Freedom’s Power

The True Force of Liberalism

Paul Starr

Basic Books, $26, 256 pp.

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Liberalism for a New Century

Edited by Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson

University of California Press, $19.95, 270 pp.

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Here’s one way a political debate might go: You and I disagree over abortion, say, and whether to invade Iraq. I take a recognizably liberal position on both issues, arguing that abortion is a woman’s private choice and that we should be deeply skeptical of war as a policy choice. You condemn my support for baby-killing and call me the pro-Saddam candidate. I defend myself, making important distinctions that people like me find persuasive. I become their hero. You get elected.

This is parody, but only partly. The general dynamic is both familiar and dismaying. Liberals will say it reflects a kind of simple-mindedness in the way conservatives respond to value judgments. The conservative reasons that since pornography and gambling are bad, the state may act to constrain them; prayer and abstinence are good, so schools should promote them. But this approach, say liberals, overlooks the diversity of citizens’ views and the importance of individual autonomy. Conservatives reply that such high-flown language is mere cover for the fact that liberals either have no moral convictions at all or lack the courage that should accompany them. Thus liberals are portrayed as either narcissistic or effete. And often both: a widely seen YouTube video created during the 2004 election featured a gun-toting incumbent taunting a windsurfing John Kerry: “I’m a Texas tiger, you’re a liberal wiener.” No pundit has yet offered a sharper analysis of the dynamics shaping that contest.

The two books under review help us move past these caricatures. Freedom’s Power provides an account and defense of the liberal project from its origin to the present. What it lacks in stylistic brio, it more than makes up for in the command with which it ranges across a variety of areas (history, political science, economics, contemporary European studies) to tell a compelling and coherent story. Summarizing this rich book is impossible. Here I’ll discuss just two of Starr’s most interesting theses.

The first is that while one might expect liberal states (compared to authoritarian ones) to be relatively weak, being constrained by things like strong individual rights and freedoms, divided powers, checks and balances, and public accountability, those constraints have in fact helped liberal regimes acquire great power on the world stage. Starr, a founding editor of the American Prospect, thoroughly documents how such factors render states more stable, more responsive to citizens, and more amenable to innovation, thereby allowing citizens to develop their powers and wealth in ways that ultimately strengthen the state. This thesis offers a tidy explanation for why first England and then the United States have been not just exemplary liberal states but dominant world powers as well. I cannot help wondering how this argument applies to debates over the proper balance between security and freedom in our own uncertain times, but to my regret Starr does not take his argument in that direction.

The book’s other main thesis is that in order to understand liberalism we must distinguish its core principle-the protection of equal freedom-from various derivative strategies that might advance the principle under changeable circumstances. At the birth of liberalism, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the driv¬ing fear was the power of the state and its offices. But as we become aware of other sites of power (the economy, the workplace, even the family), we realize that protecting freedom may require intrusion into domains liberalism had previously left alone. Starr’s point, then, is that such oversight, even when exercised by the state, is no departure from liberalism but an expression of its core ideal.

This distinction between core principle and derivative strategy is not of academic interest alone. Consider the recent Supreme Court decision barring consideration of race in assigning students to schools. Chief Justice John Roberts summed up the majority view with impeccable logic: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” he wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This makes sense if our core principle is: Never take account of someone’s race in considering how she should be treated. But Starr would reply that, under certain conditions (here, the intransigence of racial stratification leading to unequal schools and life chances), the protection of equal freedom requires that we take account of race, at least remedially, to overcome systematic unfairness.

I think Starr is entirely right here. But if his argument advances a liberalism more responsive to changing social needs, it may also suggest that at least some of our rights are not as immutable as liberals have blithely assumed. If you are white, for example, the need for affirmative action may sanction discrimination against you on the basis of your skin color. It’s an important question, then, how much of the liberal commitment to inviolable rights survives under Starr’s derivative strategies.

Liberalism for a New Century, whose essays reflect a range of both scholarly orientations and political emphases, offers a less systematic account of the promise of liberalism. The book is divided into three parts, with essays exploring broad philosophical and historical questions about liberalism, its connection to particular topics (including the family, religion, environmentalism, and evolution), and its application in the international realm. Despite this internal diversity, the book as a whole is consistently instructive in two important ways.

First, it shows the delicacy of the liberal triangulation between conservatives on the Right and radicals on the Left. The latter survive chiefly as what the editors dub the Academic Cultural Left (ACL), which often seems driven either by reflexive opposition to anything that might appeal to persons on the right, or by the unswerving conviction that any exercise of American power is in the end only a covert assertion of American hegemony. How else to explain the ACL’s general derision (chronicled in Neil Jumonville’s essay) of Tipper Gore’s proposed music ratings system alerting parents to songs like “A Bitch Is a Bitch,” or its smug assumption that only a raving warmonger could find any good cause for deposing Saddam? That liberals need to distance themselves from such knee-jerk postures is a recurrent suggestion in many of these essays; the idea is developed splendidly in Michael Tomasky’s discussion of the liberal response to the current Iraq war.

But liberalism may also entail fairly deep social changes that are likely to be opposed by those on the right. Mona Harrington’s essay, for example, makes the case that the contemporary conception of the ideal worker (someone who works long and steady periods unhampered by the tasks of reproduction and the responsibilities of caretaking) is deeply out of touch with both economic realities and with contemporary gender relations. What liberalism needs, she says, is “a clear social theory that connects individuals, economics, and families.” Harrington may be right, but I suspect the change she recommends will come about only if Americans allow the state a role in economic oversight somewhat different from the one they have traditionally accepted. At a minimum, they may have to rethink the public/private distinction that is one of liberalism’s sacred cows.

The book’s other important lesson concerns the widespread view that liberals’ talk about moral values is somehow empty and insincere when compared to similar pronouncements from conservatives. If you think about the causes liberals have championed-racial and gender equality, workers’ rights, equal opportunity, and so on-the accusation seems crazy. But it perdures, in large part because religion remains for most Americans the ultimate ground of morality, and liberals are distinctly uneasy with religious argument in the public square. This opens them to charges of relativism or worse. For the prosecution’s exhibit A, consider Alan Brinkley’s claim, in his essay “Liberalism and Belief,” that liberalism “need not, indeed cannot, rest on faith in eternal and uncontestable truths.” (Does this make Catholic liberals logically impossible?) My fellow members of the ACL may readily agree that morality needs no such underwriting. The general public, I suspect, has other ideas.

The depth of the challenge here is nicely conveyed in Peter Berkowitz’s terrific essay on the tension liberalism generates between the claims of freedom and order. Berkowitz’s central point is that any politics built around the supremacy of freedom inevitably threatens, to some degree, the bounded structures of authority within which any satisfying exercise of our freedom occurs. For example, though he becomes capable of autonomous choice only by being raised within a particular society, the sovereign individual can’t help wondering why he owes anything to a community he hasn’t chosen. Or again, recurrent emphasis on the need for freedom in our romantic relationships risks making sex a mere act of the body and turning marriage into just a voluntary partnership, dissolvable at either party’s whim. Both the Left and Right try to avoid these tensions between freedom and order by downplaying one side or the other, but such tensions cannot be overcome: they can only be managed. Doing this well, Berkowitz suggests, is the major task facing any liberalism worth the name. It is also a central challenge of modern political life, which means that debates over the nature of liberalism will remain vital for some time to come.