Does Liberalism Have a Fighting Faith?

“The greatest gods of ancient Greece each had many names, and the number of his names proclaimed the number and diversity of the powers the god enjoyed; for these gods were manifold characters.” Our situation is different, wrote Michael Oakeshott in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (written in 1950, published posthumously 40 years later). With reference to difficult and frequently modified words such as “freedom” and “democracy,” he worried that “our political deities each have a single name, but beneath it is concealed a character not less manifold and often much more diverse.” 

That concern is sensibly applied to one of our age’s most embattled gods, “liberalism,” all the more because of the word’s different connotations on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Before we get on living in the post-liberal era, it would be good to know what it is we have forsaken—or perhaps reflection will enable us to rout the apostates and rekindle the faith.  

Such is Adrian Wooldridge’s hope in The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, a book with a great deal to offer those of us who fear the excesses of identitarian progressives on the left and national populists on the right. Wooldridge, now of Bloomberg Opinion after decades at The Economist, brings to bear a remarkable breadth of learning as he explains why liberalism was justly celebrated in the past and why it should remain our guiding light today, if only its corruptions can be identified and reversed. But, notwithstanding the book’s UK title, Centrists of the World Unite!, it is hard to talk oneself into believing that liberalism is likely to be making any revolutions anytime soon. The Revolutionary Center may be a better guide to how liberals ought to see their cause in our twenty-first-century postliberal world.  

Wooldridge’s argument is Janus-faced: “The only way forward is to restore liberalism to its proper place. What often passes for liberalism today is a ghost of its former self.” He promises to discern what made liberalism so potent before, what has enervated it today, and what would recover its former glories. Fulfilling all these goals at once is a tall order, to say the least. Indeed, any one of them could fill volumes; liberalism’s character is “manifold,” and tracing its varied career over the previous three centuries is sometimes hard to distinguish from taking stock of the history of modern Western civilization. 

Wooldridge attempts to boil liberalism down, without ever denying its complexity. Liberalism is “the belief that society starts with the individual rather than the collective, that power is so dangerous that it needs to be restrained, that truth can be striven for only through open discussion.” But it is “dynamic rather than dogmatic,” a sensibility rather than a doctrine. Liberals birthed individualism and grew up alongside capitalism—but have also been the sharpest critics of their excesses. For Wooldridge, “Keynes was just as much of a liberal as his friend and rival, Hayek.”  

But The Revolutionary Center is not posing as a systematic work of political theory or intellectual history. Wooldridge makes his case impressionistically, mostly by creating a statuary of heroes, adorned with their choicest bon mots. They include liberalism’s prefiguring prophets (Erasmus, Hobbes, and Montesquieu), early leading lights (Adam Smith, America’s founding fathers, de Staël, Constant, Humboldt), latter-day saints (Theodore Roosevelt, Lloyd George, Churchill), and theorists and practitioners of the postwar Pax Americana that he sees as liberalism’s crowning achievement (Keynes, Acheson, the German Ordoliberals). Through engagement with these figures’ exemplary lives, Wooldridge stakes out his vision of liberalism, properly understood: individualist and tolerant at its core; for free trade and for nationalism, so long as both are moderate; committed to meritocracy and against elite self-dealing. Perhaps most importantly, Wooldridge stands with Matthew Arnold, who declared, “I am a Liberal, but a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture. 

He also puts on display “Enemies of Liberty” who have corrupted this sensible vision, sorting internal wreckers into three camps. Among left liberals, he condemns the anti-authority spirit of 1968, the fetishization of oppressed groups, and the leveling instinct that treats all distinctions as forms of bigotry. He is nearly as troubled by “neoliberals,” including Friedrich Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, and Gary Becker, whom he charges with losing sight of the corrupting tendency of power when private corporations are involved, allowing “kleptocracy to run amok” in 1990s Russia, and commoditizing the private sphere (damnably giving rise to Airbnb, Uber, and OnlyFans). Finally, the “managerial liberals” who run global multinationals and rub elbows at Davos receive his bitterest denunciations; these “functionaries” have walled themselves off from democratic control in the name of technocratic competence, broadcasting their contempt for ordinary people even as they discredit their class through self-dealing, nepotism, and mismanagement. 

Add up the missteps of these three groups, and “liberalism” finds itself struggling to fend off a new wave of populist challengers who are at best indifferent and, more often, hostile to the liberal virtues that made the West successful. Wooldridge warns that history is now running in the wrong direction, thanks to “a conga line of illiberal strongmen and strongwomen” around the globe, and to the “barbarians inside the gates” of liberalism’s Anglo-American heartland: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage, among others. Wooldridge loathes these characters and desperately wants to arrest their ascent, but he chides those who think they can be seen off simply by name-calling. Along with a willingness to sow division, they are armed with legitimate public complaints that must be addressed rather than suppressed. 

To focus his sometimes-sprawling argument, Wooldridge turns to the life of the saint he considers most instructive: John Stuart Mill. In Wooldridge’s telling, Mill’s dynamism stands out. Although his father, James Mill, whom John Stuart Mill described as Jeremy Bentham’s “most faithful and fervent disciple,” gave him a famously accelerated education, he also indoctrinated him into a stilted, shallow utilitarianism that obscured more than it illuminated. At age 20, the younger Mill had a “mental crisis” when he realized (in Wooldridge’s words) that his strange education “had robbed him not only of his childhood but also of a portion of humanity.” Although he did not entirely forsake the utilitarian’s faith in reforming established institutions, his encounters with Goethe, Tocqueville, and England’s Romantic Lake Poets awakened him to “a doctrine that made room for genuine happiness rather than the felicific calculus and for the public square as well as the atomized individual.” 

Mill’s re-invention of himself inspires Wooldridge’s brand of “centrism”: rather than getting stuck in some muddy middle, Mill was energized by insights from across the political spectrum. As a mature thinker, he took from the left an appreciation of trade unionism, state activism, and women’s rights. From the right, he took a skepticism of untutored democracy and a strong conviction that not all “goods” are created equal; in Wooldridge’s interpretation, this amounts to understanding that “Liberal society could only thrive if you paid attention to soul craft as well as material well-being.” 

Wooldridge argues that liberalism in the 2020s needs to follow this same arc: Brexit and Trump’s 2016 election “ought to have forced the liberal establishment to go through a collective mental breakdown followed by a Millian reorientation.” But while there were some stirrings of reorientation, it unfortunately “fizzled”; at least in the last decade, “Chastened liberalism was no match for the angry identity politics of the left and the bitter populism of the right,” precisely because it was not chastened enough, nor confident of its own foundational strengths. 

This is an arresting yet problematic metaphor. Why exactly would the “liberal establishment” have suffered from the immaturity of the young J.S. Mill? The implication is that our governing class has been corrupted by malign teachers—namely, those three groups of “enemies” who masquerade as liberals while sullying its real essence. The liberal order that once saw to the common good fails because of this miseducation.  

Put this way, Wooldridge sounds like a bedfellow of post-liberal right populists. Like them, he believes the key to moving forward is “attack[ing] established elites and their institutions.” Like them, he hates DEI, political correctness, and the contemporary EU’s bureaucratic bloat. Like them, he is disgusted by how belief in personal liberty can curdle into the institutionalization of vice. And, like them, his tech-skepticism and admiration for TR’s trust-busting record make him a fan of Lina Khan. 

And yet, Wooldridge offers a purgative, not a revolution. “Above all, we need to make the liberal elite more self-consciously liberal,” he insists, meaning more open to genuine argument, capable of true discernment, and devoted to checking runaway power in all its forms. Yes, he believes the populists are more right than wrong on immigration and crime, but this only means that center liberals must defeat the self-sabotage of the left. He is horrified when the right cozies up to authoritarians abroad or apes the victimhood scripts created by identitarians; he wants no part of “Woke Tweedledum [or] Anti-Woke Tweedledee.”  

Wooldridge’s analysis is most illuminating when he warns us about the diseased interaction between populists and untrue liberals: “The more populists seize control of the political system the more liberals entrench themselves in their chosen caves, and the more the liberals entrench themselves, the more furious the populists get.” We must end this pattern and recreate “a fruitful balance between democracy and technocracy, managerialism and self-determination and globalism and localism.” 

That sounds good—but who is “we”? Even in the best of times, it would have been self-evidently ironic to cry out, “Liberals of the world, unite!” And in our own time, when (as Wooldridge has explained) liberalism is such a troubled concept because of its many perversions, “True liberals of the world, unite!” will surely not produce any mass movement.  

We should understand Wooldridge as trying to summon a certain kind of elite to the cause of purifying and rehabilitating liberalism. Several times, he expresses admiration for Samuel Coleridge’s notion of a “clerisy,” explaining it as “an endowed national order of intellectuals charged with propagating high culture and thereby steering society in the right direction.” As the name suggests, this “order” would include proper clerics, but also other sorts of guardians of our civilizational inheritance; Wooldridge’s admiration for the right sort of Oxford don radiates from these pages. Members of a proper clerisy “were to be umbilically connected to the status quo, providing paternal guidance to the state without surrendering to the congenital temptation of intellectuals, prating against the established order simply because it was established and preparing the way for the dictatorship of the mob.” 

Where will these “umbilically connected” defenders of what is true and good in our civilization be found? 

Wooldridge’s answer is meritocracy (the subject of his previous book); somehow, if we fairly pick the smartest, most talented youngsters and educate them in the right way, a truly liberal clerisy will be the result—one that is rooted in the real people, but unembarrassed to guide them away from cheap thrills and toward the higher things. Many of his suggested reforms are appealing: expand gifted programs and magnet schools instead of forsaking them, revitalize and recenter the humanities, and teach people to resist the distractions of the digital age. But each of these is a hard sell in the context of our fallen liberalism, and even if they were all enthusiastically implemented, it is hard to imagine that the students thus properly educated would simply be able to halt the dysfunctional push-and-pull between governing elites and their populist antagonists. Indeed, when English sociologist Michael Young coined the word “meritocracy” in his 1958 book, he did so for satirical reasons, to suggest that however good at actually selecting for “merit” a test-taking, child-picking regime might get, it would never be good enough to make the “unmeritorious” simply shut up and enjoy the good governance on offer from their betters. The replacement of traditional class-bound aristocracy with an “earned” meritocracy tends to replace a sense of duty with a sense of smug superiority. Wooldridge is attentive to the risks of self-satisfaction, but mere admonishment seems unlikely to be enough to avoid them.  

The strangest thing about Wooldridge’s book is that he sees the left-liberals, neoliberals, and managerial liberals who so disappoint him as nevertheless remaining part of a common project of liberalism, such that they can be called back to the faith. I am afraid this is a bit like assuming that Jews and Muslims are likely to resolve their differences on account of being children of Abraham. At some point, a common heritage is not enough. It is revealing that many on the American left have ceased using the word “liberal” to describe themselves, while in Wooldridge’s UK, the Greens have gone from a marginal presence to a formidable powerhouse in an instant. The old liberal establishment seems unlikely to reabsorb all these elements. 

Instead, old school liberals ought to act like a formidable faction, if perhaps not fully at home in any political party. Accepting this place in the muddle of our times should lead to a greater willingness to be opportunistic, especially by cooperating with populists in their reformist moods. If liberals instead hold their breath waiting for their preeminence to return, they may become mere anachronisms. 

Whatever the future holds for liberalism, it is important for those who hold to the faith to know and revere their forebears, and Wooldridge’s book is genuinely admirable for that purpose. His excitement about Mill, Keynes, and less celebrated figures like Benjamin Jowett and H.H. Asquith is infectious. If he makes an unlikely revolutionary, he is nevertheless an admirable teacher.  

Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Why Congress (2023).