Political ideas in the 21st century

In 1950, the editors at Foreign Affairs asked the political theorist Isaiah Berlin to take the long view of his own moment. As a former child refugee from the Bolsheviks, biographer of Marx, and Jewish witness to the rise of Nazism, as well as the casual prejudices of an Oxford common room, Berlin knew firsthand the consequences of ideas in the world.

His take, however, was unconventional. Rather than a world cloven into capitalist and communist parts, or a sphere of freedom and one of unfreedom, or places that prized individual liberty versus order and obedience, Berlin saw the dominant “political ideas in the twentieth century,” as his essay was called, entirely differently. The great divide was not between left and right but between certainty and skepticism.

The struggle of his own time, Berlin believed, was how to protect the creative power of doubt in a world replete with ready-made answers to the great problems of human existence. The extremes of left and right shared an assumption that the ultimate ends of political life were beyond serious debate. “What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith or stronger leadership or more rational organization,” Berlin concluded. “Rather is it the opposite: less Messianic ardor, more enlightened skepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies, more frequent ad hoc and ephemeral arrangements, more room for the attainment of their personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find (whether rightly or wrongly must not matter) little response among the majority.” Surviving the century, Berlin believed, would require less conviction and more conversation.

As a writer and, even more, a voracious talker, Berlin was interested in how people make sense of history in a given place and time—how dominant worldviews, available metaphors, and local common sense shape the way people understand reality. For Berlin, the 19th century had been characterized by broad optimism that the great problems of human society—how best to organize government, how to alleviate want, how to secure peace—were solvable with the right application of reason and virtue. Government and international affairs were thought of as a kind of science, one that offered better and worse solutions based on experience and a proper view of what had worked in the past and what had failed.

Berlin’s own century was different, he felt. The worldviews of communism and fascism entailed not so much alternative solutions as a claim that political and moral problems were not problems at all. Once class conflict disappeared or the racial state was purified, everything else would be reduced to technical questions of efficiency and polishing. What the world needed in 1950 was a defense of the right to be wrong, to be genuinely different, to make a mistake, to try again.

Berlin’s midcentury stocktaking was standard among a certain subset of European intellectuals. For all their differences, writers such as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and Hannah Arendt saw the deepest canyon in politics as running between pluralists and anti-pluralists. They were, at base, liberals trying to make sense of the rise of two different kinds of European illiberalism in their own time: Stalin’s and Hitler’s. The priorities of a liberal outlook—individuals over groups, people over states, freedom over conformity, rules over fiat—had been brutally overturned by twin tyrannies in the first half of the century. The societies that emerged afterward—the welfare states of Western Europe, the integrated European Union, even the United States as something approaching a multiracial democracy after 1965—were backstops against the same thing happening again. This “liberalism of fear,” as the political theorist Judith Shklar put it, would remain the dominant way of understanding the threats to the liberal order down to the present.

But to the degree that postwar liberalism triumphed, it came to suffer from its own brand of complacency and self-satisfaction. As Tony Judt warned in his Aron Lecture at Brookings in 2005, a month after the publication of his monumental book, “Postwar,” “We have lived, most of us in this room, and most Europeans today, for too long in a post-ideological or, if you like, post-political era. We’ve forgotten what it was like before, how fragile the Western consensus of the past few decades could so easily prove.” Tony could foresee the ascendancy of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin because he was a student of societies that had produced the same kind of person in the last century. But, unlike Berlin, he came of age in a time that had faith the old demons were more or less exorcised—a faith that he believed was in error. As Tony put it, “[w]e’ve forgotten what ideological politics were like.”

Today, ideological politics has come roaring back. At no point since the 1940s have the contrasting ideas at stake in political debate been so starkly evident. Nor have they been so aligned across the United States and Europe. Like isobars on a meteorologist’s map, the Atlantic is part of a single political weather system. Four years ago, the U.S.-based movement Black Lives Matter energized communities across Europe. Terms such as “anticolonialism” and “indigeneity” are now deployed by both American college students and young people in Ireland, Ukraine, and Georgia. Serious American political theorists and commentators, not just trolls or YouTube bros, make common cause with the European nationalist right, just as Russian intelligence officials seek inroads with the antiracist or anti-Zionist left. And figures such as Nigel Farage or Viktor Orbán regularly speak at Republican conferences—in Orbán’s case, casting Hungary as a version of what a Christian Reconquista might yet achieve in the United States. “The adherents of [the] old world are still sitting there in Brussels, . . . and I am afraid they are sitting there in Washington, too. This year we set out to chase them away, so that the era of sovereignty will finally come,” Orbán told the three thousand attendees at the new CPAC Budapest conference, an offshoot of the principal annual gathering of American conservatives. “Go Donald Trump! Go European sovereigntists!”

So, how are we to make sense of all this? The easy account is to repeat Berlin’s analysis. An entire shelfful of books by contemporary liberal commentators frame their plight much as Berlin did, as defending a plural, ad hoc, imperfect, conservational worldview against twin intolerances—the woke on one side, the Volk on the other. Pluralism seems once again threatened by new forms of self-satisfied certainty, and these challenges allegedly come as much from the progressive left as the radical right, as anyone schooled in the competing phrasebooks of mobilized theory can confirm: Christian nationalism, postliberalism, settler colonialism, intersectionality, white privilege, antiracism, the Great Replacement, identity politics, CRT, DEI, and on and on. These “discontents with liberalism,” Francis Fukuyama has written, “do not have to do with the essence of the doctrine, but rather with the way in which certain sound liberal ideas have been interpreted and pushed to extremes.” Saving liberalism, Fukuyama argues, will require returning it to the moderate, commonsensical middle ground.

But I think this is the wrong way of seeing things for many reasons, only one of which I can focus on today. The habit of defending pluralism as unmarked and apolitical, as a casual, confident neutrality outside the realm of conviction, is ill suited to the new ideological politics that Tony foresaw twenty years ago. Berlin’s pluralism always had the feel of an overstuffed Oxford sofa—comfortable, cozy even, and most enjoyable when occupied by two disagreeing friends. His liberalism, as Berlin scholars have noted, was more of a disposition than a theory, the product in part of a postwar order when liberals had the luxury of thinking that time was most likely on their side.

But that era is not ours. When confronted with a clear set of counterclaims about history, politics, economics, and human nature, most powerfully from the extreme right, from MAGA Republicans to the Alternative for Germany, pluralists need a more robust account of what it is they actually believe. We need a clearer idea of what pluralism is, what alternatives are on offer, and how to energize a specifically liberal pluralist worldview for our own time.

Many of us of a certain age had our formative intellectual experiences in a late-century grand consensus: in the decades marked by what Fukuyama called the “end of history,” the inevitability of globalization, and the European Union as an epoch-defining experiment in transnational governance. So it takes some effort to reacquaint ourselves with what ideological politics inside our own political systems really looks like.

First, we will have to get used to competing vocabularies of politics. If everyone was a liberal of a sort after the Second World War—with freedom, human rights, and “European values” as the stuff of political discourse—agreement about the terms of debate is now gone. The culturally defined nation has returned, as has the family, along with words that we might have thought were banished, such as “purity,” “vermin,” “mass deportation,” and “blood.” These are of course terms now wielded by the far right, but liberals are unused even to debating mainstream conservatives who speak of politics and society in unfamiliar ways. “Virtue” and “civilization,” for example, are part of a conservative discourse that liberals have not had to engage with in any serious way—outside the seminar room—for decades.

Second, ideas live in places, so we will have to get used again to the idea of competing centers of ideological politics. When the economist Walt Rostow laid out the basis for American engagement in the developing world in 1960, in his “Stages of Economic Growth,” there was a reason that he subtitled it “A Non-Communist Manifesto.” He understood that the Soviet Union offered not only a source of arms and materiel but also a specific model of governance and growth. Something similar is happening now—the difference being that the sources of the new ideological politics are not as neatly delineated as during the Cold War. Russia has become one of the producers of ideas about government, greatness, and gender that travel along the darker corridors of the internet. But thinkers, parties, and institutions in the United States, the E.U., and India are part of the mix as well. It is now a toss-up as to whether, in a matter of weeks, the ideas that animate the executive branches of government in the United States and Russia will come closer than ever before. That is not at all what the Soviet physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov had in mind by the term “convergence” in the 1960s, but it is a word that seems even more accurate now than in the past.

Third, we have to think in terms of not only ideas and their purveyors but also the ecosystems that sustain them. Here I mean not just the miasma of social media, televised infotainment, and professional influencers. Eighteenth-century pamphleteering worked in similar ways. It was the Enlightenment, after all, that gave us some of our earliest recorded complaints about what we now call likes and followers. “It fell dead-born from the press,” David Hume famously complained about the publication of his “Treatise of Human Nature” in 1739.

More troubling is that our version of polarized, idea-driven politics operates inside a market of churning consumerism, something perhaps most apparent in the United States. Over the last 30 years, Americans have sorted themselves not so much into political parties, faith communities, or racial and ethnic groups as into communities of consumption. Private and religiously affiliated schools and universities, social media, cable and satellite television, communal entertainment, and even clothing and home décor are now zones of expressive ideology in ways that would have been astonishing a few decades ago. If you’ve not heard of Hillsdale College, or watched a film produced by Angel Studios, or purchased clothing from Cabela’s, or shopped for a scented candle at Altar’d State—all organizations and businesses very familiar to many Christian conservatives in the United States—you live on one side of a vast American divide. At present there is no exact European equivalent of this phenomenon—consuming your ideology until it becomes an identity—but the logic of ideological politics under consumerism has the potential to push everyone in this direction.

A defense of pluralism has always been challenging because one so often finds oneself defending it against people who also claim to be pluralists. Nationalists are perfectly willing to admit that other nationalities exist, just so long as they stay in their lane. Racists make the same rhetorical move. “In united effort we are meant to live under this government . . . each striving from his separate political station, respecting the rights of others to be separate and work from within their political framework,” George Wallace said in 1963, “[b]ut if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers, then the enrichment of our lives, the freedom for our development, is gone forever.”

Even current-day illiberals admit that modern, diverse societies are by definition plural. The issue at stake is what the default setting should be for the states that govern them. As the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony has written about the United States, governments will have to “restore Christianity as the normative framework and standard determining public life in every setting in which this aim can be attained, along with suitable carve-outs creating spheres of legitimate non-compliance.” If liberals seek to monopolize the public sphere and privatize conservative values—hanging a Pride Flag outside a government office but making the building off-limits to a Bible study group, for example—then conservatives would simply flip the script. Public life would return to being nationalist and outwardly religious by default, with opt-outs for anyone who wished to dissent. “Not every citizen of America is a Christian, obviously,” said Senator Josh Hawley at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference. “But every citizen is heir to the loves, to the liberties, to the common purpose our Christian tradition gives us.” The same speech, of course, could have been given by rightist politicians from across the E.U.—the difference being that, for some, even the carve-outs would disappear inside a re-nationalized, re-sacralized state.

Defending a liberal pluralism, as opposed to this conservative version, should not be hard, even if liberals have gotten out of the practice of doing so explicitly. A defense might include some of the following: A liberal view of pluralist politics doesn’t require that everyone be gay, change their gender, or have an abortion. It simply requires that government be rooted in individual dignity, choice, and voice. Where government fails to live up to these ideals, it should have mechanisms for remedy that are also rooted in individual dignity, choice, and voice. Moreover, the choices that individuals make in these societies are likely to be better—that is, more productive of individual flourishing and general happiness—when people are schooled in developing critical and independent minds. Progress is possible, meaning that the requirements of today and tomorrow have pride of place over the imagined preferences of the dead. History offers no necessities, only nudges. As a result, claims to truth that reside outside real history, for example, in ideas about transhistorical destiny, the hierarchy of one kind of community over others, or the will of God, are less compelling than those that reside in lived human experience.

If liberal pluralists will have to get better at making their case in an era of ideological politics, they will also have to do so in a matrix of memory and history that is very different from that of the recent past. We are now in a moment when the signposts that have guided European and American thinkers and politicians since the mid-twentieth century are passing fully into history. The Second World War, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, 1968, 1989—these are no longer the experiences, histories, and symbols that they were for people of Berlin’s generation, or Tony’s, or for that matter mine.

As societies change, so do their metaphors and the lessons they are held to contain. This is natural, but it is also a challenge—especially if liberal pluralists have become more used to wielding metaphors and symbols than ideas. Let me state this plainly: I don’t think Western liberals are yet intellectually prepared for a reality in which the central world-historical and moral event of the twentieth century is no longer remembered as the Holocaust but rather as decolonization. W. E. B. Du Bois framed the problem already in 1925. How would Europe reimagine itself, he wrote, “if Europe became suddenly shadowless,” that is, shorn of the overseas colonies against which European states long defined themselves and their civilization?

The extremes of right and left have already worked out their answers. Good riddance to the shadows, say the nationalists, who have decided that their struggle, too, is a form of decolonization. (“The E.U. must die for the true Europe to live,” declared Björn Höcke, the Alternative for Germany leader in Thuringia.) We are the shadows, say those on the mobilized, multicultural left, and we’re still here. Meanwhile, liberal pluralists chug along with a set of debates, a political vocabulary, and existential worries that have not changed substantially since the end of the Second World War. 

One way to start reviving liberal pluralism is to jump back to the 19th century, to a time when liberalism was not triumphant but embattled, with a vitality, in Britain and in continental Europe, that is as invigorating as it is unfamiliar. As the historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn has argued, we have forgotten the fact that, before it was fearful, liberalism was genuinely liberating. That is why rereading some of the foundational documents of that earlier period—even dusty hymnals such as “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill, published in 1859—can feel radically refreshing today.

Mill was writing in deep conservation with purveyors of cognate and rival ideas: French liberals and continental socialists of various stripes, as well as his old frenemy, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, who was himself the great interpreter of German romanticism to an English-speaking audience. There was also Mill’s wife, Harriet Taylor, who ought to receive at least equal billing for many of the ideas Mill put forward in “On Liberty” and elsewhere. As Mill himself wrote at the top of “On Liberty,” Taylor was “the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half [her] great thoughts and noble feelings . . ., I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivaled wisdom.” That passage is still the most astonishing dedication any husband has written to his wife—and no doubt the only such thing ever to appear in a classic of Western philosophy.

To Mill and Taylor, no one really knew what the best possible life might look like. For that reason alone, individuals had to be given the freedom to figure out the best way to act and thrive—hence, their famous “experiments of living” phrase in “On Liberty.” That arrangement, in a free society, guaranteed more chances of someone’s coming up with the formula—or at least a formula—for what a good life might be. Morality didn’t come from blindly following custom, nor did it derive from aligning one’s behavior with a given set of virtues, which were, in any case, different from place to place and, in all of them, changeable over time. Instead, in large, modern, diverse societies, the problem of how to live was best understood as a numbers game, with everyone having the scope to work out for themselves what made for a happier world. “[T]he only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals.”

The claim to liberty, Mill and Taylor believed, came not from God’s will or tradition, nor did it rest on disembodied “rights” that humans were said to possess. Rather, a liberal worldview was the natural outgrowth of one of the few things in life we can be absolutely sure of: that we will meet people whose opinions, values, and talents are different from our own. All the problems of morality and governance came down essentially to this encounter, to the question of how to behave with someone very unlike oneself. Everything else was metaphysics.

That was only part of the story, however, and here we come to an unexpected alleyway in Mill and Taylor’s version of liberal pluralism. In a society of free individuals, it was impossible to escape the worry that liberty might descend into anarchy. If I am truly free, after all, what do I possibly owe you? In a world that prizes individual freedom, what are we to do with duty, or obligation, or restraint?

As Mill and Taylor both knew from experience, the one place where this problem had to get worked out was inside a marriage, face to face and every day. In a household, there was simply no place to hide, no solitary retreat where duty disappeared and one was left alone, a pure and denuded individual. A domestic union of equals was the zone that best exemplified the push and pull of individuality and belonging, the deep desire to express one’s selfhood alongside an even deeper commitment to make sure that things didn’t spin out of control. Taylor would ultimately illustrate this in the most astonishing way. For the first two decades of her romantic relationship with Mill, she was still married to someone else. When her husband, John Taylor, fell ill with cancer, Taylor would attend him lovingly until his death. Two years later, she and Mill were finally able to marry.

In practicing duty and obligation inside a family of whatever configuration—and Mill and Taylor’s was a very unconventional one—individuals had an opportunity to work through some of the great questions of modern life: about what outlooks on reality we think of as obvious or normal; about the place of kinship in social order and personal wellbeing; about which behaviors and prejudices we believe are innate and which are amenable to change. In their time together, Mill and Taylor came around to the startling realization that building one’s own life in the fullest freedom and flourishing might even depend on binding it to another’s. As Mill recalled in his autobiography (it, too, a joint effort with Taylor), their marriage had produced “a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth . . .: the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.” At their best, Mill and Taylor believed, families change us by encapsulating difference-without-otherness—which also turns out to be one of the foundations of plurality, democracy, and social progress. Healthy politics was simply a scaling up of what made for a thriving home.

I have focused here on Mill and Taylor because they confound the ranking of values that liberal pluralists spend most of their time defending. What Mill and Taylor understood better than anyone in their time was that for all the debates about the size of government, the nature of the market, or even the definition of the nation, the first thing that ought to matter to liberal pluralists is the equality of women and men. The need for an absolute equality of the sexes, Mill later said, was an abstract principle he had felt from childhood. But only through knowing and loving Taylor did it become a viscerally felt conviction—the linchpin, as he saw it, of everything. “[I]t is now the great question of the coming time,” he wrote in the “Autobiography,” “the most urgent interest of human progress, involving the removal of a barrier which now stops the way, and renders all the improvements which can be effected while it remains, slight and superficial.”

Amid debates in Europe and the United States about many other issues—immigration, Ukraine, government spending—we shouldn’t forget how vital that idea remains today. Opposition to real equality between the sexes is the glinting thread that connects the authoritarianism of Putin with the cultural revanchism of Orbán, the Nazi-adjacent nostalgia of the Alternative for Germany with the “manoverse” of Trumpist social media, the “common-good conservatism” of the Catholic right with the Christian nationalism of Protestant evangelicals.

One way for liberal pluralists to recognize this is to recast their own intellectual heritage in a more accurate way, that is, by thinking more capaciously about who gets admitted to the liberal canon and for what reasons. In a phrase, liberal pluralists need to talk more about women. Enlarging the historical conversation is not about “justice” or “regendering” a syllabus, although for progressives those might be goals in themselves. Rather, a broader reading of the origins of liberal pluralism will enrich the vocabulary of political debate and alter the very things that liberals believe are most worth defending.

In the 1790s Mary Wollstonecraft was not just a champion of women’s rights, which is how she is usually taught to undergraduates today. She was also a brilliant theorist of state visibility—the categories of person who were allotted a “civil existence in the state” and those the state simply chose not to see. That very idea would be essential to later conversations about everything from civil rights to accessible building design to marriage equality. In the 1850s Harriet Taylor pushed Mill into seeing that the legal inequality of the sexes rested not only on shaky moral foundations but on shoddy empirical ones as well. As they put it in “The Subjection of Women,” “What is natural to the two sexes can only be found out by allowing both to develop and use their faculties freely.” Human nature, Mill and Taylor taught, can only be glimpsed, if at all, under conditions of equality. That same insight would inform one of the great unsung phenomena of the twentieth century: the shift not only in our moral sense about evils such as racial segregation in the United States or empire among European colonial powers, but the transformation of our common sense about the obvious way to live. Impatience with stupidity, it turns out, may be at least as powerful a force for change as outrage at injustice.

In the 1960s the political theorist Hannah Arendt showed not just how habitual lying fed totalitarianism but also how the mental categories of truth and falsehood were being eroded in democracies, too. “[T]he result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth by defamed as lies,” she wrote in 1967, “but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” For nearly a decade, we have been wondering where Donald Trump’s moral bottom might lie, when at a distance, Arendt was encouraging us to put the problem differently: to understand that what she called “Madison Avenue methods” were the principal feature of his style of politics. In a political and media space where no publicity is bad publicity, the only measure of right is notoriety. And then in the 1980s, Judith Shklar envisioned an ethics that put at its forefront not the preservation of liberty or the defense of individualism but rather the prevention of cruelty. Imagine today how debates in virtually any policy field would be transformed if we asked, as Shklar did, what it would mean to “put cruelty first” on our list of public bads.

Visibility, naturalness, notoriety, cruelty—liberal pluralists will have a richer vocabulary of political analysis if they work harder to fill out the maternal side of their intellectual family tree. At some point in the “Prison Notebooks,” the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci quotes Benito Mussolini to the effect that fascists have lived contemporary history too much to have the obligation to know past history perfectly. Pluralists should aim at exactly the opposite. Berlin’s liberalism may be less suited to our own moment than his, but his method still holds. To get a handle on the past as well as on our own moment, we have to define more fully, as he put it, “the concepts in terms of which people speak and think.”

The great debates of Berlin’s own time—individual freedom versus state control, communal nationalism versus individualism, even certainty versus doubt, as Berlin saw things—were not timeless political or intellectual divides. They were produced by a specific historical moment and, he imagined, would likely fade into other debates, other great divides, as history moved on. Ideas now rule politics once again, but we should not expect that the concepts in terms of which people speak and think will be the same as those during the era of postwar liberalism, a time that—liberals, progressives, and conservatives alike might agree—is now at an end.