Professor Samuel Moyn teaches history and law at Yale University and he’s attempted to start a philosophical debate about the status of liberalism in the opinion pages of the Washington Post. I read his piece twice, and then I read it again. While it’s laced with worthwhile insights, I don’t understand how it was published in its current condition. It has about as much narrative consistency as a Jackson Pollack canvas.

Assuming we accept his definition of liberalism (“the turn after the Protestant Reformation to a secular politics that allowed individuals and groups to coexist while they pursued their own goals in their own way”), he appears to be saying that freedom of conscience is under threat. To demonstrate this, he mentions the conservative and increasingly authoritarian governments of Poland and Hungary, which seems like a good start. But enforced religious conformity isn’t a very precise or even accurate description of what is happening in those two countries. He mentions instead rigged courts and elections, and an assault on the independence of academia. There’s certainly a religious component to these changes, driven as they are by concern about Muslim and non-white immigration into Europe. And the essay might have gone somewhere and been coherent if he had gone on to explore the relationship between cultural nationalism and illiberalism.  But he didn’t pursue that angle.

He describes the right’s persistent critique of liberalism as promoting “not autonomy but atomism, not fairness but inequality, not fulfillment but emptiness, not culture but anarchy.” He then describes the Marxist critique: “liberals believe in freedom, but…fail to see that the market cannot create the conditions for such freedom.”

Having established that there is an economic component to both the left and right’s criticisms, Moyn somehow devolves into sniping against Barack Obama’s staffing decisions as if Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel have some obvious logical relationship to Andrzej Duda and Viktor Orbán.

This piece is supposed to serve as a warning. His conclusion is alarming: “If American liberals — especially those in the Democratic Party — do not pivot from their complacency soon, they may find themselves ushered to an untimely funeral.” But he doesn’t explain the root of the problem and his only offered solution is devoid of meaning.

Americans have to push their politicians to embrace old traditions of honoring the common people and invent new traditions that save the ideal of a free life from thralldom to market values and meritocratic conformity.

What we get instead is a kind of whirlwind tour of a few centuries of Western history followed by some griping about inequality and some observations about how there’s a bit of an uptick in bastards running things who aren’t exactly dedicated to free and fair elections, academic freedom or the rule of law.

To tell you the truth, as I read through the piece, I kind of saw an opening for him to embrace the things we’ve been pushing at the Washington Monthly and that have been taken up most thoroughly by Elizabeth Warren. This would be an advocacy of restoring the economic freedom of the little guy: aggressively breaking up anything that gains too much market share, stomping on colluding corporate behemoths, advocating for small business and entrepreneurism and regional equality through banking, agricultural and regulatory policies.

That fits right in with what Professor Moyn is saying here about a reanimated John Stuart Mill surveying modern America:

Mill today would be appalled, not by the supposed depredations that liberal society visits on the religious (which are minor) but by the ways rampant consumerism for those who make money, and penury for those who don’t, obstruct the possibility of the creative lives liberals once promised.

Liberalism’s main problem is that its vision of a life well lived has been corrupted — not by too much license and self-expression, but by an overemphasis on economic freedom that has undercut its own promise.

The right strategy for liberals is therefore to own their failure to make their ideals of self-creation a reality.

Those words can easily be fit into our recommendations and seem to be reflected in Warren’s platform. My only quarrel is that we wouldn’t say that we’ve put too much emphasis on economic freedom but too little. Or, to put it another way, the only economic freedom we’ve cared about is the freedom for retailers and service-providers to merge into ever-greater conglomerates that destroy the economic opportunity of everyone else. What has undermined liberalism is the destruction of entrepreneurial opportunity and small town businesses.

People often think too big about solving this problem. They think in terms of globalism and trade agreements when they should be thinking about old-fashioned antitrust enforcement and the availability of capital for everyday Americans who have a good idea and lots of energy but are told that the only way to get ahead is to speculate in real estate or the stock market.  We need independent businesses to flourish again in this country so the only employers in town aren’t franchisees and a Wal-Mart out by the interstate ramp.

I think this describes what Moyn recommends when he says, “Americans have to push their politicians to embrace old traditions of honoring the common people and invent new traditions that save the ideal of a free life from thralldom to market values and meritocratic conformity.”

With a better editor, he might have gotten to some kind of point rather than meandering from one century and continent to another discussing everyone from Benjamin Constant to Karl Marx to Patrick Deneen. In the end, what’s troubling liberalism is economic stagnation. A society isn’t healthy when even the go-getters are reduced to corporate serfdom and the road from the bottom to the top is blocked. It could be that conservative defenders of liberalism figure this out before the progressives do, because the progressives are focused on absolute bullshit most of the time.