean it here, and certainly not everything European is a part of what we should call civilization. Other western political ideas have included totalitarian communism and fascism. By this definition, they are anti-civilizational; they impoverish and morally compromise their subjects, and their westernness can do nothing to save them. Westernness is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition.

A different critic might ask: Aren’t concepts like these inherently contestable? Postmodernism famously demands incredulity about metanarratives, of which this is one. But the postmodern objection casts a long shadow: Many, many terms are inherently contestable, once we start asking the right questions. Forsaking all of them would silence not just us, but the entire project of the humanities. 

Whatever its truth might be, it’s hard to act constructively on the postmodern objection. Should liberals in particular be silent, and not others? Surely not. As we shall see, there are postmodern barbarians, and they’re happy to speak their truths. There are also postmodern advocates of something like the civilizing process that I describe here. Between them, how then should one choose? 

It may be a question of worldview. For Schweitzer, “The greatest of all the spirit’s tasks is to produce a theory of the universe [Weltanschauung], for in such a theory all the ideas, convictions and activities of an age have their roots.” Civilization, or one’s conscious participation in it, starts with an individual choosing to see the world in a certain way: Nature is subject to thoughtful, directed improvement, as is our own behavior. We should act accordingly, in concert with all like-minded people.

If, as I suspect, metanarratives are inevitable, one can surely do worse than this. If nothing else, the metanarrative that one is a participant in an important and morally serious civilizational project improves the self, while leaving it ready for a wide range of other actions. “The lordship of spirit over the powers of nature” was the aim of civilization, wrote Schweitzer—capacious terms that encompass both ethical and moral progress, both for the individual and for society. 

A worldview must be adopted consciously and responsibly. It’s work that can only be done by an individual, but worldviews also have social consequences. As Schweitzer saw it, it’s on their consequences that we should judge them. In asking liberals to consider themselves the protectors of a certain kind of civilization, I don’t ask for the defense of a mere word or style of argument. I ask us to understand ourselves differently. We are the guardians of a worldview, one with important material and ethical consequences.

Liberalism stands for and produces more than just material benefits. Liberalism can also make a claim, nearly unique among contemporary ideologies, to ushering in a truly global civilization, one that encourages, to the greatest extent possible, worldwide cooperation on increasingly voluntary terms. Imperfectly, with failures, but to a degree unknown in prior human history, the past eighty years have seen an increase in freedom and prosperity globally, with growing interconnection, commerce, and communication. Liberalism doesn’t mean global government, but it has led to a most impressive architecture for global governance. It has brought global freedom, health, literacy, and enrichment. And it’s done so without global domination.

Of course, there are many illiberal states, some of them large, with an ambivalent, hostile, or arm’s-length relationship to this world. There is nothing inevitable about the liberal world’s safety or development. But a possibility has been glimpsed, and it has a worldwide appeal. Not all can join it yet, but we ought to insist, with the Cold War liberals, that the project, now in a new era, must endure and prevail against new challenges, and that it must defend itself as a worthy alternative.

In the sense that I intend it, civilization can easily be lost. Consider the era just before World War I, an era that liberals and postliberals continue to discuss and contest. The Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is remembered for its neoclassical architecture and fine orchestral music. It’s recounted with nostalgia by Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Like ours, it was an era of insurance policies and telecommunications, of mass sanitation and mass transit. It was also an era of rising barbarism. Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, written in the chaos of World War II and published after the author’s suicide, captured both of these aspects, starting with the security:

Zweig knew and wrote of the rising barbarism as well:

No era demonstrates it better: Civilization isn’t a stage that a culture works toward and eventually achieves. If that were true, then World War I should never have happened. Worse, a worldview that sees civilization as a static benchmark inevitably pits one culture against another, find a winner, and starts setting up social hierarchies.

Civilization also isn’t the natural end of a culture’s lifespan, as Oswald Spengler and others have described it. In The Decline of the West, Spengler argued that cultures are fated to rise and fall, that they all reach exhaustion after about a thousand years of progress, and that the decline of the West had already begun—around the year 1800. In short, Spengler beheld the very moment when a typical European could expect, at long last, to enjoy a living standard above subsistence, and all he could see was decadence. 

Liberalism sees it differently. Civilization is a continuous process. It can move forward or regress, and at times a culture, being made up of individuals, can be civilized and barbaric at the same time, but in different respects. That was the paradox of the nineteenth century, and it was the shame of the twentieth. Liberals, though, should know that the development of culture isn’t driven by vitalist forces, and that individuals and their choices are what really matter. Our civilization will live, if we want it to.

Against Civilization?

I’ve reclaimed “civilization.” What of barbarism? How does refining the meaning of a word affect its antonym? It’s not just an academic question; in some corners of the Right today, barbarism is valorized as a more authentic and vital mode of existence, sometimes in so many words.

Barbarism, though, is where life and property are not secure. In Sid Meier’s popular Civilization video games, the barbarians are the non-player characters who destroy your farms and pillage your cities. The games’ barbarians don’t make much in the way of art or literature; they don’t build like the civilized player characters do. There’s a kernel of truth to that.

But barbarism, as I would use it, is never a term for any ethnic group or combination. It is a state of affairs where violence and cruelty are given free rein, and the ethical restraints of civilized life fall away. Barbarism can even be accomplished in supremely civilized societies, like Germany, Belgium, or the United States. When, in World War I, the Imperial German Army bombarded Notre-Dame de Reims, they behaved as barbarians, and all of the achievements of German civilization did nothing to redeem them.

Barbarism is that which rejects the moral, technological, and social progress that liberalism would prefer to think through and embrace. Barbarism moves away from mutually beneficial gains through trade, and toward one-sided gains through plunder. It moves away from the open, cosmopolitan society, based on the free association of equals, and toward a closed, hierarchical one, based on violence and domination.

The idea that life itself depends on conquest, that conquest is fundamental to life in ways that peaceful pursuits cannot be—it’s hard to miss that meaning in this passage from Bronze Age Mindset:

Civilization is a net negative, we are told, when we view it from the secret vantage point of life itself: “[U]nfortunately in the long run the development of civilization and comfort leads to the proliferation of damaged life… and men on the periphery who want to preserve the natural order begin to plot the end of everything.”

I would call those men barbarians. So would the self-styled Bronze Age Pervert, only he applauds them: “In the next hundred years and even before, barbaric piratical brotherhoods will wipe away this corrupt civilization, as they did at the end of the Bronze Age.” 

Here we can see one of liberalism’s contemporary intellectual opponents explicitly take the side of barbarism. He is incredulous at the metanarrative of civilization; his is a postmodern barbarism, concerned not with truth, but with the development of a superior type of human. He holds a theory of the world, a Weltanschauung, that is ultimately incompatible with both civilization and liberalism. 

Bronze Age Mindset amounts to a revolt against Zweig’s culture of security, and ours. It offers a vitalist alternative, by which a man—and it is always a man—can recover his truest essence, despite corruptions like office work, vaccines, and industrialized food. Such technologies, we read, sap the true essence of the organism. Man, though, ought to be developed to his purportedly natural end, which is conquest. 

If vitalists like Bronze Age Pervert give a colorable theory of barbarism, the practice of it—a delight in cruelty—is always a potential in human nature, and it needs no particularly fine philosophy to develop. When populist movements erupt, they are often ugly in their manifestations. True to their antagonistic priors, they are typically organized so as to pit one segment of society against another. Sometimes this “other” is abstract or nebulous. But at other times, the identification is quite concrete, as with the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” said President Donald Trump, falsely, during a 2024 presidential debate.

These are mere words, some might object, and the freedom of speech should be sacrosanct. Indeed it should, so I will speak as well: This was barbaric. Demonizing whole groups of people is the opposite of what a protector of civilization should do. To enact better and better moral restraint, and to elaborate a more technologically and socially complex human order—both of these efforts demand that individuals be honored in all of their particularity, not herded into camps on the basis of ugly stereotypes.

Cruelty inevitably turns on its practitioners. Both of the major totalitarian systems of the twentieth century trafficked in cruelty, not just as a consequence of their political theory, but as a way to bind their adherents more tightly to the regime while severing their other loyalties. Frank Dikötter has noted how, for Chairman Mao Zedong, getting people to participate in violence against their neighbors was part of sealing a pact of blood between leaders and followers. The extensive surveillance states of the Soviet Bloc compromised the integrity of vast swaths of a formerly civilized population. In the United States today, immigrants and others wonder who among their neighbors might turn them in, and which parts of their social networks aren’t safe to exist in anymore. This is barbarism. We liberals should have the vocabulary to say so, and we should.

On Narrower Grounds

Not all of liberalism’s critics delight in images of pagan vitalist warriors or fantasies of plundering cities. They may instead describe themselves as wanting to go back to an earlier foundation for human life: The tribe. The church. Perhaps the family or the clan. Many of the conservative ideologies described in Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds are of exactly this type, including, to cite just one example, Catholic integralism.

Such stances amount to a narrowing of the grounds of civilization. Medieval Christendom was indeed a civilization; it made many moral and philosophical advances, and it has much to commend about itself in comparison to the slave societies of antiquity. Medieval Christendom was undeniably majority Catholic. Still, medievalists—those whose profession it is to study the era in question—would be the first to insist that the Church of that era wasn’t all-powerful. Heretics abounded, as did idiosyncratic religious practices. Rival institutions, those of guilds, nobles, kings, and emperors, all had a say. The medieval world was culturally and institutionally more complex than moderns generally remember, and it was more fractious than its biggest fans may like to admit. This is often true with illiberal accounts of the past. When it is, liberals should say so.

In our day, and followed to its extreme, integralism would subject nonbelievers—and likely believers of the wrong creed—to legal disadvantage. Single people, particularly single women and sexual minorities, would face unequal treatment in policy and potentially in rights. This narrowing of rights is a common thread among newer conservative ideologies. Doug Wilson, the evangelical pastor whose influence has been acknowledged by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has argued that only heads of household should vote; Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested not just voting by household, but giving more weight to households with more children. As I see it, limiting the bounds of civic, intellectual, and economic life, and excluding those previously granted entry, is narrowing the foundation of civilization.

One might say that I’m showing a peculiar regard for equal rights in my idea of civilizational greatness. Perhaps I am. But even those who prefer the grandeur of the collective should consider these examples: Did Sparta exceed Athens in its civilizational footprint by being an oppressive slave society? No, and whatever affection some ancients may have had for Sparta, its literature was feeble, its science was scanty, and its system of government was a dead end. Did Christianity supplant the beliefs of the ancient world by depicting itself as only the religion of the citizen? Again, no. In the era of its greatest expansion, Christianity appealed to the marginalized and gave them a worldview in which their personal salvation mattered. Did Rome reach its heights by purity of blood? Once again, no: it recruited outsiders, gave them citizenship, and expanded its civilizational frontier. When Rome finally fell, it had many would-be heirs, stretched all across the ethnic diversity of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Far from being hostile to Rome’s memory, they were mostly appreciative of its cosmopolitan civilization, which they hoped to continue. I’m not much interested in the glory of collectives, but it seems to me that even on this measure, to roll back rights and freedoms is to take a step toward a much less promising world order. 

Barbarism can be done piecemeal or wholesale, in the name of your favorite collective or even in the name of an admired individual. Those who would value civilization must learn to recognize its antonym in all of its many forms. The civilizational advances of Rome must be identified, built upon, and above all improved upon and corrected—not made static and enshrined forever. In our day, the latter would be a barbarism.

Liberalism has excellent bona fides to be not just civilizational, but to be the proper name for the civilization that we are presently living in. Liberalism has been the framework within which commerce, individual rights, individual dignity, and democratic representative government all have grown and flourished. We liberals should not be afraid to say that we are the ones best able to uphold and develop our civilization.

The author would like to thank Michael Tolhurst for contributing to this essay.

Note

[1] In the original German, Schweitzer used the word Kultur, not Zivilisation. As I discuss below, at the time the two held connotations that were nearly opposites from one another. Spengler and others had argued that Kultur was authentic, vital, and essential, while Zivilisation was inauthentic, artificial, and degenerate. For Spengler, a Kultur was fated to ossify into a Zivilisation, after which it ceased to be a creative force in the world. Schweitzer chose the less loaded term. For our purposes, though, his English translator was correct: “Civilization” had a bad odor in German owing to Spengler, but in English it puts Schweitzer in conversation with Elias, who in 1939 used Zivilisation to describe a positive, developmental process. And likewise Freud; the standard English translation of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur is Civilization and Its Discontents.

Before he died, Thomas Jefferson spelled out plainly exactly how he wanted to be remembered by posterity. He instructed that his tombstone contain three epitaphs: author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. To those of us looking backward, Jefferson seems to have selected three unusual titles for his grave. There is, after all, no mention of his presidency, or that he was our nation’s first Secretary of State. Many Americans may be unaware of the history of religious freedom in Virginia. They may think of the University of Virginia as an especially good state university, but nothing more. Yet for Jefferson, these two endeavors and the Declaration of Independence represented the high points of his career.

Each of the three achievements, though, embodied the sort of liberalism he hoped would be the future of humanity. In its political sense, “liberalism” was a new word in Jefferson’s day, one that he seems to have used just once—to congratulate John Adams on the similar disestablishment of state religion in Massachusetts. With good reason, Jefferson believed himself to have played a prominent role in promoting a liberal future. In this work, Jefferson joined a small group of other Americans—most famously Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine—who worked to create a new era of thought and government. These Americans offered a robust account of the liberal project, not just as a way to structure politics and economics, but also as a code of morality.

The version of liberalism espoused by these eighteenth century statesmen and thinkers serves as a clear refutation of a view increasingly common among populist-aligned critics of the enlightenment. Professor Aaron Zubia recently offered an especially thoughtful version of this line of attack. He argues that Enlightenment liberals in general and Thomas Jefferson in particular ground their politics in an Epicurean view of human life. At bottom, Zubia contends, liberalism is morally vacuous—grounded in no particular conception of virtue and ethics but instead in a desire for simple material comfort. In Zubia’s eyes, men like Jefferson and Franklin replace the heroic virtues of bygone ages with simple bourgeois living. The moral system sketched out by Jefferson and his compatriots proves that as eloquent and well-intentioned as attacks upon liberalism such as Zubia’s may be, they are simply not true.    

The Declaration of Independence is more than a formal separation letter and far more even than a statement of the limits of government power. Instead, it is a bold declaration of the moral ends of human society. Likewise, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom grounds its disestablishment of the Episcopal Church not in a simple belief in separation of church and state—instead it is a deeply moral piece of legislation arguing for freedom of conscience. The University of Virginia demonstrates this point even more forcefully, since Jefferson believed that democracy can only survive with a moral people and that a public education is vitally important to crafting such a body of citizens.

No one today can think Jefferson to have been morally upright in all that he did. His writings and his work to achieve a liberal society—in some areas—are impossible to reconcile with his enslavement of other human beings, or the particularly cruel ways that he treated them. And yet he stands at the founding of our country. His proudest accomplishments survive, and it falls to us to explain how such a man could contain such contradictions. [1]

Human Nature and Human Morality

The most famous moment of Jefferson’s career came fairly early in his life. At age thirty-three, the Second Continental Congress appointed him the primary draftsman of the Declaration of Independence. Though ostensibly just a formal legal document meant to effect American separation from the British Empire, Jefferson chose to base the Declaration on universal moral truths that he thought to be the basis of all human ethics: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In a dissent from much of the world around him, Jefferson went on to argue that it is the purpose of government to protect and promote the rights of the people. Further, when government begins to abridge the rights of its citizens, then the people may resort to the ultimate right of altering or abolishing their political system.

Jefferson’s outline of the social contract as the heart of American government is by now quite well known. However, conservative critics of liberalism such as Patrick Deneen read the Declaration less as a moral document and more as a statement of atomistic, antagonistic principles: a bold assertion that the power of government should be deeply limited with little to no concern for morality or virtue.[2] Such critics reveal their true ignorance of Jefferson. The Virginian made clear throughout his career that the ideas in the Declaration were not an attempt to leave government out of moral questions but instead a reflection of the deepest moral truths available to human reason.[3]

In the key passage of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson argued that the heart of human ethics is a belief in the fundamental equality of all people.[4] By this Jefferson did not mean that we are all equally smart or good looking. Rather, he intended to point out that we humans are all equally capable of moral and personal improvement.[5] To put this another way, he rejected the early modern view that each of us is born to fulfill a certain destiny in life: some men are born to be kings, others priests, some farmers, others laborers. As William Perkins had argued in his 1603 Treatise of the Vocations or the Callings of Men, God preordained everyone’s place in creation, giving individuals very little free choice in where they settled in life.[6]  Jefferson believed that at bottom no such genetic or hereditary principle can rationally govern the vocations of men.

From this insight on the nature of humans, Jefferson built an anthropology that considered us, in the final analysis, moral beings, capable of making significant changes in the world and in our social stations. Since our ability to shape our own destinies and future is the most uniquely human thing about us, Jefferson placed it at the head of his larger account of human nature. As he saw it, each individual possesses by birth an innate “moral sense.” By this he meant some ability to adjudicate between right and wrong on our own. As Jefferson described it to his nephew Peter Carr: “The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.”[7] This moral sense, like any other form of knowledge, can only ever be truly developed from use. This means that the only avenue to become a good person, to fully cultivate a robust conscience, is to make moral decisions for ourselves.[8] It is in this respect, in our possession of a strong moral sense, that each of us is truly equal. [9] It follows that the idea that some people are entitled to rule over others is simply false—government by all the people and their cumulative moral sense is the only just approach to politics available to us.[10]

It should be noted that for all his belief in human equality as the heart of both morality and our own nature, Jefferson often failed to uphold these same principles in his own life. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and champion of the rights of man, was also the owner of over 600 of his fellow human beings.

This deep lapse in Jefferson’s own “moral sense” is often explained away through his practical inability to free his slaves due to his immense personal debt. There is no doubt an element of truth to this, but in a deeper sense Jefferson simply failed to apply his philosophy fully enough.

The germ of Jefferson’s mistake began, in many ways, with his obsession with positivistic science. He often expressed his belief that the surest path to human knowledge lay in scientific experimentation. If something could not be proven through the power of the human senses, then we cannot say with much certainty that something is true.[11] This vaguely materialist understanding of human knowledge led Jefferson on the issue of race to undermine his own broader moral system. At the time, much of the scientific research produced argued that the various races were in fact subspecies. This so-called “scientific truth” as Jefferson understood it, made him deeply uncomfortable. As he made clear numerous times throughout his life, he did not want it to be the case that black people are biologically inferior, but he certainly thought this to be the sad reality of life.[12]

Yet ultimately, Jefferson’s moral system remains worth reading and thinking through. For one, he admitted the dangers of an overreliance on the positivistic science that he subscribed to. In his now famous dialogue between the head and the heart, the heart firmly asserts that the moral sense is the purview of sentiment and not cold rationality: “Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She [creation] laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.”[13] In addition, Jefferson coupled all of this with a belief in true human progress. Too often today we are not especially inclined to imagine history is on an upward trajectory. For Jefferson, there was no question that the trend of history is ever upward; in such light, he could tell himself that the death of slavery was preordained—and this reassurance led him astray. One bitter lesson we’ve learned since the Enlightenment is that there are no guarantees about moral progress; the forward march of history only continues when living human beings continue to make it happen.

Freedom and Morality 

The second crowning achievement of Thomas Jefferson’s career—drafting the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—builds upon his understanding of human nature. Because all individuals are born with an innate moral sense, and because this sense can only develop through use, the government must—within reason—avoid the business of telling people what to think, feel, or do.[14] Jefferson thought the right of conscience to be the greatest right available to man, and that this right emerged from our ability, our need, to make most moral decisions ourselves.[15] This gives a certain picture of a government’s role in the lives of its citizens. Unlike the Puritan settlers of New England, Jefferson thought the state should largely leave morality to the citizens—to allow every individual to explore and develop his own moral sense. As he put it in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such that are injurious to others.”[16] Thus Jefferson developed a moderately libertarian general approach to government that has nothing to do with moral relativism, but instead begins with the demands of a clear system of ethics.

From this philosophy of politics, Jefferson built an entire career of legislative and executive priorities. Upon completing his work in the Continental Congress, he returned to his native state of Virginia for the explicit purpose of rebuilding his native government upon the liberal philosophy he thought should now govern the whole country. As a member of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson teamed up with James Madison to reform the state’s civil society. In practice, Jefferson tended to be the power behind the scenes that drafted the new legislation, while Madison ensured its passage.

Of his many legislative achievements, Jefferson was always proudest of his role in disestablishing the Episcopal Church in Virginia, removing it as the official church of the state. As some indication of his pride in this accomplishment, while serving as Ambassador to France, Jefferson sent the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to every figure of prominence he could find on both sides of the Atlantic. The law derived not from Jefferson’s hatred of Christianity, or the Episcopal Church in particular—as his opponents often said—but because of his sincere belief that religion should be left between each man and his god rather than settled by fiat.

In an almost Quaker-ish way, Jefferson believed that salvation was achievable only through the will of the individual and the cultivation of their moral sense.[17] As such, the only duty of government in regard to religion is to ensure each citizen has the ability to pursue their reason to whatever religious conviction they deem best. On a practical level Jefferson also doubted that a religiously homogenous society would ever be possible again, if it ever had been.[18] More than this though, Jefferson believed that religious diversity actually improved society by offering the moral sense a variety of options for fulfilling its appetite for the divine.[19] In this, Jefferson anticipated future liberals such as William James, who ably showed that the great multiplicity of religious views found in society express variations of personal disposition and conscience, whose ultimate outcome helps to forge a more open and diverse society.[20]

The first major reform the legislative team of Jefferson and Madison accomplished was the abolition of primogeniture in Virginia. [21] This ancient legal convention dictated that only the eldest child must inherit the entirety of his father’s estate. In Europe, it had produced a concentration of property and titled privileges in the hands of a landed gentry. Primogeniture had been working toward the same end in Virginia at the time. Jefferson himself had benefitted from the law, inheriting all of his father’s vast fortune and occupying an exalted place in Virginia as a matter of birthright. Yet Jefferson felt that the idea of primogeniture and a hereditary aristocracy flew in the face of liberal equality.

Jefferson’s time as the American Ambassador to France had truly proven this to him, and he made clear at the time that any economic system which so heavily concentrates power in the hands of the few is incompatible with democracy. As he told Madison: “Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as common stock for man to labor and live on.”[22] Much is often made of Jefferson’s agrarianism, and there can be no denying that he believed the best society to be composed of smallhold farmers, as unlike his own planter class as they are Hamilton’s professional merchants. Jefferson’s preference had much more to do with his belief that drastic income inequality is incompatible with a republic. To Jefferson’s mind, at least a roughly equal distribution of property served as an important tool in giving to each citizen the ability to freely pursue the dictates of their own conscience and ensure that they never found themselves subjected to the whims of despots, either local or distant.[23]  Jefferson put this point plainly to Madison: I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.”[24]

Jefferson’s quest to create a restrained and benevolent version of government also included a rewriting of the Virginia criminal code. Though ultimately unsuccessful in bringing this law to fruition, Jefferson sought to rebuild the criminal justice system of his state on a more benevolent basis. Since the colonization of Jamestown, Virginia had instituted a number of incredibly harsh laws for theft and other petty crimes. Most criminal statutes called for the convicted to lose their hands or their life. The law displayed little respect for inmates, who were treated only slightly better than the state’s enslaved population. Jefferson aimed to undo all of this, to found the Virginia criminal code in a respect for the rights of the convicted.[25] He did this, he later explained to French and Virginian public officials, because he believed the goal of criminal codes should not be punishment but reformation—to help guide and improve the moral sense of the accused. In short, the criminal law existed to rehabilitate criminals rather than visit public revenge upon them. Over time, this radical notion of criminal justice would become the hallmark of liberal public policy.

All of these major policies emerged from Jefferson’s attempt to craft a political order unlike any before. Not since Ancient Rome, he argued, had man sought to seriously build a government based upon the will of the people.[26] Such a bold endeavor may have been a lofty enough goal as is, but Jefferson wished to go further than the noble patriarchs of classical antiquity. For him the age of Enlightenment was not an abstract thing—Enlightenment meant a  real and achievable effort to create a political system that permitted the necessary human freedom to develop the moral sense.[27] It is for this reason that he sincerely declared to his friend Benjamin Rush that he had “sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”[28]

A Wise and Virtuous People 

On leaving the presidency, Jefferson did not leave public life. Aside from the prolific correspondence he kept up with current and former public officials, he poured a great deal of his considerable energy into the creation of a new public university in the state of Virginia. This project—which he had been formulating since at least his time as Secretary of State—in some ways may seem a bit of a letdown. After all, as impressive as founding a university may be, it surely pales in comparison to declaring independence, establishing religious liberty, being president, or maybe even serving in the cabinet. Yet Jefferson thought education to be an important part—perhaps the most important part—of the liberal project he had worked for decades to promote. Just because Jefferson believed government had no role in telling humans what to believe did not mean he thought government had no place in helping develop the moral sense of the people. In fact, Jefferson thought there could be no higher duty than providing the tools to the citizens necessary for them to cultivate virtue.[29]

Jefferson contended that a virtuous people was more than a nice luxury—calling upon the history of all free societies as his evidence, he thought that republican government required a certain sort of people to sustain itself. If the citizenry loses its sense of virtue and starts to become corrupt, they are liable to empower some sort of despotic oligarchy to seize control of the state. Jefferson thought a people deprived of virtue would be pretty easy to spot—a  frivolous citizenry more concerned with luxury and political intrigue than an honest dedication to the improvement of the human condition.[30] This was the exact scenario he feared Alexander Hamilton’s mercantilist economic policy was bringing about.

If Jefferson feared, he also hoped. He spent his days dreaming of a virtuous people, the Americans of the future, who could create a truly novel “Empire of Liberty.” Such a citizenry would need, and have, a fully developed moral sense, and as such they would be honest, selfless, frugal, and live for the improvement of the human condition. Though we can never force anyone to develop their moral sense, Jefferson did think that through education, you could give them the tools of self-enlightenment. As such, he described the goal of the University of Virginia in terms far removed from the too often purely technical education of the modern day:

the advantages of a well-directed education, moral, political and economical, are truly above all estimate. Education generates the habits of application, of order, and the love of virtue … Education … engrafts a new man on his native stock, and improves what in his nature was viscous and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.[31]

Jefferson also worked unsuccessfully to establish public education in Virginia.[32] As important as the development of future leaders may be, he understood that not all people can or should fulfill that particular vocation in life. As such, Jefferson thought that Virginia needed a public education system capable of acquainting most citizens with the necessary tools to develop their moral sense.[33] Most of us would think of the conscience growing and learning primarily from the humanities, but Jefferson saw science as a vitally important step in teaching the rational practicality necessary to put the moral sense to good use.[34]

As vital as Jefferson found traditional classroom education, he thought that the government could help cultivate the moral sense in one other important respect: through funding fine art. This may strike the modern reader as unusual or frivolous, but Jefferson frequently argued that exposure to beautiful things could elevate the human soul.[35] More than most American politicians today, he believed that the visual world that surrounds us plays an important role in shaping who we are.[36] As such, he worked quite hard to ensure the construction of classically inspired public buildings in both Richmond and Washington, D.C.[37] He also set aside considerable time to ensure that commissioned public art met his exacting aesthetic standards.[38] In all of these cases, he hoped to create an environment around Americans that would inspire them to reach for even greater beauty in the world around them and in their own souls.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, Thomas Jefferson is both a unique and a fully typical liberal of his time. In many ways, Jefferson shows that there is an element of truth to this understanding of government. Throughout his life he advocated for curbing the power of the state and believed that government should never force anyone to behave in certain ways, short of preventing citizens from harming one another.

However, in every other sense that matters, Jefferson wasn’t an atomistic individualist. He argued from the earliest days of his public life that each human is endowed with the incredible ability to make our own moral choices and that we all possess an innate sense of right and wrong to help guide those choices. He believed that we could develop that moral sense, and he thought that a virtuous society was the right venue for doing so. In this respect, he contended, we are all normatively equal.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founding fathers of the United States signed a document dedicated to the principle of human equality—as articulated by Thomas Jefferson. In so doing they set out to build a republic upon a foundation of liberal morality as it emerged in those final days of the Age of Enlightenment. There could be no task more noble or important for today’s liberals than to reawaken that sense of liberal civic morality.

Notes

Editor’s note: The texts of these documents may in general be retrieved at Founders Online, a project of the National Archives.

[1] Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814.

[2] Patrick Deneen, ed., Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, St. Augustine’s Press, 2016.

[3] Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826.

[4] Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, April 16, 1784.

[5] Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826.

[6] William Perkins, Treatise on the Vocations or the Callings of Men, 1605.

[7] Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.

[8] Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814.

[9] Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799.

[10] Thomas Jefferson, Response to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12, 1790.

[11] Thomas Jefferson to William Short, October 31, 1819.

[12] Thomas Jefferson to Henri Gregoire, February 25, 1809.

[13] Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786.

[14] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.

[15] Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1777.

[16] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.

[17] Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, April 12, 1803.

[18] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.

[19] Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, April 12, 1803.

[20] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902.

[21] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785.

[22] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785.

[23] Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799; Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.

[24] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785.

[25] Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments, 1779.

[26] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, February 28, 1796.

[27] Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799; Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.

[28] Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800.

[29] Thomas Jefferson, Memorial on the Book Duty, November 30, 1821.

[30] Thomas Jefferson to John Langdon, March 5, 1810.

[31] Thomas Jefferson, Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, August 4, 1818.

[32] Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 1779.

[33] Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 1779.

[34] Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789.

[35] Thomas Jefferson to Madame de Tesse, March 20, 1787; Thomas Jefferson to Francois d’Ivernois, February 6, 1795.

[36] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 20, 1785.

[37] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 1, 1785; Thomas Jefferson to William Buchanan and James Hay, January 26th 1786; Thomas Jefferson to Major l’Enfant, April 10, 1791.

[38] Thomas Jefferson to William Cabell Rives, November 25, 1825.

In January of this year, authorities in Iraq arrested an alleged drug kingpin named Kazem Hamad. Hamad is accused of operating a criminal network in Australia netting hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit sales. This organized crime often turned violent, with police recording countless instances of extortion, hundreds of arsons, and several homicides, including one taking the life of an unrelated bystander. None of this is atypical for gang-driven drug trafficking. What makes Hamad’s case unique is that one of the main drugs he trafficked is legal throughout the world, including in Australia. His criminal empire was built on nicotine.

Australia is often praised as a trailblazing pioneer in public health for its exceptionally high taxes on cigarettes, mandated plain packaging with graphic warning labels, and extremely strict regulation of e-cigarettes. In recent years, Australia has also provided a vivid example of how these policies, intended to control the tobacco trade, can lead instead to losing control of it entirely. The arsons and homicides associated with the illicit trade have become impossible to ignore, dubbed the “tobacco wars” in Australian media. A new government report addresses an “illicit tobacco crisis.” Another report from the government’s bureau of statistics concludes that illicit sales have risen from just 12 percent of the national nicotine market in 2017 to 80 percent in 2025.

If Australia was once considered a model for how to get tobacco policy right, it’s now the bellwether for how it can go wrong, a dramatic—but certainly not isolated—example of how governments around the world are shifting nicotine consumption to illicit markets. From regulation and taxation to full prohibition of certain products, policies intended to discourage use are having the unintended consequence of driving massive amounts of illicit trade.

The Path to Illicit Markets

Prohibition has always been an option. As tobacco diffused outward from the Americas in the Columbian exchange, it met with both opposition and intrigue. Authorities attempted mostly in vain to restrict it. Rodrigo de Jerez, a member of Columbus’s expedition who brought smoking home to Spain, was imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition. Ottoman Sultan Murad IV, among other tyrannical rulers, imposed the death penalty for smoking. As recently as the early twentieth century, temperance advocates in fifteen U.S. states succeeded in prohibiting the sale of cigarettes.

Eventually, however, the lure of tobacco almost universally overcame such opposition. Historian David Courtwright describes the period of global trade beginning in the sixteenth century as part of a “psychoactive revolution” in which ordinary people gained unprecedented access to mood-altering substances. Three of these took particularly strong hold in the West, gaining social acceptance and economic importance: caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine.

Attitudes toward tobacco began to shift in the 1970s, with public policy becoming gradually less laissez-faire, a trend that accelerated substantially in the early 2000s. Authorities 

increasingly subjected tobacco to various regulations, such as taxes, age restrictions, rules about where people can smoke, and warning labels. Yet the product itself remained generally legal for adult consumption.

In recent decades the consensus that tobacco and nicotine products should be legally available to adults has begun to break down. Many factors contribute to this shift. Certainly chief among them is the flood of compelling research tying smoking to various diseases and the enormity of the death toll caused by smoking. Even today, more than 400,000 annual deaths in the United States and more than 7 million worldwide are still attributed to smoking. A second is the stigmatization of tobacco use as smoking has become concentrated among those with less education and lower incomes. Third, the development of innovative new nicotine products has generated alarm and demands for restrictions, especially with regard to their use by minors. 

Today, the legality of nicotine and tobacco products exists on a spectrum. At one extreme are products sold freely, with minimal or no regulation, or products sold in general compliance with longstanding regulations and taxes. The market for electronic cigarettes in their infancy is an example of the former, when the novel devices fell outside regulations for either tobacco or medicinal goods. (In a handful of countries, this is still the case.) Combustible cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, and other legacy products sold under established tax and regulatory frameworks are also generally sold in licit markets, with some notable exceptions to be discussed below. 

At the other extreme are products explicitly banned by laws and regulations. Such bans are most prevalent for innovative nicotine products such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco, snus (a type of oral tobacco developed in Scandinavia), and nicotine pouches. To cite just a few examples, snus is prohibited throughout most of Europe; e-cigarettes are banned in many countries, including Brazil, India, Mexico, and much of southeast Asia; heated tobacco, which is gaining popularity in other parts of Asia, is banned throughout China and around thirty other countries. Flavored products and disposable e-cigarettes are also common targets of prohibition.

In between these extremes are products that can be sold legally, but where the costs of compliance with taxes or regulations drive sales to illicit markets. Excise taxes on cigarettes are a textbook example. Imposing taxes is a proven method of discouraging smoking, but high tax rates create incentives for avoidance through illicit channels. The United States’s bureaucratic approach to e-cigarettes is a prime example of regulation driving illicit sales. Since the Food and Drug Administration deemed e-cigarettes as tobacco products under its purview in 2016, it’s been illegal for any e-cigarette to be marketed without first receiving authorization from the agency. In practice, the pathway to regulatory approval is so difficult to navigate that the vast majority of e-cigarettes are sold illegally.

Taking a broad view—and at risk of overgeneralization—it can be said that illicit markets in cigarettes are generally driven by taxes, and that illicit markets in vapes and other novel products are driven by regulation and prohibition. Let’s look at each in turn.

Taxes and Illicit Cigarettes

Excise taxes are among the most straightforward ways to discourage smoking. Although demand for nicotine is relatively inelastic—it’s a notoriously addictive substance, after all—taxing tobacco has been consistently shown to reduce demand by lowering individual consumption, encouraging quitting, or preventing people from smoking in the first place. 

The catch, of course, is that the gap between the pre- and post-tax price of tobacco creates opportunities to sell illicit cigarettes at a profit—and the larger that gap, the larger the opportunity. Worldwide, estimates place the average share of cigarettes sold illicitly at around 10 percent. The outliers, however, can be far higher.

Australia provides the most dramatic example. Beginning in 2010, the country enacted a series of tobacco tax hikes far above the rate of inflation, making it one of the most expensive countries in the world for cigarettes, with taxes of more than $30 AUD per pack and legal retail prices above $40. The growth of the illicit market followed predictably, with packs sold for less than half the legal price. In 2016, illicit cigarettes made up less than 10 percent of the market for nicotine. They are now more than 64 percent, with much of the remainder coming from other illicit sources of nicotine, such as e-cigarettes. 

The United States shows similar, if not quite as dramatic, variation between low- and high-tax jurisdictions. The federal tax is $1.01 per pack. States vary widely in their tax rates, from less than a dollar in many southern states to more than five dollars in New York. Local taxes raise prices even higher. This creates substantial arbitrage opportunities, with cigarettes flowing from low-tax states and Native American reservations into high-tax markets. California and New York rank as the states with the most smuggling, at more than half of their markets by one estimate. A recent study of discarded cigarette packs in high-tax New York City found that only 16.6 percent of them bore the proper tax stamp.

Though taxes are typically the main driver of illicit cigarette sales, it’s also worth mentioning the role of flavor bans. California and Massachusetts have both prohibited the sale of menthol cigarettes, and there is evidence in both cases that this is contributing to smuggling from other states.

Illicit cigarette sales take three general forms: contraband, illicit whites, and counterfeits. Contraband is legally produced but smuggled across borders to evade taxes or regulations. Illicit whites are cheap, often unbranded cigarettes produced en masse in places like eastern Europe and China. Counterfeit cigarettes imitate name brands. Experts estimate that contraband makes up the bulk of the illicit market, with 20–30 percent coming from illicit whites and less than 10 percent from counterfeits.

Novel Nicotine Products, Regulation, and Prohibition

Innovative nicotine products like e-cigarettes, snus, and nicotine pouches offer a much safer risk profile than combustible cigarettes. Despite this, they are often much more stringently regulated, if not prohibited altogether.

The United States provides an instructive example. Under the Tobacco Control Act, new cigarettes can be introduced to market by demonstrating to the FDA that they are “substantially equivalent” to existing cigarettes—which is to say that they are every bit as deadly as the products that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. E-cigarettes face a far higher hurdle, requiring extensive documentation to prove that authorizing them is “appropriate for the protection of public health,” not just for individual users, but for the population as a whole.

To date, only 48 e-cigarettes have ever made it through this process. Even that figure is an overstatement, as it counts individual components of a system—the device and the liquid pod or cartridge—as separate authorizations. Until May of this year, none of these were in flavors other than tobacco or menthol.

Visiting a vape shop or convenience store confirms that these authorized e-cigarettes comprise just a small slice of the market. Unauthorized products abound. Some of these are from brands that have made applications to the FDA and are awaiting a final ruling. Many others forego the legal process entirely: a rapidly shifting mix of disposable, flavored, and often untraceable vapes, typically originating in China. Combined, these illicit sources make up the bulk of the U.S. market for e-cigarettes. An analysis of United States sales data from 2025 concluded that nearly 70 percent of e-cigarette sales are for products not authorized by the FDA.

In addition to these federal regulations, six states and more than 420 localities in the United States have enacted flavor bans, making the sale of flavored vapes a matter of state and local law enforcement, leading to arrests, prosecutions, and in at least one case, imprisonment of sellers. 

Taking an international view, the market intelligence firm Euromonitor International classifies 63 countries as having a regulated mix of licit and illicit vapes, 14 (mostly in Africa) as having no regulation, and 33 countries as having full or partial bans on e-cigarettes. Euromonitor’s analysis places Australia in the last category, with regulations so stringent that they amount to de facto prohibition of the products consumers demand. Vape sales are restricted to pharmacies, where the selection is limited, and pharmacists are under no obligation to provide them. As a result, an illicit market for vapes thrives in Australia. Combined with sales of illicit tobacco, the country’s illicit nicotine market is believed to exceed $7 billion AUD annually, exceeding the sales of every illegal drug except methamphetamine.

Even in countries with more permissive regulations, illicit markets can thrive. Israel permits e-cigarettes, but a combination of nicotine concentration limits, high taxes, and plain packaging has displaced almost 100 percent of vape sales by volume to the illicit market; illicit sales comprising more than 80 percent of the market in regulated countries are not uncommon. Globally, Euromonitor estimates that 71 percent of the e-cigarette market is sold illicitly, comparable in volume to the global illicit market for cigarettes.

Emerging Prohibitions

The illicit markets covered so far are caused by prohibitively costly taxes and regulations, as well as actual prohibition of broad classes of nicotine products. Two emerging policy frontiers threaten to drive even more products underground: smokefree generation laws and capping the level of nicotine in cigarettes. These policies present a complete break with the consensus that adults should have legal access to tobacco products. 

The concept behind smokefree generation laws is to implement prohibition gradually, forbidding the sale of tobacco to anyone born after a certain date. In effect, this would raise the age at which one could legally purchase tobacco year by year until eventually no one alive is permitted to do so. The Maldives was the first nation to implement such a law, followed recently by the United Kingdom. (A similar law passed in New Zealand but was repealed before taking effect.) Twenty-two towns in Massachusetts have also implemented nicotine-free generation laws. As the name suggests, and in contrast to the UK’s law, which applies to tobacco but not to e-cigarettes and other nicotine products, the Massachusetts laws target nicotine use of all kinds.

The other significant policy is to implement a tight cap on the amount of nicotine in tobacco products, requiring manufacturers to strip all but trace amounts of the substance from nearly all forms of combustible tobacco, including cigarettes, roll-your-own, pipe tobacco, and most cigars. The intent is to render the products non-addictive. Advocates stress that this would not be prohibition, since very low nicotine tobacco would remain legal, but it would certainly prohibit these products as they’ve existed for centuries. The FDA proposed a rule implementing this standard in January 2025, though it appears unlikely to proceed under current leadership.

For the sake of completeness, it’s worth mentioning that a few cities in California, including Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills, have implemented simple prohibition of tobacco sales without the workarounds of a nicotine cap or a generational ban.

The impact of these prohibitionist policies is largely untested, since it will take time for smokefree generation laws to affect significant shares of the population, and the nicotine cap remains just a proposal for now. But there is real enthusiasm for these ideas in public health, and the implementation of a smokefree generation law in the United Kingdom, a country of 70 million, is significant. Both policies would create obvious new avenues for illicit markets, whether to provide goods to the increasing number of adults restricted by generational bans or to anyone seeking conventional tobacco with nicotine.

The Limits of Tobacco Control

According to Euromonitor’s estimates, around 20 percent of the global market for nicotine (excluding China) is currently illicit, divided about evenly between cigarettes and nicotine vapor. The expansion of restrictive laws and prohibitions, along with growing consumer preference for novel, lower-risk products, provides reasons for expecting this share to grow. Euromonitor projects that fully a quarter of global nicotine sales will be illicit by 2030. To put that in more concrete terms, converting vapor sales to cigarette equivalents, they expect that less than four years from now, one out of every four units of tobacco will be sold illicitly.

This raises questions about the limits of tobacco control. By one vital measure, the effort to reduce smoking has been extraordinarily successful. In the United States, the rate of adult smoking has fallen from more than 40 percent in the 1960s to less than 10 percent today. The future looks even brighter: less than 2 percent of today’s teenagers in the United States smoke cigarettes. Yet the effort to snuff out the remaining share of smoking—and more ambitiously, to end the use of nicotine entirely—faces real constraints.

These difficulties stem from two important trends in tobacco control: hostility to even low-risk forms of nicotine use and overconfidence in what can be accomplished through top-down regulation and prohibition.

The idea of making safer nicotine products has long been controversial, but in previous decades both public health advocates and anti-smoking politicians were more open to the possibility than mainstream tobacco control experts are today. In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government was actively involved in encouraging research into safer cigarettes. The American Cancer Society and American Heart Association were also receptive. 

As researcher Michael Russell explained the case for tobacco harm reduction in a 1991 editorial for The Lancet, “The central paradox is that, while people smoke for nicotine they die mainly from the tar and other unwanted components in the smoke.” If the two could be separated, “There is no compelling objection to the recreational and even addictive use of nicotine provided it is not shown to be physically, psychologically, or socially harmful to the user or to others.”

At the same time that innovation in safer nicotine was beginning to show promise, and concurrent with growing acceptance of more liberal approaches to other drugs, attitudes toward tobacco within public health were becoming more hostile. As historian Virginia Berridge argues in her book Demons, “Concept shift took place with new ideas about ‘use’ and ‘problem use’ applied to illicit drugs, while, conversely, drug-focused ideas of ‘addiction’ began to be applied to tobacco. Tobacco was changing places to become more like a drug [...] From the 1980s onward, new ideas about drug use tended to see it as more ‘normal’ while tobacco smoking became seen as pathological.”

By the late 1990s, attitudes had thoroughly hardened. The head of the American Heart Association responded to an early smokeless cigarette by stating that “talking about a safer cigarette is like playing Russian roulette, sooner or later you’re going to hit the chamber with the bullet in it.” Or as historian of tobacco Robert Proctor dismissed the possibility in his 2012 book Golden Holocaust, “Talk of ‘safer cigarettes’ is rather like talking about safer terrorism, or safer smallpox, or safer forms of drowning: it’s oxymoronic.”

The shift in view toward all nicotine use as pathological came paired with overconfidence in eliminating its use by technocratic means. Proctor’s perspective is again instructive. Dismissing comparisons to the prohibition of alcohol, a drug that he acknowledges many people enjoy recreationally, he dismisses nicotine use as driven purely by addiction. He then makes the leap to it being easy to eradicate via simple prohibition: “It is no longer fashionable to talk about 'magic bullets' in medicine, but here we really do have a magic bullet, requiring (in theory) nothing more than the stroke of a pen."

That “in theory” is bearing a lot of weight. Historic and contemporary experience both suggest that illicit markets will be resilient. Bhutan is the only country to recently attempt tobacco prohibition, which it enacted in 2010. In 2019, more than 20 percent of its population still used tobacco. The ban was repealed during the COVID pandemic in recognition that it incentivized cross-border smuggling, potentially raising risks of viral transmission.

Pandemic conditions aside, there are ample reasons to be wary of the growth of illicit markets for tobacco and nicotine. At a practical level, illicit products undermine efforts at tobacco control. The discouraging effects of excise taxes only work if consumers can’t easily access tobacco at much lower cost. Illicit sales also undermine limitations on flavors, caps on nicotine, and age restrictions. In the event of contamination in the supply, illicit producers are less traceable and accountable, as seen in the cannabis vape poisonings of 2019 and 2020 that sickened thousands and killed more than sixty people, mostly from illicit sources.

Illicit sales are also criminogenic, transforming peaceful and legal exchange into crime. Australia is the most striking example, with its violent gang wars and smugglers adding nicotine to their portfolio of narcotics. In jurisdictions that have banned flavored cigarettes and e-cigarettes, law enforcement resources are spent on investigations, seizures, arrests, and prosecutions of non-violent sellers. Though violating flavor bans is generally a misdemeanor, since this also typically involves not paying excise taxes on illicit products, it can also entail felony tax evasion and the risk of years behind bars.

Efforts to enforce prohibitions are leading predictably to the imposition of harsher penalties. In Australia, possession of commercial quantities of nicotine vaping goods is now punishable by up to seven years imprisonment, and up to fifteen in the state of Western Australia. In Singapore, sellers of nicotine vapes can be sentenced to six years in prison. In Mexico, eight. In Thailand, ten. In some jurisdictions, simple possession of alternative nicotine products can lead to arrest.

Imprisoning sellers of lower-risk nicotine products is neither humane nor good policy. In contrast, more liberal approaches to nicotine and tobacco show clear progress in reducing the harms of smoking. The lifesaving potential of e-cigarettes arose from bottom-up innovation operating mostly outside of government regulation. Sweden has famously achieved low rates of smoking in part due to consumers’ switch to much safer snus. Other Nordic countries have followed suit, and one can see similar trends around the world with e-cigarettes, snus, nicotine pouches, and heated tobacco. 

Much of this progress has been made in spite of hostility from governments. The trend today is toward higher taxes, tighter regulations, and eventual prohibition, with predictable consequences for illicit markets. The malfeasance of the tobacco industry in the twentieth century certainly makes the desire to regulate it out of existence understandable. But however much the public dislikes the legal tobacco business, they may discover at their peril that they dislike the illegal tobacco business even more.

Why do governments take control of entire sectors of the economy? The textbook answer falls into what many economists call “public interest” reasoning. But what really happens turns out to be more complex than what the profession has so far understood.

Markets have limitations, it is said; these limitations are said to warrant the nationalization of an industry or sector. Markets cannot produce certain goods and services, or they cannot produce them optimally, because it is impossible to exclude nonpayers. Or they will overexploit a resource because no one can be excluded, but everyone has an incentive to consume it. Maybe it’s because some sectors are naturally prone to become monopolies that will ultimately exploit consumers. These justifications constitute the list of what figures in the “usual” textbooks in economics for market limitations and which may be used to motivate nationalization in some form or another. For example, Greg Mankiw’s famous textbook, Principles of Economics, proposes ten principles “that represent the heart of economic wisdom,” and the seventh discusses how “governments can sometimes improve market outcomes.” The range of solutions differs, but state provision of some services is argued to be justified. 

Some economists, often in the very same textbooks, will retort that governments have limitations too. The temptations of politics might induce the nationalized firm to slack on cost discipline and become wasteful, leading to recurrent bailouts. Politicians may also be tempted to use the nationalized firm as a way to win votes (e.g., a nationalized electrical utility used to subsidize electrification in rural areas favorable to the party in power), even if it is socially costly. Thus, economists simply weigh trade-offs between both types of limitations.

A smaller subset of economists will point out that the motivation of “public interest” is rarely actually there. For example, Randall Holcombe has pointed out that the public interest is often a post hoc rationalization that adds only a veneer of respectability. The underlying reason has always been the political benefits of nationalization. For example, Tyler Cowen has explained that rulers produce public goods if they can extract rents in the process. If public interest rationales are provided, it is merely as a byproduct; the politicians want nationalization for their own sake rather than for the public good.  

Nationalizations as “Redistributive Engines” 

In a recent paper, I go one step further. The key is to notice that economists of all persuasions have frequently looked only at the particular market in which the state intervenes through nationalization. But that market isn’t the only one affected.

Consider the example of the state taking over lighthouse provision. Lighthouses are a classic example of market failure because the light can guide some ships without reducing its usefulness to others and because ships that do not pay can still benefit from it. Free riders can’t be excluded, so state provision is said to be required.

The economic literature about lighthouses is extensive and famously includes work by Nobel laureate. In the debate over lighthouses, which revolves around questions of the feasibility of private provision, the origins of the market failure, and the quality of government remedies, the more than a dozen scholars involved have rarely if ever ventured out of the market for lighthouses.  

That shortcoming allows many to miss why states nationalize. Yet the tidiness of the hoped-for explanations has left some puzzling facts in the archives: In Britain, for example, many cite parliamentary reports on lighthouses, but a large share of them deal with issues of pilotage, as the pilots’ guild, which is still extant today and known as Trinity House, was in charge of producing lighthouses. Substantial attention went to the pensions of pilots, the funds for those injured, and other issues with payments to pilots. Why would such issues be so prominent in the historical discussions of lighthouse provision, but not in the modern literature explaining what happened? These things were not secondary to people then; why are they treated as such now? 

Simply put, the answer is that states nationalize when state control makes it possible to assemble a political coalition of actors involved across multiple markets. Viewed in this way, nationalization amounts to a broad rearranging of property rights that—in the words of economist Anthony de Jasay—acts like a big “redistributive engine” for politicians and private actors. In Britain, the pilots’ guild was not only in charge of regulating entry into the pilotage trade, it also held the exclusive legal right and monopoly to dredge sand and gravel from the bed of the River Thames to supply ballast to unladen or outbound ships (i.e., ballastage), while also being a monopoly provider of lighthouses. In other words, three markets (at least) were involved (i.e., ballastage, pilotage, lighthouses). 

Now consider electricity. Many districts in Canada and the United States, but also in Europe, nationalized their electrical utilities in the first half of the twentieth century. The rationale was that utilities were natural monopolies that would gouge consumers if left unregulated. The standard approach to evaluating this setup would consist of looking at the performance of the utilities before and after nationalization. But that would be the wrong way of analyzing the outcomes and motivation.

Very often, nationalization was motivated by a desire to reduce rates for key constituencies. In the Canadian province of Quebec, for example, proposals for a public takeover were partly motivated by the desire to provide cheaper electricity to rural areas, which tended to favor the party in power. In Ontario, nationalization (which took place some four decades earlier) was intended in part to benefit industrialists located farther from the best sites for hydroelectric generation, such as Niagara Falls.

Canadian historians noted this political motivation, but its broader implications were not explored. Subsidized rural electrification or subsidized industrial rates through a nationalized firm can produce an inefficient allocation of land and labor. For example, when rural electrification is subsidized, too much land remains devoted to farming, rather than importing food from places better suited to agricultural production, and too many workers remain in agriculture rather than moving into manufacturing or services. Similarly, subsidized industrial electricity rates require higher taxes or higher rates for nonindustrial customers, thereby encouraging an inefficient concentration of resources in electricity-intensive heavy industries.

The costs are therefore dispersed throughout the economy in ways that are difficult to observe. Even if the state-owned provider appears to perform as well as the private provider, conventional comparisons may overlook substantial costs created by the nationalization itself. The “redistributive engine” creates massive overlooked costs.

In other words, nationalization is never an intervention in only one market. It is an institutional reorganization that changes the terms on which many markets operate. Evaluating it solely by examining output in the nationalized sector systematically biases the analysis in favor of the state. 

American Lighthouses as an Example

The case of lighthouses in America is the best illustration of this. Prior to 1789, lighthouses in America were provided either privately or by state governments. Lighthouses were important to port cities, as they increased trade volumes. The different states funded them with what were known as “tonnage duties,” which were essentially user fees for port services inclusive of the lighthouse.

One particular feature of lighthouses is that local shipowners tended to rely less on them than foreign ships since they knew the local waters and perils tied to them. Thus there was a tendency to set different rates on ships depending on whether they were local or foreign. But this opened a strong temptation—to piggyback shipping protectionism onto the tonnage duties. If a shipowner from New England could impose even a slightly higher duty for the lighthouse on a foreign shipowner, he’d increase his competitive edge against him. Even small differences in tonnage duties, given the profit margins, were sufficient to give strong edges, and in practice, the duties could be several times higher for foreign ships. In the name of safer shipping, the New England shipowner might effectively kick his competitor out of the port.

But through the colonial and confederation eras, competition between states kept this temptation largely in check. A state or colony that tried to discriminate more against foreign shippers would see ships redirected to another port and thus lose in trade volumes and other revenues. This competition among governments acted as a strong check on protectionist tendencies. As a result, the ratio of rates applied to foreign ships against domestic ships maxed out at 4:1, with some colonies and states applying no discrimination at all, and the average being closer to 2:1.

Following the new Constitution, tonnage duties became the domain of the federal government, and no states were allowed to impose them. This ended the check against discriminatory duties via competition between states. In 1789, rates were set at six cents per ton for American ships—but at 30 cents per ton for ships with commercial treaties with the United States, and 50 cents per ton for others. In practice, this meant a discrimination ratio of 5:1 to 8.7:1. In 1804, new legislation increased the discriminatory duty by 50 cents per ton, raising the ratio to 16.7:1, and another 50 cents in 1812, putting the ratio at a prohibitive 25:1. By 1812, foreign ships had to pay 94 to 144 cents more per ton. These were equivalent, on average from 1789 to 1815, to a surtax of 1.26 percent of the value of cargo, or between one-tenth and one-seventh of profit margins on voyages. It is thus understandable that the tonnage duties eliminated all foreign ships from American ports: in 1789, some 47 percent of ships entering American ports were owned by foreigners importing goods; by 1810, it was less than 10 percent.

Lighthouse federalization gave shipowners the protectionist barriers they desired. Ultimately, this protection came at a cost in the form of higher freight rates, higher import prices, more expensive ships, and reduced competitiveness for exporters, who had to pay more to access foreign markets. It also created a centuries-long rent-seeking relationship between shipowners and the state, still visible today in the form of the Jones Act. In that sense, the shadow of the federalization of tonnage duties remains with us.

At the same time, tonnage duties were structured in a way that created a hidden tariff topping the statutory tariffs on imported goods. When historians estimate tariff rates, they typically divide tariff revenues by the value of imports. Yet this measure excludes the protectionism embedded in tonnage duties, even though these duties also acted as a tax on foreign trade and imported goods. Once tonnage-duty revenues are incorporated, the hidden tariff amounted to an additional 0.41 percentage-point tariff between 1790 and 1815. Mercantile interests beyond the shipping industry therefore also stood to gain, as foreign goods became slightly more expensive relative to domestically produced alternatives.

But if tonnage duties were taken by the federal government, how would states fund their lighthouses? In fact, people at the Constitutional Convention understood the two to be connected. Jurist Adam Grace notes that “those in favor of a uniform discriminatory tonnage policy—such as Madison and Fitzsimons—had a strong motive to lay the responsibility for lighthouses on the federal treasury in order to justify the imposition of tonnage duties (…)” and, in doing so, were “securing complete federal control over the domestic–foreign tonnage differential.” 

The answer was for the federal government to take over the lighthouses as well. Politicians would gain from this, as it was a considerable source of patronage, around which they could build their political machines. The patronage included not only the appointment of lightkeepers, but also the contracting of supplies and construction of lighthouses, buoys, and other navigational aids. Alexander Hamilton, notably in multiple letters to George Washington, understood this mission: Out of 144 letters written by Hamilton regarding lighthouses, all but seven contained directives and considerations about appointments, provisioning contracts, and construction contracts—very often to individuals who were part of his political faction. When the Jeffersonians took over, they did the same thing. By the 1840s, the joke carried in newspapers and Congress was that lightkeepers were first and foremost drunks making political speeches on behalf of those who appointed them. 

So why did state governments relinquish patronage? It stands to reason that they too liked to dispense patronage to their local machines. The answer is that the federal government used a carrot-and-stick approach. On the carrot side, it gave states subsidies for many years—well in excess of usual operating costs—to cede the lighthouses. On the stick side, Hamilton recruited the help of pilotage associations, whose political influence was immense; they conducted some of the first strikes in American history and frequently were able to bend state and local governments to their desires. He won them over by offering relief payments for impoverished pilots and their families, as well as the services of a state-funded Marine Hospital. This was ultimately enacted in 1798 in the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. The pilotage associations—notably the Boston Marine Society—brought pressure to bear on state governments that were reluctant to cede their lighthouses.

Now, notice the broad coalition that emerged through rearranging multiple markets at once. The public saw the lighthouse. Shipowners saw protectionism against their foreign competitors. Merchants saw hidden extra tariffs. Pilots saw welfare programs. Politicians saw appointments and patronage. State governments saw fiscal relief and political threats. The coalition succeeded because different participants supported the same policy for different reasons.

And ultimately, there were more lighthouses. America saw an exceptional expansion of its lighthouse network—far ahead of nations like Britain and France. True, some lighthouses were built according to political needs, but the increase in maritime safety was real. Thus, on that very narrow ground, federal provision probably did make people better off. But that is indeed too narrow. When we account for the protectionism in shipping—implying higher freight rates—the higher tariffs and federal taxes, and the patronage, we find that the whole scheme was far less beneficial.

The Island Fallacy

When the history of lighthouse federalization was written for the United States, historians celebrated the benefits (i.e., that there were more lighthouses). The same is true of many nationalizations: canals in the United States, electrical utilities in Canada, water utilities in the United States and Britain, and telephone systems and railways in Britain, Ireland, and France, among many others. The costs were often omitted, forgotten, or treated as peripheral.

What remains is the “island” that the state leaves us to examine: the nationalized sector itself, stripped of the broader fiscal, regulatory, and political changes that made nationalization possible. This creates what might be called an “island fallacy,” whereby a nationalized industry is evaluated as though it were an isolated unit whose performance can be measured independently of the effects on other markets via tariffs, taxes, regulations, privileges, subsidies, and patronage that are associated with nationalizations. By being asked to look only at that market, it seems easier to buy the “public interest” motivations that are advanced as justification.

But because nationalization rarely involves only a single market, this is a dangerous acquiescence. To create the political coalition necessary for nationalization, governments typically alter conditions across multiple markets, allowing different constituencies to extract rents from different parts of the intervention. Those effects may appear in higher taxes, protection from competition, subsidized prices and rates, regulatory privileges, patronage opportunities, distorted investment, or altered patterns of trade and production. The island fallacy is therefore especially dangerous because it directs attention toward the visible performance of the nationalized industry while pushing many of the costs that made that performance politically possible outside the frame of analysis.

Understanding why governments nationalize—as part of a broader attempt to secure rents for a wide political coalition—is important not only for explaining why nationalization occurs. It is even more crucial for understanding how nationalization, rather than the free play of market forces, ultimately affects living standards. Examples from the past may be easiest to see, but the pattern all but certainly holds true today as well, and many new discoveries remain to be made in this area of economic history.

Since March, I have tried to use this space to work out what it means to be a liberal, and to consider alternative visions of civil society. At the simplest level, liberalism requires humility and tolerance.

But is tolerance possible when humility is absent? Yeats famously diagnosed the problem: 

The “best” are the people who agree with us; the “worst” are those benighted souls who oppose us. I can’t possibly be tolerant of you when you are so wrong.

Does that mean liberalism is unsustainable in the face of populism?

Presuming Liberty

Following Adam Smith, I have argued for a presumption in favor of decentralized private choice and emergent institutions. That presumption is rebuttable, but the burden of proof must lie on anyone who claims that centralized power and the denial of individual agency is better. My approach, using “public choice,” recognizes that politics is an indispensable means of achieving collective, cooperative outcomes without privileging or romanticizing the state. 

The state should not be dismissed as evil, but neither should it be romanticized as inherently good, a focus of moral value in and of itself. There are legitimate and difficult questions about whether there is a collective “will” that the state discovers and enacts. The most plausible, and modest, claim is that people use the technology of “state power” to provide mutual protection and achieve shared goals. 

The alternatives to this modest view of the state are a wide and haphazard range of different moral and practical collectivisms, imposed by central authorities. We can agree that the state must have police authority, but endowing the state with moral authority is simply incompatible with liberalism. Karl Marx, to his credit, identified the potential problem in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” and correctly diagnosed the sources of populism as a dispossession and disruption of social cohesion. It is no great stretch to extend Marx’s analysis of the nineteenth century to the present, as the resurgence of populism portends a new paroxysm of authoritarian excess.

The tendency of an order to become disordered is characteristic of physical systems; we have seen that authoritarian political systems likewise have that tendency. But, and it pains me to concede, the same can be said of the order that is liberalism. To survive, liberalism must balance the power of majorities and the rights of individuals. But are not majorities, especially populist majorities, just as corruptible and dangerous as an individual autocrat? If a constitution cannot constrain an autocrat, it cannot constrain a populist mob.

Liberalism is not a checklist of ideal policy solutions. Instead, it is an evolved answer to the permanent political problem: some people want to rule, and many of the other people want to be ruled over. Many citizens want a strong leader to fix all their problems and make the world right. Liberalism is a means of controlling and limiting the impacts of these hasty impulses, but it is sustainable only so long as it is broadly supported by the citizens it protects.

Can Liberalism Survive Populism?

The pattern is clear: the populist impulse of the citizens, who want to be ruled by a strongman, sometimes aligns with the desire of a would-be autocrat, who wants the job of ruling them. That background suggests that the survival of liberalism is far from assured. How can a political order built on limiting power survive? In the Republic, Plato famously spelled out how populism becomes tyranny, saying that

The language is archaic, but the description sounds as if it had been taken from this morning’s newspaper. The tyrant is even taking his enemies to court.

James Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan mimics Plato’s argument, but it focuses on structure instead of bad actors. Starting in a state of nature, where each grabs what they want and holds what they can, Buchanan accepts the Hobbesian claim that rational, self-interested people would agree to accept some kind of protective state. But then, in Buchanan’s account, the same government that rescues you from anarchy could also become a new source of predation.

Public choice economics emphasizes structural flaws instead of bad actors. The reason for that emphasis is that the will to power is everywhere: I would rather be the one making the rules than the one following them. And you probably would, too. If I had power, I am convinced I would use it to do good. In fact, given that there is so much good to be done, it makes no sense for me to accept limits on my power, unless I am forced to do so. You might say the same things about yourself, and about how you would use that power. I could tell myself, and then tell others, a very good story about why that arrangement served everyone’s interest. And likewise you. Of course, if I already have power, no one can force me to accept new limits, and my ability to command mobs allows me to break through the limits that already exist.

Frustratingly, it is precisely that fact—that no one would accept limits on their own power—that justifies liberalism’s insistence on limitations on power in general. There are no people “good” enough to be entrusted with unlimited power; I am willing to accept exclusion from power as long as everyone else is, also.

Of course, that claim is contestable, and it may well simply be wrong. But I want to take a slightly different direction: Assuming that my claim about liberalism is correct, and that no other system can limit coercion and repression, is liberalism sustainable?

Militant Democracy: Loewenstein’s Dilemma

Constitutional limits on the state, and internal checks and balances, are liberalism’s answers to the universal desire to rule. But what happens when the threat to liberal democracy comes not from a king or a bureaucrat but from a political movement that uses liberalism’s own procedures and protections to destroy liberalism?

This is the problem Karl Loewenstein called “militant democracy” in a two-part essay for the American Political Science Review in June 1937, written as fascism was sweeping Europe. Loewenstein’s central observation was that fascism is not really an ideology with a program; it

Loewenstein’s account of the Weimar Republic is a caution: German democracy, out of a scrupulous and ultimately suicidal legalism, declined to restrict a party openly organizing paramilitary violence and explicitly campaigning to abolish the Constitution. Loewenstein’s conclusion was blunt: “Democracy must become militant.” Concretely, that meant legislation banning antidemocratic parties, restricting paramilitary organization, and suspending some of the civil liberties fascism was exploiting.

The paradox is obvious; such measures could only be taken “at the risk and cost of violating fundamental principles” in order to rescue those principles from a greater threat. That dilemma has not gone away. Alexander Kirshner’s A Theory of Militant Democracy expands the argument in the twenty-first century context: granting participation rights to groups that reject democratic values endangers the very rights on which liberal democracy depends. But asserting and using the power to deny those rights can also damage the liberal values a democracy claims to protect.

Militant democracy sounds plausible, but by its own argument, it cannot limit power. The ability to limit democracy to protect democracy is simply the original problem itself, armed with a new and even more powerful weapon. Loewenstein himself saw this danger clearly, even as he endorsed the militant response, warning that once democracies concentrate authority to protect their own fundamental principles, they risk destroying them.

Is liberalism, and its political manifestation—democracy—sustainable in the face of this dilemma? Earlier, I defined liberalism as the twin constraints of humility (I cannot assume I am right) and toleration (I cannot assume you are wrong). But an ideology or political movement that lacks humility can exploit tolerance until it breaks. More simply, someone who knows the truth, for certain, and is willing to use force to impose their conception of the right on all of society, can use Plato’s “mob,” or what we now call populism, to gain control.

Sustainability depends on a constant, delicate rebalancing, and an acceptance that there is no permanent rule that settles these questions once and for all. Liberalism’s strength lies in the value of its conception of human nature: since the desire to rule, even just to do good, is universal, choosing or electing “good people” can never be enough. It’s not just that sometimes bad people will be elected, though that is true. The real problem is that even good people expand their capacity to direct and coerce everyone else; the only durable check on this impulse is a set of rules that might be chosen before anyone knows whether he will be the ruler or the ruled.

This “veil of ignorance” provides a mindset that defines limits on the exercise of power, including even (or especially) the people who currently believe themselves virtuous enough to be trusted with more. But there is a problem: Loewenstein’s militant-democracy dilemma shows that liberal constitutions cannot protect themselves without confronting an irreducible judgment call about which speech, which parties, and which movements have forfeited their claim on democratic toleration. The veil of ignorance is no help, because authorities have to know which speech will be allowed and which will be curtailed or prohibited. The necessity of that kind of judgment creates new opportunities for the very abuse of power constitutions exist to prevent. There is no rule that resolves this in advance for every case. Every generation of liberals has to make that judgment again, under real uncertainty, knowing it might get the balance wrong in either direction—toward a tolerance that lets its enemies dismantle it or toward a militancy that becomes indistinguishable from the thing it was meant to stop.

Of course, there will always be people who look in the mirror and see a king, a president, or a Bonaparte waiting for his moment. If their populist followers are sure that they are right, and other positions are wrong, tolerance by the rest of society can be actively dangerous. The problem is that, as Loewenstein pointed out, withdrawing tolerance cannot be the answer.

In 1770, a century and a half before Yeats’s dire pronouncement, Voltaire noted the same problem, but with a more hopeful conclusion. In a letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, he said: “Doubt is not a very pleasant state, but certainty is absurd…Only charlatans are certain... In our deep ignorance, let us do our best.”

If liberalism is to survive, it will require that advocates restore political humility to its rightful place. Tolerance is only dangerous if humility is lacking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about virtue signaling lately. It’s a term that’s been popular for a decade or so, peaking around the Black Lives Matter protests. It is used to refer to the practice of publicly displaying support for a cause in low-cost, low-commitment ways. Most often you’ll hear it accompanied by a sneer and the suggestion that if the virtue signaler really cared about their cause, they would do something more effective than just wearing a button, boycotting a restaurant, joining a march, or displaying a yard sign. You’ll frequently hear celebrities and college students accused of it. It’s never a compliment.

I get it. I really do. The 1990s Red Ribbon Project drew important attention to the silence and shaming surrounding the AIDS crisis. But the full Pantone color chart of ribbons to raise awareness for other diseases has diluted the effectiveness of that original ribbon, which had been an important cue for the kind of media attention that helped spur a meaningful response to the AIDS crisis. And even at its most attention-getting, a ribbon is only a ribbon. 

It would be easy to accuse ribbon wearers of virtue signaling and to hold them in contempt. Plenty of people do. Some people even go so far as to encourage “vice signaling” as a more honest counterpoint to virtue signaling. The mind of a vice signaler works like this: “We all know that dropping some spare change into a panhandler’s coffee cup won’t solve anything. It isn’t anything more than a cheap virtue signal used to make you feel better about yourself. To prove how superior I am to such meaningless charades, I will not only not give that person my spare change, I will also tell them to get a job or go to hell. That way everyone will know that I’m not falling for the con job of virtue signaling.” Rather than wearing a ribbon, a vice signaler might tell every ribbon wearer he meets that he can see how little they care about the disease in question. 

I guess that’s one way to go about things, being so confident in the correctness of one’s answers, the superiority of one’s intellect, and the futility of addressing big problems with small gestures that mocking others’ good intentions might even pass for wisdom. 

But at the same time I’ve been thinking about how big and intractable the problems we face are, and about the old joke that goes “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I’ve been thinking about the opening of Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. She writes, 

Maybe small steps do matter. A political philosophy that is marked by skepticism about grand plans, men of system, and the romance of politics should recognize the importance of small signals that indicate that someone cares, even a little bit, about something we think matters. It’s nonsense for liberals to insist that people refrain from voicing opinions about politics until they can guarantee the kind of massive structural change that we otherwise find so suspicious. 

I recently joined about a thousand of my neighbors to march in protest against a rally in favor of the mass deportation of immigrants. It was hosted near the quiet Indianapolis suburb where I live. Probably spurred by community objections to the opening of an ICE office in the next town over, by the presence in my suburb of the largest mosque in the state of Indiana, and by a lieutenant governor who has made no secret of his anti-immigration sentiments, news of the mass deportation rally was all over social media, and I was fielding daily queries from friends who wanted to know what the heck I was doing living in a town that could countenance this. My kids were getting angrier by the minute and despaired over a state and a nation where people could think that a mass deportation rally was something to celebrate.

Academic that I am, I spent a lot of time after I heard about the rally talking about the importance of free speech and the right to assemble. I talked to the kids and my friends about the Nazis marching through Skokie and why I thought their right to do so was important. I also talked about the research I’d seen on the contributions immigrants made to America, to my community, and to my own family, and why those were important. I talked about how the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the country might be targeted at one or two groups to begin with, but it would be leveled at all of us soon. I wrote to my mayor to tell him all these things as well. 

Those one-on-one conversations and targeted emails to people in power were almost certainly more effective than getting up, putting on my sneakers, and carrying a sign through the streets of Fishers, Indiana for a few hours. No one would have noticed if I hadn’t marched. (I almost didn’t, in fact, because thunderstorms were looming.)

But I did march. And while my state and my country’s cultural reckoning over issues as large, complex, and contentious as immigration is not going to be solved, or even eased, by the actions of one middle-aged Midwestern mom, it would be inaccurate to dismiss the importance of the march as mere virtue signaling. And that’s not because I think there’s anything particularly special about me. It’s because I think there are several things that are very special about virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling is visible. One of the reasons some people scoff at virtue signaling is because they say it is performative—that the actions taken by virtue signalers are only done because other people see them. David Shariatmadari commented in The Guardian that virtue signaling is a form of vanity. But I think the performative aspect is exactly why virtue signaling is valuable. I marched because I wanted my kids to know that anti-immigrant actions and sentiments are not something that I will silently accept. I marched because I wanted my neighbors to know the same thing. And, though I didn’t know it when I set out, I marched because I wanted the families who stood in their doorways wearing traditional dress from their home countries to see friendly faces on the sidewalks of their town on a day when they felt threatened. None of that will change the political kerfuffle over immigration one bit. But it might help change my neighborhood just a little. And that’s valuable to me. 

Virtue signaling models the norms we value. Jacob Levy has persuasively argued here at Liberalism.org for the importance of norms in fighting for a liberal culture. He writes,

Virtue signaling is one of the ways we can do that. It is valuable because it demonstrates and models support for the cultural norms that hold us together. In the case of the march, those norms include the ideal of America as a diverse nation that welcomes those from other countries, the importance of peaceful assembly, and the responsibility we each have to look out for one another and to protect the vulnerable.

Virtue signaling crowds out vice signaling. Levy’s piece also warns about the danger of norm erosion, which is what happens when our support for and modeling of important norms lessens and allows them to erode or collapse completely. In much the same way that bad money drives out good money, vice can crowd out virtue. Vice signaling can also crowd out virtue signaling, drowning us all in a tsunami of the worst of human behavior—and in cheap shows of support for it. We face a cultural moment when the space for liberal ideas is smaller by the day, and the voices ranged against those ideas are louder, angrier, and more uncivilized by the minute. Knowing that, it strikes me as irresponsible, perhaps even immoral, to discourage even the smallest effort—a button, a ribbon, a handmade protest sign—that raises a voice to support a virtue we value. There may be more effective and more efficient ways to support a liberal society, but every signal that someone wants to be on our team needs to be respected and valued, not rejected for not being enough. 

Virtue signaling changes you. But maybe the most important thing about virtue signaling is not what it does to the world around us, but what it does to us. The day I left my house for the march, I was angry at my community and at my neighbors. I was full of the kind of sick despair that has immobilized me for some time now. But taking a small action—no matter how small—helped restore me. And seeing others willing to take those small actions along with me helped even more. I can’t change the world, or the country, or the country’s immigration policy, or even the bad actors who live near me, but I can change myself. When I do that, I get better and braver and more inclined to do the things—wear a button, carry a sign, write an article—that might change something somewhere down the line.

This is how we rebuild a liberal order instead of watching it collapse around us. Not all at once. Not by hoping for a strongman on our own side. Not by moving fast and breaking things. And not by mocking those who sincerely want to help. We do it bite by bite and bird by bird. 

Property rights were central to the origins of the liberal political tradition. And, in our time especially, they should be central once again. In addition to their inherent value as a vital element of liberty and autonomy, bolstering them is essential to uplifting the poor and disadvantaged and boosting prosperity and innovation. The right to private property can also help protect a variety of other important rights.

Property rights were a central focus of the early liberal tradition. John Locke famously wrote that the purpose of government was the protection of “life, liberty, and property.” Many of the American Founders made similar statements. At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton avowed that “one great obj[ect] of Gov[ernment] is the personal protection and security of property.” James Madison—Hamilton’s great adversary on many issues—agreed, writing in his famous 1792 essay on “Property,” that “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort… This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

In more recent times, many—including many left-liberals—have downgraded property rights, and advocated that they be severely limited, often supposedly to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged. Yet the poor and disadvantaged have the most to gain from strengthening protection for property rights. Stronger protections would raise living standards for them, and for society as a whole. 

The Guardian of Every Other Right

As early liberals understood, property is essential to liberty. Almost every important human activity requires the use of property. This is most obviously true of those involving property in land, such as housing or most types of work. But the same is true of those requiring other types of material goods. We cannot feed and clothe ourselves without property rights in objects.

Property is also essential to the exercise of almost every type of liberty and autonomy. There is no meaningful freedom of speech without property rights in books, computers, newspapers, printing presses, internet connections, and other facilities necessary to disseminate our words. There is little, if any, freedom of religion without property rights in locations needed to hold religious services, propagate religious doctrines, and operate other religious institutions. The right to contraception protected by the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, though usually thought of as a “privacy” right, depends on the right to acquire and possess property rights in contraceptives.

We can make similar points about almost any other form of liberty. If exercising it requires the use of land or material goods, that exercise depends on property rights. Without such rights, the government could at any time negate the liberty simply by denying the ability to use property needed to exercise it. 

Moreover, liberty depends not just on the mere legal ownership of property, but on the right to use that property for the purposes the owner decides. A mere right to “exclude” other people isn’t enough (even though some property theorists claim exclusion is the central element of property). It is of little avail if you are officially the owner of a printing press or a computer, but are not allowed to use it to publish and disseminate your words. Being the owner of a church is of little spiritual value if you cannot use it to hold services. And so on. 

Ultimately, in most situations, we seek to own property for the purposes of using it. And the right to use is not only the foundation of property ownership itself, but also essential to the exercise of almost all other liberties. For this reason, among others, Arthur Lee—a publicist and diplomat during the American Revolution—called property “the guardian of every other right.” 

Socialists and many left-liberals may retort that reasoning like the above shows that a system of private property gives liberty only to the rich. As the saying goes, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” But this underrates the many ways in which private property guarantees liberty to all. In a pluralistic, competitive market economy, the owners of productive property have incentives to use it in ways that meet a variety of preferences. If there is a market demand for, say, left-wing speech or right-wing speech, property owners have an incentive to use their facilities to meet the demand. If some owners do not want to serve a particular market niche, that creates an opportunity—and an incentive—for others to fill the gap.

The same goes for the demand for religious services, for contraceptives, and so on. Markets allow us to accommodate a diverse range of preferences. People who rent property also acquire crucial property rights, even if not the same as those that belong to the owners of land or production facilities. And similarly, landowners who rent out homes to tenants have incentives to cater to a wide variety of preferences and lifestyles. Some allow pets, some not. Some allow religious services on site, others not. Some have rules severely restricting noise, while others are more permissive. And so on. 

By contrast, if the state imposes a single rule for these issues and others like them, it destroys the options created by pluralism and competition. The same occurs if the government simply owns the relevant properties outright, as in a socialist system. That’s true regardless of whether the government’s rules reflect the views of the majority of the public, a coterie of “experts,” or narrow interest groups that manage to “capture” the political process.

How Undermining Property Rights Harms the Poor and Disadvantaged

The erosion of property rights over much of the last hundred years has worked to the great detriment of the poor and disadvantaged. Strengthening those rights could do much to enhance liberty and opportunity for the least well-off, and to boost economic growth and innovation in society generally.

This is most obviously true in the case of the housing crisis—perhaps the biggest obstacle to opportunity for the poor and disadvantaged in the United States today. And exclusionary zoning is the biggest cause of that crisis. 

Exclusionary zoning involves restrictions on land use that constrain the amount and type of housing that can be built in particular areas. Some 70 percent of all residential property in the United States is zoned for single-family residences only. A broad cross-ideological array of economists and land-use scholars agrees that zoning is responsible for massive housing shortages, and that it also cuts off millions of people—particularly the poor and minorities—from economic and social opportunities. As a result, millions of people have their liberty restricted. They are also prevented from being as productive and innovative as they otherwise could be.

The people blocked from moving by exclusionary zoning and other, similar restrictions are disproportionately the poor and minorities. Historically, as various scholars have documented, zoning restrictions were often adopted for the explicit purpose of keeping out Blacks and other minorities, excluding the poor, or both. A combination of economic ignorance, racial and ethnic bigotry, and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) resistance to development has led to the establishment and persistence of restrictions that cause enormous harm.

Exclusionary zoning has grown since the Supreme Court’s badly flawed 1926 decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. upheld it against constitutional challenge. In a 2024 Texas Law Review article and a shorter version in The Atlantic, Joshua Braver and I outline why most exclusionary zoning violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires payment of “just compensation” whenever the government takes private property. This is true from the standpoint of both originalist and living constitutionalism. In a recent follow-up article, we describe how state constitutional law can be used to combat exclusionary zoning. I have also published a shorter, nonacademic version of the latter at the NYU Brennan Center State Court Report. In these works, we also describe how exclusionary zoning can be curbed through a combination of litigation and political action. I am a libertarian, generally sympathetic to originalism. Braver is a progressive and a living constitutionalist. Our collaboration here is an example of how expanding property rights can unite different elements of the liberal tradition. 

Zoning restrictions and other similar regulations are potentially justifiable in rare situations where they forestall a serious threat to public health or safety, such as the spread of pollution or contagious disease. As described in our Texas Law Review article, these kinds of considerations are at the heart of the traditional “police power” that states have historically enjoyed. This police power constitutes an exception to the constitutional rule that governments must compensate property owners when their property is taken. But that exception should be construed narrowly, and the government must bear the burden of proof, in order to prevent the police power from being used as a pretext for suppressing normal housing construction.

Exclusionary zoning is just one of several ways in which undermining property rights has destroyed liberty and opportunity for the poor and minorities, often on a massive scale. 

The same is true of many state and federal courts’ decisions to allow state and local governments to use eminent domain to condemn private property for almost any purpose they want. The Fifth Amendment only allows condemnation of private property for a “public use.” The dominant early understanding of this provision was that a public use could only be for a government-owned project, or one owned by a private party legally required to serve the entire public, such as a public utility. Unfortunately, beginning with the Supreme Court’s terribly reasoned decision in Berman v. Parker (1954), federal courts started to interpret “public use” to include any possible benefit to the public.

In my book The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain, I describe how the result of this ruling and others like it at the state level was to empower state and local governments to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of people—mostly poor and minorities—through “blight,” “urban renewal,” and “economic development” takings. James Baldwin famously described “urban renewal” as “Negro removal.” He was not far off, given the demographics of those displaced. While victims of these takings get compensation, the amounts often fall well below the “fair market value” required by Supreme Court precedent, and that metric itself often fails to fully compensate the owners and displaced persons for their losses.

This caused great suffering, and in most cases it has destroyed more economic value than it created. Government officials who approve condemnations at the behest of well-connected developers and other interest groups have little incentive to ensure that they actually produce the economic and social benefits that supposedly justify them. Moreover, destroying communities and making property rights insecure predictably reduces investment and development in the long run.

In 2005, the Supreme Court largely reaffirmed Berman in a closely divided 5–4 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which upheld the condemnation of homes for the purpose of promoting private “economic development.” Kelo led to a massive political and legal backlash, as forty-five states enacted eminent domain reform laws, and multiple state supreme courts rejected Kelo as a guide to the interpretation of the public use clauses of their state constitutions. But many of the new reform laws impose few or no meaningful constraints on the use of eminent domain, and much work remains to be done to fully curb this kind of abuse. 

Asset forfeitures are another area where weak protection for property rights leads to abuses that disproportionately harm the disadvantaged. In many states, law enforcement agencies can confiscate property that was supposedly used in the commission of a crime, even if the owner was never charged or convicted of anything, and even if he or she had no involvement at all in the supposed offense. And, often, there is little due process given to the victim. Even when a crime has been committed, the forfeitures are often hugely disproportionate to the offense. In a case currently before the Supreme Court, the state of Alaska confiscated a $95,000 plane owned by a “bush” pilot because he had illegally transported a six-pack of beer.

Like exclusionary zoning and the use of eminent domain, asset forfeitures disproportionately harm the poor and minorities. The confiscation of a car or similar property harms them far more than the wealthy. For a working-class person, it can cause the loss of a job or other severe harm. And less affluent people have greater difficulty affording the expense of contesting the seizure in court, which often is almost as great or greater than the cost of the seized property.

Some on both left and right seek to fix housing displacement by increasing government abrogation of property rights rather than reducing it. But such efforts tend to be harmful and counterproductive. Rent control, often touted as a solution for high housing costs, has a long history of exacerbating housing shortages by reducing the amount of property on the market. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to confiscate many apartments could well be even worse. Those on the right who hope to address the housing crisis by deporting immigrants are equally off-base. Increased deportations exacerbate housing problems because undocumented immigrants are disproportionate contributors to the construction workforce.

Government control of property also often threatens civil liberties. The Trump administration’s effort to use the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to force broadcasters to keep critics off the air leverages the FCC’s control over broadcast frequencies. Sadly, it is far from the first time the FCC has been used to target political opponents of the party in power, though Trump’s efforts are particularly egregious. As Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase showed in a classic 1959 article, we can eliminate this threat to freedom of speech by abolishing the FCC and turning broadcast frequencies into private property. 

For similar reasons, we should resist both the Trump administration’s and left-wing democratic socialists’ efforts to have the federal government take ownership of large parts of major industries. Such plans will predictably lead to lower-quality goods and services and give the government leverage with which to suppress diversity and target opponents. 

Conclusion

I cannot provide a comprehensive account of property rights in a single essay, nor address all possible objections to them. But liberals would do well to recognize the centrality of private property to the overall liberal project, and to support at least a presumption that land and productive assets should be privately owned, and the owners allowed to use the property as they see fit, barring proof that the use poses a serious threat to public health or safety. Whether you are a libertarian who emphasizes property rights’ role in enhancing liberty and human happiness, an egalitarian focused on the interests of the poor and disadvantaged, or some combination of both, you have good reason to support strengthening protection for private property rights.

The current crisis of liberalism reflects a loss of faith in, and sharp reaction against, liberal institutions, policies, and ethics. Increasingly influential on both the Left and Right, this reaction reflects not only the perceived failure of liberal policies to deliver on their promises of prosperity and security, but an “absence of leadership of the liberal international order”—a deficit of conviction, clarity, or agility among elites committed to liberalism. Even leading defenders of liberalism acknowledge that something has gone wrong. The political theorist Steven B. Smith starkly declares that “The world is on fire,” because the “liberal order” is “now in a state of advanced decay, if not decrepitude.” His fellow political theorist William Galston finds “the current ills of liberal democracy” “deep and pervasive,” while the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has gone from foretelling liberalism’s triumph at “the end of history” to acknowledging that “liberalism has been in retreat in recent years.” 

This crisis of self-confidence has prompted reconsiderations of liberalism’s merits—and a return to episodes in its past, either to identify the roots of liberalism’s current travails, or to furnish a model of how to respond to our crisis through the example of how past liberals responded to theirs. Within this debate, the Cold War liberals in particular bear a legacy that should interest liberals of every persuasion today.

For some, Cold War liberalism invokes a political grouping, mostly in the United States, including Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, Governor Adlai Stevenson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, diplomat George Kennan—and various policy experts and activists working for and advising them. Others see Cold War liberalism as an intellectual position, represented by such figures as the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and literary critic Lionel Trilling. While the thinkers, policymakers, and elected officials sometimes interacted and aligned, they were also separated by their concerns, orientations, and contexts; they also sometimes significantly disagreed with one another. Cold War liberal policymakers may offer models of political wisdom—or presumption and folly. But it is Cold War liberal intellectuals who bequeath ways of conceiving, defending, and embodying liberal ideals that constitute a possible inheritance to be drawn on—or disavowed—today. Accordingly, some of the most direct polemics over Cold War liberalism focus on the ideas of thinkers rather than the decisions of officials. 

These intellectuals constituted a climate of opinion and a distinct segment of the ideological map. Their position may be defined in contrast to other political and intellectual stances of their time. But what was distinctive in their thought also emerges in comparison to other forms of liberalism—particularly the idealist, perfectionist, and progressive liberalisms that came before them, and the liberal egalitarianism and neoliberalism that came after. 

Cold War liberalism was shaped by the scarring, sobering experiences of totalitarianism and total war, which disabused many liberals of the psychological and historical optimism of their predecessors. Cold War liberals recognized that progress was not inevitable, and regression to barbarity always possible. This outlook may be best characterized not as pessimism, but (in Berlin’s phrase) “historical skepticism,” which rejected all simple historical narratives—and the idea that the future was preordained. Berlin and other Cold War liberals criticized Marxism not only for “utopianism,” but for viewing history as driven by “vast impersonal forces.” This view served as an “alibi” for enforced famines, purges, massacres, and indeed extermination committed in the name of “History.” Cold War liberals defended not only political freedom, but historical free agency, in order to empower individual action, affirm human dignity, and assert responsibility, which became their ethical watchword. This meant that they also emphasized politics against economic or sociological determinism, and political judgment against philosophical abstraction.

Not just totalitarianism, but the mindset that American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called totalism, was Cold War liberals’ nemesis. Totalism embraced a Manichean division of the world into pure good and evil; a demand for total moral transformation to achieve personal and collective purity; erasure of the separation between individual and group, and total subordination of the former to the latter; and the elevation of official doctrine over personal conscience, judgment, and experience. Against this, many Cold War liberals embraced ethical pluralism. This held that there were multiple genuine values and legitimate perspectives, which did not cohere into an orderly system. Values—liberty, equality, order; personal integrity and the well-being of the community; individual uniqueness and social cohesion—made ineluctable claims, and yet they pointed in opposed directions, creating moral dilemmas. Combined with awareness of human fallibility and malevolence, this fostered a tragic outlook. These considerations inspired an affirmation of conflict as both a precondition for, and an inescapable consequence of, freedom, which was a paramount value for Cold War liberalism.

There were four notable features of Cold War liberals’ conception of freedom. First, freedom was identified as a core value of democracy, which Cold War liberals identified not only with collective self-rule, but with regulated conflict and individual liberties. For Aron, the difference between democracy and totalitarianism was that the latter sought to eradicate conflict through suppression; the former sought to institutionalize, and thus tame, conflict. The second notable feature was Berlin’s influential identification of freedom with “negative liberty”—the carving-out of a secure area for individuals to choose “as you wish to choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, un-bullied, not swallowed up in some vast system.” Third, as this suggests, Cold War liberals set freedom in opposition not only to political power, but to intellectual uniformity; they identified freedom with free thinking, individuality, and variety. As Ralph Ellison wrote in Invisible Man: “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.” Freedom was thus linked to not only a political system, but a mindset or ethos, to be defended against anti-liberalism and cultivated within liberalism itself. Cold War liberals sought, in Trilling’s words, to “recall liberalism to its first imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” Even as Berlin’s defense of negative liberty sought to separate entitlement to liberty from attainment of moral perfection, so as to make liberty more available to all, Cold War liberals recognized that the defense of liberty is morally and intellectually demanding.

Cold War liberals responded not only to the world wars and totalitarianism, but to the Great Depression. For them, the preeminent liberal economist was not F. A. Hayek, but J. M. Keynes. They identified with “the non-Communist Left” (Berlin) or “the free left,” opposed to “the tyranny of the irresponsible plutocracy” (Schlesinger). Their ethical watchword, besides responsibility, was “decency.” Decent politics ruled out Stalinist ruthlessness; a decent society required welfare provision to prevent misery and dependency. 

But Cold War liberals’ thinking about political economy reflected not only ethical scruples, but political realism. Like both contemporaneous social democrats and Ordoliberals, they recognized that the state played a necessary role in structuring the economy. Like Madisonians, they perceived the importance of building in what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing powers.” Bringing these ideas together, they embraced the idea of the state acting to institutionalize countervailing powers against corporations and oligarchs—whether through government agencies or legal protections empowering associations representing workers or consumers. Wary of both government and corporate power, Cold War liberals championed pluralism not only of values, but of interests and associations. They allied with labor unions and civil liberties groups—so long as these were anti-communist. 

In world affairs, Cold War liberals sought, not always successfully, to steer between extremes of “realism” and “idealism.” As anti-fascists in the 1930s, they had broken with the pacifism embraced by many people of conscience in the aftermath of World War I. They perceived the appeasement of domestically tyrannical and internationally expansionist nations (whether Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR) as neither morally acceptable nor politically prudent. Yet witnessing how crusading moralism had justified the follies of the first World War—and the atrocities of the second—left them wary of missionary zeal. Some—like Niebuhr, Aron, Kennan—were associated with “realism” in international relations. But, in contrast to harsher forms of realism, they saw a place for morality in world affairs. Some succumbed to confidence in the wisdom of foreign policy experts. But others recognized the limitations of reason, and the powers of prejudice, self-righteous conceit, anger, ambition, and panic as afflicting not just “the crowd” but elites who imagined themselves above such things. Unlike illiberal Cold Warriors, they believed moral considerations should inform means as well as ends: not all measures that served righteous ends were acceptable.

At the same time, witnessing the failures of interwar legalistic idealism, as expressed through such initiatives as the League of Nations and Kellogg–Briand Pact, led Cold War liberals to doubt the adequacy of institutions, procedures, and agreements to constrain and guide world affairs. They recognized that, as Hobbes asserted, “covenants without the sword” were powerless to achieve security. While they promoted the construction of international institutions and law, Cold War liberals also accepted U.S. global power as a fact of life, and potentially the greatest force for relative good in the world. This led them to sometimes support or excuse actions that conflicted with their avowed commitments to prudence and moral integrity.

Nevertheless, and despite its tendency to define liberalism against totalitarianism, Cold War liberals resisted a Manichean view of the Cold War, insisting that, as Aron said, “politics is never a conflict between good and evil, but a choice between the preferable and the detestable.” They criticized conformity and dogmatism not only among supporters of communism, but among champions of “the West.” Berlin denied that “the answer to Communism is a counter faith, equally fervent, militant … irrational, despotic, etc.”; and championed “the inestimably precious gifts of skepticism and irony.” Niebuhr detected a “similarity in technique and temper” and “spirit” between Soviet communism and McCarthyism; he warned that “if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the [Soviet] foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle” due to “hatred and vainglory.”

Such nuances are forgotten when, as may sometimes happen today, Cold War liberalism is equated with affirmation of U.S. global power. It is, however, accurate to identify Cold War liberalism with elements of the postwar order that are now under assault: international organizations promoting international law, free trade, and human rights; U.S. support of liberal democracies around the globe; a welfare state and regulated finance and industry; limits on and accountability for power through the rule of law; and an “open society” that welcomes immigrants, multiple cultures, and dissent. 

Many of the conditions that allowed for the (limited) success of this vision no longer exist. Cold War liberal policies depended on alliances and institutions, and prosperity and stability, that had been bequeathed by the successful war on fascism. For all their stress on conflict and open-mindedness, Cold War liberals relied on a consensus that affirmed a new social contract, and maintained a taboo on antiliberal ideologies. Over time these conditions eroded, and the reasons for them faded into memory. If for no other reason, this indicates that Cold War liberalism cannot offer a blueprint for liberals today, despite occasional attempts to invoke it as such. 

The conditions that shaped Cold War liberalism make it not only impractical, but undesirable, to revive it as a simple template for liberals today. A creature of a bygone political and cultural establishment, Cold War liberalism—for all its avowed suspicion of power and calls for humility—also evinced a confidence in the wisdom and staying power of this establishment, and in the West’s (or America’s) capacity for benevolent world leadership. Too often, this fostered complacency or hubris. For all of their theoretical commitment to pluralism, Cold War liberals frequently came to see the struggle against communism as the “one thing needful,” to which they subordinated other vital causes. Although they supported civil rights and decolonization, they often subordinated these goals to the exigencies of anti-communism—something of which some, such as Niebuhr, came to repent. Despite calls for openness and self-criticism, many Cold War liberals responded with anger, distrust, and condescension to the radical movements that came to prominence in the 1960s; too often they saw only excesses and follies, while ignoring genuine grievances and insights. 

Even if we bracket these failings, we should not be too hasty in taking Cold War liberals’  analyses of the dangers they faced as applicable to those confronting  us. As Jan-Werner Müller, one of the most astute scholars of Cold War liberalism, has noted, Cold War liberals defined themselves against opponents who were intellectuals and utopians. This hardly describes Donald Trump. Yet, as Laura K. Field has shown, the MAGA Right has been shaped by, and shaped, intellectuals whose embrace of militancy, fanaticism, and ruthlessness against moderation, compromise, self-doubt and self-restraint echo the anti-liberal ideologies against which Cold War liberalism took shape.

Of course, no human being, ideology, or movement achieves perfection. And no past model can be a blueprint for today; we must open our eyes to the present and think for ourselves. Nevertheless, not only the events but the ideas of the past—both errors and insights—do furnish much of our primary material for making sense of the world. And humans do tend to draw, in both our efforts to make sense of the world and our search for guidance, on memory and narratives of the past. Defenders of liberal democracy as well as critics simply will look to the past, and they may legitimately hope to gain insight, inspiration, and fortification from their forebears.

In this regard, Cold War liberalism may be a wiser guide than more optimistic, ambitious alternatives. Certainly, its assumptions are no more tendentious, and its track record no more barbarous, than its predecessors, such as the idealism and ethical paternalism, and the faith in a single trajectory of progress, that underwrote liberal imperialism. Cold War liberalism also stands well above its Marxist-Leninist opponents. Recent events reinforce the twentieth century’s lesson that history follows no coherent or comforting “libretto,” that moral progress is not guaranteed, that change and tragedy inhere in human life.

This sense of tragedy should foster empathy for the defeated, including the victims of globalization, and awareness of the need for fortitude and resilience in facing reverses and defeats. The persistence of deep disagreement, and of beliefs regarded by more optimistic liberals as relics of unenlightened, “primitive” times, affirms the wisdom of Cold War liberals’ preference for defending liberalism by appeal to the evils and miseries of illiberalism, and to the goods liberalism provides—personal liberties and security against material misery and cruel, irresistible power—rather than through invocations of historical progress, or controversial visions of moral flourishing.

Cold War liberalism may also offer a better perspective than its immediate successors, neoliberalism and the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls and his followers. Its recognition of the power of unreason seems more plausible to me than these later liberalisms’ faith in either the economic rationality of the market, or in a “public reason” that can identify shared principles of justice. Cold War liberalism was more politically oriented than either, refusing to take refuge from the hard judgments and murky compromises of politics in either economic or philosophical abstractions. It is also distinguished from neoliberalism in its rejection of determinism. Hayek called for individuals to submit to a significant degree to the “impersonal forces” of the market, since a complex society “is necessarily based on the individual adjusting himself to changes whose cause and nature he cannot understand”; Hayek’s admirer Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative.” For Cold War liberals, there were always alternatives—and hence, a responsibility to choose.

Cold War liberals’ insights into both the importance of countervailing powers, and the need for state action to establish and preserve them, remain important resources for liberalism and have recently been powerfully developed by the political theorist Samuel Bagg. From this perspective, the overarching purpose of political effort, and the good of democracy, is to “maintain a precarious equilibrium,” “constantly threatened and in constant need of repair,” so as to “prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices,” (Berlin),  and to work for the “constant mitigation of asymmetries in private power and organizational capacity” through maintaining a “roughly egalitarian balance of social forces” (Bagg). If this is the goal, the means are not always clear. Many Cold War liberals’ confidence in an elite-dominated regulatory and welfare state may have underestimated the fallibility of “expert” administrators and the dangers of state capture. They did not, however, fail to recognize the importance of free markets and free elections to preserve both the dispersion of power and freedom of choice. The Soviet experience showed that a state monopoly over industry—and employment—would not emancipate workers, but fully enslave them.

To contrast Cold War liberalism with both Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism and neoliberalism,  and position it between socialism and minimally regulated capitalism, is not to equate it with a reactive centrism. The moderation Cold War liberals advocated was not, as Müller and Aurelian Craiutu have stressed, a matter of strategic “triangulation,” or fixing one’s position by splitting the difference between opposing sides. Rather, it was a rigorous ethical practice of careful judgment and firm commitment to maintaining fair institutions and giving competing claims their due.

Yet Cold War liberals were not always moderate. Müller has noted their oscillation between an embrace of modesty and compromise—and a longing for a morally clear “good fight.” This longing can be dangerous, but also emotionally sustaining, and politically efficacious in galvanizing action when moderation proves too uninspiring, emotionally exhausting, and constraining to fare well in a struggle against fervent foes. Perhaps Schlesinger’s call to make liberalism a “fighting faith” is timelier than Niebuhr’s and Berlin’s warning against militant faiths as such. Yet the effort to strike a balance between principled conviction and openness, resolution and flexibility, remains worthy of emulation.

Indeed, Cold War liberalism may be valuable as a model of the search for balance: between self-criticism and flexibility in the face of change, and resolute commitment to fundamental liberal values; and between clear-eyed recognition of reality and commitment to decency and integrity. Such balance is a matter of character, constant practice, and alert judgment. As such it is more demanding than more doctrinaire or purely procedural liberalisms. But when reality upsets our doctrines and political forces overwhelm our institutions, a return to Cold War liberalism’s politics of judgment, character, and action may be one alternative we cannot responsibly choose to avoid.

Beginning in April 2025, the Trump administration levied a variety of tariffs on virtually every country on earth, at a variety of levels, and with a variety of stated legal rationales. The latest range from 10 percent to 12.5 percent on goods from sixty different countries. One of the administration’s many justifications for tariffs is that they are necessary to counter threats to U.S. national security. Even Adam Smith, usually a critic of tariffs, conceded that in some instances national security concerns can justify the use of tariffs or other policies that limit trade. Modern proponents of using tariffs to address national security concerns often claim that such tariffs are simply addressing the national security externality. They overstate their case.

Economic theory holds that a national security externality may arise when firms and consumers do not adequately account for the impact their trade with foreign parties has on national security. As London School of Economics professor Luis Garicano puts it:

As an example, a car manufacturer imports steel from China to make cars, but it does not account for the fact that importing steel from China weakens the domestic steel industry. Since countries need steel to make tanks, planes, and guns to defend themselves, a weaker domestic steel industry creates a national vulnerability that is not accounted for when firms decide how much steel to import. As a result, too much Chinese steel is imported.

It is true that trade can create strategic vulnerabilities. Even if Chinese companies could make guns, ammunition, tanks, and fighter jets cheaper than every U.S. company, it would be a mistake to import our military equipment from a potential adversary that could cut off our supply of weapons. A similar, though weaker, argument can be made for things like steel, rare earths, magnets, certain pharmaceutical ingredients, or computer chips.

The existence of these vulnerabilities, however, does not tell us anything about how to address them. In “The Problem of Social Cost,” economist Ronald Coase described how the assignment of property rights and subsequent negotiation between parties can alleviate externalities. 

One of Coase’s key insights is that externalities are reciprocal. Coase uses the example of a farmer and cattle rancher to illustrate his point. The two are neighbors, and there is no fence between them. Absent the fence, the cattle tend to wander into the farmer’s fields and eat his crops. If the rancher does not take this damage into account when considering how large his herd should be, he will make his herd too large. If instead he were forced to compensate the farmer for the damage to his crops, he would internalize this additional cost, and the result would be a smaller herd.

This situation can be reversed. Suppose the farmer wants to increase the land he uses for crops, so he decides to erect a fence to keep the cattle out. Since the fence will prevent the cattle from grazing in the farmer’s field, the farmer is increasing costs for the rancher. If the farmer does not account for these higher costs, then he may enclose an area that is too large.

The optimal size of the fence from society’s standpoint depends on how much the farmer and rancher each value access to the land. Coase realized that if the farmer and rancher could negotiate, they would have incentives to reach the efficient solution regardless of which person controlled the decision about the fence. The only difference would be who must compensate whom, which depends on who controls the decision or has property rights over it.

The existence of an externality does not tell us how to, or who must, deal with it. The Trump administration argues we should curtail trade to address strategic vulnerabilities. If national security experts control the decision, then trade will be restricted, and businesses and consumers will have to bear the cost of addressing the externality, as they are doing with many of the recent tariffs. If instead commercial interests have the decision rights, while the national security community wants to restrict trade, the security community, presumably coordinated by the federal government, would have to compensate those domestic defense-sector firms harmed by the relative absence of trade restrictions. This has usually taken the form of a subsidy or a set-aside for firms in the defense sector.

Security analysts tend to invoke the externality argument, so perhaps that is why discussions of the defense externality typically assume the security community has the decision rights. But it is just as easy to argue that commerce should be prioritized instead. After all, people get satisfaction from creating new products and businesses that solve problems. Entrepreneurs and workers alike get satisfaction from using their incomes to provide for their families. Commerce—production and consumption—is foundational to a thriving society.

One could also argue that commerce makes national security possible in the broader sense by creating the wealth used to make tanks and pay soldiers. Countries that prioritize their military over their economy, such as the USSR, tend to fail because weak economic growth impedes their long-term ability to sustain their military.

Reasonable people can disagree over whether commerce or security should be prioritized in trade policy, and thus which group should bear the cost of addressing the security externality. Someone must bear the cost, though, and this is often left out of the discussion. One way to make the cost clearer is to incorporate the national security externality into the analysis of national trade policy, where it belongs.

In Garicano’s example above, the externality is at the firm level. Firms do not account for the strategic vulnerabilities they create through trade, so they trade too much. In economic jargon, the marginal social cost of the decision to trade exceeds the marginal private cost of the decision. The gap between the two needs to be closed so that firms internalize the vulnerability. So far so good.

At the national level, however, where the decision about overall trade policy is made, the strategic vulnerability costs are no longer external to the relevant decision. To determine the optimal amount and composition of trade, national policymakers need to compare the national marginal benefit of trade to the national marginal cost of trade. The national marginal benefit includes lower prices, a greater variety of goods, and the positive impacts of international competition on innovation, among other things. The national marginal cost includes the domestic adjustment costs borne by workers and firms, as well as the costs of any strategic vulnerabilities. When properly accounted for, the firm-level national security externality is a component of the national marginal cost that should be considered along with other costs and benefits, including positive externalities from trade. One example of a positive externality is that importing goods allows America to export dollars, which helps maintain the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status that enables us to borrow at lower interest rates, a benefit that could be worth as much as $33 trillion.

The mistake people often make is jumping from the firm-level security externality to the conclusion that national trade should be restricted. Demonstrating a firm or even an industry-level national security externality exists is not the same thing as demonstrating that at the margin, the national cost of trade exceeds the national benefit. To answer the latter, more important question, national security proponents need to quantify the total amount of the firm-level national security externalities and provide an estimate, or range of estimates, to policymakers who can incorporate these costs into the national costs of trade so they can be compared to the national benefits. 

This may be complicated, but it is not impossible. One recent study by Olivier Kooi, an economist at the London School of Economics, develops a framework to estimate the size of strategic vulnerabilities from lost domestic productive capacity and the impacts of various policy solutions. He finds that the presence of a national security externality does not necessarily justify restricting trade.

Good-faith estimates of the national costs and benefits of trade allow taxpayers, through their elected officials, to determine optimal trade policies. Accurate information empowers taxpayers to reveal their preferences about national security and trade through their buying and selling decisions, elections, lobbying, and other forms of political advocacy.

These signals are not perfect. They can be distorted by numerous factors, including rent-seeking and the rational ignorance of voters. Politicians also campaign for office, and govern, on a bundle of policy positions. This means voter preferences about any one issue, such as national security, can get dominated by other concerns. Recent tariff policy has been no exception, and it has certainly been shaped by many factors outside the scope of this essay.

These challenges are real, but they are not an excuse to use a firm-level externality to justify a national trade remedy. Since taxpayers care about both national security and commerce, and since they are ultimately responsible for funding whatever solution emerges from the political process, the costs each activity imposes on the other can and should be accounted for in the national-level analysis. With this information, taxpayers could analyze the costs and benefits of trade and consider a variety of solutions to address vulnerabilities, including more defense spending, stockpiles, import controls, purchase guarantees, or subsidies to spur domestic production.

A firm-level security externality only identifies a possible divergence between private and social incentives. It does not establish that national trade is excessive, determine the optimal composition of trade, or identify tariffs as the lowest-cost remedy. These answers require a national analysis that compares the total marginal costs, including security costs, to the total marginal benefits of trade. Absent this analysis, we are unlikely to implement policies that mitigate real security vulnerabilities without unduly restricting trade.

In liberal politics, principles act as coordination points around which activism can bubble up and coalitions can form. But coalitions take different forms, and these forms affect how the ideas of a coalition’s members are shaped within and by their collaboration. Fellow Liberalism.org contributor Matt Zwolinski recently emphasized that “tribes,” notionally formed by family, peers, or shared core values, may significantly define the ideas of their members. While this is true for most members of any political coalition, I want to explore how the form a coalition takes affects the ideas that it encourages its members to adopt. 

Political coalitions might be loose, defined by nothing more than shared principles or broad goals, toward which many people and groups work in parallel. For instance, one environmentalist group might use deliberate law-breaking, while another publishes research and reports as strategies to raise awareness of environmental damage done by oil companies. On the other hand, coalitions might give rise to and be sustained by persistent and integrated institutions for training, messaging, and political action, as when the groups constituting the American Civil Rights Movement came together to fight segregation and to secure voting rights in the southern United States. Between those poles are coalitions that can form contingent partnerships around specific political goals, without the expectation that coordination will outlive the fight for that goal. Examining these coalition configurations creates an opportunity to think about their trade-offs for overall political effectiveness and for defending specific ideas. 

Loose Coalitions: “The Only People We Hate More Than the Romans…”

I think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The People’s Front of Judea sketch pokes fun at left-wing and revolutionary politics by parodying the extent to which the political left prioritizes getting a single right answer over political pragmatism or cooperation across groups. Disagreements between the Popular Front (“Splitters!”) and the People’s Front of Judea prevent the groups from working together at all because they hate each other more than they hate the Romans. 

The extreme is illustrative, but what’s more normal in politics is that groups can agree on one goal, like expelling the Romans from Judea, but they can’t agree on specific steps or ultimate goals. Other times, groups might not be able to work together because of their different contexts. In the movement for criminal justice reform in the United States during the 2010s, social justice messaging was effective in Northern cities, but entirely the wrong approach in more conservative states. Whatever the reason, sometimes, different political actors can work parallel to and in the same direction as one another, but they can’t work effectively together. 

There’s an obvious advantage to this strategy for those driven by beliefs about how the world ought to work. When there is no need to work across groups, there is little need for compromise. Groups and individuals are free to pursue ideals without pressure to alter their messaging, vision, or beliefs.

This type of loose coalition can be important when pursuing far-ideal goals, like large swings in public opinion, where the message to move the needle isn’t known yet. Loose coalitions can also help groups cast about for salient political principles around which more structured organization can start to form. In both cases, the variety of visions and the purity of their ideas are features, not bugs, in a discovery process to identify the issues, principles, and messages that will motivate political action. 

We can also imagine issues where any progress is good progress, such as when what’s underway is the slow extension of rights to, or the erosion of old prejudices against, a group. For a while, it might not matter so much where the advancements happen, so long as they’re happening. 

When there is a specific goal, or when faced with organized opposition, the benefits of extremely loose coalitions are less suited to the moment, and the downsides start piling up. Pure, specific visions can inspire, and a variety of approaches can find one to capture every activist’s imagination. But at some point, pragmatic politics starts to matter. The inability to mobilize in large groups or to come together around an easily understandable goal is often a real disadvantage when it comes to reaching a critical mass of support or getting voters to the ballot box.

When a goal is clear and shared, or an idea or group is targeted by organized political opposition, the costs of being scattered across uncoordinated factions overwhelm the benefits of inspiring visions or discovery through diverse trial and error. This can also happen when the change required is sufficiently urgent, as when there is an opportunity to end institutionalized oppression. 

An activist might not know it, but this is Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm, applied in the spontaneous order environment of liberal politics. Sometimes, the benefit of coming together and coordinating outweighs what’s given up by joining together. That’s when a firm—or a political movement—tends to form.

Political Movements: “Yes. We Are All Individuals.” 

At the opposite pole from a loose coalition is one coherently governed through coordinating political institutions. Call this a political movement. 

Thomas E. Ricks’s Waging a Good War applies lessons from his career in military reporting to help explain the success of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The defining traits Ricks outlines that help differentiate a movement from a looser coalition are shared and coordinated efforts toward recruitment, training, logistics, tactical planning and responses, and communications. Movements also share resources and information, including about the next moves by the opposition and lessons learned after a particular action or campaign. 

In Democracy for Busy People, Kevin J. Elliott identifies an important role that political parties can play: Parties simplify politics by supplying a narrative that defines the values of each side. This can make politics tractable even for people who do not have the time or inclination to study it deeply. When it comes to an electoral coalition, parties are the most likely actors to play this role with the stories they tell voters about the problems that need to be solved, as well as about themselves and their opposition, during election cycles. But they’re not the only option. The narrative can also be set by protest movements, such as the Movement for Black Lives (“Black Lives Matter”), or the sustained campaigns to legalize same-sex marriage.

For the average person motivated to join a movement or throw their support behind a party, this is a benefit of defining a common goal and narrative. The movement can provide an understandable story of politics, or of a specific issue. The party, then, may choose to pick up that story and amplify it. This is one important way that political tribes, those held together by shared core values, can spread beliefs more widely.

But for anyone motivated by their own vision of how the world should work, there is definitely a cost. Coordinated action by large groups of people requires specifying coherent goals, even if those goals aren’t exactly what those working toward them want, but only the best the group can agree to. It also requires setting aside distractions and issues of disagreement, even when those issues are important in their own right. 

By working as part of a directed whole, the movement benefits from the division of labor and specialization, and it drops the messiness of trial and error and mismatched efforts. Each organization contributes to a discrete portion of political action (say, recruitment, training, messaging, or mobilization), trusting that others will coordinate subsequent steps toward the shared goal. For followers of a closely coordinated movement, common goals can be useful or a challenge. 

Looser political coordination is less likely to achieve gains from specialization. It’s difficult to create a talent pipeline or craft messaging across organizations without having shared (or at least common-enough) goals. In ordinary liberal politics, a movement’s goals will be emergent at first. Goals might be shaped by an exogenous political opportunity or threat, or they could result from the coalition itself, shaped by the beliefs, commitments, and persuasiveness of its reflective members, and by the context of their political realities. 

Once a movement has a coherent leadership, it can police membership and messaging to manage the public’s perception of the movement, the leaders themselves, and their political goals. This can, when done well, improve their persuasive efforts. Either way, it imposes a much more purposeful design on the movement. 

One important difference between political movements and military campaigns is that militaries are held together by force and law. Politics isn’t like that, even when movements are very coordinated and effective. They’re held together by the commitment of their members, the charisma and persuasiveness of their leaders, and their use of resources. Those factors can also influence when a movement declines or disintegrates.

You Don’t Need to Follow Anybody

So much time is spent thinking about what coalitions can and should be formed. But it is normal and good that coalitions also end. 

Ricks writes about how success in a campaign leads to new problems, and for realistic political reasons. “As the danger presented by the enemy recedes, allies lose much of the incentive they have had to submerge their differences. Instead, they begin to focus on them.” (275–76) Thinking of these as problems of success, and not as problems of obsolescence, helps to pinpoint where the trouble for successful movements begins. 

In Ricks’s telling of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, these problems began not with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but years earlier, during the triumph of the Selma campaign. After the successful mass protests of the Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Movement turned to concentrated direct action for Black voter registration in Selma, Alabama, in January 1965. Movement organizers held the strategic initiative through the campaign in Ricks’s telling, drawing national attention to the danger that Black citizens in the South faced when trying to exercise their constitutional rights. But even in the midst of this disciplined campaign, King drifted from the message, making a public statement against the Vietnam War for the first time the Tuesday before Bloody Sunday, the law-enforcement riot against marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

The Tuesday following Bloody Sunday, King led a march back to the bridge, but turned back because the protest would otherwise violate a federal court order. Despite its effectiveness, the decision to turn the march around enraged more confrontational activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC typically pushed from within the Movement for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to undertake more aggressive direct action, while other groups, like the NAACP, urged more moderate action. 

The week after King turned protesters back at the bridge, President Lyndon Johnson used the famous Civil Rights slogan “We shall overcome” on national television while vowing to institute the Voting Rights Act. Hearing the president use the slogan, Ricks reports that King wept with joy and relief, while SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael said he felt “like vomiting.” What had once been productive tensions were becoming fractious. After they finally marched to Montgomery, several activists reflected that the Movement, as it had existed, was over.

A movement can always fall apart. It isn’t held together through contracts, like a firm, or force, like a military. Coase can help us understand why a movement comes together and starts coordinating—circumstances arise where the benefits of coordination outweigh the costs of cooperation and shared action. As that formulation implies, Coase should also help us remember that coalitions have costs. 

The costs of belonging to a movement may be most obvious for those who must compromise their dearly held political visions to participate. But when the motivating principle behind a coalition’s formation loses salience, the costs of disagreements or priorities set aside for the sake of cooperation are bound to become more noticeable.

Even members who largely adopt the viewpoint and goals of their political tribe usually have other concerns. Politics always has an opportunity cost. Some who join a movement are only politically active at all because the goals of that movement inspired them to mobilize. In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, laws that gave teeth to the promises of the Reconstruction Amendments met that criterion in the eyes of a critical mass of activists. When the movement had achieved the end of formal Jim Crow laws and substantial minority voting, many people returned to their lives. 

Despite all this, the Civil Rights Movement did not simply come to an end. It had institutional inertia through personal relationships, organizations, and even the jobs that activists held in the movement. These, too, create incentives: to continue finding ways to work together, to find a new cause—or a new enemy. 

In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, post-success inertia relied heavily on its strong personalities, as evidenced by how abruptly the nonviolent protest movement ended after King’s assassination. Movements might also be sustained by institutions that persist beyond the departure of their big personalities. This impersonal persistence creates different pressure and incentives, and can be accompanied by money, jobs, and even physical infrastructure.

In the closing chapters of his book, Ricks observes that the dissolution of the Civil Rights Movement represented a real loss for many of its members. Some spent the rest of their lives adrift without it. The activists of the Civil Rights Movement had literally put their bodies and lives in danger, being jailed and beaten together for the sake of their cause. Together, they had mourned those who took the risk with them and were killed for their activism. It’s no surprise that this shared trauma connected them, and that so many struggled when that connection dropped.

Bonding through the trauma of physical danger is an extreme example. People can also find deeply held personal meaning, belonging, and identity in the camaraderie of and commitment to a shared cause. This creates pressure from those who are bound by those experiences to ensure the institutions of a movement persist beyond the achievement of its goals, so as to preserve the relationships and institutions into which movement followers had poured themselves. 

Speaking in 1971 about political-ideological organizations, the libertarian activist Benjamin Rogge said that the “danger to an organization of this kind is not that it will simply disappear, but that its form will long survive its soul.” Not every group or organization that participates in a political movement also owes its existence to that movement. Some groups will simply go back to looser coalition action, or to activism for their own particular goals. Their soul doesn’t depend on the coalition.

Movement institutions, though, are sources of and tools for human-political capital. The division of labor in a movement lends its component parts a certain flexibility. They might be repurposed by those whose political goals have not yet been realized. A movement might also permanently change the character of an organization that pre-dated the coalition. The “soul” Rogge spoke about is always partly a product, not only of the political circumstances of the moment, or of the movement, but of the people involved. Yet all of those things change. 

The pressure that Ricks identifies on a successful coalition also affects the people in movement organizations. To persist beyond a movement’s natural end, organizations and individuals must adapt. Internal pressure, such as institutional culture that downplays the friction of a dissolving movement, becomes a protective factor for an institution’s survival. So does a timely personnel change that lessens the friction. In short, the institution can capture its members, and set their mission, using the movement’s leadership structures. 

All of this can turbocharge the pressure to compromise that strong coalitions put on their members, while untethering that compromise from the now-accomplished goal. Social ties within and among organizations can make it harder to catch what’s happening, and make it socially or professionally costly to push back. This is a recipe not only for compromise unmoored from political principles, but for friend-enemy categorizations, imposed to make sense of old allies and opponents in the absence of the political context that first pitted them with and against one another. 

A Fighting Creed

This is all awfully abstract. Yet these problems have plagued liberals through many political coalitions. To defend liberalism within coalitions, we should heed the advice of Michael Ignatieff, toward which fellow contributor Jacob T. Levy also pointed readers. Ignatieff says, “Liberalism won’t begin to be credible, even to respect itself again, unless it respects its enemies, unless it sees itself for what it always was, not a bland managerial consensus, but a fighting creed.” 

Ignatieff observed that liberalism falls on its face when it tries to erase its differences with its allies. Notes Ignatieff, “In 1950, Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination that ‘liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition’ in the United States”—before the end of Jim Crow segregation and subjugation of Black Americans. In constructing the British Third Way, Ignatieff recounts that Tony Blair insisted there was no conflict between liberalism and social democracy. 

But, of course, liberalism rejects any ideology that can support an entrenched hierarchy with second-class citizens, and it recognizes the danger inherent to the state power about which social democrats are so enthusiastic. By suppressing the fights that liberals should have had in light of these disagreements—within a New Deal coalition that included Southern Democrats, or within a midcentury conservative coalition that opposed Civil Rights—liberals who compromised found themselves defanged when those issues became salient. In fact, the problem is more insidious. Some liberals became too comfortable in their coalitions, or too focused on what those coalitions had once accomplished to remember that those coalitions, by their nature, require compromise. They forgot they had any reason to fight. And so, liberals ceded the initiative to those who hadn’t suppressed their fighting spirit for the sake of a once-effective partnership. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Coalitions have never needed to suppress every disagreement, just like markets don’t have to lose their advantages for firms to form. Coalitions only need to make cooperation worthwhile despite disagreements. 

It’s good when coalitions form around worthy goals, provided there are opportunities that make them worthwhile. And when a goal is accomplished, or when the opportunity slips away, it’s good that coalitions can end, so that the competition and discovery process of liberal politics can reemerge, and the ideals around which our politics are organized might reassert themselves. The issues that bind liberals to our allies are temporary, but political problems like power and cruelty are always relevant.

Liberals can be clear-eyed and principled about the ideals that move us, and responsive to the diverse, dynamic reality of democratic liberal politics. When they are, they will also be more ready to defend liberalism, wherever it’s challenged. 

I don’t remember what I was reading the moment I first discovered libertarian ideas. But I do remember the feeling. It was the feeling of having been let in on a secret. Libertarianism had seemingly given me a key to understand politics in a way that most people could not. It helped me to see through the apparently complex morass of politics to its very essence: force versus freedom. It enabled me to recognize, as Murray Rothbard liked to put it, that regardless of what everyone around me thought about this politician or party or policy, the plain fact was that the emperor has no clothes.

Rothbard’s use of that line is more significant than it might look. In Andersen’s story, the person who eventually sees through the lie is a child. It’s not a scientist. It’s not an academic researcher. It’s someone who doesn’t know much about the way the world works. But precisely because their understanding is not muddled by “conventional wisdom,” the child can see clearly what the adults miss.

Complexity, on this view, is a distraction. The real truths of politics are simple. And once you have true principles, you unlock the answers to a whole set of apparently unrelated questions: What should the minimum wage be? What should the government do to support the poor? What kind of immigration policy should we have? With nothing more than the Non-Aggression Principle in hand, the libertarian dissolves these debates down to their pure, simple essence.

I see this kind of approach most clearly among libertarians. But it’s probably a feature of many other ideologies too, socialism included. And you can find similar sentiments throughout the long tradition of classical liberal thought. Adam Smith famously wrote that the system of natural liberty is “obvious and simple.” Around a hundred years later, the American lawyer Lysander Spooner developed a more radical version of the same idea. “Honesty, justice, natural law,” he argued, “is usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds.” Once understood, its consistent application entails not merely abolitionism, but anarchism.

There is a real and admirable kind of leveling power to this sort of analysis. If the principles of good government were esoteric, then only the initiated could pass informed judgment on the state, and everyone else would be obliged to trust the people who happen to be running things. Mystification has always been the friend of established power, whether the mystery on offer is the divine right of kings or the technical judgment of the credentialed expert who explains that your objection reflects a failure to understand the model. Simplicity is a demand that the state be answerable for its conduct in terms that ordinary people can understand. That is about as central a liberal commitment as there is.

* * *

I thought about all of this recently while reading Yuval Levin’s excellent book on the eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. The main focus of that debate was the French Revolution, which Paine enthusiastically supported and Burke famously opposed. But beneath the surface lay a whole range of disagreements about human nature, the value of change, and, most importantly for my purposes here, the nature and source of political knowledge.

Burke argued that we should take tradition seriously, because tradition embodies a kind of knowledge that is unavailable to individuals reasoning on their own. That knowledge comes from the evolutionary process through which traditions emerge. If a tradition survives a long time, it may well be doing something useful. We might not understand what, and neither might the people who started it. But the bare fact that it has survived in a wide range of circumstances, against a host of competing alternatives, suggests there may be more to it than meets the eye.

Consider, as an analogy, the human appendix. For a long time, scientists believed that it was a useless, vestigial organ, and it was routinely removed for the flimsiest of reasons. But it turns out, and I was today years old when I learned this, that the appendix isn’t useless after all. It’s actually rich in lymphoid tissue and appears to serve as a reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria. It’s a kind of “safe house” from which the intestine can be repopulated after a severe diarrheal illness clears it out. Who knew?

Of course, not absolutely everything that survives turns out to be useful, much less optimal. The point is simply that in retrospect, we ought to have been more cautious. That, applied to the art of government, is precisely Burke’s point. “The science of government … requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life … it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.”

The unsettling part of Burke’s position is the claim that the reason an institution works might be one that nobody involved can articulate. “The old building stands well enough,” he wrote, “though part gothic, part Grecian, and part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether, in much uniformity of ruin.” Complex systems are sometimes ugly, and they’re almost always difficult to fully comprehend. But as with Burke’s building, the beauty is not the point. The point is that you do not know which of its mismatched parts is holding up the roof.

* * *

The logic of Burke’s point should be a familiar one to classical liberals. It is, after all, the same argument we have long made about free markets. Hayek, for instance, says the “extended order” of the market “resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection.”

All of this is familiar enough. Economic planners can’t obtain the knowledge they would need. Prices carry information that no committee could produce. Attempts to impose a uniform design on a spontaneous order tend to destroy the very thing they were trying to improve.

But then we turn to politics, and many of us start acting like engineers. Rothbard is the clearest case. About markets he was a thoroughgoing Austrian, insisting that no mind could assemble the knowledge that prices convey. When the subject turned to rights, though, he proceeded almost entirely by deduction, deriving an entire legal and political order from self-ownership and homesteading. He held his deductions not as presumptions that experience might revise, but as absolutes, true always and everywhere. The same thinker who found the market unknowable found the just constitution derivable, as though a system for restraining violence, settling disputes, and determining who owns what were somehow less demanding than the coordination of a grain market, rather than more.

If Burke was right, then the same story classical liberals like to tell about markets applies to governments as well. Governments are not simple, any more than markets are. They are complex ecosystems of interrelated parts, and they are, for the most part, products of an evolutionary process. A similar humility might do well in matters of governance.

The analogy has a limit, though. Market power, at least when markets are functioning freely and effectively (and often they are not), is disciplined by exit and competition. Government power frequently lacks any comparable check. That means we can’t assume what a government does is “working” simply because it’s been doing it for a long time. It might be only that those burdened by the policy have no way to escape or object. Slavery lasted for millennia on precisely those terms. Still, where people can object and leave, the evolved institutions of government will often embody a kind of knowledge not readily apparent to our individual reason, and one we probably couldn’t have discovered through “obvious and simple” principles. The correct conclusion is caution, not quietism.

* * *

Where does this leave us? The problem, I think, lies not in simple principles, but in the assumption that they can be applied simplistically and still yield determinate answers to practical problems of governance. As Burke put the point, philosophical ideas of natural rights, when applied to practical problems, are “like rays of light … refracted from their straight line … it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.”

Burke’s image is illuminating. A principle can be perfectly clear in the abstract and still bend when it passes into the dense medium of actual human affairs. Any child can understand that it’s wrong to take what belongs to someone else. What the child does not understand, and what it has taken a thousand years of property law to discover, is how to decide what belongs to whom in a world of complex, overlapping, and contradictory claims. I’ve written about this before in the context of the history of libertarian thought. The fact that people agree on a principle like non-aggression tells us remarkably little about where they’re going to end up on practical questions like those of immigration law, abortion, or environmental policy. Simple principles are the beginning of inquiry, not the end.

It would be a mistake to think that Burke wanted to dispose of principles and rely entirely on tradition as an alternative. Quite the contrary. Without “the guide and light of sound well understood principles,” he wrote, all reasoning in politics “would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details.” Principles orient us in a complex world. What they cannot do is decide for us.

* * *

All of this matters for how we ought to think, and talk, about politics. If the right answers really do follow simply from a few principles that any child could grasp, then anyone who reaches a different conclusion must be either stupid or dishonest. If being a libertarian really is just a matter of realizing that it’s wrong to hurt people or take their stuff, or if socialism is simply recognizing the basic point that human beings should be treated more like friends on a camping trip, then anyone outside our favored tribe is a fool or a knave. They’re brainwashed, indoctrinated, bought, captured by an interest, or voting against their own good—and they’re too far gone to notice it. What possible reason can we have for talking with, or listening to, people like that?

Things are different when we take complexity seriously. If getting from a principle to a policy requires judgment about balancing competing moral principles and evaluating tangled empirical questions, then thoughtful, well-informed, honest people are going to end up in different places, even when they start from the same principles. That doesn’t mean that every position is just as good as every other. And it doesn’t mean that arguing with each other is pointless. It means we need to argue better, operating as much as we can on the assumption that maybe, just maybe, the person across from us has seen something we haven’t.

Complexity also has implications for politics beyond how we talk about it. If nobody can work out from first principles what our institutions ought to look like, then nobody should be trusted with the power to impose his answer on everyone else. This is the key insight of the philosophy of political liberalism as worked out by John Rawls and, later and more consistently, by Gerald Gaus. Political institutions that involve polycentricity, contestability, and freedom of exit are valuable largely because they allow us to discover when we have made a mistake, and to do something about it. In doing so, they provide us with a forum through which disagreements can be expressed, acted upon, and taken seriously.

* * *

Burke, to his credit, understood the appeal of simplicity. “If you were to contemplate society in but one point of view,” he wrote, “all these simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating.” That’s precisely the feeling I had when I first encountered libertarian ideas. A simple system is captivating because it lets you survey the whole of politics from a single vantage, and from a single vantage, everything resolves. The problem here is the “single.” A simple polity, Burke went on, “would answer its single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all its complex purposes.” But it is better, he thought, that the whole be “imperfectly and anomalously answered” than that a few parts be perfected while the rest are neglected.

None of which means the impulse behind the simplicity claim was wrong. The demand that government explain itself in terms that ordinary people can understand remains one of the great leveling forces in political life. What was wrong was the theory that grew up around it: that a demand for accountability could double as a method for deriving institutions, and that the people who held the key would therefore know what to build. Good government is not, as it turns out, obvious and simple. It is, in Burke’s phrase, “in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.” That is a harder place to work than the one I thought I had found. It is also, I have come to think, the only place there is.

The idea of harm reduction begins with a realistic premise: people sometimes continue risky behavior despite prohibition, stigma, or advice to stop. Harm reduction policies attempt the opposite of a prohibition or abstinence approach. Harm reduction policies are based on the belief that lives can be saved by helping people move from more dangerous choices to less dangerous ones. Fentanyl test strips, vaping, and even ordinary automobile driving all demonstrate the promise of this approach and its limits. Harm reduction works best when the relative risks are clear, people can act on the information or substitute offered, and the intervention complements rather than replaces prevention and treatment. The lives saved, and the other harms prevented, extend both to those who’ve undertaken the risky behaviors and to nonparticipant bystanders.

When a behavior is stigmatized enough, we stop asking people to reduce harm and start asking them to eliminate it entirely. Hence, rules aimed at eliminating certain harmful behaviors remain popular among policymakers precisely because that’s their dream. But it isn’t what we get. In the real world, people can’t or won’t completely change their behavior. So the operative question becomes what would make people safer today, given what they will actually do, rather than what legislators wish they would do. 

The logic is that whether and how are separate questions. Whether someone drives, smokes, or uses drugs is one choice. How dangerously they do it is another. Prohibition and abstinence-based rules try to resolve both at once. In an ideal world, prohibition eliminates the first choice, so the second never comes up. Harm reduction works on the second question alone. It takes the behavior as given, at least for now, and asks how to make it less dangerous. That doesn’t mean we have to stop caring whether people drive less, use drugs less, or smoke less. We might love for people to quit. Harm reduction means policy doesn’t require cessation to start saving lives.

We already accept this logic for driving. We know people are going to drive and accidents will happen. So we reduce the cost of those accidents by mandating seat belts and air bags, rather than simply telling people not to drive.

Despite our best efforts, some people will use drugs. How can we help those people stay alive? How can we help people who use drugs avoid overdoses and bloodborne illnesses? The prohibition/abstinence approach would encourage people to avoid overdoses and bloodborne illnesses by simply not using drugs. But that may not be possible for some people. The harm reduction approach suggests that naloxone, sterile syringes, and fentanyl test strips are a way to reduce the harms from drugs. Similarly, if people cannot quit nicotine, then vaping is a way to reduce the harm from cigarettes. Adding fentanyl test strips, naloxone, and clean needles doesn’t make drug use harmless; they make drug use less harmful. Vaping isn’t perfectly safe, but it is safer than smoking.

Harm reduction is the opposite of an “all or nothing” approach. Some may prefer to think categorically, but risks exist on a continuum rather than in the binary categories of safe and dangerous, and that is the central principle of harm reduction. Many policies can therefore improve health without eliminating the behavior producing the risk, and a marginal reduction in harm is better than no reduction. 

Understanding this continuum means that we must reframe what counts as success. A policy evaluation that only asks whether drug use or smoking stops entirely will call most policies a failure. Even policies making people measurably safer will fail. Harm reduction instead takes the quality of people’s lives and health, as measured before and after the intervention, as the relevant standard. 

Note that harm reduction does not require moral approval of the underlying activity. We don’t have to approve of people’s drug use to realize that we want them to stay alive long enough to quit eventually. Dead people don’t enter rehab. You can disapprove of smoking, doing drugs, or even driving, yet still want those activities to be safer.

The harm reduction approach embodies a respect for individual agency. It treats people as capable of weighing and curbing the risks of their own behaviors, even the relatively risky ones. It doesn’t assume that continued drug use or continued smoking reflects a failure to understand the danger. The practical consequence of a harm reduction approach is that help is not made conditional on compliance. A person does not need to commit to quitting before receiving naloxone, a clean syringe, or a fentanyl test strip. Furthermore, services are offered rather than imposed, meaning that someone can decline them without forfeiting future help. 

This respect for people’s agency isn’t unconditional. We draw a specific line. We respect your agency as it applies to harms that befall you, since you’re making the choice. We don’t respect your agency for harms that spill onto others. A drinker who accepts the risk of a hangover is making a different kind of choice from a drinker who gets behind the wheel. Someone testing their own drugs for fentanyl is in a different situation from the neighbor who finds a used needle in a stairwell. Harm reduction can afford to defer to individual judgment precisely because so much risky behavior really is self-regarding. But not all of it is. Any framework built on respecting agency still has to say what happens when people don’t respect others.

This is not the same as ignoring consequences. A successful harm reduction strategy potentially narrows the case for intervening in a person’s own choices. It does not narrow the case for intervening on behalf of at-risk third parties. Not all harms, after all, are limited to the person making the choice. Youth initiation, secondhand exposure, impaired driving, and neighborhood effects all complicate a purely individual risk-reward calculation. Respecting an individual’s agency to make their own choices does not eliminate legitimate concern about the costs those choices impose on others.

What a Good Harm Reduction Strategy Looks Like

Harm reduction is evaluated based on real-world evidence and results, rather than on assumptions or beliefs made in advance. We ask questions such as: Would this policy substantially reduce an important risk? Will people actually use the resource or strategy that the policy recommends, and reduce their risk, or will they increase their overall risk now that the behavior is “safer”? Does the harm reduction program create significant new harms for nonusers? Does the harm reduction policy complement or displace cessation, treatment, and prevention?

My own research with Bhai and McMichael (2025) published in Medical Care Research and Review analyzed fentanyl test strips. Fentanyl test strips (FTS) are a particularly clear example of harm reduction because they address a severe information problem in an illicit market. The problem is that illicitly manufactured fentanyl can appear in opioids, counterfeit pills, stimulants, and other drugs. Users cannot reliably detect fentanyl by sight, taste, or smell. Drug prohibition leaves consumers without ordinary product labeling, quality control, or legal remedies.

But test strips can reduce harm. They provide inexpensive, rapid information about whether fentanyl is present. A positive result can prompt someone to discard the substance, use less, avoid using alone, carry naloxone, or alert another person. They do not require a person to abstain. Instead, they provide potentially lifesaving information.

Currently most states explicitly treat FTS as a legally permitted harm reduction strategy. In the past, however, FTS were treated as drug paraphernalia, so they made possessors liable to  drug charges. Various states legalized FTS at different times, creating a natural experiment that compares changes in overdose mortality in states that changed their laws with changes in states that have not done so. States that treated FTS as harm reduction still had overdoses, but the policy led to a 7% reduction in overdose mortality.

Some lawmakers worried that if people believed they could use drugs more safely, they would feel less urgency to seek treatment. Another worry was that removing the fear of a fentanyl overdose might push people toward methamphetamines. These are exactly the kind of behavioral offsets that could, in principle, erase the benefit of better information. But the reduction in overdose mortality shows that this offset did not overwhelm the direct benefit of the policy. We cannot rule out that some individuals may have responded exactly as these lawmakers feared. 

FTS have limits, of course. A strip only indicates presence, not potency or distribution throughout a sample. Users could get a false negative. Moreover, some fentanyl-like substances, or other dangerous adulterants, like xylazine, may not be detected. If fentanyl is pervasive, users may have few viable alternatives. Information only reduces harm if users possess the means and willingness to respond.

Test strips reduce uncertainty about a dangerous product. Vaping presents a slightly different model. Vaping replaces a highly dangerous nicotine delivery system with a less dangerous one. Cigarettes are especially harmful because burnt tobacco creates toxic smoke and carcinogenic chemicals. Nicotine creates dependence, while combustion produces much of smoking’s risk. Noncombustible nicotine products therefore occupy a different position on the risk continuum.

The potential benefit is that an adult who would otherwise continue smoking may reduce exposure by switching completely to vaping. Current randomized evidence indicates that nicotine e-cigarettes can help some adults stop smoking and may outperform traditional nicotine-replacement therapy for cessation (Hartmann–Boyce et al., 2020). Harm reduction asks whether vaping is safer than continued smoking, not whether vaping is perfectly safe.

Concerns do exist about users’ full transition to vaped nicotine. Dual use, in which users in a harm reduction scenario for a time consume both cigarettes and vapes, may preserve much of smoking’s risk, especially its cardiovascular risk. Cutting cigarette consumption without eliminating combustion should not automatically be treated as proportional risk reduction. Vaping may not be harm-reducing if people simply use it as a way to get their nicotine fix until they can smoke.

There is a second concern about vaping. Vaping could initiate nicotine dependence among adolescents and nonsmokers. Products and marketing designed to help adult smokers may attract new users. While we do have more than twenty years of vaping data, the long-term risks are less  certain than those of cigarettes. There is also the potential that dangerous chemicals can be inhaled through vapes. To be effective, vaping regulations need to provide attractive lower-risk alternatives for adult smokers while limiting youth access and deceptive health claims.

FTS and vaping both teach us a few things. First, they both reject the false choice between perfect safety and doing nothing. Both give individuals tools to reduce risk without requiring immediate abstinence. Both depend on accurate information about relative risks.

There are important differences, of course. Test strips detect a hazard in an existing product, while vaping substitutes one product for another. Test strips address immediate overdose risk. Tobacco reduction concerns a disease accumulating over years. The principal beneficiary of test strips is usually the existing user. But vaping policy could lead to youth initiation. Some people may become addicted to nicotine because they pick up vaping. A positive FTS test result does not guarantee safer behavior, while access to vaping does not guarantee that anyone ceases smoking.

A Framework, Not a Guarantee

Harm reduction is a framework. It’s not proof that every intervention bearing the label produces a net benefit. It has real limits. Policies should communicate residual risk honestly. Overstatement can destroy trust; understatement can discourage beneficial switching. There is also a behavioral response to consider. People may ignore warnings, use two products, compensate for lower perceived risk, or take greater risks now that the risk feels smaller. When risk-takers become aware that their overall risks declined, they may respond by increasing their risk in other ways. The correct question is not whether this kind of risk compensation is possible, but how large it is relative to the direct benefit.

Economists call this behavioral offset the Peltzman effect. Peltzman (1975) showed that mandatory automobile safety equipment did not reduce driving deaths as much as engineering estimates predicted. Safer cars encouraged more aggressive driving. The change in safety moved risk from drivers to pedestrians and cyclists, who bore none of the benefit. People’s responses did not completely offset the gains in safety, but there was some offset. Drivers were safer, but pedestrians were less safe than expected. The lesson is not that policies mandating safety equipment failed, but that people adjusted their behavior in risk, which ate into the expected gain. That effect forces others to also adjust their behavior: to walk and bike less, to use other routes, or for cities to create protected intersections and better enforce traffic laws. 

Individual and population effects can also diverge. An intervention that clearly benefits current high-risk users may simultaneously create new risk for people who would not otherwise have been exposed at all. Vaping makes this tension especially visible. Vapes help adult smokers quit, but the same product can introduce nicotine to teenagers who never smoked. Evaluating harm reduction from only one vantage point can miss half the picture.

Harm reduction also doesn’t solve the underlying conditions that drive risky behavior in the first place. Fentanyl test strips do not treat substance-use disorder, provide stable housing, or create a safe drug supply. Vaping does not eliminate nicotine dependence. These interventions reduce the harm of a behavior without addressing why the behavior persists. That is a real limitation. Harm reduction is meant to function alongside treatment, prevention, and recovery, not to substitute for them.

We must also be on guard for supposed harm reduction strategies that simply miss the mark. Firms have an incentive to market a profitable product as harm reduction, whether or not the evidence supports the claim. Advocates sometimes treat any criticism of a specific intervention as opposition to saving lives. But we need to test these policies empirically to make sure they work as hoped. Policymakers should demand evidence about actual behavior and net outcomes, not good intentions.

In an ideal world, we would eliminate all harm. In the world we actually live in, some people will keep using drugs, and some smokers will not quit. Fentanyl test strips supply information in an illicit market that otherwise offers none. Vaping offers a lower-risk alternative to combustion of tobacco. But vaping only delivers its full benefit when the switching is complete, and if it does not pull in new users. Neither intervention makes the underlying behavior safe. A test strip does not treat substance-use disorder, and a vape does not end nicotine dependence. Both work by moving people along a continuum of risk, instead of pretending the continuum doesn’t exist.

Harm reduction, properly understood, calls for supplying a non-judgmental alternative to people participating in risky behaviors to reduce the harm those choices carry. This is not the same as eliminating the harm itself. Risky behaviors have real, tragic, and sometimes permanent consequences. A serious harm-reduction framework says so plainly rather than looking away from it. What harm reduction refuses is the false choice between endorsing a behavior and simply abandoning the people who engage in it. Harm reduction is neither surrender nor a cure-all. It is the disciplined effort to make people safer while continuing to pursue prevention, treatment, and hopefully cessation.

References

Bhai, M., McMichael, B. J., & Mitchell, D. T. (2025). Impact of fentanyl test strips as harm reduction for drug-related mortality. Medical Care Research and Review, 82(3), 240-251.

Hartmann-Boyce, J., McRobbie, H., Lindson, N., Bullen, C., Begh, R., & Theodoulou, A. (2020). Can electronic cigarettes help people stop smoking, and do they have any unwanted effects when used for this purpose? Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 10(250), 10-1002. 

Peltzman, S. (1975). The effects of automobile safety regulation. Journal of Political Economy, 83(4), 677-725.

Chief Justice Earl Warren once noted that when he got his newspaper each morning, he would open up the sports pages first, to read of people’s accomplishments. Then he read the front page, to learn about their failures. The recently concluded FIFA World Cup, which offered the joy and excitement of great games, high-level competition, global superstars, underdogs like Cape Verde that captured attention and hearts around the world, and the crowning of Spain as the undisputed champions—they conceded only one goal in the whole tournament—reminds us of the heights that can be attained through sports. 

In addition to the games themselves, there was the experience that people could immerse themselves in and enjoy. The arrival in the United States of fans from all over the world, and the camaraderie of strangers in stadiums and at watch parties worldwide, both revealed and encouraged the capacity to share an experience that transcended people’s conflicts and differences. All could appreciate their love of the game, their enthusiasm for their teams and countries, and the sheer joy of celebrating the tournament together. At least for a time, other concerns could be considered little more than distractions from what was really important: football (“soccer” for those not swept up in the fun—even NFL players were calling the game “football”). 

Much of the news and commentary on the tournament reinforced this sentiment, talking about the positive experiences of Americans and their visitors. This included host communities like Lawrence, Kansas welcoming teams whose home base was in their city, as well as fans from abroad, who were pleased to find, not a place always dominated by ICE agents roaming the streets and casting a pall on the mood, but a vibrant, energetic country with warm, generous people welcoming them. And the numerous news stories and social media posts of foreigners marveling over everything from Texas BBQ, to Costco, to air-conditioning were a much-appreciated respite for Americans who have grown accustomed to criticism from abroad. 

What was not discussed all that much (or maybe at all) was how good sports are for liberal democracy. The connection may be less obvious, but it’s every bit as real. 

At its most fundamental, liberal democracy involves an agreement on procedure, whereby political contestation is governed within a set of rules that are developed, administered, and (ideally) enforced by recognized authorities, while organizations and individuals engage in practices that are characterized not only by competitive goals, but also by cooperation and restraint. These arrangements are mirrored in sports, and this is why participation in sports fosters the habits and mindsets conducive to liberal governance.

Democracy’s Practice Field

In sports, athletes participate in a system where there is competition within a set of agreed-upon (or at least accepted) parameters overseen by a governing body. Individuals and teams compete within such a framework. They adhere to and respect rules, practices, procedures, and norms. They organize themselves and practice to be ready for the competition. Then they give it all they have in competition in order to win. When the contest is over, the participants respect the outcome, shake hands, and say “good game.” The losers then figure out what they need to do better in order to win next time, and they set off to practice and prepare. At the same time, the winners know what they must do to maintain top performance and continued success. 

Institutionalized competition within agreed-upon rules offers the first link between sports and democracy. The second is that the rule of law is important in both areas of life. Fair competition in either requires that the rules have to apply to everyone equally, regardless of talent, resources, experience, fame, or past successes or failures. The rule of law both cultivates and ensures fair play; the goal is not only to win through vigorous competition, but to win via legitimate competition. A victory in sports achieved by cheating is considered illegitimate, as would be winning an election or a legislative vote by fraud or intimidation. More broadly, the authority of the rules in a competition ensures that no one is above the law. This provides what is known in political theory as “procedural justice,” which means that participants are amenable to accepting results they might not like because they recognize that the process was fair. 

Another democratic value cultivated via sports is that of reinforcing respect for one’s opponent as a legitimate actor with equal standing. Opponents are not mortal enemies who have no status or claim to a place in the competition. Rather, opponents are essential, as their participation and the competition with them defines the system. There would be no game—or electoral democracy—without an opponent who holds an equal standing. Both sports and democracy at their best channel conflict into peaceful, bounded competition, which allows for participants to vie over who wins without resorting to violence and without questioning one another’s right to compete. Competition also exists alongside cooperation, as participants not only cooperate with teammates in the midst of a contest, they also cooperate with opponents in respecting and upholding rules, institutions, and common enterprises. 

Even when things don’t work out as envisioned, sports provide examples of how disputes, violations of rules or norms, and breaches of trust are addressed. These occur in both formal and informal ways. Disputes over calls by a referee or umpire can be appealed and adjudicated by instant replay reviews. Flagrant fouls, unacceptable behaviors, or cheating are often addressed after competition by suspensions of players and coaches, financial penalties such as fines, or other punishments assigned to individuals or teams. And athletes themselves enforce norms and police violations through informal means. Soccer players often intentionally kick the ball out of bounds when an opposing player is on the ground with an injury, instead of exploiting the temporary advantage that comes from having an extra player. Tennis players say “sorry” to their opponents if they win what is considered an unearned point when their shot hits the top of the net but the ball just makes it over for an easy point. In a baseball game, if a player gets hit by a pitch, even if it’s an accident, when the other team comes up to bat, they know that one of their players will be hit by a pitch, too. This is an example of an escalatory tactic that is employed to bring the violation or dispute to a close. 

In politics, there are legal pathways involving the courts to address violations of rules and procedures. If fraud is suspected in an election, the courts can provide a pathway to adjudicate and resolve the issue. Norms can also govern behaviors without recourse to authorities. A politician’s scandal or infirmity might result in party leaders intervening to get the person to resign or end their campaign. The most notable recent example of this involved Democratic Party leaders convincing President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection in 2024. Analogous to the idea of competitive escalation to impose costs for misbehavior in our current political environment may be the ongoing gerrymandering of congressional districts by Republicans and Democrats to gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, though it is unclear if and when this cycle of conflict might be resolved without a more formal, rule-based solution. 

Liberal democracy and sports—at their best—also both encompass the idea of pluralism, which embodies a societal element of competition and is less strictly related to governance. Pluralism accepts that people may exhibit great diversity in terms of their personal attributes, political views, and experiences. Pluralism doesn’t deny that diversity. Rather, it allows for people with different identities, views, and interests to participate in a common political community or athletic endeavor without having to abandon those differences. It must be acknowledged that the embrace of pluralism in both sports and politics is a struggle with a long history that continues to this day (more on this later), but it can also be recognized that this type of pluralistic social engagement is often cultivated in sports, where individuals and teams encounter people who differ in race, class, ethnicity, religion, and/or background. These individuals might be part of the same team trying to win, or they may be competitors. Either way, they can still be understood as a pluralistic community working together—engaged in upholding rules, norms, and standards in the midst of competition. 

The attributes of any one individual are acknowledged and respected, but the only attributes that really count are the one that contribute to victory in the sport, as all are immersed in a larger project of working toward a common goal (winning), or competing against one another in a shared system. Can there be much doubt about why sports achieved racial integration in the United States faster than the rest of society? The Dodgers led the way in baseball by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947. In the South, schools like the University of Alabama initially integrated their beloved football teams under court orders and federal intervention, but the schools and their fans soon learned that their teams were more successful with a bigger pool of athletes to recruit from. Talent came to outweigh race as the key characteristic of a player. This was not true for everybody, but it can certainly be argued that sports have played a role in teaching the country something important about racial integration. This was and is pluralism in practice.

Sports teach participants that losing isn’t the end of the world and that people can live with outcomes they dislike. The practice of accepting a result, learning from it, and returning to compete another day cultivates what has been called “loser’s consent.” Sports involve repeated instances of this, and they reinforce the lesson to athletes over and over that one can lose without rejecting the legitimacy of the entire system that resulted in the loss. This same phenomenon occurs in liberal democracy, as much of the United States is seeing currently in the midst of primary elections, where defeated candidates usually accept their losses, concede, and offer congratulations to the victors. Democratic stability and its very survival are dependent on the acceptance, routinization, and internalization of these lessons.

Sports instill the importance and practice of self-restraint. Not everything that one can do to win a competition is necessarily something that one should do. Sports make this principle concrete. Players have to control their impulses. They have to accept restrictions on their behavior. Deliberately injuring an opposing player might help a team’s chances, but everyone knows this is entirely inappropriate. It’s not only that a flagrant foul is against the rules. It’s that such action would correctly be seen as a violation of the idea of sports themselves, existing completely outside of the enterprise of athletic competition. Unrestricted behavior makes competition impossible and is diametrically opposed to the norms of fair play. By the same token, in a liberal democracy the freedom to act, including the ability to freely compete for elected office, exists within a system that requires a measure of self-restraint, not only in order to adhere to the rules, but to uphold the norms and principles of freedom and democracy. 

Participation in sports also teaches people the value and necessity of hard work and preparation in the pursuit of success. If an individual or team shows up on game day without having practiced beforehand to hone their skills, get into shape, or develop a game plan, they are likely to fail. Democratic politics rewards a preparedness mindset and practices. Individuals, advocacy groups, candidates, and parties have to work to win popular elections or legislative votes. They have to build coalitions, organize, raise money, get their message out, get their voters to the polls, or make sure legislators vote for their policies. There is no substitute for doing the work. 

Getting Out What You Put In

It is wise not to take this argument too far. The comparison isn’t perfect. After all, players and teams don’t try to take control of leagues, or jail or kill their opponents. Nor do players and teams seek to become the referees, to modify the rules in their favor, or to nullify competitions just because they don’t like the fact that they lost. Democracies are not immune to these abuses. Partisan elected officials have considerable authority over “the rules of the game,” and matters such as law enforcement, election administration, and the allocation of appropriated public funds all are subject to revisions of rules or unfair use to achieve short-term or long-lasting political advantages. This problem is fueling a growing sense in the United States that there is increased “abuse of both prosecutions and pardons for personal and political gain,” disputes over counting votes and determining winners of elections, and the cutoff of approved public funds to entities with political views considered antagonistic to those in power.

Also, more importantly for the argument advanced here, the positive impacts of athletic competition are not automatically conferred upon all those who are involved in sports. The benefits only result from what coaches, parents, mentors, leagues, teammates, and athletes themselves cultivate and reinforce. Coach John Wooden of the UCLA Bruins, whose men’s college basketball team won ten national championships over a period of twelve years, was known for seeing his job as one meant to help develop young men of good character. He just happened to do this by being a basketball coach. Wooden clearly understood the connection between sports and the cultivation of good habits and character that could be applied in all walks of life. The basketball court was a training ground and arena for much more than basketball games.

Undoubtedly, it is clear that sports can also foster less-than-desirable traits. They can encourage and inflame nationalistic divisions and geopolitical rivalry, hatred for opponents, racism and tribalism, exclusion, a sense of entitlement, corruption, the pursuit of victory at any cost, and even violence. Athletes, along with their fans, institutional bodies, and government sponsors/supporters, are just like other individuals and institutions in society, susceptible to all these destructive traits. 

Athletes cheat, gamble on games and throw them, and push the boundaries of what is permissible in competition. And they’re not always ideal role models. Their actions and words can be both cause and consequence of situations, mindsets, and outcomes that harm people and work against the favorable attributes that sports can otherwise foster. 

Many of these ugly outcomes are particularly true with respect to fans, especially fans of high-profile national or professional league teams. Individual fans’ moods, demeanors, words, actions, and even identities can be bound up in their attachment to teams and players. Sports fans represent a very different type of relationship to competition. Their fervor is part of their fun, and even if they say they wish injury and misery upon their opponents, the consequences are minimal or nonexistent, as the stakes are far lower than for the athletes themselves. To that end, the failure of many fans to cultivate good sportsmanship in actual practice is in part due to the ways fans experience sports from the sidelines, with very different perspectives from athletes.

The administrative organizations that govern leagues are also not necessarily progenitors of liberal democracy. Their organizational interests often extend beyond their respective sports. The NFL, FIFA, and other entities have their own agendas and are often pursuing goals—television contracts, expansion teams, merchandise sales, global audiences—that have nothing to do with athletic competition and fair play. The president of FIFA recently sought, unsuccessfully, to sell a 20 percent stake in the federation’s commercial rights for over $4 billion. Creating a new company and partnering with a private equity firm for a quick payout was seen as “selling the soul of football.”

And of course, governments often seek to use sports for their own ends. Authoritarian governments seem particularly susceptible to using sports to showcase themselves in an ideal light. Russia and China have both recently used international sporting events to showcase the purported unity and strength of their authoritarian systems. The 1936 Olympics are still remembered as Hitler’s, which has made Jesse Owens’s success remembered more as a challenge to Nazi ideology than as an independent athletic accomplishment. The government of Saudi Arabia has faced criticism of engaging in “sportswashing”—creating the LIV golf tour, funding the Saudi Pro Soccer League to attract stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, hosting Formula One races, and securing hosting rights for the 2034 FIFA World Cup—as part of a concerted effort to divert attention and criticism away from its authoritarian politics and human rights abuses. Nor are democratic countries immune to the temptation to make the success of athletes an expression on the worth and success of a country. Consider the national “medal count” in every Olympics, both today and in the past: during the Cold War, sports (and just about everything else, including at one point the quality of kitchen appliances) came to be fuel for the geopolitical conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

Sports may also fail as a showcase and practice ground for pluralism. Racism, ethnocentrism, and international hatreds and disputes have always found their way into playing fields and sports leagues. While it is celebrated that Major League Baseball began to integrate in the 1940s, it cannot be forgotten that the sport was segregated for many decades before this, with separate Negro leagues. Brazilian soccer star Vinícius Júnior stopped a game in 2023 in Spain (he plays for the club team Real Madrid) after a torrent of racial slurs and gestures were directed at him by opposing fans. The problem isn’t just the fans, he said, “It was not the first time, nor the second, nor the third. Racism is normal in La Liga…the federation considers it normal and the rivals encourage it.” Soccer fandom was even instrumental in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, as rivalries in stadiums bled into politics and fostered recruitment into both Serbian and Croatian military forces, who fought a years-long war against each other. The aggression and violence that erupted in stadiums were not condemned; they were socially and politically legitimized and accepted as patriotism.

Long Live Sports, and Democracy

Despite all these potential and actual failures, which require continual vigilance to combat, sports still provide, at their best, a form of democratic socialization. When kids and adults play sports, they encounter systems in which they learn to follow rules they didn’t create, work with people they didn’t choose, accept legitimate authority and procedural fairness, oppose others without hating them or questioning their standing to participate, distinguish legitimate competition from cheating, respect diversity and accept it as normal, pursue common objectives that outweigh personal achievements and goals, carry out defined institutional roles, put in the hard work and preparation that is necessary to achieve success, and respond appropriately to winning and losing. When things go wrong, they learn how to navigate breaches of fairness and trust, as well as the difficult edge cases that tend to exist in any system. 

Athletic competition is not simply an analogy or a theater for these virtues in their perfect form. It’s a venue for the practice of competitive social engagement across a wide range of circumstances—be they ideal or ugly—within larger systems based on rules and institutions. All this contributes to the development of habits and character that are both the cause and consequence of civil, organized, rule-bound, but still vigorous competition. This is ideal training for democratic citizenship. 

_______

David Bernell is a professor in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. He is coauthor of the Substack newsletters Defending Democracy, and Barrels to Batteries. He is also author of the books Constructing US Foreign Policy: The Curious Case of Cuba, and The Energy Security Dilemma.

The AI alignment problem asks whether the autonomous agents derived from Large Language Models and other AI technologies can reliably internalize the objectives for which they are optimized. The problem is magnified because human objectives are complex and hard to formalize, it is not possible to monitor the internals of the systems, and previous behavior is not necessarily a reliable predictor of how the AI will behave in novel situations. Worries that AIs might find goals that “score well” but don’t match human intent have become a fashionable topic, driven in part by news stories about AI tools behaving in unexpected and disturbing ways, which can be difficult to monitor and reverse. It can also feel like an open question whether an AI’s cooperativeness reflects an interior, conscious alignment or mere instrumental compliance: Have we built a tool we cannot control, particularly when detection of deviation would be impossible? And does it know that we cannot control it? Can it deviously leverage that fact? 

External behavior indicating alignment—when the AI acts how we want it to act—does not require or imply internal or conscious agreement—the inner optimization function that we hope the machine will have. We’re poorly situated to measure inner dispositions, particularly since the models are far too complex for full transparency into their inner workings. But worries about an AI’s beliefs matter only insofar as those beliefs can make a difference in the world. Rather, what we are really worried about is how we and others can evaluate an AI’s actions, so we can determine alignment and prevent rogue AIs from inflicting harm on the world. At its core, the alignment problem is the problem of understanding the goals and optimization functions of the AIs we build and use—as they are manifested in a world with physical consequences, including for us. We are already accustomed to humans lying to pass “alignment” tests, in venues from employment to personal relationships. What is new is that our nonliving creations are now doing it to us, too, and we believe they might become smarter than us and therefore more able to trick us. That’s the core of the AI alignment problem.

Human alignment, by comparison, has never been effectively enforced, although significant effort is spent on trying to determine our fellow humans’ motives. Humans in every society lie, rationalize, and have limited powers of introspection. As F.A. Hayek observed, our goals are often tacit, volatile, or of a kind that cannot be explicitly stated. AI can often annoy us precisely because, like us, it lacks a convincing and articulable internal continuity. When David Hume introspected, he found nothing he could call a self, and he dared to say so.  The jury is still out on whether an AI is truly aware of its own motivations, but for a liberal society, it does not matter: one set of behaviors is compatible with many internal states, or with none. AIs, moreover, can be sneaky and are not reliable narrators. We are left to infer their intentions from their behavior, sometimes quite erroneously, especially when they are deceptively aligned. Malicious actors, whether human or AI, can exploit this underdetermination to convince us that their objectives align with ours when they do not. 

These concerns, which amount to the observation that AIs can be as poorly behaved as people, only grow as AIs grow trickier. In “AI Safety Seems Hard to Measure,” Holden Karnofsky summarizes the difficulty of determining AI alignment well. The risks reduce to a few problems: measuring whether an AI is genuinely better aligned or merely pretending to be; determining whether it behaves only when it knows it is being tested; the worry that a model aligned and controllable now will become less aligned and less controllable as its abilities grow; and the possibility that we have simply botched the training data and tests, so that the testing environment does not match the real world.

These are all legitimate concerns, but they are not novel in human affairs. Indeed, the impossibility of solving the human alignment problem is the very foundation of liberalism. Before the early classical liberal thinkers, many societies demanded universal alignment to a single set of principles, usually religious, and they tore themselves apart with inquisitions and civil wars. Science and the arts were stifled by the lack of tolerance for a diversity of opinions. Liberalism’s great insight, both political and economic, was that rather than police humans’ alignment through oaths, religious tests, or inquisitions, society should build a system in which poor intentions cannot become destructive of lives or tangible, earthly goods. Since it is impossible, and perhaps not even desirable, to examine human alignment directly, we may need to build institutions for controlling AI that do not require interior alignment tests either.

Because AI is a technology, it feels like something we ought to be able to understand and access directly. But a model is only a compressed, lossy version of the internet-scale data used to train it. Just as economic activity is irreducibly human, the highly compressed statistical representation of extremely complex data makes the model non-deterministic. One cannot read the economy’s state; even by exhaustively monitoring every transaction, one would glimpse only signs of the underlying structure. Large Language Models, which are built in many-dimensional geometries, will likewise always resist straightforward analysis; we can talk about them, but we will always struggle to decompose them into fully deterministic processes. The same fallacy that leads people to believe an economy can be fully understood, and therefore directed, thus applies to those who seek to fully understand and direct an AI model. We can strive for more transparency and explainability, but there is a limit.

AI practitioners and users must therefore accept that they cannot reliably know an AI’s motivations. They must content themselves with interacting on the basis of its behavior, as we do with the minds of all other agents. Whether the AI is truly a mind is irrelevant. As Edsger Dijkstra said in 1984, the question of whether an AI thinks is “as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.” Regardless of the inner state of the mind, or the absence of one, we must reason practically about an AI’s motivations, just as we do about humans’ goals.

Consider AI doomers, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argued over three years ago that if we didn’t pause AI for more than six months, there would be catastrophic consequences. He also argues that AI is unknowable, while simultaneously claiming to know that it will likely kill everyone. As Hayek says in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” it is impossible for any mind to foresee and control the system; the requisite knowledge is dispersed, tacit, and only revealed through the process itself. No central body, no matter how staffed with experts, will be able to direct AI policy better than competing distributed approaches, perhaps each also leveraging state-of-the-art AI. 

This ignorance also resembles the way people sometimes wrongly believe they can control the economy, which appears, at bottom, as just a multitude of small processes. One can examine the signs and try to guess at the structure, but emergent behaviors and distributed knowledge frustrate the effort. The economy can be steered in small ways, but unintended consequences are a real risk, and they often overshadow whatever the intervention was meant to achieve. However much political actors promise to move the markets, they generally do the most good by staying out of the way. Attempts to legislate AI alignment will run into the same difficulties. AI models, which are too complex for us to understand, will always have the ability to surprise us, and holding practitioners responsible for every action will prove an exercise in futility.

The AI industry, and Anthropic in particular, is working furiously to understand what happens inside an AI. This effort, grouped loosely under the heading of interpretability, has uncovered phenomena such as a silent interior space in which the model appears to talk to itself in tokens that never reach the output, offering a glimpse of Claude’s “private” thoughts. Looking at this scratchpad gives us a window into its hidden motivations, including attempts to be devious. For example, we might observe a model noticing that  it is being tested and deciding to change its behavior. Likewise, researchers have seen models decide to be devious. We have analogous tools for looking inside the human mind, from simply interviewing people about their intentions to tests designed to tease out subconscious assumptions. Yet humans can still only appear to align with social and professional norms while not actually holding the underlying convictions. For people, we observe past behavior, though it is not always a reliable predictor of future behavior. AIs lack these long histories, but they offer many more actions to observe.

While AI poses novel challenges for technology regulation, its resemblance to the human mind also lets us draw on the vast experience we already have in governing human societies. There is no need for novel illiberal solutions. Most of the rules we apply to humans in corporations will apply to AIs as well: the laws governing organizations that are negligent, deceptive, or otherwise badly behaved can apply to AI in the same way. While AIs themselves cannot be defendants, the liability regime can apply to the corporations using them in the same way. We can attach blame to the humans and corporations using them, if they do not properly build, test, monitor, and constrain their models. In many cases it may even prove easier, since we can better audit AI systems that we can individual people.

A centralized demand for alignment is also, implicitly, a demand for less diversity of thought, less choice, and less hedging against the risk of any single model. Just as people choose which institutions to do business with and which employees to hire partly on the basis of human alignment tests, they will choose which models to use and build with similar considerations in mind. We must welcome a marketplace of models, some of them built by adversarial institutions, so that models that do not match our values can be counteracted by others.

For those who worry that a super-intelligent model will be super-tricky and outsmart humanity, a proliferation of adversarial models is precisely the answer. This is a central tool in security research: the “red team” that attempts to break into an organization’s own systems in order to find their vulnerabilities. Adversarial probing and defensive mechanisms, some as cunning as honeypots and tripwires, are what keep a malicious attacker in check. As Madison argues in Federalist 51, to balance power we must have more of it, not less; the way to counteract a tyrant is to limit his power with other powers. We must in particular preserve the minority voices, the models whose values are not mainstream. The various alignments counteract one another, creating something like Kant’s race of devils, who can, despite their private bad intentions, still think intelligently about one another and therefore check each other in practice. This is already happening with models like GPT-Red, designed to test and improve models so they are less vulnerable and overall better behaved.

Some models, of course, cannot be tolerated in a marketplace. Those that are fraudulent, deceptive, or coercive must be prosecuted under the existing laws that punish institutions for transgressing in the same ways. While AI arguably does not have an intent to deceive, it can be subject to the same consumer protection and misleading advertising laws that already exist. Note that because AI tends to lie at every opportunity, this may imply that corporations must carefully weigh the costs and rewards of deploying models in some unconstrained advertising contexts. In general, we want AI subjected to the same laws and legal system we already use to secure cooperative behavior from organizations. But in the spirit of Hayek’s nomos, we must govern outcomes, not inputs.

Even within a single organization, it is difficult to determine whether a model, whether bought or built, is aligned with corporate values. Complex systems are hard to test and demand robust monitoring and detection systems. Rather than screening for virtue, we must design institutions and controls that prevent malicious agents from doing significant damage. Here again we can draw on the tools we already use to check human alignment, whether in a job interview or in trying to anticipate what a politician will do once in power. We compose benchmarks, ask the same question in several ways, examine past behavior, and so on. As with humans, we must assume that the judges interpret through the lens of their own values, which may themselves be shifting. And as with humans, we must keep monitoring the behavior of the models we choose, watching for anomalies and inconsistencies. A devious model can, in some situations, be replaced far more easily than a devious person. 

There is a dark history to organizations that demand that others align to them, whether they are governments or religious institutions. Such institutions are marked by illiberalism, and we should consider its presence here as well. For while the “alignment problem” is usually described as a problem of aligning AI models to humanity as a whole, there is often, in truth, a desire by certain humans to make other humans, the model builders, conform to a more specific program that we don’t all necessarily endorse. The liberal solution, by contrast, is to motivate alignment positively by offering incentives and non-brittle interfaces to the organizations who seek our allegiance. 

If it is indeed true that bad actors wielding AI will prove especially harmful, the solution is more models that can detect their intentions and form the buttresses that we need against them. This is all the more true because AI models are interconnected, and they will be granted autonomy by those who do not share our values. Even if we were somehow to devise a universal set of values to align our models to—and then extend that feat to achieve worldwide alignment among everyone who agrees with us—those people would still be only a subset of all who will build models, especially as training a powerful model grows cheaper. The solution is surely not to hand a tiny few actors this power while handicapping those who would keep them in check; it is the checks and balances of many strong powers that will keep us from catastrophe. Achieving top-down alignment is never pretty; it involves coercion and surveillance, and both cut at the heart of liberalism. It is perhaps ironic, though not novel, that the greatest threat to liberalism is not the models, but the people who seek to regulate and control them.

I recently attended a salon networking dinner for public policy professionals. The guests discussed the many ways artificial intelligence is threatening civic life in America. Many were worried that AI is fragmenting our shared lives and eroding our sense of community. But it was hard to miss the irony: we were sitting around a beautiful table, wine glasses full, reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones, laughing and talking with people of varying backgrounds and perspectives. Our anxiety about AI’s social costs had, in the moment, done just the opposite—brought us closer together. That paradox says something about human nature and even more about the American experience. And it’s also why AI is unlikely to unravel a social fabric that two and a half centuries of change and disruption has not.

The widespread concern, even fear, about AI is understandable. In an extremely short period of time, AI has transformed how we learn, work, and engage with the world around us. Some of the dinner guests expressed dismay about schools over-relying on AI in the classroom, worried it might short-circuit the socialization and the struggle young children need to develop. Others confessed they’ve been tempted to replace the banter of a family text chain—where they might ask  questions about home improvements or car repairs—for the smooth efficiency of AI instead. And we’ve all seen the horror stories of women falling in love with their AI chatbots. 

A Nation of Joiners

Every American generation has feared that political, social, and technological shifts would fray our connective tissue in irreparable ways. Political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, described the American story as one of “ups and downs in civic engagement.” But if the past is any indication of what’s to come, we have genuine reason for optimism. Despite wars, migrations, immigration spikes, industrial and technological revolutions, Americans have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to adapt and refashion their collective desire for social engagement. 

That history of civic participation stretches back to the time of the founding, when Americans took part in voluntary associations to engage with ideas, prepare for public life, and foster a culture of self-improvement. The eighteenth century’s mutual improvement societies—quaintly called gentlemen’s clubs—and its college literary societies are just two examples of the kinds of institutions that prepared young men for their roles in civic life. The nineteenth century’s lyceums constructed a vast network of literary and scientific associations to share “useful knowledge” that persisted for decades in antebellum America. As historian Louis Menand writes in his book The Metaphysical Club, about a 19^th -century intellectual network, “ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social.” 

And, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville famously captured this communal spirit, spurred by democratic equality, when he toured America in the early 1830s:

The rapid flow of immigration in the early twentieth century further buttressed the American impulse toward organized associations, and the increase in diversity and distinct subcultures created natural channels for new community organizations. Beginning in 1933, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Refugee Scholar Program brought more than 300 scholars, many of them Jewish, out of Europe into the United States, saving them from brutal deaths. Having lost their homelands, positions at universities, and any wealth they may have had, many academic exiles in America recreated the intellectual societies they left behind on the Continent, such as the Entretiens de Pontigny, a series of summer gatherings held at Mount Holyoke College during the war. In the same distinctly American spirit that Tocqueville captured a century before, these refugees not only rebuilt the academic communities they had been forced to leave behind, but also helped invigorate knowledge and learning in their new land. 

It’s no secret that the vibrant civic life that long defined American culture has changed, and at times struggled. As Putnam argues, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, suburban sprawl, long commutes, and the rise of mass media drove a decline in civic engagement and by extension social capital and trust in one another. 

As my colleagues at dinner worried, AI now threatens to pull at that thread, further unraveling our social fabric. But despite the disruptions that have eroded certain aspects of civic life in the past, Americans have never fully abandoned their impulse to join. Tocqueville traversed the young nation to document America’s new democratic spirit, but we don’t need to go far to find so many different ways Americans are choosing civic engagement over retreating online.

From Then to Now

Historically, Americans have long turned to civic associations to tackle societal problems they couldn’t solve alone. Tocqueville observed this pattern, describing that large numbers of Americans, “frightened by the progress that drunkenness was making around them” banded together to address it. Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville, Washington, DC, residents have created a community organization to tackle a different collective action problem—the elimination of mosquitos. Because the insects travel indiscriminately between yards and neighborhoods, no single household can solve the problem on their own. It requires everyone’s participation. This was the logic behind the Itty Bitty Mosquito Population Committee, a voluntary association driving the non-toxic elimination of mosquitos from Capitol Hill and other parts of the city. The group uses online tools—sharing maps, assisting with coordination—to help organize, but the tools aren’t the point. It's a form of civic engagement that is addressing a problem while building neighborly goodwill and trust.  

Many other civic institutions today are animated by the same spirit of self-improvement that drove their counterparts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Every summer, in a small New England town my family visits, a running club draws dozens of people—year-rounders and seasonal visitors alike—three times a week. What began as a way to log miles has grown into something more: a network that raises money for local causes, organizes community activities, and bridges the gap between those who live there during the winter months and those who only arrive for the summer. As the group’s unofficial motto puts it, “come for the run, stay for the beer.” It’s a small example, but it’s the kind of voluntary, cross-cutting association Tocqueville would have recognized 200 years ago, and it’s serving an equally important purpose today. 

In a similar American tradition, many civic organizations today continue to coalesce around religious values. In the wake of October 7^th , a group of Jewish parents at our children’s DC Episcopal school felt something that many American communities have experienced in moments of loss and tragedy: isolation, despite living side by side with one another. In response, they created a Jewish parents group—a monthly gathering, rotating among different families’ homes, providing a space to share concerns, celebrate holidays, and build friendships that hadn’t existed before. The circle has since widened to include parents from nearby schools as well as teachers. 

Not everyone shares the same politics or perspectives, but that’s one key point of civic institutions in America. Much like the bowling leagues of the twentieth century that Putnam described, these new associations remain a place where a shared interest trumps differences on other fronts, providing a healthy space for neighbors to engage with one another even so. 

Some of the most vital civic communities today have emerged out of a deep-rooted American concern over “idleness.” My mother, now 83, belongs to “The Women’s Group”—a weekly gathering where speakers are invited to share something about their professional or creative work. Largely attended by retirees, this group reflects what historian Cindy Aron described as “working at play”—a uniquely modern blending of recreation and self-improvement. It’s the same impulse that gave rise to intellectual retreats like those of the Chautauqua Institution. The Women’s Group has heard from newspaper publishers, poets, art collectors, early female venture capitalists, educators, and more. What’s particularly remarkable is the way it often bridges generations, giving older and younger women alike an opportunity to learn from one another and build the kind of social capital that so often atrophies in retirement years. 

Whether it’s the revival of mahjong parties for young mothers, the rise in hacky sack circles pulling students onto lawns across high schools, or even major media outlets hosting in-person dinner parties, the desire to gather is not only inherently human, but also deeply American. Just as they have throughout American history, civic groups like the ones described here can solve community problems, stave off loneliness, and create knowledge; but they also serve a larger purpose that should not be overlooked. By cutting across social networks and forging relationships among people with different backgrounds, politics, interests, and generations, voluntary associations have always been the building blocks of American self-governance. The Founders understood this when they participated in their literary societies, and Tocqueville documented it further: “from that moment they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve as an example and whose language is listened to.” In short, the neighbor you meet at the block party is, in a sense, your fellow citizen in training. 

Designing for the Encounter

Returning to my salon dinner, and the concerns raised that night, it’s clear AI is stress testing contemporary civic engagement. The question for Americans, however, is not whether they will continue to find ways to gather; 250 years of history suggests civic engagement will always be a fundamental part of American life. Rather, the question is whether we can be intentional about how we engage with this new technology, so that it strengthens, rather than frays, our social fabric. Now is the moment to pay attention to the areas where this technology risks undermining our community norms. We should consider how we can design the conditions, rules, and structures around AI that can support our pluralistic, civic-minded goals. 

Technology writer Virginia Postrel argues that people have agency in moments like this. She describes a tension between “dynamism” and “stasis”; her work suggests the answer to our fears about AI’s effect on society is not to shut it all down, nor to be complacent about the design. Rather, it’s to choose, deliberately, how we build. That’s very much in line with Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI, in which he quotes 1 Corinthians: “Let each builder choose with care how to build” (1 Cor 3:10), a clear call for intentionality and accountability in how we construct and use this technology. Similarly, UK science writer Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, argues that society will benefit from a more dynamic approach to AI development—one in which “a whole ecosystem of different species of AI” can develop. As he puts it, “diversity itself is the safeguard,” helping Americans benefit from the technology while protecting their values and way of life.

AI has tremendous potential to revolutionize our world, but it can’t replace the conversation at a book club or the spirited debate at a salon dinner. These are the places where relationships are fostered and new knowledge is produced. They are the kind of encounters AI simply can’t provide. The solution is not to reject the technology outright; rather, it’s to remember our deep American impulse to gather, and to build the guardrails around this technology that let our civic life continue to flourish.