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Donald Trump's reelection and assumption of the highest office in the land have provoked a lot of soul-searching and hand-wringing among liberal progressives; and not always the most productive kind. A lot of people decided the problem wasn’t Democrats and liberals failing to earn the right to represent voters. No, the problem was that many American voters were just too stupid or evil to appreciate everything liberalism had done for them. Others took the well-trodden path of blaming the party’s left wing for its loss, despite having run three consecutive candidates from the party’s center to mixed and increasingly diminishing returns. Some also suggested focusing too much on trans issues hurts the Dems.

Finally, there were a few road-to-Damascus moments from movers and shakers who suggested that, actually, the party hadn’t moved far enough to the left. By pivoting away from the policies and styles that reached America’s working classes, the party of FDR and Lyndon Johnson had become the party of Robin DiAngelo. Unsurprisingly, by adopting then-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s disastrously failed strategy of abandoning blue-collar workers to pick up moderate conservatives in the suburbs, liberals ensured the working class abandoned them. 62% of working-age adults in the United States lack four-year college degrees — no party can hope to succeed without their support. The solution has to be to win back the working classes by economically populist strategies. In the past year, there have already been proven successes. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have held massive rallies, drawing in record crowds concerned about an oligarchic takeover. Political newcomer and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani beat out establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo in the high-profile New York City mayoral primary in a major upset. This, despite (or perhaps because of) Cuomo’s deep ties with and enormous financial support from the 1% and Zohran’s neophyte status.

I think the latter approach is the right one strategically, but I’m sure many liberals won't exactly be feeling the Bern. After all, doesn’t this route mean abandoning our commitment to free markets and limited government? Isn’t it the “road to serfdom?” I’d argue that actually moving in a direction that is both liberal and socialist doesn’t run contrary to liberalism’s core values. In fact, some of the most important liberal thinkers and movements in history felt that moving toward liberal socialism was absolutely necessary if we were going to be sincerely committed to liberalism.

Liberal Socialism, a Pocket History

In his Liberalism Against Itself, historian Samuel Moyn notes how in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. “Cold War liberalism” came to be associated with caution, a wariness of mass democracy, and a veneration of capitalism. All of these are undoubtedly qualities and principles espoused by many liberals, but Moyn notes that they don’t represent all of liberal thought. In the 17th and 18th centuries, liberalism was associated with revolutionary ambitions, well captured by the quintessential rabble rouser Thomas Paine’s dictum that we had it in our power to begin the world over again. Aristocratic conservatives like Robert Filmer and Joseph de Maistre argued that Godly providence had elevated the few to rule over the many, and using critical reason to challenge such dogmas was dangerous or even Satanic. By contrast, liberals argued that in the beginning all were created equal, and it was fundamental inequities in rights and power that needed to be justified. Liberals used their growing cultural power to topple aristocratic regimes from America to France. The rallying cry that all were created equal and entitled to liberty, equality, and solidarity inspired millions.

From very early on, many quintessential liberal thinkers extended their criticisms of the aristocracy to the discrimination of wealth and class more generally. Around the time he wrote Common Sense (1776), Paine himself was a pretty standard liberal in the John Locke sense. But when he penned the Rights of Man (1791) at the height of the revolutionary era, Paine shifted his opinions on important economic issues. He insisted that private property was a social and not a natural institution. Consequently, those who possessed a lot of private property owned society and owed a debt to the poor for their work in maintaining it — especially since the ownership of what were once common resources, like land, dispossessed ordinary people of it. This debt was to be paid through taxes to finance a generous welfare state, which the rich should have to do as a matter of right rather than charity.

Writing at the same time, Mary Wollstonecraft chastised male liberal revolutionaries for not fighting for the rights of women. But in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft noted that:

“The respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue. One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue. Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.”

These attitudes evolved into forms of liberalism that were happy to call themselves liberal and socialist. They included quintessential liberals like John Stuart Mill, who in his Autobiography (1873) took pride in identifying under the “general designation of Socialists” while calling for a redistribution of wealth and the democratization of economic firms. As libertarians Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi point out in The Individualists (2023), many early American libertarians also identified as socialists. This may seem odd today, but Zwolinski and Tomasi observe that many American libertarians drew parallels between the exploitation of slaves in the South and labour in the industrializing economy of what became the plutocratic Gilded Age. In her Lost History of Liberalism (2018), Helena Rosenblatt notes that liberal socialists were quite common: “proponents of the new liberalism admitted that they could be seen as preaching socialism, but they didn’t mind. In 1893, a leading liberal weekly in Britain wrote that ‘if it be Socialism to have generous and hopeful sentiments with regard to the lot of those who work […] we are all Socialists in that sense.”

In the 20th century, liberal socialism continued to attract some of the most prestigious liberal thinkers, including John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Hobhouse, Carlo Rosselli, and many others. But inarguably, the most significant thinker in the tradition was John Rawls, the great American political philosopher. In his classic Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls argued that a just liberal society has to secure two principles: protection of basic liberties for all, and fair equality of opportunity, accompanied by organizing society so that any inequalities work to the benefit of the least well-off. For a long time, Rawls was read as offering support for a more modest welfare state of the sort associated with, say, the Lyndon Johnson administration. But in his last work, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), Rawls explicitly rejects this moderate reading, insisting that a just liberal society must either be a Jeffersonian “property owning democracy” or a “liberal socialist” regime:

“Welfare state capitalism also rejects the fair value of the political liberties, and while it has some concern for equality of opportunity, the policies necessary to achieve that are not followed. It permits very large inequalities in the ownership of real property (productive assets and natural resources) so that the control of the economy and much of political life rests in few hands. And although, as the name ‘welfare-state capitalism’ suggest, welfare provisions may be quite generous and guarantee a decent social minimum covering the basic needs, a principle of reciprocity to regulate economic and social inequalities is not recognized […] This leaves […] property owning democracy and liberal socialism: their ideal descriptions include arrangements designed to satisfy the two principles of justice.”

Whatever one thinks, it is telling that the most deep and influential liberal thinkers of two centuries, Mill and Rawls, both came to insist that a just liberal society would need to be one with a democratic economy. What this meant, according to them, was extending liberal principles into the workplace so that workers had rights to vote, to free expression, to assemble into cooperatives and unions, etc. In recent years, this argument has been defended by thinkers like Elizabeth Anderson, who points out in Private Government (2017) that Americans would never accept the state telling them when to wake up, what to wear, or when to eat lunch, but readily accept their employer doing just that.

Why We Need a Liberalism of Hope

Of course, liberal socialism is hardly the more recognizable form of liberalism, though I’ve tried to reintroduce it in my new book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (2025). Cold War liberalism, and other forms of liberal thinking that drew heavily on conservative philosophers like Edmund Burke, became ascendant. F.A. Hayek argued that social planning of the sort practiced by many Western European postwar governments was a “road to serfdom”, even though he supported a minimal safety net and rejected conservatism. The American writer George Will argued for a conservative reading of the American Founding Fathers as enacting a political rather than social revolution; their overthrow of a previous government and replacement of the original constitution notwithstanding. Politicians like Margaret Thatcher drew on these wells to argue that the soul of the nation needed to be remade, with economics being the tool. Once so remade, they’d recognize there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families that must look after themselves.

The result has been a disaster for liberalism. Ironically, the cautious, incrementalist approach was one of the least prudent steps liberals could take. Liberalism has always been most vulnerable to the charge that it’s an elitist doctrine that forecloses any kind of excitement, higher forms of justice, or deep solidarity. In his Civil Religion (2010), Ronald Beiner observes that the “deepest objection to liberalism as a way of life is its deliberately nonheroic or anti-heroic attitude to life, its banalization of the problem of human existence.” Cold War liberalism affirmed many of these clichés, devolving into what political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, writing in Liberalism As a Way of Life (2024), rightly called a kind of faux “liberaldom.” Rather than being fighters for the rightless and the poor against plutocratic demagogues, liberals instead promised to stay the course on a road many citizens had long since veered away from.

It should therefore come as no surprise that liberals are widely regarded as out-of-touch elitists. In their book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (2018), conservative social scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin note that many citizens perceive liberal governments to be aloof, globally minded, and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. More progressive researchers like Thomas Piketty and Martin Gilens have shown that these perceptions are grounded in reality, as everyday citizens do indeed have minimal say in how they are governed. Despite progressive policies like public healthcare, increasing unionization, and challenging inequality being perennially popular, liberal politicians have done little or nothing to advance them — in some cases, promising to do something and then not delivering. This owes much to the spread of Cold War liberal ideas favoring incrementalism, deference to the wealthy and powerful, and above all, a hagiography of market ideals in their most extreme form.

We liberals are harvesting the dark fruit of this critical mistake as I type these words. Donald Trump has not eased back into the Whitehouse. He’s launched a suite of executive orders and radical changes that threaten to cut vital services to the vulnerable, has stacked his administration with more billionaires than any other in American history, and has begun stripping away longstanding rights like birthright citizenship. Trump has also signaled hostility toward the LGBT community, scrubbing references to LGBT issues from the government and advancing anti-trans policies. In addition, he has elevated figures such as Vice President J.D. Vance, who expressed reservations about same-sex marriage, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that allowing gay or bi troops to openly serve was part of a “Marxist” agenda.

Given Trump’s frequent expressions of admiration for Hungary’s very conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, we can expect this to continue. Skyrocketing levels of inequality continue to be the order of the day, and will likely be compounded by another wave of plutocrat-friendly tax cuts. Many people are angry and want things to be better, but liberals and Democrats cannot tap into these yearnings if they continue to be the party of Hollywood celebrities and Mark Cuban in the public mind.

What liberals need to offer is not the promise of more change with continuity, but a real sense of hope that things can get back on track. From New York to LA, people are responding to a more ambitious and positive message. Liberal socialism is nothing if not a liberalism of hope, and it deserves a hearing in these illiberal times.

Published June 30, 2025