The Liberalism We Live and Breathe
People remember the Stonewall riots, born of righteous fury against police brutality. They remember governments silent as AIDS ravaged communities; the closets, the firings, the whispered slurs, the families torn apart. But they also remember courage: Harvey Milk’s bullhorn, ACT UP’s refusal to let the dying be invisible, Pride parades marching defiantly through streets that once hunted them — acts that succeeded in the only places they could: liberal democracies.
These memories matter because they show not only what liberalism can achieve, but how it works — not through sudden revolutions alone, but through millions of acts of persuasion, protest, and, eventually, belonging. This is what I call covenantal liberalism: a moral tradition whose roots go far beyond books, laws, or rights, and manifest in memory, restraint, and the daily negotiations of mutual respect. This is the liberalism that helped win LGBT rights — and remains our best hope for defending them against rising intolerance on the illiberal right.
This liberalism endures not in great monuments or declarations, but in the small gestures through which human beings sustain one another. Memorials crumble and empires fall. Percy Shelley once wrote of a mighty king who declared, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” — words carved into stone beside a shattered statue, half-buried in desert sands, staring out over emptiness. Parchment fades, marble erodes, and even digital storage drives fail. But the living world persists. This is how a society’s moral character is sustained: not merely through laws or inscriptions, but through the habits of communities that teach what they cannot fully explain — a grandmother’s smile to a child, and the child’s smile in return — a human bond that philosophers, in their abstractions, arguments, and deconstructions, often fail to capture.
Memory in liberal societies is not static. It adapts and enlarges the circle of dignity. The story of LGBT rights shows how the moral conscience of a society can evolve, how memories of injustice become the seeds of justice. Memory has not been the enemy of progress; it has been its midwife, shaping how we treat our neighbors, raise our children, and define who belongs.
Yet some today look at the persistence of injustice, the apathy of ordinary citizens, and the rise of radicalism and declare that liberalism has failed — or is failing. On the political left, scholars like Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, prominent voices in the Critical Social Justice movement, view liberalism’s language of neutrality and universal rights with suspicion, seeing it as a mask for preserving racial and gender hierarchies. Meanwhile, right-wing post-liberal writers like Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony argue that liberalism, in its abstract devotion to individual autonomy and rational principles, has left citizens feeling rootless, alienated, and spiritually adrift. Post-liberals see that most Westerners cannot easily articulate the principles said to define our civilization. And from this silence, they conclude that liberal societies have lost meaning — that liberalism will collapse and be swept away by something better, more communal, and more able to command loyalty. Just don’t ask for any specifics on what this “something better” is — post-liberals either won’t say or don’t know.
In response to such critiques, some liberals make the case for a bolder liberalism — one that commits to a radical plan to overhaul society. Political theorists like Matt McManus speak of liberal socialism as a philosophy of hope, calling for liberalism to be more self-aware, visionary, and willing to reshape society to fulfill its promises of justice and opportunity. Yet there’s a danger in believing that ideas alone can remake reality without respect for the traditions and memories that hold communities together. Too many revolutions begin, as in France, with noble words — Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité — only to end in tyranny, terror, and the guillotine. The impulse to transform society through sweeping change burns just as bright today, driven by the hope that big enough reforms can fix most of our problems at once. Some radicals imagine that abolishing private schools or upending economic systems will erase centuries of prejudice overnight, while movements outside the liberal tradition, like Critical Social Justice, turn to speech codes and hijack institutional bureaucracies to impose virtue. History suggests both paths end in disaster.
The mistake made by the social-justice left, the post-liberal right, and even radical liberals is that they misunderstand where liberalism truly lives. Each imagines liberalism in different ways: Critical Social Justice sees it as a matrix of hidden systems of oppression; right-wing post-liberals see it as an untethered ideology dissolving communal bonds; and radical liberals imagine it as a stagnant model in need of transformative updates. There are kernels of truth in each of these critiques, but all three miss where liberalism operates.
Liberalism, long rooted in the moral and legal traditions of the West, found its philosophical expression in the Enlightenment, but in practice — and over centuries — it has become something deeper. It lives quietly in the habits and relationships of everyday life. Though few can express its principles in lofty ideological terms, countless people embody them daily — in how they raise their children, treat their neighbours, and remember what ought never to be repeated. It is not a weakness that liberalism — a tradition of individual dignity, personal liberty, mutual respect, freedom of conscience, and toleration of difference, all sustained by shared duty and restraint — has become something many cannot easily name, for that very anonymity is the proof of its success. Its values have so thoroughly merged with the fabric of society that they are now the air we breathe — lived, not proclaimed.
Liberalism unfolds around dinner tables at holiday gatherings when a drunken uncle erupts into a homophobic rant and the forks pause mid-air, glasses clinking as the table falls silent. “Come on, it’s 2025,” someone says, and the uncle, red-faced, holds up his hands and mutters, “I know, I’m sorry.” It happens in workplaces when voices grow quiet and glances dart uneasily when a colleague scoffs that same-sex marriage will never be “real marriage”, and someone asks in an even voice, “Why would you think something like that?”
In these moments, and untold others, boundaries are established — not only because careless words are checked, but because those who speak them are offered a path back into belonging, reminded that a free society rests on the simple tradition that we speak of others only as we would wish them to speak of us. It is the work of friends, families, and communities — not of governments, outrage mobs, or the police.
Liberalism breathes in these ordinary moments: when a child learns that another’s toy is not his to seize, and that fairness requires saying “I’m sorry” and giving it back; when teenagers are told they may speak their minds, even if they disagree, so long as they show respect. These lessons are woven into family dinners where disagreements are voiced but tempers cooled by gentle reminders that we live together. They are not taught from Locke’s treatises or legal texts, but through the countless small rituals by which liberal societies instill property, liberty, pluralism, and mutual courtesy. Belonging isn’t imposed from above; it is built from below. And that is how change once unthinkable became part of the moral fabric of modern societies — not through conquest, but through millions of hearts convinced.
The victories of LGBT rights did not descend from legal rulings. They arose from conversations at kitchen tables, from reconciliations between parents and children, and from communities that chose, sometimes with trembling reluctance, to widen the circle of belonging. A man who once shouted slurs learned to love his bisexual son. A neighbor who recoiled at Pride flags offered congratulations at a gay wedding. A colleague who once stared at a woman in a suit and tie eventually asked where she’d bought such a sharp jacket. In these moments, dignity is renewed and expanded — not just because acceptance is offered, but because the boundaries of who belongs subtly and irreversibly shift.
When same-sex marriage was only a dream, the path forward was not a violent rupture, but the slow, brave work of storytelling. Couples who had loved each other for decades stepped forward to show that their bonds were not threats to society, but reflections of it. Transgender people, once forced into silence, began speaking publicly of lives hidden and hearts misunderstood. They taught neighbors that identity is not deviance but the honest expression of a human soul.
This work did not win every heart, nor silence every bigot, and many an overzealous activist has done more harm than good to their cause. But it persuaded enough of the public that when courts finally ruled for equality, those decisions could take root rather than spark violence. LGBT rights today rest on laws, yes — but far more so on a vast, invisible architecture of memory and persuasion. These victories — the freedom to marry, to raise families, to work without fear — endure because society was convinced. To some radicals, incrementalism feels like surrender. But for others, incrementalism has often been the only path. Progress came in steps: the decriminalization of same-sex intimacy; the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, anti-discrimination protections in employment and housing; the right of LGBT people to serve openly in the military; and the right to marry. Each step built upon the last, making the next possible. There is more persuasion still to do, but we must not scorn the method that has brought us all this far. Because in liberal societies, even partial victories create moral footholds that cannot easily be erased.
Source: Gallup.
Across America, books are banned, flags are torn down, and laws seek to silence voices. Yet the quiet work of persuasion continues, reminding us that liberalism, for all its flaws, remains the ground on which LGBT rights stand.
Radicals often claim liberalism lacks heroism — that it is too modest, too polite, too afraid to call for rupture. Look again. Is there no heroism in the parents who chose love over dogma when their child came out? Is there no heroism in communities that opened their doors to neighbors once shunned? Is there no heroism in the millions of quiet conversations that shifted the moral compass of entire nations? Liberalism’s heroism lies not in political violence, revolution, or tearing societies apart, but in holding them together by understanding one another. It is the heroism of patience, conversation, and memory.
The liberalism that defends LGBT rights is more a moral instinct than a maxim. For it simply feels right that every human being should have an equal claim to dignity, and it feels equally true that societies thrive when they honour that claim. Liberal societies often fall short of these ideals. They compromise when they should stand firm. They move too slowly, and sometimes betray the very people they promise to protect. Yet they remain the places where LGBT people — as well as women, ethnic and religious minorities, and atheists — have the best chance not merely to survive, but to flourish. And that is no coincidence. For at its best, liberalism remembers: it knows that laws are not enough unless the underlying values live in the conscience of the people, that rights endure only when woven into culture, and that freedom is secured not by force, but by the stubborn work of changing minds.
This is covenantal liberalism. It is not an apology for caution. It is a declaration that lasting justice must grow from roots that run deep. For LGBT people, this covenant is not abstract. It is the difference between being citizens and being strangers in the land of their birth. And for liberal societies, defending that covenant is not merely a political task — it is a moral duty. Because in the end, revolutions may raise barricades, but it is memory, persuasion, and covenant that keep the doors open for everyone — the same memory that remembers Stonewall, and the same courage that refused to be silenced in the streets that once hunted it.
Published Oct 28, 2025
