Franklin Foer on the Roots of Liberalism

Our weekly series on American progressivism continues with the journalist and author discussing the genesis of liberalism – and how the Civil War remade politics

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The book I’m writing grows out of my obsessive interest in conservative history. There is a clear asymmetry. Conservatives have a canon of texts and things that provide some ideological clarity. That should make liberals jealous – they have lost touch with their ideological forebears, and the sustenance that comes with having a genealogy of their beliefs. I’ve set about trying to help liberals trace their roots.

There was a moment when liberalism had a very distinct meaning. The term liberal was always associated with political liberty. Between the enlightenment and the early part of the 20th century, the term was also associated with a limited role for government. In the middle of what we call the Progressive Era, liberalism stops meaning laissez faire and starts meaning faith in affirmative government. I’m interested in that moment.

At the height of the progressive era, presidential candidates chased after the same set of reform-minded voters. After Theodore Roosevelt was defeated in his 1912 third-party run to regain the presidency, he was so embittered that he began criticising Woodrow Wilson in the most over-the-top way. Sensible progressives wanted to distance themselves from Roosevelt’s fulminations, so they stopped calling themselves progressives and many began calling themselves liberals. The meaning of the term liberal changes a lot over the stretch of time between Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama. But you can see the outlines of a sensibility and ideology from that time on.

The term progressive is making a comeback. But it means something different today.

We went through a long period where people who were left-of-centre were very confused about what to call themselves. The term liberal was trashed in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. A whole generation of politicians, who would have identified themselves as liberal in a previous era, rushed to call themselves something else – “progressives”, “new democrats”, and so forth. But these people clearly have a different agenda than the original progressives, who were much more interested in reforming the citizenry and creating a sense of almost spiritual regeneration in the country. If you asked people who identify themselves as progressives what it is they mean, you probably hear them talk about implanting virtue in the polity.

Which label do you wear on your lapel?

I call myself a liberal because there is this ideological tradition. I think running away from the term liberal creates intellectual confusion and muddies the public’s perception. I’d rather rehabilitate the word liberal than distance myself from the liberal legacy.

The State

By Woodrow Wilson

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Let’s begin with The State by Woodrow Wilson. The then-to-be 28th president of the US wrote this treatise in 1898, just after receiving his PhD in political science. Tell us about it.

Today people like to call Barack Obama and Bill Clinton intellectual presidents. They aren’t, in comparison to the likes of Woodrow Wilson. He was a genius. He wrote this book, The State, as a young academic. It’s from a neglected and relatively radical period of his career. In the next decade, he took a much more conservative turn as president of Princeton. The book outlines a much more robust role for the executive branch and also what an activist state would look like.

So you can see why Wilson has become the bête noire for Glenn Beck and the Tea Party. He wasn’t nearly as left wing as Teddy Roosevelt in his most progressive incarnation, but he is easier to demonise. He doesn’t have a stuffed animal named after him like Roosevelt. There is something distant and nerdy about him. Still, it’s ridiculous to hold him up as a poster child for socialism. He was criticised from the left for being a corporatist and he was criticised by the right for paving a path to socialism. But he actually represented a third way. If you want to trace American liberalism back to any sort of genesis, The State being published would be a good candidate. And if you want to trace it back to one politician, that politician is Wilson.

How did Wilson’s two terms shape the progressive agenda?

Wilson racked up a lot of progressive accomplishments as governor of New Jersey. For instance, worker’s compensation. When he ran for president in 1912, his guru was Louis Brandeis, who advocated using antitrust laws to break up big business. As president, he created the Federal Trade Commission, he created the Federal Reserve Board, and he appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.

But the crucible of the Wilson administration was World War I. Progressives thought that the war presented a tremendous opportunity to remake the state as a much more active player in the economy and in society. The government grew tremendously during the war and progressives were installed in various new-fangled agencies. They thought that nationalism could be a vehicle for creating a liberal state, but instead they saw that the war unleashed animal spirits. There was hysteria and paranoia, labour and racial strife. A period of liberal disillusionment followed, during which the entire infrastructure that Wilson had managed to construct disappeared almost overnight.

In The State, Wilson lists various functions performed by the US government, and cites John Stuart Mill to support his conclusion that “it’s hardly possible to find any justification common to them all, except the comprehensive one of general expediency”. How important is utilitarianism to liberal thought?

If you ask people “who was the quintessential liberal thinker?”, a lot of people would say “John Stuart Mill”. But when it comes to American liberalism, utilitarianism isn’t really that central. Pragmatism is a much bigger influence. Pragmatism was a political philosophy developed, largely at Harvard, by William James and John Dewey. Neither of those thinkers was heavily influenced by Mill.