A Liberal Identity
The liberal tradition has a long history. We should talk about it more.
Something I’ve been trying to make sense of since Trump’s victory is, why am I not a Trump supporter?
I don’t mean this totally flippantly. I’m a (relatively) young white male, without a college degree. I even have friends who voted for Trump. I actually have plenty of substantive policy disagreements with Democrats, and there are even some areas where my policy positions probably align better with Trump.
So why was I not just unhappy that Trump won, but physically disgusted by the result? Why did I have trouble sleeping for days after the election? In other words, why did I go left, where so many of my peers went right?
It is commonly said that Trumpism is a revolt against liberal elites, part of a broader rejection of neoliberalism following the 2008 financial crisis. In essence, people lost faith in our institutions-the federal government, banks, medical organizations, and especially political parties-and responded with a populist revolt, seeking new leaders who would replace the old ones and enforce what they, the people, saw as a better way forward.
On the left, this manifested in the 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns of Bernie Sanders, and on the right, it manifested in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns (and presidencies) of Donald Trump.
In retrospect, I think it is obvious why left wing populism failed. For one thing, it calls itself socialism, which the average American is extremely suspicious of, and for another, it fundamentally misread the American people. It aimed to create a multiracial working-class coalition; but it assumed that the multiracial working class had the social values of the educated, upper-middle class white kids that constituted the base of the populist left.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, was much closer in his messaging to the actual values of the American working class, because the working class is the less educated class, and in America, the less educated class is the more socially conservative class.
In 2016 and 2020, I was an avid Bernie supporter. Around 2020 I was just starting to become conscious of politics and the philosophical roots of various political ideologies. I hated the Democratic party, viewing it as an out-of-touch elite that was suppressing the organic will of its base, a large enough portion of which was feeling the Bern that it seemed like Bernie might have actually won the Democratic nomination. From that point, it seemed pretty plausible that I would have become a Bernie-Trump swing voter, or at least a fence-sitter, in 2024 if not in 2020. A shockingly high 15% of Bernie voters said they would vote Trump after he dropped out in 2020. And as Timothy Carney would have identified me at the time, I was an “alienated voter”-which he described this way:
No college, no church, no history with or dedication to the party they’re voting in?
That’s the same exact profile as the Trump voter. I laid that out in detail in my book, Alienated America. It’s the Alienated vote: Voters who lack a sense of belonging voting for a revolution.
We saw it in earlier states: Sanders won the New Hampshire voters who never attended college, and he easily won those who never attend church while finishing third among those who attend frequently.
If you belong to things, you’re less likely to turn to Sanders to find meaning.
Basically, I was probably more likely than most to have been a Sanders-Trump swing voter in 2020. But I wasn’t then either-although I voted for Biden with far less enthusiasm than I had voting for Kamala Harris.
I strongly believe that far more of politics is personal than practical, especially for disaffected voters like I was in 2020. Who you vote for is in large part a statement about who you are, at least for higher-propensity voters. And there is no doubt that being a Bernie supporter, a progressive, and eventually a libertarian socialist was filling a void in my identity that gave it an outsized importance, and I suspect this is largely what’s happening with a lot of Trump supporters-or at any rate anti-establishment people who voted for Trump-this time around.
My identity changed between 2020 and 2024, apart from other changes in my life, in my movement from socialism to liberalism. I went from being a radical to something far more universally despised: a staunch defender of the status quo. And that shift had to do with a certain intellectual tradition which, for the first time in my life, allowed me to really feel proud to be American and to uphold what I understand to be American values.
I am part of a relatively small subset of people for whom my political beliefs, at least insofar as I can control them, are dictated by underlying philosophical principles, which they hopefully fall out of as a matter of simple logical deduction. If you ask me why I believe in free markets, I will cite the philosophical principle that everything fundamentally acts out of self interest, and to improve the general welfare, you have to incentivize people to produce wealth; if you ask me why I’m pro-choice, I will cite the belief that personhood is identical to the possession of a mind, and a mind corresponds to a certain level of complexity in the brain. All of these positions should, ideally, be grounded in the most logically coherent and defensible theory of the fundamental nature of Being that I can come up with. If they aren’t, I probably ought to change my mind.
Most people find this way of thinking extremely tedious and uninteresting. I, in turn, find those people extremely tedious and uninteresting, and I’m probably not the person to attempt to persuade them to support Democrats. But for those who actually enjoy thinking in this way, I think the left has fundamentally failed to offer a coherent framework for reasoning through political beliefs, and since all political beliefs are at least partly ethical beliefs, this means it has failed to offer people a clear story of why they ought to behave in one way rather than another, and it has failed to offer them a tradition of people who model that behavior well.
I find this very frustrating and sad, because I happen to think the Enlightenment era that birthed liberalism is one of the peaks of human intellect and culture, and if a young man is looking for an identity, it’s hard for me to think of better figures to emulate than the likes of Descartes, Bruno, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Condorcet, or Hamilton. All of these men were hard-working, ambitious, unafraid of controversy, and utterly self-assured. They upheld exceptionally high standards of personal virtue, and expected the same of those around them. They contributed to the formation of a form of civilization which could liberate people from legal, physical, and mental bondage through new forms of government, new sciences, and new technologies. Their names and their lives should be known to every young man in America trying to figure out what to make of themselves, and what kind of society they want to live in. This has to be given as a viable alternative to Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and Donald Trump as positive examples of masculinity.
But it’s quite hard to find anyone on the right or the left who points to men like these as moral exemplars, even though they laid the groundwork for our present civilization. Indeed, I’m convinced the vast majority of even college-educated young people have never heard of most of them. Even on the intellectual right, these figures are spurned for ushering in modernity, which is generally taken to be the source of all bad things in right-wing thought. On the left, of course, they commit the unforgivable sins of being white, male, and, well, ushering in modernity (as opposed to this or that hypothetical utopia). Both movements have left quite a lot on the table as a result of their ideological hang-ups, and I think we liberals ought to get better at exploiting that. The truth is, we are the ones who have claim to the roots of the American tradition, and we really ought to start acting like it.
To me this represents an opportunity for a new liberal movement, one which is proud of it history and understands itself as a continuation of it. Such a movement would be far better poised to argue for preserving the Constitutional system and what remains of the rules-based global order.
Unfortunately, doing this will mean ending the decade-long civil war on the left by winning it. Liberals need to stop playing nice with people who hate us, and hate the tradition we represent. The kind of movement I’m suggesting is not compatible with people who support tearing down statues of Thomas Jefferson. Whatever it is they’re into, I’m not a part of it, and we should be willing to bite the bullet on that.
The result of the 2024 election should be the final word on whether the identitarian left is a worthwhile part of the Democratic coalition. For a long time, it seemed like a worthwhile price to pay to appease progressives with extremely dumb takes on social policy so long as they never got too close to fucking with anything that actually mattered to the basic quality of life of most Americans. That was a mistake-so long as a vote for a Democrat is perceived as a vote for an activist, Democrats will be playing with both hands tied behind their backs. When Seth Moulton, a Democratic Representative from Massachusetts, says that he thinks Democrats should be allowed to say that biological males shouldn’t play on high school girls’ sports teams, he shouldn’t have to worry about whether his top aides are going to quit, and his own state party chair is going to repudiate him. Parting with progressives also means being able to call out the many, many terrible governing choices they’ve made in cities that have pushed moderate voters away from the Democratic party.
Matt Yglesias recently put out an essay advocating a “Common-Sense Democrats” platform. I view what I’m talking about here partly as a philosophical complement of that, and partly as a suggested cultural aesthetic. I think what the right has shown over the past decade is how, to win over young voters, you need to give them the whole package-to tell them who they are, how to dress, what to think, and who to hate. I mostly think this is dumb and cringe, but sometimes dumb and cringe things actually work really well. So, that’s my pitch.