Liberalism after Despair
Or: righteous anger as a worthless currency
The week following the 2024 election has seen an explosion of despair in left-of-center culture, and I think that’s bad.
It’s normal and warranted to feel anger and despair after an election loss, certainly after one of this magnitude. Politics matters, and many lives will be impacted by the incoming administration, and if you are convinced that the impact will be bad then anger and despair is an appropriate response.
It isn’t the feelings themselves that are bad, nor (as I see it) the values that lead to those feelings. What I see as bad are the incentives of left-of-center culture, incentives where anger and despair are promoted and encouraged. They are promoted and encouraged as measures of righteousness - if you don’t feel anger and despair then that means you aren’t paying attention, or (worse) that you simply don’t care.
The more anger and despair you feel, the more you are paying attention and the more you are being correctly affected by the horrors you perceive. Furthermore, anger and despair constitute a form of emotional damage done to you by the wickedness of the world, and this emotional damage entitles you to deference and compensation. The more anger and despair you feel, the more people are morally obliged to pay attention to you, and the more people are morally obliged to give you whatever you want to make you feel better.
What frustrates me is that this incentive structure is a degeneration of something good. Conservatives think that this degeneration is an inevitability, a reason to jettison liberalism altogether. I disagree, while conceding that this degeneration is (obviously) a possibility, and that this possibility is something liberals are responsible for taking seriously.
As I see it, It is correct and good to seek the reduction of unnecessary suffering and the removal of artificial impediments to human flourishing. ‘Unnecessary’ and ‘artificial’ are key words in the sentence above - we are finite beings, condemned to have some sort of limit somewhere, meaning that some suffering and some impediments to flourishing are things we have to learn how to accept. The nature of those limits are great topics for debate, as is our capacity to extend ourselves beyond our known limits, but the limits as limits will always be there whether we like it or not. The right attitude towards our lives and human society is a combination of optimism and humility - we can always do better and we can never be perfect.
If we remove the qualification of finitude, then things go sideways.
If we pursue a vision of liberty as the total absence of constraint and the total absence of any negative feeling, then we get a vision of liberty in which nobody ever feels bad for any reason and nobody is ever free to tell another person ‘no’.
Very few people would consciously assert the above vision, but I think it’s in the background of a lot of left-of-center culture.
Consider the phrase ‘X should be universally accessible human right’, where X is some good or service like housing or health care. I think that universal access to something is a worthy aspiration, but that declaring such access a ‘right’ distorts things tremendously. Consider the case of someone getting punched in the face while walking down the street - we would obviously say that whoever punched them violated their right to bodily autonomy, and that the puncher should be urgently stopped from continuing to violate that right. Is failing to provide health care or housing the same sort of rights violation, to be corrected with the same urgent immediacy? Are you violating human rights by not yourself pursuing a career as a doctor and then working as much as humanly possible and without ever charging for it?
That isn’t to say that universally accessible things are somehow not good or not worth pursuing, just that it doesn’t work to call them a ‘right’ in the same way that not being punched in the face is a ‘right’. It feels good to add a veneer of moral urgency and necessity to a claim, but that urgency and necessity can be paradoxically paralyzing.
To repeat, I think that abundance is good and that universal access to X is a fantastic goal. I also think that such goals should be pursued with consciousness of our limits and tradeoffs. One such tradeoff is the incentive structure created by over-inflated ‘rights’ claims.
In my preferred vision of liberty, freedom comes coupled with attendant responsibilities. In a market system, you can have anything you want if you make it worth it for someone else to give it to you. Whatever your individual desires are, fulfilling them requires doing some work to fulfill the desires of others. This is obviously unworkable for the very old and the very young and the very sick, which is where families come in - families are people obliged to each other in profound ways beyond the incentives and necessities of material trade, people obliged to each other in relentlessly particular ways beyond the abstract rules of anonymous citizenship.
Put another way, if we want to increase access to X, the people who are seeking said X have their own responsibilities, to be good citizens and workers and family members. Perhaps our vision of those responsibilities is distorted and impossible to actually rise up to, but even in the most generous case the responsibilities will always remain in some shape or form.
If we hyperinflate our image of ‘rights’, then this responsibility goes away. If you don’t have X, you can’t get X by being a better citizen or worker or family member. The absence of X is evidence that your right to X is being violated. You cannot make any attempt to acquire X by contributing more to other people - the only path forward is to collapse and complain and spray your misery at the absence of X everywhere until somebody takes pity on you, or until people who like you take power and force other people to give it to you.
This dance can apply to just about every aspect of the human condition. The vision of heaven here is a world that provides everything and expects nothing, a life of state-subsidized stagnation and self-indulgence, the world of an eternal child.
This impossible, unworkable vision of unconstrained freedom leads us to the culture of anger and despair I described at the start. If we believe that all constraints are artificial impositions of wickedness, then the existence of any constraint becomes evidence of exploitation and oppression. If we believe that all negative feelings are violations of human rights, then feeling bad becomes proof that someone else has wronged us. The result is a culture that incentivizes displays of emotional damage while simultaneously making that damage impossible to heal - after all, healing would require accepting some constraints as natural rather than imposed, some negative feelings as inherent to life rather than inflicted by oppressors.
The liberal project I want to defend is one that remains committed to expanding human flourishing while staying grounded in the realities of our finite existence. It's a liberalism that sees constraints not as universal oppression but as the framework within which meaningful freedom becomes possible. Just as a poem finds its power not in the absence of rules but in the creative navigation of form, human liberty finds its fullest expression not in the elimination of all limits but in the wisdom to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary constraints, and the courage to challenge the latter while accepting the former.
This means building a culture that rewards resilience alongside empathy, that validates righteous anger while also valuing the hard work of healing, that fights against unnecessary suffering while maintaining the emotional and intellectual tools to cope with necessary limitations. Critically, these necessary limitations include the limitations of other people’s liberty, in particular the liberty that free people have to reject us.
In the wake of political setbacks, this balanced liberalism offers us something better than perpetual despair - it offers us a sustainable path forward, one where we can acknowledge both our losses and our ongoing capacity to work toward something better. Our goal should not be to eliminate all non-positive experiences but to reduce unnecessary suffering; not to abolish all constraints but to eliminate artificial ones; not to guarantee universal permanent bliss but to expand the possibilities for human flourishing within the boundaries of our finite existence.
This is a harder story to tell than either pure optimism or pure despair. But it is, I believe, the only story that can sustain liberalism as a living political tradition rather than a ever-falling spiral of grievance and entitlement. It's time to reclaim this more mature vision of liberty - one that pairs rights with responsibilities, freedom with limits, and justified anger with the courage to heal.