For government schemes, a path to dignity for the poor
Written by Shamika Ravi Updated: November 28, 2023 10:03 IST
The writer is Member, Economic Advisory Council to Prime Minister of India
India’s Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system has been globally recognised as a “logistical marvel.” In essence, DBT leverages digital public infrastructure to directly transfer the benefits of various government schemes. Reports indicate that 310 government schemes across 53 ministries have used DBT to reach beneficiaries. DBT has also been used for in-kind transfers to provide subsidised grains via the public distribution system to poor households. Even though the DBT was initiated in 2013, its full potential was realised with the JAM Trinity (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile) post-2017-18. Most discussions on the benefits of DBT have focused on its impact on curbing corruption or reducing leakages, or increasing coverage. It is estimated that DBT has resulted in savings of 1.14 per cent of GDP.
In this essay, however, we would like to focus on another crucial beneficial feature of DBT that has received little attention: DBT preserves the dignity of the poor. Even though dignity might be challenging to quantify, it should be recognised that even without corruption or leakages, the poor would have to undertake a poverty parade to avail government benefits. This change in approach, where instead of the poor availing of government benefits, it’s the government benefits that reach them without an intermediary, has important implications for their psyche. In a civil and humane society, it is essential to recognise that all individuals, irrespective of their economic and social circumstances, have equal rights to dignity.
Before I proceed with my arguments, discussing poverty from different perspectives is imperative. In the dystopian novel The Rise of The Meritocracy, written in the late 1950s, Michael Young argued that in a purely merit-oriented society, there will be two classes. The elite, who believe that “their success is a just award for their capacity, their efforts.” The rest would be those who failed either because they did not try or lacked the capacity. Given that elites were “meritorious”, they legitimately deserved to rule over the poor and the unsuccessful.
Poverty in such a world was an individual’s fault. Though this book was written as a satire, it captured a thought process that became a dominant view among the experts who wanted to eradicate poverty. For these experts, poverty was a technical problem of either lack of resources, lack of capabilities, or lack of self-regulation or discipline. The paternalistic solution was either to provide resources to the poor or to nudge them towards the rightful corrective action to improve their well-being. This sentiment towards poverty eradication was captured in the introduction of the book The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly.
However, Easterly highlighted that there was an alternative approach to thinking about poverty that did not receive much attention from the experts. Its fundamental premise was that experts must understand poverty from the individual rights perspective or its deprivation. Before providing solutions, experts must understand the historical context that has led to that state of affairs. Rather than looking for technical answers from the outside, addressing poverty might require working with the poor.
Broadly, the rights-based approach highlighted that the state attempts to provide basic security to all its citizens regarding food, shelter, and health. Intuitively, in the rights-based approach to poverty, there is an implicit recognition that people can find themselves in unfortunate economic and social circumstances beyond their control. There could be circumstances when the poor tried and yet did not make it. The corollary to this is that the rich and the powerful owe their success not only to their capabilities but also to luck and other factors beyond their control. In a rights-based approach to poverty, institutions must be designed from the Rawlsian perspective of justice with a veil of ignorance. In such a society, the burden of poverty has to be shared by all members of the society, particularly by the rich and the elite, who have to be more circumspect and humbler about their success.
In the rights-based approach to poverty, it’s not just what we provide to the poor that matters, but also how we provide it. We have to be cognisant in the design of the programmes that while delivering the rightful benefits to the poor, the mechanism is such that their dignity is preserved. Before DBT, the poor would have to knock on the doors of the intermediary elites to receive what was rightfully theirs. They would often be turned away or would have to wait in long lines, which eroded their dignity and deprived them of respect. DBT ended the poverty parade with the government reaching the poor rather than the other way around. In my opinion, restoring the dignity of the poor via DBT is a non-quantifiable but significant benefit that merits attention.
We should attempt to replicate the DBT design in other areas as well. One such area is the judiciary. In November 2022, on the occasion of the 73rd Constitution Day, while addressing the gathering of judges, the first woman tribal President, whose simple and relatable personality, guided by practical wisdom and civic virtue, is an inspiration for all of us, made an earnest appeal to judges in particular and society at large, highlighting the plight of the poor prisoners who have been languishing for years in jails for petty crimes because they do not have the financial or legal resources to fight their cases. She appealed to the judges and government to design a mechanism where justice can reach the poor, not where they have to struggle and fight for justice and still be deprived of it.
We need to think hard about how we can replicate the success of DBT, which leveraged technology to efficiently deliver goods and services to the poor in other areas, such as the judiciary, where justice can be efficiently delivered to the poor. The problem is complex and challenging, but I am sure it is not unsurmountable if we make a collective effort.
Foreign Policy asked leading thinkers for their best (and sometimes uncomfortable) advice.
For 15 consecutive years, Freedom House’s annual tally has recorded a decline in the number of democracies worldwide. It’s a steady loss of ground that Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, calls a “democratic recession.” And no event put the reality of democratic backsliding more dramatically on display than the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—when the world’s oldest liberal democracy endured the first violent presidential transition in its 245-year history. As we mark that event’s dubious anniversary, we’re reminded how fragile democracy really is.
GENERAL PERSPECTIVE REGARDING DEMOCRATIC RECESSION
Democracy is on the defensive, and the reasons are as deep as they are familiar. Growing inequality has fed a global mood that democratic institutions aren’t serving their citizens. The internet and social media have hypercharged political polarization and cultural divides, which populists easily exploit. Mass immigration and rapid demographic shifts have empowered extremists.Around the world, authoritarian regimes have seized the West’s weakness as an opportunity to expand their influence. Autocrats are winning admirers in the West, too:In an ever more complex world facing generational threats—from pandemics to climate change—the speed and totality with which autocracies can implement decisions has some wondering if messy, deliberative, compromise-seeking democracy can still do the job. In a June 2021 poll, a slight majority of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 had a favorable view of socialism, suggesting that younger generations in Western democracies are increasingly open to alternative systems of governance.
All this is a call for action. Foreign Policy brought together 10 prominent thinkers to share their most important fixes to reform the workings of democracy, defend it against its enemies at home and abroad, and ensure it survives and thrives by better serving the people it governs.
REQUIRED STEPS
Several themes emerge.
The most urgent fixes obviously begin at home, starting with ways to lessen the inequities of 21st-century capitalism.
Technology is an urgent field for policy action, as the toxic discourse abetted by social media and the dangers of hacking, spyware, surveillance, and disinformation demonstrate.
Following a year that saw a nationalist insurrection in the United States and the continued strength of anti-immigrant populists in Europe, several of our contributors focus on how racial and other social divisions might be addressed.
And in light of the growing conflict between democratic and autocratic powers, it’s no surprise that better defenses against external threats—from weaponized corruption to election interference—rank high among the writers’ concerns as well. We asked the participants to be as prescriptive and radical as possible. Their responses show that the task is huge and the fixes are tentative at best.
Perhaps the one thing missing from the debate is a call to stop acting as if democracy were doomed. It might help to recall that the history of democracy fatigue is as old as democracy itself: In 1787, Benjamin Franklin predicted that the American republic would soon end in despotism, “when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.” History went on to tell another story. Despite its well-documented flaws and constant need for reinvention, liberal democracy has brought civil rights, political participation, social mobility, and economic opportunity to once-disenfranchised masses and minorities. Around the world, poor and autocratic countries might gladly take Moscow’s mercenaries and Beijing’s money, but it’s still Western-style democracy to which their citizens aspire. As Anders Fogh Rasmussen writes in this issue, “People rarely take to the streets demanding more autocracy.” A little more confidence could go a long way as democracy writes its next chapter.—Stefan Theil, deputy editor
One cannot make sense of the current crisis of liberal democracy without understanding the seismic economic and demographic shifts that have transformed Western democracies. Today, economic opportunity is heavily concentrated in major cities. A new urban elite—much more multicultural, diverse, and cosmopolitan—is redefining cultural norms and rearranging traditional hierarchies of race and gender.
MORE PARTIES SYSTEM NEEDED
Left behind are those who stayed in the rural and post-industrial hinterlands, where globalization has not been kind. Here, far-right populists recasting themselves as defenders of national greatness and a bygone order have flourished, especially among white men. The leaders of such movements are cold to the traditional values of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on diversity and tolerance and its embrace of a market capitalism that has hit these regions hardest.
In the United States and Britain, Trumpism and Brexit are both clear manifestations and fierce accelerators of a dangerous us-versus-them divide that is hitting right at the heart of liberal democracy.
Other countries have been spared such shocks. Nationalist or far-right parties such as Alternative for Germany, the Sweden Democrats, the Dutch Party for Freedom, and the Danish People’s Party have galvanized voters in their countries’ left-behind regions. But so far, they’ve been kept out of government, rejected by at least three-quarters of voters.
The difference? The United States and Britain have first-past-the-post elections, which organize conflict around just two parties and force voters into two competing camps. Though the Brexit referendum didn’t perfectly map onto the Labour-Conservative divide at the time, it accelerated a divisive polarization that now defines British partisan politics.
In an earlier period, when national politics in most Western countries was dominated by a large moderate center, two-party and multiparty systems proved equally adept in holding together a rough national consensus. But today, with urban-rural cultural conflicts driving political competition, majoritarian democracies are amplifying and escalating the zero-sum fights between progressive urban elites and a resentment-driven rural populist right, with no release valve or opportunity for a new center to emerge.
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
Voting reform can help. The proportional democracies of northern Europe, after all, are more effectively riding out the storms of authoritarian populism. There, center-right voters have been able to support center-right parties without supporting illiberalism, and more flexible multiparty systems have facilitated new coalitions to keep illiberal forces out of power.
The idea of introducing proportional representation in the United States and Britain is hardly new. What’s new is the context. Cultural, educational, and geographic divides are likely to shape politics for decades to come. A two-party system that by definition splits a country in half will reinforce and deepen identity polarization, pushing national politics even further into trench warfare. Proportional systems are far from perfect. But they allow for new and shifting coalitions that can help liberal democracies navigate these difficult circumstances. Most importantly, they avoid the binary winner-take-all conflict that so easily lets politics slip into an irresolvable zero-sum contest of us against them—a toxic polarization that even long-established democracies such as the United States and Britain may not survive.
Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
By Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time, and it is on a collision course with democracy. Surveillance capitalism’s giants—1. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple—now own, operate, and intermediate nearly every aspect of human engagement with global information and communication systems, unconstrained by public law.
2. All roads to economic, social, and even political participation now lead through a handful of unaccountable companies, a condition that has intensified during two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The result is a trail of social wreckage:
1. the wholesale destruction of privacy, 2.
2. vast corporate concentrations of information about people and society,
3. poisoned discourse,
4. fractured societies,
5. remote systems of behavior manipulation, and
6. weakened democratic institutions.
While the Chinese designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their own system of authoritarian rule, the West failed to construct a coherent vision of a digital century that advances democratic principles and government.
Rights and laws once codified to protect citizens from industrial capitalism—such as antitrust law and workers’ rights—do not shield us from these harms. If the ideal of the people’s self-governance is to survive this century, then a democratic counterrevolution is the only solution.
U.S. and European lawmakers have finally begun to think seriously about regulating privacy and content, but they have yet to reckon with the far more basic question of how to structure and govern information and communication for a democratic digital future.
Three principles offer a starting point.
First, the democratic rule of law governs. There is no so-called cyberspace immune to rights and laws, which must apply to every domain of society, whether populated by people or machines. Publishers, for example, are held accountable for the information they publish. Surveillance capitalists have no such accountability, even though their profit-maximizing algorithms enable and exploit disinformation.
Second, unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions. Existing antitrust laws can be used to break up the tech giants, but that won’t address the underlying economics. The target must be the secret extraction of human data once considered private. Democracies must outlaw this extraction, end the corporate concentration of personal information, eliminate targeting algorithms, and abolish corporate control of information flows.
Third, new conditions require new rights. Our era demands the codification of epistemic rights—the right to know and decide who knows what about our lives. These elemental rights are not codified in law because they have never before come under systemic threat. They must be codified if they are to exist at all.
We can be a surveillance society, or we can be a democracy—but we cannot be both. Democracy is a fragile political condition dedicated to the prospect of self-governance, sheltered by the principle of justice, and maintained by collective effort. Each generation’s mission is always the same: to protect and keep democracy moving forward in a relay race against anti-democratic forces that spans centuries. The liberal democracies have the power and legitimacy to lead against surveillance capitalism—and to do so on behalf of all peoples struggling against a dystopian future.
Break Down the Barriers
By Eduardo Porter, economics reporter at the New York Times
JOAN WONG ILLUSTRATION FOR FOREIGN POLICY
The most insidious threat to Western liberal democraciesdoesn’t come from China or Russia but from within: from the dread their white majorities feel as demographic change puts their grip on power at risk. The urge of white, Christian native populations to circle the wagons against Black and other racial minorities and increasingly non-Christian immigrants has fueled illiberal politics from the United States to Europe, opening the door to autocratic politicians who promise to protect the volk.
This presents a particularly complicated challenge for the liberal order because demographic change will not be stopped. In the United States, the non-Hispanic white population will slip into minority status in a couple of decades—regardless of future immigration trends. Immigration to Western Europe is increasing despite all efforts to keep outsiders at bay. Saving liberal democracy, given this inexorable demographic reconfiguration, requires that we build a sense of shared citizenship that can survive the reallocation of power.
This is highly improbable. In the United States, the most ethnically diverse of the Western democracies, the debate over the nation’s racial divisions has no center. The left demands redress from white people for the centuries of oppression that various groups have faced. The right doesn’t believe those groups have a legitimate claim. Communities of color in European countries may benefit from their more robust social safety nets. But immigrants’ claim on public goods is resented, and their claim to broader citizenship and belonging are flatly denied.
It is easier to identify pitfalls than to propose an effective way out. The anti-racism proposed by some activists on the U.S. left is divisive by design—cleaving the nation into antagonistic racist and anti-racist camps. The demand for reparations to be paid to the descendants of enslaved people, moral though it may be, is equally contentious. Clearly, building a more cohesive nation requires reducing the United States’ gargantuan inequalities of income and wealth. But imagine how a $10 trillion reparations bill would shape the politics of the 63 million non-Hispanic white people who voted for then-U.S. President Donald Trump in 2020, many of whom perceive themselves under threat by their country’s racial transformation.
Those 63 million American voters—like the millions of voters for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the Dutch Party for Freedom, or the Sweden Democrats—must be part of the conversation. Liberal democracy cannot be saved without finding better ways to include the angry citizens threatening to bring it down.
How do we do that? Policies to counter residential segregation, including incentives to build affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods, would help. So would efforts to integrate schools that have become increasingly segregated by race and class. A program of national service requiring every 18-year-old to work on community projects and build public goods could mix young people from all backgrounds and help start urgently needed conversations across identity frontiers. The broader objective is to build an inclusive citizenship. Living next to each other, going to school together, and sharing the granular challenges of life are just a few ways to start to humanize each other.
Credit...Illustration by Alia Wilhelm. Photographs via Getty Images
By Cass R. Sunstein
Mr. Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, is the author of “How to Interpret the Constitution.”
More than at any other time since World War II, liberalism is under siege. On the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.
Fascists reject liberalism. So do populists who think that freedom is overrated.
In ways large and small, antiliberalism is on the march. So is tyranny.
Many of the marchers misdescribe liberalism; they offer a caricature. Perhaps more than ever, there is an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.
Here is one attempt at an account, in the form of 34 sets of claims about liberalism.
1. Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. They believe not only in democracy, understood to require accountability to the people, but also in deliberative democracy, an approach that combines a commitment to reason giving in the public sphere with the commitment to accountability.
2. Understood in this way, liberalism does not mean “left” or “right.” It consists of a set of commitments in political theory and political philosophy, with concrete implications for politics and law. In North America, South America, Europe and elsewhere, those who consider themselves to be conservatives may or may not embrace liberal commitments. Those who consider themselves to be leftists may or may not qualify as liberals. You can be, at once, a liberal, as understood here, and a conservative; you can be a leftist and illiberal. There are illiberal conservatives and illiberal leftists. Historically, both Republicans and Democrats have been part of the liberal tradition. Right now, some Republicans are illiberal, and the same is true of some Democrats.
3. Abraham Lincoln was a liberal. Here is what he said in 1854:
If the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism. … No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle — the sheet anchor of American republicanism.
We might change “American republicanism” to “liberalism.” The idea of a sheet anchor is a useful way of linking self-government, in people’s individual lives, with self-government as a political ideal.
4. Rejecting despotism, liberals prize the idea of personal agency. For that reason, they see John Stuart Mill’s great work “The Subjection of Women” as helping to define the essence of liberalism. Like Lincoln, Mill insists on a link between a commitment to liberty and a particular conception of equality,which can be seen as a kind of anticaste principle:If some people are subjected to the will of others, we have a violation of liberal ideals. Many liberals have invoked an anticaste principle to combat entrenched forms of inequality on the basis of race, sex and disability. Liberals are committed to individual dignity.
5. Though liberals are able to take their own side in a quarrel, they do not like tribalism. They tend to think that tribalism is an obstacle to mutual respect and even to productive interactions. They are uncomfortable with discussions that start, “I am an X, and you are a Y,” and proceed accordingly. Skeptical of identity politics, liberals insist that each of us has many different identities and that it is usually best to focus on the merits of issues, not on one or another identity.
6. The rule of law is central to liberalism. The rule of law requires clear, general, publicly accessible rules laid down in advance. It calls for law that is prospective, allowing people to plan, rather than retroactive, defeating people’s expectations. It requires conformity between law on the books and law in the world. It calls for rights to a hearing (due process of law). It forbids unduly rapid changes in the law. It does not tolerate contradictions or palpable inconsistency in the law. The rule of law is not the same as a commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of religion or freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. It is a distinctive ideal, and liberals adopt it as such.
7. Liberals believe in freedom from fear. One of their principal goals is to restrict both public and private violence.
8. Liberals are aware that all over the globe, liberalism is under assault. They note that antiliberals, both old and new, reject the liberal commitments to freedom, human rights, the rule of law, pluralism, security and democracy. They regard Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban as contemporary antiliberals. They see Hitler and Stalin as defining practitioners of antiliberalism. They see Karl Marx and the German political theorist (and Nazi party member) Carl Schmitt as defining antiliberal theorists. Now, as in the 1940s, liberals admire Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words about those who call for a new order: “It is not new, and it is not order.”
9. Liberal authoritarianism is an oxymoron. Illiberal democracy is illiberal, and liberals oppose it for that reason. Liberals reject illiberal populism.
10. Liberals believe that freedom of speech is essential to self-government. They understand freedom of speech to encompass not only political speech but also literature, music and the arts (including cinema). Liberals embrace the words of the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: “Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
11. Liberals connect their opposition to censorship to their commitment to free and fair elections, which cannot exist if people are unable to speak as they wish. They cherish the right to vote. They work to defend freedom of conscience, the right of privacy, economic opportunity for all and the right to be different. They agree with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who championed “the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” Liberals who insist on that proposition do not claim that people must declare their fidelity to liberal principles, including that one.
12. Liberals are committed to freedom of religion. They believe that people should be allowed to worship in their own way or not at all. Many liberals have deep religious convictions. They are acutely aware that all over the world, some people of faith abhor the idea of separating church and state and think that the government should embrace and even enforce a large number of religious commitments. But liberals want to make the state free from domination by any particular religion, and they seek to ensure that the state guarantees safety for religion.
13. If postliberals or antiliberals insist on an official religious orthodoxy, liberals will respond: Who do you think you are?
14. Some liberals follow Immanuel Kant, who argued that people should be treated with respect and as ends, not as mere means to the ends of others. Emphasizing individual dignity, those who follow Kant are liberals because they are Kantians. Some liberals are utilitarians, seeking to maximize social welfare; they are liberals because they are utilitarians. Some liberals, known as contractarians, find it useful to emphasize the idea of a social contract between free and equal people; they are liberals becausethey are contractarians. Many people believe that their religious tradition compels or is compatible with liberalism.
15. Liberals prize free markets, insisting that they provide an important means by which people exercise their agency. Liberals abhor monopolies, public or private, on the ground that they are highly likely to compromise freedom and reduce economic growth. At the same time, liberals know that unregulated markets can fail, such as when workers or consumers lack information or when consumption of energy produces environmental harm.
16. Liberals believe in the right to private property. But nothing in liberalism forbids a progressive income tax or is inconsistent with large-scale redistribution from rich to poor. Liberals can and do disagree about the progressive income tax and on whether and when redistribution is a good idea. Many liberals admire Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society; many liberals do not.
17. Many liberals are enthusiastic about the contemporary administrative state; many liberals reject it. Within liberalism, there are vigorous debates on that question. Some liberals like laws that require people to get vaccinated or to buckle their seatbelts; some liberals do not. Liberals have different views about climate change, immigration, the minimum wage and free trade.
18. Liberals abhor the idea that life or politics is a conflict between friends and enemies. They associate that idea with fascism and with Dachau and Auschwitz.
19. Liberals believe that people with diverse backgrounds and views can embrace liberalism or at least certain forms of liberalism. Many liberals enthusiastically support John Rawls’s idea of an “overlapping consensus.” With that idea, Rawls called for “political liberalism,” which is meant to accommodate people with very different views about fundamental matters and which can easily be supported by people on the left, the right and the center.
20. Liberals think that on both left and right, many antiliberals and postliberals have manufactured an opponent and called it liberalism without sufficiently engaging with the liberal tradition or actual liberal thinkers. They think that some antiliberals wrongly conflate liberalism with enthusiasm for greed, for the pursuit of self-interest and for rejection of norms of self-restraint. They think that some antiliberals describe liberalism in a way that no liberal could endorse. Liberals agree with the Nobel economics laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, who complained of those who try to refute a position by mischaracterizing it: “The refutation of a caricature can be no more than a caricature of refutation.”
21. Liberalism is a wide tent. John Locke thought differently from Adam Smith, and Rawls fundamentally disagreed with Mill. Kant, Benjamin Constant, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Rawls, Joseph Raz, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Jeremy Waldron, Frederick Douglass, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Susan Moller Okin, Christine Korsgaard, Martin Luther King Jr., R. Douglas Bernheim and Martha Nussbaum are liberals, but they differ on fundamental matters. Some liberals, like Hayek and Friedman, emphasize the problems with centralized planning; other liberals, like Rawls and Raz, are not focused on that question at all. Liberals argue fiercely with one another. Many of the important practitioners of liberalism — from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan — did not commit themselves to foundational philosophical commitments of any kind (such as Kantianism or utilitarianism). This is so even if some of them were, in an important sense, political thinkers.
22. A liberal might think that Ronald Reagan was a great president and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an abomination; a liberal might think that Roosevelt was a great president and that Reagan was an abomination. Liberals have divergent views about negative liberty (the right to be free from government intrusion) and positive liberty (the right to receive government help) and about whether there is a meaningful difference between them.
23. Liberals think that those on the left are illiberal if they are not (for example) committed to freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity. They do not like the idea of orthodoxy, including on university campuses or social media platforms.
24. Liberals favor and recognize the need for a robust civil society, including a wide range of private associations that may include people who do not embrace liberalism. They believe in the importance of social norms, including norms of civility, considerateness, charity and self-restraint. They do not want to censor any antiliberals or postliberals, even though some antiliberals or postliberals would not return the favor. On this count, they turn the other cheek. Liberals have antiliberal and postliberal friends.
25. If postliberals object that free markets have serious limits and that a great deal of regulation might be justified on grounds of efficiency, redistribution or fairness, liberals are likely to say: Very possibly so. If the objection is that neoliberalism is a terrible idea, liberals are likely to say: We are not sure what neoliberalism is, because the term is mostly used by people who hate it. But if it is identified with deregulation and an insistence on the ceaseless wonders of free markets, then liberals need not embrace neoliberalism.
26. It is true, of course, that if people want the government to act in illiberal ways — by, for example, censoring speech, violating the rights of religious believers, preventing certain people from voting, entrenching racial inequality, taking private property without just compensation, mandating a particular kind of prayer in schools or endorsing a particular set of religious convictions — liberals will stand in opposition.
27. Some people (mostly on the left) think that because liberals believe in private property, they cannot accept redistribution or cannot prevent economic inequality from leading to political inequality. Different liberals have different views on these questions. Some liberals insist on both the importance of private property and the need for large-scale redistribution. Nothing in liberalism is incompatible with redistribution to those who need help, and indeed, many liberals believe that the best forms of liberalism require such redistribution. Liberals insist on opportunities for all. Because liberals believe in self-government, they are strongly committed to political equality and seek to ensure it. They are aware that doing so raises serious challenges.
28. Some people (mostly on the right) think that liberals oppose traditions or treat traditions cavalierly and that liberalism should be rejected for that reason. In their view, liberals are disrespectful of traditions and want to destroy them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider just a few inherited ideals, norms and concepts that liberals have defended, often successfully, in the face of focused attack for decades: republican self-government; checks and balances; freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; due process of law; equal protection; private property.
29. Liberals do not think it adequate to say that an ideal has been in place for a long time. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it: “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.” Still, liberals agree that if an ideal has been with us for a long time, there might be a lot to say in its favor.
30. Liberals like laughter. They are anti-anti-laughter.
31. Some antiliberals (again mostly on the right) argue that societies need not only freedom but also constraints. They emphasize the value of community and the need for norms of self-restraint. Most liberals agree with them — mostly. They believe in the public interest and the common good.
32. Liberals insist on the difference between liberty and license. Some liberals vigorously defend certain constraints on freedom — consider restrictions on smoking or bans on the use of dangerous drugs. But they believe that constraints on freedom must be justified and that some justifications, pointing vaguely and abstractly to (say) the will of the sovereign or the public interest, are not enough.
33. Liberals insist on reason giving in the public domain. They see reason giving as a check on authoritarianism, because authoritarians feel free to exercise power and to use force without justifying their choices. Liberals insist that public power cannot be legitimately exercised solely on the ground that the king says so, the president says so or God says so — or even the people say so.
34. Liberals look forward as well as backward. They like to think that the arc of history bends toward justice. William F. Buckley Jr. said that his preferred form of conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling, Stop.” Liberals ask history to explain its plans, and they are prepared to whisper, “Go.”
Cass R. Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard and author of “How to Interpret the Constitution.”
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