Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be in pretty bad shape these days
By ‘bedrock liberal principles’, I mean things like: respect for individual liberties and property rights, respect for the rule of law and equal treatment under the law, and a widespread / consensus belief that authority and legitimacy of the state derive from the consent of the governed.
Note that “consent of the governed” is distinct from simple democracy / majoritarianism: a 90% majority that uses state power to take all the stuff of the other 10% might be democratic but isn’t particularly liberal or legitimate according to the principle of consent of the governed.
I believe a healthy liberal society of humans will usually tend towards some form of democracy, egalitarianism, and (traditional) social justice, but these are all secondary to the more foundational kind of thing I’m getting at, which traces back to ideas from Enlightenment philosophers and U.S. Founding Fathers.
Nor does “respect for property rights and individual liberties” imply orthodox libertarianism as the only compatible system of governance; in practice most people have a revealed preference for a fairly large welfare state and lots of state intervention in various aspects of society. These interventions are not necessarily incompatible with bedrock liberalism, but they do require some care—just because it would genuinely be in the national interest or majority interest for the state to intervene in some way, doesn’t mean that an intervention is justified or legitimate under liberal principles. Advocates who want to respect and work within the framework of liberalism must make an argument for why a particular intervention is justified and not too onerous or restrictive, choose implementations that minimize the infringement on liberal principles, explicitly acknowledge illiberalism as a cost / tradeoff (even if they think it is worth paying), and work through existing democratic and constitutional processes to build consensus.
Anyway, hopefully that’s enough background / gesturing; my actual point is that outspoken support for these principles appears to be waning in the US and around the world, on all sides of the political spectrum and in all strata of society (politicians, intellectuals, the general public, and in popular media, etc.)
I don’t want to get too into the weeds on the object-level history / politics of this decline, but my own impression, at least in the US, is that this trend is currently somewhat worse on the mainstream right than the mainstream left, and that Trump has accelerated the decline (though Trump’s own popularity is in part a reaction to illiberalism on the left).
This seems bad, especially as the responsibilities and size of governments around the world continue to grow, as they’re faced with important policy questions around AGI, war / instability, falling birth rates, etc. All else equal, I believe it would be better for people and governments to work through these problems under the framework of liberalism than something else.
I do think there is hope though: I also believe that liberalism is still broadly popular among many factions of elites, even if there are fewer people who are outspokenly for it and fewer places where it can be taken for granted as a kind of shared background assumption in mainstream western politics, relative to other time periods in recent history.
A few thoughts on what could be done about this:
Directly raising awareness / popularity of these principles among the general public seems pretty doomed. It’s hard enough to get people to care about good policy and politics even when it’s about very concrete kitchen-table stuff, without getting drowned out by culture war memes. Abstract principles of political philosophy are even harder to get mindshare for.
(Re-)instilling these values in kids (through the education system and culture broadly or in one’s own family) seems more plausible as a long-term solution, but perhaps not very useful / actionable unless you have relatively long AI timelines.
There are people and coalitions involved in politics with sensible policy positions who probably generally believe in and support these principles (e.g. various rat-adjacent bloggers, abundance / neolib people, anti-Trump neocons, some old-school / mainstream Democrats, a few old-school / liberty-focused Republicans, technocrats, EAs and rats generally, etc.).
Nudging / encouraging / reminding sympathetic elites and tastemakers to speak up for and support liberalism qua liberalism, whether it applies to their own pet policy agenda or not, could be effective at popularizing explicit support for liberalism on the margin.
Some examples of what the last bullet could look like:
An economics blogger who writes about why tariffs are bad economic policy could also mention that Trump’s recent implementation of tariffs was quite illiberal (imposed suddenly and unilaterally, without congressional approval, on flimsy national security grounds).
Abundance liberals and YIMBYs talking about housing policy often make the (correct) argument that deregulation and zoning reform are more effective ways to increase housing supply and prosperity vs. rent control.
But they could also mention (more frequently than they already do) that rent control is illiberal (e.g. unfair to property owners), not necessarily as a knockdown argument against it, but as a point / reminder that in a liberal society, an intervention like rent control requires ongoing justification and careful implementation. That is, even if it were in the national interest or majority interest, it requires balancing that with the cost of allowing the state to just take stuff from people, and proponents of rent control should be pushed hard to acknowledge that explicitly as a serious cost on its own terms.
(Lots of great bloggers that talk about these kinds of issues already do speak up for liberalism pretty strongly, but it seems worth encouraging and doing explicitly even more so.)
Perhaps a more salient example on LessWrong: @TsviBT’s recent post makes an
excellent case for a relatively permissive approach to genomic engineering within a
liberal framework.
In a world where explicit support for liberalism becomes the default, any argument against the principle of genomic liberty that Tsvi outlines would have to start by acknowledging that Tsvi’s position is a kind of default under liberalism, and then make the case for why it is worth restricting anyway, or why an ordinary / straightforward application of liberal principles doesn’t apply.
This observation isn’t exactly new to me, but it’s been on my mind lately given various recent world events, so I thought I would write up my own thoughts on it. I’ve become increasingly convinced that one of the necessary ingredients for making AGI go well is to build a healthier and happier societies that are worth living in, both to make coordinating on a problem like AGI more possible, and to make delay more palatable. Better governance through widespread respect for liberalism seems like a key aspect of that.
I notice that this whole post doesn’t identify a single argument against the positions you advocate for keeping alive.
What is the strongest argument against, for example, YIMBYism? If I were to ask the average YIMBY critic (not even necessarily a NIMBY) what do you think their strongest argument would be?
The most common arguments against YIMBYism are economics-related, but they mostly flow from misconceptions and econ illiteracy. Stuff like “increasing the supply of housing increases the price of housing because new houses are more expensive than old houses.” This argument fails to actually analyze how the rent and prices of existing housing units change when new units are built nearby; empirical analyses conclusively prove the former decrease significantly, as basic supply-and-demand theories would suggest.
Much more economically literate is the suggestion that the “amenities effect” can push rent up even when the supply of housing increases. The argument goes as follows: if more units are built in a certain neighborhood, business owners and franchises predict a ton of new people will move in soon, so they start setting up shop in this neighborhood to take advantage of the new clientele. This shifts the housing demand curve upwards in this area (because the neighborhood becomes more attractive due to the many amenities available), thereby increasing the price of housing. It’s at least theoretically plausible that this can happen, but the same empirical analyses find that the overall effect of new buildings is to make housing cheaper, not more expensive; the shift in the supply curve is much more significant than the shift in demand.
Then there are critiques of YIMBYism from the left, which mostly distrusts market mechanisms of all kinds and blames rich people, businesses, and “monopoly power” for almost all instances of unaffordability. There are discussions regarding induced demand/gentrification (which Matt Yglesias convincingly disproves here), about market concentration (which Hanania conclusively shows does not meaningfully exist in housing markets here), about how YIMBYism lacks a “theory of power” (it does, it’s just one that doesn’t reflexively blames the rich for everything wrong in the world), about how market-rate housing only helps rich people (it doesn’t, because it helps the market for “affordable” housing clear by allowing the rich and the poor to compete for separate types of housing, thereby reducing overall demand for “affordable” housing and pushing prices down), etc.
The strongest arguments against YIMBYism are ones that flow from more of a conflict theory perspective. They correctly point out that building more houses and enacting YIMBYism is not a Pareto improvement, so your support or opposition to YIMBYism can depend on which of the categories of beneficiary/adversely affected party you belong to or sympathize with. This is the case for two main reasons:
building new houses, as per basic economics, decreases the value of houses. But in the West (and especially in the US), homeownership is for many people by far the largest generator of wealth they have access to. Lowering the price of housing directly lowers their wealth and makes their life worse. Since these people are mostly millionaires,[1] I’m not personally sympathetic to this argument. Nevertheless, I can understand how there was almost an implicit social contract involved, where young Americans in the 60′s/70′s era were told by society that buying a nice, big house should be your ultimate goal and that it will ensure your family’s financial well-being for generations to come precisely because of these anti-competitive mechanisms. So there is a case to be made that tearing this apart breaks some sort of trust or promise; I’m not personally convinced by it, however.
building new houses in a neighborhood changes the character of the neighborhood. Unlike the previous bullet point, which viewed housing solely as an investment good, this objection acknowledges that housing is also a consumption good. And when (mostly upper-middle-class) families decide where to set down roots, many select single-family-zoned suburbs precisely because they enjoy the aesthetic and the lack of fights over parking spots and the vibes and the fact there are significantly fewer poor (or homeless) people around, unlike in the poor-filled city proper. Changing the nature of their area directly harms them by forcing them into a neighborhood type they hate, a neighborhood they presumably paid a premium of many tens of thousands of dollars to get away from in the past.[2] I acknowledge this as a real drawback of YIMBYism, but I believe the benefits ultimately far outweigh it.
And, additionally, they maintain their wealth by capturing economic rents through banding together in cartel-like HOAs and lobbying local governments to artificially restrict supply, thereby decreasing the overall pie in addition to violating libertarian principles of freedom to contract
There is also an economic efficiency point lurking in the background here; I think Tyler Cowen made it explicitly somewhere on MR. Over time, absent changes in governmental policy, individuals follow their incentives and ultimately get to some sort of equilibrium where an aggregate of economic efficiency and personal aesthetic value reaches a local quasi-maximum. But then when the rules change, chaos ensues, as per Eliezer’s classic post on Free to Optimize.
The benefits for who though? Certainly not those people who specifically moved to that neighborhood for its character and are now having said character changed.
Indeed, not for them; they lose out, illustrating why these policies do not generate Pareto improvements.
The benefits are for the marginal residents of this area, who would not be able to live there but for the cost-of-living reduction created by lowering the price of rent and housing through the increase of housing supply.
The benefits are for renters, who are on average significantly poorer than homeowners and need these cost-of-living reductions far more.
The benefits are for the economy, both overall (increasing the supply of housing increases the sum total of real goods produced in the economy, by reducing the deadweight loss and economic rent captured by existing homeowners) and locally (since new, productive residents move in and start purchasing goods and services from local businesses, increasing their sales and profit as a result).
The benefits are for anyone who uses public services in the area (such as roads, parks, police services, schools, etc.), since those services are funded by local taxes, and the local tax base increases when new residents can move in and engage in economic activities.
The benefits are for new homeowners, who would like to purchase a house in a nice area where they have access to good jobs, but who often cannot because houses cost millions of dollars in the most sought-after neighborhoods (see: virtually all of San Francisco) due to artificial restrictions on supply.
The benefits are for investors and construction companies, who would like to create economic value for themselves and their surrounding community but can’t because of zoning regulations or other legal restrictions.
The housing crisis has been going on for quite a while at this point, and its deleterious effects touch almost all aspects of urban and suburban life, particularly in the United States. Increasing the supply of housing through YIMBY policies is the only economically literate and sustainable way of fighting against it.
Alright so there’s an acknowledgement that at the very least, the people who originally occupied that nice area are losing out.
Your breakdown of the benefits seems more or less fair. The only thing I take issue with is “who would like to purchase a house in a nice area where they have access to good jobs”. I don’t think it’s fair to take it for granted that the area will stay nice post-YIMBY change (in fact the core acknowledgement here is that the character of the neighborhood is going to change) or that jobs will stay.
Would you consider that a “load bearing belief” for your YIMBYism? As in, if it’s possible that by enabling YIMBYism to come to a nice neighborhood with lots of jobs, both of those characters of the neighborhood might be changed, that might prompt you to change your position?
I’d say those people could be losing out. But usually only if the following conjunction happens:
they are homeowners as opposed to renters (otherwise the reduction in rent would reduce their cost of living and improve their lives to such an extent that it would likely overcome aesthetic sensibilities)
they are not small business owners/investors in such businesses (otherwise the larger clientele should excite them for the potential profit it will allow them to obtain)
they care more about maintaining a specific aesthetic vibe of their neighborhood than they do about the increased quality of public services generated by having a larger tax base
If these bullet points hold (and to be clear, they certainly hold for a non-negligible minority of the population), they would indeed lose out.
The types of jobs I had in mind were, for example, tech jobs in California, where even a high-by-national-standards salary is often insufficient to allow those people to buy houses in the Bay Area.
In any case, the types of workers who could move to high-cost-of-living areas tend disproportionately to be white-collar workers, and these industries would have no reason to move away from an area when it becomes larger and more economically productive. On the contrary, the fact that many prospective workers would be able to move to a city after an YIMBY change serves as a powerful economic incentive for these companies to actually stay, since they now have a lot of new possible employees to select from.
Plus, I think whether the area is “nice” or not is mostly a matter of taste. A significant proportion of the population prefers class/racial homogeneity and single-family-zoned suburban vibes in their neighborhoods, but that doesn’t make alternatives to it not nice; density, if properly done, allows for a different kind of flourishing that prospective residents with different aesthetic tastes can enjoy.
I think it’s not a load bearing belief. The arguments for economic efficiency and the elimination of deadweight loss and economic rents, the benefits to local businesses, the progressive reduction of cost-of-living massively helping the renter class, and the value given to those who either invest in the area or benefit from public services, would still be more than sufficiently compelling for me to remain a YIMBY.
It is actually very easy for renters to lose out due to YIMBYism, because your “otherwise” clause is flat wrong—there is essentially no amount of rent reduction that could improve my life to the point of compensating for (to take an obvious example) my favorite restaurants, cafes, stores, bagel shops, etc. all going out of business (which is one possible way in which “the character of a neighborhood” can change). This is basically a trivial, yet critical, point: if something is not available, then I can’t buy it with money. If I can’t buy something I want with money, then no amount of money will get me the thing that I want.
Your term “aesthetic sensibilities” is essentially a trivialization of the factors that constitute, to a large extent, the texture of a person’s day-to-day life. I don’t see why I should give up most of the things that I enjoy about what my day-to-day life is like, in order that… other people… might benefit?
My default position on this sort of topic is to oppose YIMBYism reflexively, for a very simple reason: I like my neighborhood and I don’t want it to change (well, it could stand to be cleaner, but as experience shows, that’s solved by electing better local government officials). If what you’re proposing involves my neighborhood changing, then I don’t like it. You’re gonna have to sell me on your proposition real hard if you want to overcome that very simple point. And basically no amount of “other people will benefit” will suffice to convince me.
I can believe this statement is true for you-in-particular, but I do not believe it is true for most renters in these high cost-of-living areas. These people usually struggle to make ends meet to the point where rent and housing costs represent a critical part of their monthly budgets; alleviating those is generally more important to them than maintaining the overall vibe of the area.
I also find it difficult to imagine that your “favorite restaurants, cafes, stores, bagel shops, etc. all going out of business” is a likely outcome of building new houses, particularly because new residents coming in increases the demand for those services. I am sure it can happen (and perhaps it has, in your own life), but in the majority of situations these businesses would flourish, expand their services, hire new workers, etc. And to the extent they don’t, that’s largely because of increased competition from more economically efficient and desirable shops and businesses; I view this as good rather than bad.
You call it a trivialization; I call it a correct factual description. I think I’m correct here; note that I mentioned many people care more about aesthetics and vibes than they do about strictly economic matters. It’s of nontrivial importance, but it’s still aesthetic in nature.
It’s generally referred to as altruism, I think. But in any case, I’m neither fully altruistic myself, nor do I generally prescribe it to others. Given your beliefs and preferences as you’ve expressed them here, I don’t think you should want to give any of that up.
But given my beliefs and preferences as I’ve expressed them here, I think we’re in the realm of conflict and not mistake, and I strongly approve of governmental efforts to remove restrictions on zoning and enact YIMBY policies. This is not an instance of a heavy governmental touch coming in to regulate the economy and restrict individual choice; it’s an instance of deregulation, where the free market right-to-build and right-to-contract are currently impeded by those who themselves restrict the freedom of others, seek out economic rents, and already benefit from the goods and services available. Changing the locus of control from local to state-level, in the US, is one example of an appropriate such structural change.
Unsurprisingly, I also approve of progressive taxation,[1] even though I also don’t see why rich people should necessarily want to give up their money so that other people might benefit.
At least as long as the Overton window doesn’t allow for more economically literate taxation systems like LVT and a VAT + income-based rebates
Would you consider being worried about an increase in crime an “aesthetic preference”?
I think I generally wouldn’t.
The areas of this argument that stands out to me as the biggest loci for disagreements are best summarized in the following sections:
and
First, there’s the “aesthetic” point. You’ve said here that you don’t consider crime concerns to be aesthetic preferences. Yet when you’re talking about the character of a neighborhood, you focus on aesthetic concerns. I think ignoring how front of mind the crime concern is to NIMBYs and even YIMBY skeptics is going to do nothing but hurt your odds in convincing anyone.
The assumption in the statement of “increased quality of public services generated by having a larger tax base” is that as population grows and the tax base grows, public services will get better. That is a very large assumption, and one you’re certainly going to need to prove.
Lastly on “nice” being mostly a matter of taste, I think that’s partly true but there are certainly things everyone would agree on being nice. Not having trash littering the streets is nice. Being able to walk around safely at night without fear is nice. There is such a thing as universally preferred “niceness” in neighborhoods.
I’d encourage you to keep in mind that when pitching plans, the ideas behind them simply exist in the world of theory. They have to be executed in reality. When you advocate a position to someone, you should be able to anticipate their worries, and lay out specific and concrete steps to address them. I have seen this in particular with YIMBYs there is a tendency to, as @Said Achmiz pointed out, trivialize concerns (or just ignore them completely as I’m pointing out with the crime).
When it comes to plans, the messenger (or the party who will be trusted with the execution of a plan) and their capabilities are often equally or more important to the message itself.
I appreciate your comment, and I certainly agree with this part. For purposes of time, I will not spend too much additional time illustrating the specific evidence I trust that speaks to the change in the prevalence of crime in upzoned neighborhoods and the way quality of public services changes when the tax base grows, but it’s perhaps unsurprising that I view both topics as providing support for the YIMBY position, as opposed to the reverse.
And while I acknowledge the importance of proper messaging that acknowledges the concerns residents may have, I also believe there are No Universally Compelling Arguments for YIMBYism. Ultimately, somebody with the beliefs and preferences of Said Achmiz should not, from his perspective, support YIMBYs, and should instead oppose them whenever they try to change his neighborhood. I view this fact as inevitable, and the NIMBYs who feel this way as political opponents.
In addition to poor and homeless, it’s also Black. Structural racism is alive and well in the United States on that front.
Okay, so what would be your pitch to those people for why they should be YIMBYs?
That depends very much on the local politics. If you are in California “This is structural racism, you can overcome your structural racism by becoming YIMBY” might be useful. If you make the same pitch in Texas it’s likely less successful.
Well arguments aside it’s worth noting that Texas is afaik more YIMBY than California.
Generally though I think the “you can overcome racism by doing what I want” well is basically dry at this point.
The way the US handled racism in the 20st century is a core reason why there are much more isolated neighborhoods in the US than in Europe. Americans who can’t directly discriminate against Black people found that if you just make housing in a neighborhood expensive enough, you can keep the neighborhood relatively free from Black neighbors.
While you might not convince people to switch to being YIMBY, the structures of racism are still a key reason why those neighborhoods are setup the way they are setup and this is part of what “character of the neighborhood” meant over the last century.
Sure if your goal is to spread awareness about this issue, then talking about it makes sense.
If your goal is to convince people to become YIMBY, IMO its counterproductive.
Personally while I don’t consider myself NIMBY, I’m certainly YIMBY skeptic. I would not only be not convinced to change my mind by someone discussing structural racism, I would actively be less likely to support whatever they were pitching. I’m just trying to tell you honestly about my reaction because I suspect a lot of others would react the same way.
I suspect a vast majority of the general population would react the same way.
But in the specific California ultra-progressive neighborhoods ChristianKL was talking about, mentioning how Euclidean zoning was designed with the specific purpose of keeping Black residents out of white neighborhoods, because the Supreme Court had thrown out previous and more explicitly racist proposals to keep out “negroes and Orientals” in Buchanan v Warley five years prior, could be more persuasive.
I gave YIMBYism as an example of a policy agenda that would benefit from more widespread support for liberalism, not as something I personally support in all cases.
A liberal argument for NIMBYism could be: people are free to choose the level of density and development that they want within their own communities. But they should generally do so deliberately and through the rule of law, rather than through opposition to individual developments (via a heckler’s veto, discretionary review processes that effectively require developers to lobby local politicians and woo random interest groups, etc.). Existing strict zoning laws are fine in places where they already exist, but new laws and restrictions should be wary of treading on the rights of existing property owners, and of creating more processes that increase discretionary power of local lawmakers and busybodies.
I think I have a somewhat different diagnosis.
For example, take ‘property rights’. As a category, this mixes together lots of liberal and illiberal things: houses, hammers, and taxi medallions are all ‘property’ but the first two are productive capital and the last one is a pretty different form of capital. I’d go so far as to say NIMBYism is mostly downstream of an expansive view of property rights—my ownership of my house is not just the volume and physical objects on it, but also more indirect things like the noises and smells that impinge on it and the view out from it.
I think the core problem for classical liberalism in the 2020s is something like “figuring out a modern theory of regulation”. That is, increased population density has increased the indirect costs of action (more people now see and are inconvenienced by your ugly building) and increased economic sophistication has increased a bunch of burdens (more complicated varieties of products require more complicated regulations) but the main answers for how to deal with this have come from anti-liberals. Like, consider Wolf Ladejinski, who helped influence land reform in Asia because he understood the popularity of communism came from (largely correct!) hatred of landlords, and free enterprise also does not like landlords strangling the economy. I think the returns to figuring out things like this are pretty high, and am moderately optimistic about ‘abundance’ types managing to do a similar thing, but I think there’s still lots of fertile ground here.
This might be a hot take, but I think most people are some combination of insufficiently smart and emotionally mature enough to grok bedrock liberal principles and why they might be good.
This creates a serious problem for any society wishing to be built on these principles. Here in America, the Founders seemed to understand this, which is why they went to great pains to creates what would effectively be an elected aristocracy rather than a true democracy. They understood the danger of mob rule and populism (I think we can fairly argue that Cromwell’s revolution, which they knew well, was a type of populism in hindsight), and didn’t fully trust the people to act in their own best interest (though to be clear there was disagreement about this point among the Founders).
We’ve had periods of time when more of American society at least, and importantly more of those who were in positions of power, grokked bedrock liberalism. But with the breaking of the old systems for creating the next generation of leaders (changes to Ivy League admissions), we’re now in a place where the last generation of solidly bedrock liberal leadership is dying out. And while it’s not gone, we have many who can take power who aren’t onboard with its principles, and the only way I see to get that back would be to wrestle control of the training institutions (the Ivy League) back into the hands of those who would consistently promote bedrock liberalism.
Perhaps there are better ideas I haven’t thought of. I’m thinking in terms of restoring what was lost. Perhaps there’s a way to fix things forward instead. I’m not sure.
Hmm, I’m not so pessimistic. I don’t think the core concepts of liberalism are so complex or unintuitive that the median civically engaged citizen can’t follow along given an amenable background culture.
And lots of policy, political philosophy, culture, big ideas, etc. are driven by elites of some form, not just liberalism. Ideas and culture among elites can change and spread very quickly. I don’t think a liberal renaissance requires “wrestling control” of any particular institutions so much as a cultural shift that is already happening to some degree (it just needs slightly better steering IMO).
I fall on the pessimistic side because I think cultural affiliation with a particular set of norms is a shallow force. By that I mean it will optimize for the meme version of something that can be said in 5 words rather than the real thing. I in fact think that’s how America ended up where it is today: we stopped teaching liberalism deeply, went with shallow, meme liberalism, and then this got warped into the two sides of the culture war we have today. Even if there is a cultural shift back to favor more traditional liberal values, it will only have a positive impact in favor of bedrock liberalism to the extent that elites actually understand it and believe in it enough that they will make hard choices because they believe liberalism is right.
A good analogy might be the Nerva-Antonine emperors of Rome starting with Nerva and continued by Trajan. They led a partial restoration of republican values, but that restoration didn’t actually change the imperial power structure, and thus was only a shallow return to republicanism (they importantly all remained emperors!). Similarly, short of a deep reformation of elite training systems (the relevant power structure here), I’m doubtful of an ability of a cultural shift towards liberalism to actually result in the deep liberalism we enjoyed in the past, rather than something like the trappings of liberalism while maintaining the bones of the current cultural regime.
You seem to talk mostly about the elites losing faith in traditional, bedrock liberal values as the cause of our troubles today. And that partly aligns with reality as I see it.
But in my view, the fundamental story of the late 20th century and early 21 century is the decline of traditional media and cultural gatekeepers and the political emancipation of the non-elites, whether through the rise of conservative radio talk shows, the Gingrich revolution, or Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservatism, and continuing all the way to populism and the Trump-led rebellion of Republican primary voters against the Republican elites in 2016.
If the elites believe in cancellation and jamming their opinions down the throats of the masses, that certainly bodes poorly for liberal values. But I don’t think that suffices to explain the conundrums of our age, because to me the elites have significantly less power and control than they used to, both culturally (to some extent) and politically (to a large extent). This has culminated in Trump 2.0, where scorn at and opposition to elites (whether in bureaucracy, academia, the Groups, etc) is the norm of the day.
I don’t think the masses were ever true believers in bedrock liberal principles, except for waving them around as applause lights to signal patriotism during times of external strife like the Cold War. But in the past, their influence on public discourse used to be muted. Media heads used to decide what topics were worth covering or thinking about, party leaders used to decide what candidates were even available, the elites used to decide what being American stood for, and all this was done without obtaining much input from the lower classes.
Today, that has been turned on its head. And I think the consequences of these changes have been an unmitigated disaster for the entire Western world.
I mostly agree with your comment. My only quibble is that I’d say anyone who gets themselves into a position of power is vying to be an elite, and old elites are largely no longer actually elites in that people don’t look up to them; they’re thought of more as these weird people who weild some power but aren’t really in charge (except when they make convenient scapegoats, in which case they are secretly in charge!). The likes of Trump and Rogan are just as much elites as JFK and Cronkite were, though they treat the role quite differently, and many don’t want to call them “elite” because it disdains the associations the term used to carry, and many modern elites have made a career of being anti-elite, meaning anti the old elite order.
Disagree. People are plenty smart enough to understand them. The case for them just doesn’t get made vigorously.
I know my take is largely opinion here, but I remember when I was a kid and the case was made more vigorously and still many didn’t get it. They seemed just unable to reason through second and third order effects. All they cared about was if their preferred group or policy won, and if second order effects came up, the response was often that it “just” wouldn’t happen because no one would do those things once their preferred thing was enacted.
So to be clear, I say this because I think bedrock liberalism requires understanding second and third order effects. The whole reason to buy these ideals is because you understand them, because liberalism inevitably means letting people you disagree with sometimes get their way, and understanding why that’s necessary and good.
Controversial ideas need to be defended bravely, clearly, and often to keep them in the Overton Window. A persistent drip of timely examples and anecdotes combined with a simple interpretation is much more effective. Ideas like “free speech” are very easy to defend in a simple way. Just pointing out that “in Britain, they just put someone on trial for calling someone a Karen” is a fine way to argue for continuing to protect free speech, without needing to get into any abstractions.
The free speech issue is not that simple, I think a lot of people agree on free speech with exceptions ™ , the fight is often about which free speech ™ should be the norm. It’s similar to how people can have different notions of fairness. I am not sure what would act as an intuition pump for most of people to agree with more fair and liberal notions of free speech.
The distinction I’m driving at is between making an in-depth intellectual argument about liberalism (which is what you and Gordon are focused on) and a winning emotional appeal (which is what I’m focused on).
My claim is that support for liberalism has been eroded by too few winning emotional appeals for it, and that they’re actually easy to make. It’s not necessary to address the ambiguities. Just share anecdotes that stir up positive feelings in the right direction.
Let me reiterate why your original comment seems to be downplaying how difficult it is to intuition pump the ideas of liberal free expression.
For a case study, take Modi’s India which also emotively endorses free speech[1][2]— but the activist groups have been screaming left and right about how his government has been steadily eroding liberal free speech norms[3].
Extrapolating from the case in India, at this point around the world it’s mostly a debate surrounding which exceptions people want do they want people criticising the government when they’re doing perceived good policies? Or insulting certain groups of people? People don’t feel strongly about liberal notions of free speech in good parts of the world, and the people who do—western classical liberals— are struggling to get their intuition pumps out there.
I can see the developing economy and cultural differences objections to the former example, so let’s take, case study of Trump, he uses the Applause Lights of free speech even more so than others. He even passed an executive order to restore free speech[4] , where his admin seems to be disagreeing on the same exceptions ™ . They think misinformation-by-outgroup shouldn’t be under free speech, others who disagree think misinformation-by-outgroup-2 shouldn’t be covered. Trump admin curbing on press freedom[5] from outgroup yet inviting —fringe and online activist— internet personalities from their own[6], which is to say their free speech policy seems to be amounting to “free speech for me not for thee”.
It would be difficult to rescue the banner free speech with “In britain they put you in jail for calling people karen” , without also engaging with “Destiny should be prosecuted for mocking on the retired firefighter who died during first trump shooting”.[7]
I think other way would be to play the information and Dark Side Epistemology game better than the illiberal side, but it would be a constant battle as evident from short-lived success of western liberal free speech advocates from prior generations and the difficulty adapting to populism,cancel-culture favoring social media environments.
https://lexfridman.com/narendra-modi-transcript/
https://www.themirrority.com/data/press-freedom-index
2021 onwards
2010-2020 (with ranking)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-freedom-of-speech-and-ending-federal-censorship/
https://rsf.org/en/usa-trump-inauguration-set-trigger-period-unprecedented-uncertainty-press-freedom
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/05/politics/laura-loomer-donald-trump-meeting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer
https://www.sportskeeda.com/us/streamers/news-he-s-gotta-hate-farming-viewers-call-kick-streamer-destiny-controversial-opinion-donald-trump-s-assassination-attempt
Most of the current debates about liberalism are debates about how to trade off between competing liberal priorities. I would regard these debates about exceptions to free speech—whether any are tolerated, and which ones—as debates within a common liberal framework. Typically, proponents of each site, all of whom are taking one liberal view or another, cast their opponents as illiberal (in the theory sense, not the American “progressive-vibe” sense). Opponents reject this label because they genuinely don’t perceive themselves that way.
I think the whole debate would be better if we recognized that there are exist high-stakes tradeoffs between competing liberal priorities, and that it’s these competing visions of liberalism that are at the heart of contemporary political discourse in America.
I only partially agree, I wouldn’t be surprised if “free speech” is now on the road to suffering the same fate as the word “democracy”—china calls itself a democracy,they too have the word “free speech” in their constitution . I think trump’s admin definition and aspiration for free speech— the legal animosity towards media, academics— is not what past US liberals would recognise as such and is departure from that tradition. What use is free speech if your critics are indirectly being suppressed? Even authoritarian governments give citizens enough “free speech” to not arrest them in day to day lives, people self censor on certain topics similar to them being taboo. I have seen some public intellectuals reacting to this mess by embracing free speech absolutism—because they get accused of being biased towards one side and disregarded if they’re partial— but those positions are very hard to get intuitions for.
I think a lot of politicians only pay a lip service to so called “liberal principles” and in the end do realpolitik.
It sounds like what you are hoping for is to avoid illiberal backsliding by making everybody crystal-clear on what liberalism is and giving them a deep understanding of why they should support it.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s tractable. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s necessary. How successful have China and Myanmar been in convincing the world they being run on liberal principles?
My view is that most people are pretty clear on the concrete facts of life that matter for liberalism.
Am I being persecuted for my beliefs?
Is my life at risk due to my identity?
Can I say what I want?
Is my property secure, and am I free to transact?
When people debate politics, I contend they typically are debating over tradeoffs inherent in liberal ideas, or between values orthogonal to liberalism. Examples of the latter include dealing with externalities such as pollution, environmental destruction, or public aesthetics. Note that a liberal society can still care about things other than liberalism, and sometimes that will result in tradeoffs with liberalism-maximalism. Making a democratic choice for non-liberal maximalism is still a position compatible with liberalism.
China probably has convinced it’s own populace that it’s democratic—a government run by the people for the people. I contend a lot of people practically against liberal principles will answer in order no,no,yes,yes to those questions in good parts of the so called backsliding or authoritarian world,maybe the last question would be more controversial depending on how it’s framed. Liberalism doesn’t impact majority of people’s life as directly as one might think in the short run, most people just want to get by, and majoritarianism is not the same as liberalism, but the people who’re part of the majority are likely to have more positive experience with the system.
I agree on the tradeoffs, rorty’s patchwork metaphor seems to fit quite well here.
Agreed. Perhaps a better test of a society’s relative liberality is to examine its worst examples of infringements of liberal views—its worst censorship, persecution of demographic groups, limits on property rights, and so on, defining these terms broadly.
I think that the tradeoff between allowing people to pursue their cultural and aesthetic agendas through legal means and preserving a basically liberal government and intercultural framework in which those agendas are pursued is an extremely difficult one to get right. It tends to produce a sense of paradox and hypocrisy. It’s also very hard to figure out when we’re facing a slippery slope into illiberalism or a non-preferred implemention of the tradeoffs inherent in liberalism.
In the context of a basically liberal society, like the USA where I live, I tend to perceive most of the flaws in liberalism as stemming from human nature rather than capture of power centers by committed illiberal ideologues. Conservatives and liberals in the USA both see themselves as basically sticking up for what we’re here referring to as “liberal” values, and I think most members of both parties, even the far left and far right, see themselves as generally presenting contrasting versions of “liberalism.” So I think we have a case here where most US citizens see their nation as less liberal than it really is, in contrast to the example you give of China, a nation where most Chinese citizens may see their nation as more liberal than it really is.
I think there have been non-democratic liberal-ish societies in the past, but it’s hard to tell whether changing landscapes will leave room for the forces which may have caused liberalism to take hold from time to time.
There are even “non-democratic liberal-ish societies” today . . . like Singapore, Brunei, Dubai and other Gulf monarchies, etc
Singapore is democratic.
I think there’s been a lot of well-poisoning. For example, people say “universal free healthcare paid by taxes is equivalent to stealing”.
It’s tempting to say that’s a small thing, but maybe not. Arguments from liberalism often seem to favor the rich and screw the poor. It’s not even a problem with the arguments, but with liberalism itself: those who have more than they need will enjoy compounding growth, get more influence on laws and the press, use that influence to tilt the playing field in their favor, and life will increasingly look like a game of Monopoly.
The only remedy for that is inherently illiberal: lots of progressive taxation and redistribution. So maybe it’s worth rethinking what the “bedrock” should be. Principles of individual freedom, and principles of helping the weak at the expense of the strong, should at the very least be on equal footing. FDR had the right idea calling it the New Deal.
i’ve been working my way through the penguin great ideas series of essays at a pace of about one a week, and i’ve never been more of a supreme respecter for bedrock enlightenment and classical liberal principles—these guys make such passionate and intelligent arguments for them! i wonder if some part of this fading support is just that reading a lot of these thinkers used to be standard in a high school and university education (for the elite classes at least) and this is no longer the case; people might not really know why these principles are valuable any more, just that they’re fashionable. in retrospect; reading js mill on freedom of speech is what truly locked that in for me as a sacred value, way back in my early 20s.
...wait, i just re-derived the “this is why classical liberal arts education is important” argument, didn’t i 😅
>rent control is illiberal (e.g. unfair to property owners)
>unfair to property owners
seems like we should probably ban either renting things (at some enactment date, convert all rental contracts to shares-based-rent-to-own, pay-out-the-previous-recent-owners-incrementally, with the same current rental price) or owning things (rent land from the government). or just do georgism but that doesn’t get rid of the split, which seems bad to me.
I support the thing that makes one invent liberal principles, but I don’t think they’ve been invented properly, and I don’t think property ownership as currently constructed (you can own stuff you don’t interact with or control in any other way than through the ownership contract) satisfies the implicit prompt that leads one to seek the concept of liberalism. if you want to argue for a postneoliberalism, seems like you’re going to need to rebuild the concept to work for an economy where owners can arbitrarily squeeze nonowners.
a lot of the response to liberalism right now is “okay, this is clearly not working, and people are just saying to go back to it without adapting the thing”.
I mean, that’s assuming current abstractions hold up for more than a year or two in the first place
I don’t really agree with the characterization of recent history as people realizing that “liberalism isn’t working”, and to the degree that I would advocate for any specific policy change, I support a “radical incrementalist” approach. e.g. maybe the endpoint of the ideal concept of property rights is pretty far from wherever we are right now, but to get there we should start with small, incremental changes that respect existing rights and norms as much as possible.
So for example, I think Georgism is a good idea in general, but not a panacea, and a radical and sudden implementation would be illiberal for some of the reasons articulated by @Matthew Barnett here.
I think a more realistic way to phase in Georgism that respects liberal principles would mainly take the form of more efficient property tax regimes—instead of complex rules and constant fights over property tax assessment valuations, there would be hopefully slightly less complex fights over land valuations, with phase-ins that keep the overall tax burden roughly the same. Some property owners with relatively low-value property on higher value land (e.g. an old / low density building in Manhattan) would eventually pay more on the margin, while others with relatively high-value property on lower value land (e.g. a newer / high density building in the exurbs) would pay a bit less. Lots of people in the middle of the property-vs-land value spectrum would pay about the same. But this doesn’t really get at the core philosophical objections you or others might have with current norms around the concept of property ownership in general.
It’s not so much philosophy as game theory. When one’s access to existing is being salami sliced away by incrementally slightly abusing rules, incremental change needs to be at least as fast as the attacking coalition to have a shot at working—and it currently is orders of magnitude slower. So you can’t expect to come in and try to play a “respect people” handbook without first doing an accounting audit on the attacks that have been getting away below the radar, and since those have heavily relied on exploitable weaknesses in the design of the ownership contract system, it seems hard to convince people to unilaterally honor it again when they’re on the receiving end of being screwed over. You’d have to pitch a way to change the game in ways that restore positive sum nature, fast.
“Liberalism is falling, it’s falling towards me, and simply putting it back up doesn’t make it inexploitable or pay me back for how it screwed me over”—most people under most banners right now
I don’t personally feel screwed over, and I suspect many of the people in the coalitions I mentioned feel similarly. I am sympathetic to people who do feel that way, but I am not really asking them to unilaterally honor anything. The only thing in my post that’s a real concrete ask is for people who do already broadly support liberalism, or who have preferred policy agendas that would benefit from liberalism, be more outspoken about their support.
(To clarify, I have been using “liberalism” as a shorthand for “bedrock liberalism”, referring specifically to the principles I listed in the first paragraph—I don’t think everything that everyone usually calls “liberalism” is broadly popular with all the coalitions I listed, but most would at least pay lip service to the specific principles in the OP.)
I would split my thoughts on this subject into two groups:
some things are bad, and we need to fix them
some things are good, and we need to explain them better to the masses
Importantly, these are two separate points. Communication to the masses is necessary; but when something is bad, it should actually be fixed, instead of trying to communicate to the masses that it is good.
Let’s start with the explanation part, because it is easier. Smart and educated people may naturally underestimate it, but we live in a world that is complex and confusing… and even more so for those who are average or below-average in intelligence or education. Educating them is a public good, because if we won’t, then it is practically guaranteed that they will make choices based on either first impression or some propaganda. With public goods, we have the free-rider problem (if we are all in the same boat, why should the holes in the boat be fixed from my budget?), and a chicken-and-egg problem with government solutions (why should politicians vote for spending government budget on liberal values, if many of them were elected precisely because the voters oppose those values?). I think this might somehow be addressed e.g. by a non-profit that would hopefully get money from some donors, and produce e.g. YouTube videos explaining the basics of liberal thought.
Then there is the problem with finding actual liberals to state and defend those values. Because there don’t seem to be many. One side of the American political spectrum opposes them openly, but the other side spend the last years undermining them gradually. (From my perspective, the woke are enemies of liberal thought as much as the redcaps. Remember “freeze peach”?) So there is a risk that a project in defense of liberal thought would be co-opted by the illiberal factions of one side, which would obviously make it unpalatable for the other side. If you want to argue for liberal values, it must be done by someone who really cares about the liberal values per se, rather than someone who merely sees them as a convenient tool to oppose Trump.
I fear this makes the situation far trickier. Fundamentally, adhering to liberal values such as freedom of speech/rule of law/etc. is akin to playing “Cooperate” instead of “Defect” in a Prisoner’s Dilemma-like game.
If everyone agrees to these values, we end up with a better outcome than if both sides suppress the other whenever and wherever they have a local concentration of force, because it allows for genuine deliberation, compromise, and the use of mistake theory instead of conflict theory to find optimal, technocratic solutions.
But if your side is the only one that defects and censors, while the opposition holds onto the notion that they must give you a full and fair chance to criticize them whenever they have the reins of power, you are at an immediate political and memetic advantage. It’s a fundamentally unstable outcome, one that rightfully feels “unfair” to the side that’s being punished for its cooperation and will likely push them to become more illiberal and censorious themselves.
Typically, the way PD-like games get resolved in society is through two main mechanisms: reputation and changing the payoff matrix.[1] By “changing the payoff matrix,” I’m referring to stuff like cooperators getting socially rewarded as nice, upstanding citizens to the point that they internalize the reward and become intrinsically motivated to love liberalism, thus making them genuinely prefer Cooperating to Defecting as actions in and of themselves.
(By the way, I recall an old LW comment which made the critical point that yelling “This is a PD-like situation! Everyone knows the Nash Equilibrium is to defect!” when people are cooperating in real life is an actively bad thing to do, because you are fundamentally changing the payoff matrix: before, game participants who cooperated thought of themselves as good; after, they think of themselves as idiots.[2] You are actively pushing the real outcome out of its fragile social-reward-supported equilibrium into the simplified and reductive and Pareto-dominated Defect-Defect one.)
But largely as a result of technological changes governing how we relate to each other (and what kinds of ingroups, subgroups, etc. we identify with), both mechanisms are starting to tear apart at the edges. This leads to stuff like “based” culture, where people circlejerk over how anti-liberal and anti-feeling-empathy-for-the-opposition they are. The social rewards in these subgroups have shifted to such a point where Defecting is seen as commendable and morally virtuous.[3]
I’d love to hear a shorter, snappier version of “changing the payoff matrix” to use in the future as a descriptor of what I’m referencing here
There is also a pop culture saying that when the percentage of cheaters on some sort of test crosses a critical threshold (I think usually 5-10%), those who otherwise wouldn’t cheat start thinking of themselves as suckers and start giving in
I definitely wish I had a detailed, mechanistic explanation of precisely how this came about, but for now I only have disparate lines of thinking about it that I haven’t quite been able to piece together yet
Not only subgroups. Discriminating against conservative people when hiring on universities was considered virtuous by… almost everyone except for the conservatives themselves, and a handful of principled liberals?
(As someone who would vote for Democrats—while holding my nose—if I lived in USA, as I see it, the Democrats defected first. And Republicans are now doing the same thing, only 10 times faster.)
I think the matter is a fair bit more complex than this, but I’ll refrain from discussing explicitly partisan politics on this site, despite the relaxation of the old norms.
I would also prefer not to be partisan, but unfortunately, framing things as “neutral vs conservative” is a trick that one side has been using for a while, and I believe it is impossible to fix the problem without addressing this tactic explicitly.
Basically, we need to make sure that “non-partisan” does not mean “supporting (pre-Trump) status quo”.
Funnily enough, I was also thinking about that exact SSC post when I was writing my comment. I do think I have a different perspective on this matter from yours, however.