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    American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time
    American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time
    American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time
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    American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time

    By John McGowan

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    Americans live in a liberal democracy. Yet, although democracy is widely touted today, liberalism is scorned by both the right and the left. The United States stands poised between its liberal democratic tradition and the illiberal alternatives of liberalism's critics. John McGowan argues that Americans should think twice before jettisoning the liberalism that guided American politics from James Madison to the New Deal and the Great Society.

    In an engaging and informative discussion, McGowan offers a ringing endorsement of American liberalism's basic principles, values, and commitments. He identifies five tenets of liberalism: a commitment to liberty and equality, trust in a constitutionally established rule of law, a conviction that modern societies are irreducibly plural, the promotion of a diverse civil society, and a reliance on public debate and deliberation to influence others' opinions and actions.

    McGowan explains how America's founders rejected the simplistic notion that government or society is necessarily oppressive. They were, however, acutely aware of the danger of tyranny. The liberalism of the founders distributed power widely in order to limit the power any one entity could exercise over others. Their aim was to provide for all an effective freedom that combined the right to self-determination with the ability to achieve one's self-chosen goals. In tracing this history, McGowan offers a clear vision of liberalism's foundational values as America's best guarantee today of liberty and the peace in which to exercise it.



    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateOct 22, 2007
    ISBN9780807885086
    American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time
    Author

    John McGowan

    John McGowan is Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of four other books and an editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

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      Book preview

      American Liberalism - John McGowan

      AMERICAN LIBERALISM

      AMERICAN LIBERALISM

      An Interpretation for Our Time

      John McGowan

      The University of North Carolina Press

      CHAPEL HILL

      © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Designed by Heidi Perov

      Set in Cycles with Meta display

      This book was published with the assistance of the H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

      A complete list of books published in the Lehman Series appears at the end of the book.

      The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      McGowan, John, 1953–

      American liberalism : an interpretation for our time / John McGowan.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3171-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

      1. Liberalism—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government—2001– I. Title.

      JC574.2.U6M355 2007

      320.510973—dc22                        2007015456

      A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org.

      11 10 09 08 07   5 4 3 2 1

      To Allen Dunn, James Thompson, and Tyler Curtain,

      synecdochically,

      but mostly for their incomparable selves

      Contents

      INTRODUCTION

      America at the Crossroads

      BOOK ONE

      LIBERALISM: PRINCIPLES AND VALUES

      1 Liberalism and Democracy

      2 Preventing Tyranny, Promoting Freedom

      3 The Rule of Law

      4 Pluralism

      5 Liberty and Equality

      6 Values

      BOOK TWO

      LIBERALISM’S CRITICS

      1 Situating American Liberalism and Its Critics

      2 Traditional Conservatism

      3 Laissez-Faire Conservatism

      4 Neoconservatism

      5 The Nonliberal Left

      BOOK THREE

      HISTORICAL INTERLUDE

      1 Toward State-Action Liberalism

      2 The National Security State

      3 Market Interventions

      4 Discrimination

      5 The Liberal Credo

      BOOK FOUR

      DEMOCRACY

      1 Democracy and Legitimacy

      2 Deliberative Democracy

      3 Democracy and Equality

      CONCLUSION

      Liberal versus Illiberal Democracy

      APPENDIX

      Relevant Facts and Figures

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      Index

      AMERICAN LIBERALISM

      Introduction: America at the Crossroads

      Democracy ain’t worth a damn if it’s not liberal. And liberalism isn’t worth much if it isn’t democratic. Americans are in danger of losing both because they have forgotten what liberalism is—what it aims to achieve and how, against all odds, it has succeeded throughout our history.

      Contempt for liberalism characterizes the populist right and the academic left both. Not surprisingly, their relentless assault has undermined the nation’s allegiance to its liberal heritage and its liberal institutions. The intertwining of liberalism and democracy in America has been misunderstood and attacked. An illiberal version of democracy has been brought forward as a replacement for the liberal democracy that evolved from the founding of the republic through the civil rights era of the mid-twentieth century. The attempt to disconnect liberalism from democracy is one manifestation of America’s still unresolved relationship to the changes wrought during the second half of the twentieth century: the altered status of blacks, women, and gays; shifting public standards of decorum; transformations in understanding what it means to be American in the face of our actions and defeat in Vietnam and in response to a new wave of immigration to this country, this time including many nonwhites; changes in America’s economy, especially in employment patterns/conditions and in the distribution of wealth and income, changes that began with the first oil crisis (1973) and that are usually viewed as the effects of globalization; the end of the post–World War II welfare state consensus, which accepted the New Deal and underwrote the attempt to form the Great Society; and last, but not least, America’s transformed role in a post–Cold War world in which civil wars and terrorists, along with states’ responses to them, are the primary source of conflict.

      We stand at a crossroads in American history. From 1890 to 1970, American society moved slowly, but steadily, toward a wider distribution of wealth, bringing unprecedented prosperity to an ever larger portion of the population. At the same time, social insurance programs protected most people from the ill effects of cataclysmic events like unemployment, severe illness, natural disasters, and workplace accidents. Social Security provided baseline economic support for the elderly, while various welfare programs aided the nonelderly poor. Since 1970, these programs have been under attack, and many of them have been eroded. Even more significantly, the distribution of wealth and income has moved dramatically in the other direction, with the most well-off significantly richer and the vast majority treading water at best and losing ground at worst. (See Appendix, items 2–3, 6–8, for documentation of these changes.) This transformation in most people’s economic well-being is accompanied by a greater volatility in incomes, a loss of job security, and an erosion of benefits, especially of pensions and of health insurance. In short, while most Americans’ economic position has, at best, remained the same over forty years even as the nation’s aggregate wealth has greatly increased, their economic vulnerability has increased. In what Jacob S. Hacker has called the great risk shift, ordinary Americans are now much more likely to suffer sudden economic downfall as a result of catastrophic illness, or losing a job, or having their retirement funds undermined by corporate failures or market downturns.¹

      This concentration of economic power at the top is matched by the increasing power of money in our politics and an increasing power in the executive branch of government. Although the decline of liberalism is now forty years old, the particularly blatant pandering to the super-rich and to American businesses during the past six years, combined with the enlargement of executive power in the name of national security, has dramatized, in our current moment, the choice between a liberal and a nonliberal future. That we stand at a crossroads, faced with a dramatic choice between two very different visions of what America can and should be, is the impetus for this book. My goal is to articulate, as fully and persuasively as I possibly can, a vision of American liberalism as the path our country should take.

      For many on both the left and the right, liberalism is their favorite whipping boy, the all-purpose cause for everything they do not like about contemporary American reality. And most of these critics also trumpet democracy as their political ideal. I highly doubt they could deliver a democracy we would wish to endorse if they purged it of its liberal elements. But I do not doubt that some of our actual or would-be political leaders are hostile to a liberalism that I will do my best to convince you is well worth supporting. My fear, quite simply, is that Americans do not understand what liberalism is or how it relates to democracy. Armed with a better understanding, they might choose to reject liberal democracy. I hope and believe otherwise. I offer here a vision of liberal democracy that explains its benefits and its frustrations, so that at least our polity can make the momentous decisions it currently faces with a clear sense of what it is choosing between and in the name of what goods it makes those choices.

      Understanding liberalism is complicated by the fact that, as a set of political principles and strategies, liberalism is not exactly the same now as it was in 1776. The story I tell emphasizes a strong continuity between the liberalism of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and the liberalism of the early twenty-first century, but it requires a fairly detailed account to illustrate that continuity. Although this story of liberalism’s evolution is complex, my political position is simple. I think liberal democracy gives us our best chance of living at peace with other Americans—and with the people in the rest of the world.

      The founding fathers were liberals. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution provide us with a mixture of noble ideals (especially of freedom and equality) and of clear-eyed legal and institutional tools for approaching those ideals. That mixture of idealism and realism is characteristically American, but also characteristically liberal. On the idealistic side, liberalism is America’s best self, articulating the goal of enabling the freedom and prosperity of all citizens. That idealism gives us both the belief that these ideals are achievable and the will to work toward their achievement. On the realistic side, liberalism recognizes that we are often not our best selves, and thus creates a system of checks and balances that prevents the accumulation of power in the hands of the few. No elite—be it political, economic, religious, or ethnic—is entitled to dominate in a polity founded on the premise that all are created equal. As I was always taught that Jefferson said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.² America can be its best self when citizens know its founding ideals—and when the checks and balances that protect those ideals are maintained and utilized. This book aims to remind Americans of those ideals—ones I believe most Americans still cherish—and to provoke them to consider what it would mean to honor them in today’s world, one that is very different from the world of 1787.

      I present an American version of liberal democracy. As will become clear soon enough, I have been influenced by political philosophers from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to the present, but I constantly try to process the general reflections and observations found in the philosophers’ work through the history of the United States. My American focus means that I begin with the American founders, depending rather heavily on the Federalist Papers written by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, to highlight the salient features of liberalism. And when I move into the twentieth century, my understanding of modern liberalism follows from the work of a quartet of American political philosophers who have tried to articulate a liberalism that speaks to contemporary conditions: John Dewey, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum.³

      I want to establish a usable past for those currently engaged in American political debates on the liberal side—thus my focus on American ideals and American history. Politics can be defined as the actions through which humans in a particular society establish, maintain, reproduce, and reform/transform the conditions of their living together. Better yet, substitute interactions for actions in that last sentence. Politics attends to our being-with-others, to the interactions and negotiations through which we build a social space we occupy together and through which we achieve individual identities, purposes, commitments, and loyalties. Politics entails (at least partially) negotiations about dividing up resources, arguments about what it is possible to do, and contention over what it is desirable to do. Disagreements on all three of these matters are the basic stuff of politics—and at the heart of a liberal democracy with its processes of deliberation, publicly staged advocacy, regular elections, and adversarial legal and legislative procedures. Liberalism, like any political philosophy, aims to articulate a vision of the best way to understand the fact that humans everywhere live in societies and to articulate a set of principles recommended as guiding us toward the best possible way for humans to organize their social relations. That more general philosophy is then taken to have consequences in terms of the positions adopted on more local, substantial political debates. Political philosophy (or political theory), then, both undertakes to describe/explain the basic conditions of human political communities and to advocate a particular way of living together. Political scientists, at times, attempt to separate these two by offering a value-neutral description or explanation of some political institution or interaction. That might well be possible, but its reverse is not. Any political vision that advocates one set of choices over alternatives will be built upon claims about the facts (the nature) of the human condition or, more modestly, the facts of the ways a specific historical polity has been and currently is organized. I strive to offer a compelling as well as reasonably comprehensive vision of American political reality and of how we could/should best live that reality.

      If readers do not recognize my portrait of liberal democracy as representing a set of American ideals and experiences, I have failed. Precisely because this account of liberal democracy is so American specific and so driven by my understanding of America’s contemporary situation, I have chosen to emphasize in the subtitle that what I offer here is an interpretation for our time. There will, of course, be family resemblances to the liberalism found in the English tradition and to democracy as understood and practiced elsewhere, but my account is almost entirely refracted through American history and American thought, while also strongly shaped by my understanding of the crossroads at which America currently stands. My emphasis is primarily on liberalism rather than on democracy because it is the liberal part of our heritage that is so badly misunderstood at present. Of course, liberalism and democracy are deeply intertwined in American history and politics, so democracy is a constant presence in these pages. I address issues of democracy directly at the end, but that fairly brief discussion makes no pretense to being comprehensive. The topics considered there are dictated by the larger goal of providing a fairly complete overview of liberalism. The interpretation of liberalism offered here presents a particular (obviously contestable) interpretation of what America has aspired to be, has understood itself to be, and has, in some historical moments and at some specific locales, actually managed to be.

      I have described this book to friends as an attempt to lay out the basic principles, values, and commitments of American liberalism. One crucial dimension of publicly articulated principles is that they are essentially contestable.⁴ To make one’s views public is to solicit others’ agreement, but also to acknowledge that the arguments and reasons that convince me will not necessarily convince others. The interpretation of American liberalism offered here is my best attempt at a full-scale liberal vision. Undoubtedly, it will prove more useful to many readers because it clarifies their own different beliefs than because it expresses what they have often felt but never put so fully into words. Either response would thrill me. I do think of this book as a basic civics lesson. I am trying to present an American liberalism that I think is an indispensable part of our political history and political ideals, a part we are in danger of losing through ignorance, misunderstanding, misrepresentations (willful in some cases), and inattention. But that hardly means I only succeed if I convert all my readers to my vision of liberalism. To the contrary, more important is to spur readers to reflect upon their own understanding of the politically feasible and desirable.

      The civics lesson aspect of this book leads me, since I want to be comprehensive yet relatively and readably brief, to portray liberalism in fairly broad strokes. Here it is probably an advantage that I am not a professional political theorist, but rather a citizen addressing other citizens. I have been deeply influenced by the political philosophy and theory that I read avidly (and sometimes teach), but I am trying to do something no academic political theorist would want to do. Namely, I pay scant attention to the fact that liberalism comes in many variants—and is characterized by a whole series of internal debates. I offer an interpretation of liberalism that I find compelling without getting much sidetracked into specific objections from liberals themselves to the ways I present and argue for various components of my view. My rhetorical aims for this book are the only justification for not embroiling myself in debates internal to the field. In doing so, I have run roughshod (sometimes knowingly, undoubtedly often unknowingly) over distinctions, disagreements, and issues that adherents to various varieties of liberalism deem crucially important. In so doing, I never intend to suggest that liberalism is monolithic and has a once-and-for-all definitional identity, or that there is a consensus about what liberalism is or what it has to say about specific topics. My understanding of political concepts is always situational; such concepts are deployed in specific contexts to advance and advocate certain beliefs and commitments. The relevant context for me is the current political climate in American society, not academic debates—hence my subtitle, An Interpretation for Our Time.

      That said, where I am aware of the academic debates that surround this account of liberalism, I have used notes to refer my readers to those debates. But my nonacademic goal leads me to keep my eye on the ball in the body of the text, and this book is designed to be completely comprehensible to the reader who never once looks at the notes. For readers who want a better sense of the public and academic debates surrounding the main text’s claims, the notes will point them toward learning more—and toward finding proponents of opposing views as well as the works of the authors who have influenced me. I have also provided an appendix that gathers together statistical and other data that underwrite some of my claims about current conditions in our American polity. But the main attraction is the text of the book, which presents what I hope is a coherent and comprehensive interpretation of what the terms liberalism and democracy mean in an American context and what is entailed in allegiance to them. These terms are used every day in political and journalistic discourse, but they are never defined—as if everyone already and always knew what we were talking about.

      If concepts are deployed situationally, then they cannot, in the final analysis, function noncontrastively. The implied contrast throughout Book One (on liberalism) is to conservatism and illiberalism, even though the contrast mostly remains implied. In Book Two, I present an account of contemporary American conservatism that makes the contrast explicit. More problematic for some readers will be the fact that, by and large, I do not engage with leftist critiques of liberalism. Partly that is the result of the attempt to keep this book of reasonable length. A fully adequate engagement with nonliberal leftist thought would have taken me far afield. But, at the end of Book Two, I do offer more substantive reasons for neglecting leftism in a consideration of contemporary American politics, as well as paying some attention to the left’s objections to liberalism.

      So much for preliminaries. Now readers are entitled to a foretaste of the book’s substantive argument to orient them as they move into the main body of the text. Liberalism, I contend, provides our best guarantee of liberty and the peace in which to exercise it, while its commitment to equality provides the ever-elusive ideal that makes it a dynamic, restless, and radical political position. That commitment to equality explains the historical transformation from the founders’ vision to the liberalism of today, as well as illuminating the main fault lines in our contemporary political debates. Whether we insist that the founders were liberal, conservative, or republican (everyone agrees that they were not democrats) makes little difference beyond propagandistic appropriations that merely muddy the waters. The key is that a distinctive understanding of freedom and of its interrelation with the ever-elusive goal of equality characterizes American political culture. I think there is a demonstrable continuity—both in political sensibility and through a series of concrete historical steps—between the views of Jefferson and Madison and contemporary, twenty-first-century liberalism. Succinctly put, classical liberalism develops a distinctive understanding of liberty, one that links freedom to individual agents, that relies on the rule of law and of legally established civil liberties to counter arbitrary and/or absolute power, and that responds to the pluralism (religious and otherwise) of modern societies by enshrining liberty of conscience, freedom of association and expression, and autonomy in choosing how to live one’s life. The liberalism of the founders, as the Declaration of Independence makes dramatically evident, already possesses a strong attachment to the notion that all men are created equal, but the full ramifications of that ringing assertion take a long time to become clear. (We have no reason to believe that they are completely understood, not to mention realized, even today.) The unfolding of what equality means and how a liberal democratic polity might better put it into practice encompasses the transition from the founders to modern liberalism. That historical story is complicated because, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the referents of the labels liberal and conservative reverse themselves almost completely. If we keep our eyes firmly on the concept of equality, however, that reversal is not so baffling.

      To lay my cards fully on the table: the liberalism I espouse is egalitarian liberalism, a phrase I take from Thomas Nagel, who characterizes this position as favoring not just individual rights but a form of distributive justice that combats poverty and large inequalities. Nagel adds that the term ‘liberalism’ applies to a wide range of political positions, from the libertarianism of economic laissez-faire to the democratic egalitarianism of the welfare state. In its European usage the term suggests the former rather than the latter; in American usage it is the reverse.⁵ John Dewey noted this divergence between American and other countries’ usage in 1927: In the United States the name ‘liberal,’ as a party designation, is still employed to designate a progressive in political matters. In most other countries, the ‘liberal’ party is that which represents established and vested commercial and financial interests in protest against governmental regulation.⁶ I employ the term liberalism in its American usage throughout this book. Linking the term liberalism with this focus on equality dates from the Progressive Era in American history and becomes firmly entrenched during the New Deal, which is emphatically not to say that agitation for equality was absent in nineteenth-century America, but only that a politics inspired by that ideal had not yet been given the name liberal. The more usual name for nineteenth-century advocates of equality was democrat, as is most obvious in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which almost never uses the word liberal, but associates democracy with the drive toward equality.

      Equality is the most complicated and contested of the primary liberal values—and I locate liberalism’s other components in relation to its commitment to equality. Democracy is then, in turn, interpreted through its relation to equality. Conservatism is best characterized by its indifference or outright hostility to equality. Norberto Bobbio, in his elegant little book entitled Left and Right, concludes that the distinction between left and right corresponds to the difference between egalitarianism and inegalitarianism.⁷ That is certainly the place to start, although there are other significant differences as well.

      My extended description of liberal democracy will not win universal acceptance, but it is presented in a positive, assertive form as representing what I consider the best thinking and experience on these matters. I offer some assertions more confidently than others. Generally speaking, throughout the book I avoid the first person when I present traits or principles of liberalism or of democracy that I am fairly confident would find wide agreement among self-described liberals. However, I do, in certain instances, discuss ideas or arguments that are attributable to specific liberal or democratic writers. In those cases, I identify the writer in question and reconstruct his or her position. Finally, when I offer interpretations of liberalism or of its consequences that I think (or know) are subject to more disagreement, I usually switch to the first person in order to signal that, here, my way of understanding liberalism is influencing the exposition.

      The book’s organization is simple. In imitation of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, I have organized the text into books with numbered sections, instead of the more usual chapters. (Hume, whose thought defies easy characterization as liberal or conservative, greatly influenced Madison and Dewey. My account of liberalism is also indebted to him.) Book One provides a long description of American liberalism’s primary principles and values, paying particular attention to how those principles and values were present at the founding moment and how they are understood today. The presentation of liberalism is followed, in Book Two, by an engagement with conservative positions and a brief discussion of nonliberal leftists. Book Three offers a historical sketch of how the liberalism of the founders became the modern (or egalitarian) liberalism of today. I hardly do justice to America’s complex history, but I do name some of the key historical transformations germane to liberalism’s evolution. The appeal to certain well-known moments in the republic’s political history indicates why a claim of continuity between the founders and today’s liberals is plausible. Book Four moves on to a discussion of democracy and toward an understanding of liberal democracy. The term liberal democracy is just about universally used by political scientists to characterize the form of government that currently prevails in the Western democracies. But egalitarian liberalism has come under extended attack in the past forty years at the same time that democracy has been elevated as a universal ideal beyond criticism. This development suggests that we live during a transitional moment in which our current political arrangements (and their historical and ethical justifications) are poorly understood—and that there is considerable impetus from various quarters to place a nonliberal or illiberal democracy in liberal democracy’s stead. This book aims to clarify what is at stake during this transitional period, and thus it concludes with a short account of the contrast between liberal and illiberal democracy.

      Book One: Liberalism: Principles and Values

      1 LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY

      Liberalism and democracy are not identical and, to some extent, not even very compatible. My contention is that they end up working well together, especially if we take into account the imperfections of this world. Do they complement one another? To some extent. But at times they also pull in different directions, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

      Historically, democracy dates back to the ancient world whereas liberalism is a modern invention. (By modern, I mean the world after 1500, a world characterized by greatly increased European contact with non-Europeans following Columbus’s voyages; by the splintering of Christianity into various sects following Martin Luther’s break from the Catholic Church; by the increased dissemination of knowledge and the growth of science that accompanied the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press; by the movement from a feudal to a capitalist economic order; and by the growth of the nation-state and its slow movement away from absolutism toward some version of popular sovereignty.) Liberalism originates as a loose set of responses offered to the problems attending social organization and authority after the demise of a single, unifying religion and as an alternative to arbitrary and absolute power lodged in a monarch. Thomas Hobbes, at the beginning of the modern era, recognizes that, in the absence of a religious authority accepted by all citizens, the basis of order will have to be secular and human. Unlike most liberals, however, Hobbes is willing to sacrifice almost all liberty to secure order. More characteristic are John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, all of whom want to maintain, even increase, individual liberty (especially freedom of opinion and belief, but also rights of free enterprise and property) while at the same time ensuring some modicum of public order. In the simplest terms (terms I will revisit later and complicate somewhat), liberalism responds to modern conditions of plurality, conditions most dramatically portrayed in the multiple religious disputes—some more violent than others—spawned by the Protestant Reformation. Modern plurality also manifests itself in the economic competition generated by capitalism. If members of a society do not share the same religious beliefs and are competing against one another economically, what could possibly hold society together? Spurning Hobbes’s drastic solution—a monarch whose power derives from the people, not from God, but who, once appointed, has absolute authority—the other liberal writers work to achieve a balance between the individual freedoms they recognize in modern plurality and the need to secure those freedoms by providing a peaceful and ordered setting for their enactment.

      I will return to this central dilemma posed by modern plurality, but the key point right now is that liberalism precedes democracy in modern political thought—and in modern political reality.¹ From 1650 on, liberalism—the attempt to end the disastrous religious wars by figuring out some way to institutionalize religious tolerance—dominates not only political philosophy, but also actual political reforms in England and Holland (at least). Democracy is not really on the table until, arguably, 1750, with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is very influential but also a marginalized outsider. The French Revolution brings democracy onto the political stage—and demonstrates that it is a short step from liberalism to democracy; the two go hand in hand. The collapse of the revolution into Napoleonic despotism and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1815 delays the full emergence of democracy in Europe to the latter half of the nineteenth century. In America, democracy is not firmly established until the Jacksonian era. According to Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, ‘Democracy’ was not to emerge as a fully legitimate cultural value in America, commanding more or less universal approval, until the 1830s, with the appearance of a national system of mass political parties.² In other words, democracy is mostly a mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon, whereas liberalism is a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century one. The crucial point for Americans is that the founding fathers were liberals intent on creating a republic; they were not democrats. That is why we are saddled with the Electoral College. The founders aimed to secure liberty and prevent tyranny. They were not committed to democratic procedures that rested political decisions on the will of the people, even though they accepted that the authority of political institutions did, ultimately, derive from the people. Hamilton and Madison understood a republic as distinct from a democracy, with the main difference being that a republic refracted and refined the people’s will through a series of filters that insulated the government from direct pressure from the demos.³ For Madison especially, a commitment to religious freedom and civil liberties was distinct from commitment to a government directly responsive to the people’s will. In general, liberalism is the attempt to maximize individual freedom within a legal order that distributes power. Democracy, on the other hand, refers to the location of sovereignty in the people and to mechanisms of decision-making at various sites, most notably within the government, but also potentially in the workplace and other locales.

      2 PREVENTING TYRANNY, PROMOTING FREEDOM

      By calling the founders liberal, I mean to direct attention to their suspicion of concentrated governmental power, their fierce attachment to liberty, and their emergent commitment to equality. Their republicanism was both antidemocratic and not yet full liberalism to the extent that they resisted full social, political, and economic equality and that they focused on the general welfare and not the prosperity of isolated individuals as government’s responsibility. American liberalism has never looked liked its European counterparts because, prior to the Gilded Age, there was never a strong voice in American politics favoring the kind of laissez-faire liberalism found in Britain in the 1820s, a liberalism that is built on the model of self-interested economic man as the best possible citizen. That British liberal position is the hallmark of American conservatism. I cannot emphasize this point enough. I agree with Louis Hartz and Sean Wilentz (and, hence, disagree with Joyce Appleby) that the laissez-faire position did not make a (significant) appearance in American politics before 1880—and that the laissez-faire position in American politics is always conservative because it is oriented toward preserving an unequal status quo.⁴ It is only when the captains of industry feared that the state would take the workers’ part in the labor struggles of the Gilded Age that laissez-faire arguments arrived on the American scene.⁵ For Hartz, American liberals (in stark contrast to their British counterparts, notably Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) of the pre–Civil War years did not distrust the state because it was their state, a servant of the people. The British Benthamites, on the other hand, were trying to undercut the legitimacy and power of a state that was still in aristocratic hands. Alexander Hamilton’s use of the state to aid commerce (through the establishment of a national bank, and through tariffs and infrastructural investment in roads and canals) set the pattern for American intertwining of state and economy.

      Jefferson and Madison’s protests against Hamilton’s actions are sometimes cited as proof of their nascent embrace of a laissez-faire philosophy. But Jefferson and Madison did not object to state action per se. What they objected to was the way that Hamilton’s economic policies favored those who were already economically most well-off. They mistrusted this combination of economic and political power because it would concentrate power in the hands of the few. Jefferson and Madison’s liberalism combined a liberal commitment to equality with republican ideas about a common good that transcended, and justified limitations on, individual interests. Neither man ever espoused a rugged individualism, and American liberalism has retained their moderation of the individualistic pursuit of self-interest. The historical transformation of liberalism in the United States (the story told in Book Three) has more to do with changing notions of the proper role of the state than with movement away from or back toward an individualistic politics and psychology based on a certain reading of Adam Smith. Thus, the interpretation of liberalism I offer is distinctly American—and it reflects the emergence of modern American liberalism out of both the liberalism and the republicanism of the founders. The founders’ liberalism finds expression in Jefferson’s ringing statement about the the pursuit of happiness and in the Bill of Rights, both of which have no precedent in a republicanism that takes Rome as its model.⁶

      The American Constitution is, to repeat, not a democratic document.⁷ Many of our democratic practices are either explicit later amendments to the original document (like the direct election of senators) or evolved, extra-constitutional procedures (like our whole process of nominating presidential candidates or, for that matter, electoral campaigns themselves, which would have appalled the founders). For this reason alone (although there are many others), it is simply impossible to take the Constitution at its word (granting for the moment the dubious proposition that we could know, unproblematically, what its word is). America has evolved away from its founding to a commitment to democracy not held by the founders. But the seeds of democracy are already contained in the framers’ acceptance of the ultimate authority of the people. Similarly, the seeds of egalitarian liberalism are present in the Declaration of Independence’s insistence on the equality of all.

      The crux is the issue of liberty and the potential threats to it. To call the Constitution conservative, as Russell Kirk does, is way too hasty because the Constitution eschews the authoritarianism of much conservative thought, and it places so much weight (especially in the Bill of Rights) on enabling individuals.⁸ In the widest view, because of his emphasis on civil liberties and his suspicion of any and all accumulations of power, Madison was a liberal. He contrasted with the more conservative Hamilton on precisely these grounds. Hamilton wanted a stronger national government than Madison.⁹ Madison’s declaration (in Federalist No. 47) that the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny underwrites his differences with Hamilton.¹⁰ As James Read puts it, What especially distinguished Madison, besides the seriousness of his commitment to civil liberties, is his appreciation of the extremely broad range from which threats to liberty can proceed.¹¹

      In a narrower view that focuses on Madison’s fear of democracy, he does appear conservative. One threat to liberty is what Alexis de Tocqueville would later name the tyranny of the majority. Madison wanted the Constitution to safeguard against that form of tyranny as well as others. There is little doubt that Madison recognized the rich as a minority and the poor as the majority. For that reason, his antidemocratic republicanism was a defense of privilege—and hence

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