Liberalism As a Way of Life

An interview with political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre, whose important new book offers a comprehensive, spiritual defense of liberalism against its enemies and opponents

When the publisher of Alexandre Lefebvre’s important new book approached me about providing a promotional blurb, I was intrigued by the title alone. I explain why in the quote I happily provided for the book jacket: “The great virtue of Alexandre Lefebvre’s book is that it concedes one of the key points of antiliberals: Liberalism isn’t just a set of neutral procedures; it’s a comprehensive way of life that shapes the way we live and think and work and love in innumerable ways. Yet he insists that it’s a way of life worth robustly defending, which he does with a rare blend of cogency, grace, rigor, and wit. The more people who read this book, the better off we will be.”

I hope my conversation with Alex below validates this praise—and if it does, that you will consider buying a copy of the book to delve deeper into its arguments. If we’re going to make it through this period with our liberal institutions and moral orientation intact and thriving, we are going to need to grapple with the issues Alex raises and responds to so powerfully and with such good humor.

A last preliminary note: I haven’t provided an audio version of this lengthy post because it would be weird for me to read Alex’s portion of this along with my own.

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DL: Thanks for being here, Alex. One reason I enjoyed your book so much is that it’s such a departure from the tired, bone-dry proceduralism of the Rawlsian liberalism I imbibed in graduate school during the 1990s. Liberalism, we were taught, is “political, not metaphysical.” It isn’t a “comprehensive view” of the good. Rather, it shows how people holding such comprehensive views can come together and do politics without reference to such bigger, deeper, or higher commitments. Your account of the liberal tradition is very different and maintains that liberalism, rightly understood, is a “way of life,” which sounds pretty comprehensive to me. Would you say that’s a fair characterization of liberalism? 

AL: Thanks for the invitation, Damon. So, those “bone-dry” kind of liberals you mention are still around, publishing in the top journals in the field. And to be fair, they’ve done important work. Starting in the early 1990s, partly in response to liberal democracies becoming more multicultural, they insisted that decent liberal democratic countries must be as inclusive as possible. The state shouldn’t be in the business of favoring or prescribing a particular worldview (whether religious or secular) but instead provide a framework for all its citizens to flourish. 

That’s a worthy ideal, don’t get me wrong. But we have to ask: Is it accurate? Does this notion of a “neutral” liberal society, so dear to liberal philosophers, politicians, and pundits, reflect what liberal democratic societies are nowadays? 

One group certainly doesn’t think so: conservatives. When religious conservatives look at our contemporary world, they don’t see societies where hundreds of flowers can bloom. They see, instead, the slow and steady creep of liberal values into areas of life that are completely remote from politics. Allow me a quote from Patrick Deneen, who wrote the influential book Why Liberalism Failed. “Liberalism,” he states, “is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world.”

I’d love to return to the conservative critique later in our conversation because I have some sympathy for it. But let me put my cards on the table. I disagree with their condemnation of liberalism as a politically noxious and personally debilitating worldview. But I believe their assessment of its scope is correct. Liberal ideals and sensibilities have become omnipresent in the public and background culture of Western democratic societies. Conservative critics, in other words, more accurately and deeply capture what liberalism has become than liberals themselves—and much more so than the liberal political philosophers you mentioned. 

That’s where my book begins: agreeing with conservatives that liberalism has, for a great many people living in Western democracies, become a comprehensive view of the good life.

DL: That’s a very nice summary of your book’s launch point, if you will. I’m especially happy you referred to Deneen, whose work I’ve written about (quite critically) at some length. But a series of questions come immediately to mind about this description of comprehensive liberalism. First, who are these liberals? Second, what is the content of their comprehensive liberalism? And finally, where does this content come from? 

AL: As we all know, religion is in decline in the Western world. People who tick the “no religion” box on the census are the fastest growing group of religious affiliation (or in this case, non-affiliation) and represent 30 percent in the United States and a whopping 53 percent, 40 percent, and 49 percent in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand respectively. That’s a whole lot of people and I’m one of them myself. The “liberals” my book is talking about are from this group of religious “nones.” They probably make up the vast majority of it. The thing is, they just don’t realize it yet!

Let me put it this way: If you ask a religious person where they get their values and moral sensibility from, they’ll have an answer right away: a church, faith, or religious text. No fuss, no muss. But it’s tricky for the unchurched. What can they point to? I’ve pestered plenty of them with this question and their impulse is almost always to respond with something local or idiosyncratic, like “from my experience” or “from my friends and family.” That’s fine and well. But clearly, the answer has to involve some broader tradition that makes sense of and shapes their experiences and relationships. 

The thesis of my book is that most religious nones should identify liberalism as the source of their values: not just of their political opinions, but of who they are through and through. Liberalism is the broad tradition that may well underlie who so many of us are in all walks of life, from family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humor to outrage, and everything in between. 

DL: Okay, but what about the content? You say there are lots of comprehensive liberals out there. What do they believe in? 

AL: Well, liberalism has a characteristic set of values. We can argue around the edges but the core, I’d say, is personal freedom, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity, self-reflection, and irony. In the way that Christianity, for example, has a recognizable package of moral commitments and excellences (such as love, fellowship, charity, and devotion), so does liberalism. 

The old-school procedural liberals you started with locate these values in the political realm. But in the past forty years or so, they’ve gone viral and entered the bloodstream of the background culture. That’s why in the book I talk so much about pop culture, whether TV (like Parks and Recreation and Leslie Knope, the GOAT of liberalism as far as I’m concerned) or stand-up comedy (such as Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chapelle, whose humor is all about probing the limits of tolerance and identity). Netflix, not civics lessons, is where we imbibe liberalism nowadays.

DL: But what do you say to those who persist in religious belief when they respond that the liberal variation on faith sounds superficial and unfulfilling in comparison to biblical religion? How on earth could a watery secular system of beliefs be a replacement for the comprehensive rituals, liturgies, creeds, and absolute moral commandments of the Abrahamic traditions? 

AL:   Okay, I admit I walked into this objection with the Netflix remark. It smacks of the self-satisfaction and shallowness liberals are often accused of. 

So let me be clear: Liberalism has moral and spiritual depths. History is instructive. Liberalism is a relatively new ideology by the standards of intellectual history: only two hundred years old. But its etymological roots go back to ancient Rome with the word liber, which meant two things: freedom and generosity, liberty and liberality. When great men and women—such as John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, and George Elliot—invented liberalism in the 19th century, they posed the question of how modern subjects could remain free and generous (that is, liberal) human beings in the face of so many temptations not to be. 

My point is that liberalism was originally a political and ethical doctrine, one which addressed the fundamental question of how to live well. Now, here one might wonder: What the hell happened to liberalism? When and why did a supposedly rich ethical doctrine retrench itself into a narrowly political project? Historians have given different answers. But putting this to the side, there’s no reason why we can’t revive this older understanding of liberalism. Not, of course, by trotting out nineteenth-century problems and solutions, but by asking once again what it would mean to live freely and generously according to the liberal commitments that so many of us already hold. 

Put it this way: There are a million and one self-help books written these days, as one might expect in secular countries with a Christianity-sized hole to fill at their center. But almost all of these books begin in the same way: they encourage readers to break free from the dissatisfaction prevalent in modern liberal democratic societies by seeking alternatives elsewhere. They often look to the distant past, like the ancient Greeks or the Scottish Enlightenment, explore non-Western contexts such as China or Africa, delve into philosophies that challenge the superficial or oppressive aspects of contemporary life, like existentialism or psychoanalysis, or turn to the arts and travel as means of escape from the everyday.

That’s fine, and if that approach works for you, go for it. But the perspective in my book is different. Instead of distancing ourselves from mainstream liberal culture, I suggest that fulfillment and purpose can be found by delving deeper into it. Liberalism is built on noble ideals like personal freedom, fairness, and reciprocity, just to list a few. By fully embracing these principles and committing deeply to them, one can find not only happiness but a life that merits happiness. For instance, living up to our liberal values teaches us impartiality through setting aside personal interests in favor of fairness, it brings joy and humor as we shift between various perspectives, it fosters gratitude and optimism by recognizing the just potential of our societies, it cultivates a delight in others through a tolerance that's embraced lightly, and it ensures self-coherence as we live out these liberal virtues both publicly and privately. These are just a few of the joys of being truly liberal, which, indeed, requires genuine effort.

Conservative critics might counter that that’s not enough. Liberalism simply can’t scratch the transcendent itch, the yearning for the beyond, that is at the core of the human condition. To them, I say: so be it, liberalism won’t satisfy you. It’s a horizontally rich doctrine that concerns itself very much with this world and this life and pays little to no attention to the vertical dimension of other beings and planes of existence. But here’s the thing I ask conservatives to consider: maybe the transcendent itch you feel so deeply is not universally shared. Sure, we liberals have our moments of doubt. A personal tragedy or a sudden illness might make us question things like cosmic justice or whether the soul lives on. We're human, after all, and we're connected, however distantly, to traditions that have pondered these questions. Yet, usually, these aren't pressing concerns for us. And there's a good reason for that: Religious and metaphysical debates aren't part of the liberal political framework or the culture it shapes. The foundation of our liberal lifestyle doesn't address these questions, so neither do we. We haven't been raised to ponder them. And we're not convinced we need to. 

DL: I’ll grant you that this may well be appealing enough to attract lots of people—away from both traditional religions and less comprehensive secular outlooks. I mean, it's obviously done this already, with millions of people in liberal countries around the world. But in that case, I think your vision of liberalism faces a different sort of objection: Rather than being too watery and uncompelling, it begins to look too strident—like a missionary faith emerging from an upstart church out to rack up conversions. The less comprehensive liberalism you’re hoping to transcend with your book frequently tells a story like this about its own emergence: Liberalism became necessary because the sectarian warfare between early modern Protestants and Catholics led to bloody wars of religion in Europe. Doesn’t your comprehensive liberalism run the risk of provoking a postmodern form of sectarian warfare, with your more spiritual liberals embroiled in battle with spiritual anti-liberals? And if so, wouldn’t that imply, with a touch of irony, that we'd need to return to a less comprehensive form of liberalism to rescue us once again?

AL: Great question. This is a difficult terrain that I want to be honest about. Liberal political philosophers often try to make a distinction that strikes me as cute, or at any rate as artificial in the current culture. They say that it’s one thing for someone to be a “comprehensive liberal” which means that their liberalism informs their character and way of life, and it’s another thing to be a “perfectionist liberal,” who is someone who also calls for the state to favor a liberal way of life with its persuasive or even coercive power. For these liberal philosophers, the first position is okay but the second is not, because it leads to a non-inclusive (and so illiberal) state. 

I myself am a comprehensive but not perfectionist liberal. So that’s nice and tidy. But I can’t help but think this position is cheating and I have sympathy for conservatives (like Deneen) who pull their hair out. “Look liberals,” they say, “you only claim that the state doesn’t or shouldn’t promote a liberal way of life because the horse has already bolted. Liberalism has won the culture war, so now of course the state can keep its hands clean. Civil society (and media, and universities, and families, and dating apps, and so much more) is doing the dirty work for it.”

Which brings us to the predicament we find ourselves in today—the current state of the culture war, as I understand it. As a longtime observer of the United States (I’m Canadian and have lived in Australia for the past fifteen years), here’s what I see: Conservatives fear that their views will die out in the current culture. And if this fear becomes widespread, it will undermine the stability of the United States (and other countries in similar situations). Followers of non-liberal traditional ways of life may come to feel, deep down, that a liberal society no longer has a place for them. More troubling still, from their standpoint it will seem necessary to resist liberalism and perhaps, when opportunity strikes, even use the power and purse of the state to advance their conception of the good life (if, that is, they become convinced they cannot hope to win the cultural war without an assist from state power). 

How we work our way out of this impasse is anyone’s guess. You’re far more competent and better placed to say. I reckon, though, that liberals need to take a first step and remember one of the pillars of their way of life: generosity, in this case, a hermeneutical generosity, a genuine civility let’s say, that would refrain from ever making those with different (yet still reasonable) worldviews feel as if they were held in contempt or had no place in our society. Liberals need a spirit of charity, to borrow a word from a different creed. 

DL: That’s all great, Alex. I mean that sincerely. I’ve urged progressive liberals to embrace a charitable outlook toward the defeated right side of the culture war for years. Or rather, I urged that back during the Obama administration. Since Trump won in 2016, which happened partly because of fear on the right that there would be no such charity coming its way from the left, things have shifted. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed abortion rights for women, for example, has been overturned thanks to Trump’s judicial appointments, and Republican governors, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, have moved to restrict transgender rights. All of which makes today’s left-liberals even less inclined toward charity than they were ten years ago.

In moving this illuminating conversation to a conclusion, and in light of this observation, I wonder if, in some ways, your book, which I think has many virtues, comes too late (or maybe too early, depending on how the fights of the moment play out). What I mean is that it reads a little like a handbook for how liberals should think and act in victory – when the reality is that liberalism today is embattled across the democratic world in a way that it hasn’t been since, probably, the 1930s. I admit that’s not entirely fair; in one chapter, you offer 17 reasons to be liberal, and some of those can be used to arm liberals to battle against their enemies. But that raises an issue I suspect many of my readers would be interested in hearing you reflect on: Is your vision of liberalism a fighting faith? Is it ready and willing (if not exactly eager) to take its own side in combat with those who very much want to see its defeat?    

AL: I’m of two minds when it comes to all the recent books and think pieces proclaiming that the end of liberalism is nigh. On the one hand, we need to take a beat and ask how much of this urgency is real and how much is driven by a news and attention economy that needs to proclaim that the decisive moment is now. After all, as Edmund Fawcett observes in Liberalism: the Life of an Idea, “Pick any decade since the 1930s, and you will find an anxious liberal checking liberalism’s vital signs or pronouncing the patient dead.”

On the other hand, it does feel different, doesn’t it? The most vital political movements in the world today are certainly not liberal and, in many cases, aggressively illiberal. There’s the MAGA movement, of course, but also the BJP in India, the CCP in China, Putinism in Russia, and many more. What I find fascinating about these movements and regimes (which will be the topic of my next book) is how they make a values-based pitch to their members. China, for instance, recently announced a new model of modernization to “enrich the spiritual world” of its people. These regimes, in other words, claim to know what a life worth living is for their citizens, are confident that their vision is popularly supported, and are prepared to harness formidable persuasive and coercive powers to advance it. 

We liberals are, I think it’s fair to say, terrible at defending ourselves. But we’re especially terrible at defending ourselves from this kind of opponent. First of all, we tend to go negative and spend our time attacking populists and authoritarians rather than talking up our strengths and virtues. Second, even when we actively defend liberalism, the discourse tends to focus mainly on legal and political arguments. Politicians and journalists underscore the importance of institutions like the separation of powers, rule of law, and individual rights. That’s necessary, of course. But these arguments aren’t fighting fire with fire. Liberals bang on about institutions while our opponents appeal to identity, meaning, purpose, and redemption. In part, that’s why I’ve written the book I have: to provide liberals with a whole other set of reasons—call them “spiritual” or “existential”—as to why we should care deeply about the fate of our creed. 

As an author, I admit this is an odd position to be in: a hegemon urging his fellows to keep up the hegemony. But the stakes couldn’t be higher or more personal for us liberals. “Liberalism,” I write in my conclusion, “is the source of my soul. The wager of this book is that the same is probably true of you.” This seems like a good place to end the interview, too. Thank you, Damon.