The United States is a country largely built on the ideals of liberalism, even if we don’t notice it. 

Liberalism broadly speaking is a philosophy which promotes individual rights and liberties. Separation of church and state is the governmental norm in our country. The Bill of Rights protects (at least in theory) basic individual and human rights. Economically, capitalism is largely the law of the land. 

But there is a backlash against liberalism from both the left and the right. Left wing illiberals decry the inequality and economic imperialism they claim has come to dictate the world while right wing illiberals criticize the degeneracy and hedonism they perceive in the West. Political polarization has become more pronounced as growing numbers of Americans see their political opponents as immoral, dishonest, and close-minded.  

In this interview with Dr. Dempsey, we explore the origins of liberalism, what it means for Americans today, and how we can address some of the challenges that the liberal order faces right now. 

Dr. Dempsey is an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches at the Thomas Jefferson Center and runs the Jefferson Scholars Program. He has taught classes about constitutional principles, American corporate law, moral relativism, and political and religious philosophy. 

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How would you define liberalism broadly speaking?

I take my definition of liberalism primarily from the early modern political philosophers. Locke is the great statement defining liberalism. It is a form of politics based on a notion of individual rights and government that exists in order to secure those rights. It also includes certain political structures of preference for democracy, representation, and limited government.

Why should or why shouldn’t liberalism be the way we orient our government or culture? 

Those are two different questions. The American government was formed by people who studied liberal political principles and tried to put them into practice. The American founders are liberals. So whether you’re liberal by preference today, or simply someone who’s an American citizen and patriot, you have to deal with liberalism as our political form. 

That said, there is a certain anthropological account of what it is to be human on which the original arguments for liberalism rest, and that’s questionable. I think we can wonder whether liberalism has harmful effects and whether it is based on a true teaching about human nature.

Can you expand on that anthropology of human nature, that assumption of liberalism?

You find that primarily in Locke, who is responding to what you find in Thomas Hobbes. Locke’s anthropology is that humans are not by nature members of political societies that are political, that government is an invention that’s used to secure certain natural needs, and that those natural needs include the desire for preservation and some amount of liberty and protection of one’s property. 

It follows from that that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. When I talk about liberal anthropology, what I mean above all is the sense that human beings are by nature individuated. That doesn’t mean they don’t have any social tendencies. Locke talks about human social tendencies all the time, but that they do not by nature have an obligation to one another. 

So the formation of the government becomes a matter of developing a social compact. That social compact is binding on us in the first place because we expect the government to provide certain things for us, certain natural goods, which are fully intelligible even to people who live outside of a political community. Since I regard that level of individuation as questionable, I think liberalism is a questionable teaching.

Can you explain what the founders meant when they said all men are created equal?

This is a matter of some debate. I would say there are a couple of main interpretations. One is that they’re all equal precisely insofar as they are endowed with the same natural rights. 

The natural rights [are what] you find in the Declaration of Independence — the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are also called unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator, but the Creator is nature’s God in that context. That means that the same rights at least belong to all human beings by nature. 

Now, what the founders’ statement requires of us is a little bit more of a question. We have to decide whether the kind of equality that the government should try to secure is equality of opportunity or equality of outcome, meaning that everyone should end up at an equal stage in their lives. The simplest interpretation, and you find this directly in Locke, is that everyone should be treated exactly the same way by the laws.

Some people will say that men only refers to males or only refers to white men. I doubt that. I think that when that was written by Jefferson, it was meant to be an aspirational statement. It wasn’t put into practice at the time, and they knew it wasn’t put into practice, but it was still meant to be–I’m getting this from Lincoln by the way–an aspirational standard for what the country should be because it was a true principle of justice. 

Whether the clause included all women is tougher, I haven’t thought that through completely. But I think it did include at least equality for all races and religions.

Is it more of an open question as to whether the clause about equality was an aspirational thing? 

I tend to think it was aspirational. Anyone who has studied the founding basically knows that there were compromises about slavery. There were different factions: some people were clearly opposed to slavery, there was a very strong, but ultimately failed abolitionist faction at the Constitutional Convention. Madison, in the “Federalist Papers,” writes against slavery very clearly. And a lot of the other people around the founding and many of the anti Federalists also thought that slavery was wrong. 

The Founding Fathers thought about whether to sacrifice founding the Union because they couldn’t do it without including slavery as part of it. And most of them came down on the side that it was worth having a country. Their hope was eventually that slavery would be eliminated. I would say that was the position of the majority of the framers of the Constitution, but again, there was a faction that never would have gone along had slavery been abolished in the Constitution.

What are the most convincing arguments for human equality, in your opinion?

I think the idea that all people are equal before God is a very persuasive argument. I also think equal natural rights, which we discussed earlier, is a very persuasive argument. But what I personally find most persuasive is the claim that no one deserves to be a slave, which is really a form of the natural rights argument.

Moving into contemporary politics, how do you define the left vs. right?

It’s complicated because a big part of the new right has become much more economically liberal. They’re much more in favor of workers rights and are openly critical of capitalism. 

I haven’t thought this through completely, and I’m not an expert on this topic. I do think there’s some truth to the horseshoe effect, where the extreme right and left start to adopt similar political attitudes and positions. I think you see this especially on economic issues: there’s an increasing sense on both the populist right and left that the current political order under which we live is not legitimate. That there’s something fundamentally at its core unjust about it. And in that sense, you get this interesting point of contact between the two.

But overall, I’m not exactly sure how to classify left vs. right in a neat and tidy way.  

How do you map liberalism onto the ideological spectrum? 

Liberalism, as we discussed, is classical liberalism. It’s actually pretty centrist in terms of what we now think about as our political spectrum. 

Classical liberalism is not progressive in the sense that we now have that term. There are limited natural rights. It also takes for granted certain gender distinctions and even certain hierarchies in a way that contemporary progressives don’t. 

It doesn’t fit with modern conservative thought either. Modern populist conservatism has, in some ways, become explicitly critical of liberalism. 

Is America a classically liberal country? 

America is pretty classically liberal, but a lot of things have also changed. We still have a Congress, which is the most classically liberal of our institutions. The basic institutions still stand and they are enormously important, but the underlying facts about them and our society have changed immensely. 

The Constitution still exists. I think it’s good that we still mostly follow it even when a lot of powerful people don’t want to, but I think the world has changed a lot beneath it.

The thing about classical liberalism is that it does not require everybody who lives under that political order to be of a certain sort. And that’s supposed to be one of its virtues – and it often is one of its virtues. Famously, the declaration talks about the pursuit of happiness. And that means that people are, to some extent, free to figure out what will make them happy and to live that way. It’s in a way typical of classical liberalism, and one of the achievements of classical liberalism, that lots of people who are not classically liberal can live in a liberal state. 

But there’s also a lot of things going on. I just attended a very nice lecture yesterday by Allison Stanger, where she spoke about, among other things, the enormous and outsized power that tech companies have now. They’re obviously a massive part of our political order. They’re not constitutional or liberal – they’re nothing that fits the classical scheme. But they’re enormously important and you can’t really understand how the American Constitution works today if you don’t think about the tech companies. 

The ground has moved under liberalism. The institutions still have value, still have punch, and are still genuinely liberal – but you see why people have doubts about our system. 

How do you fix polarization? 

In my capacity with our center, we promote this civil discourse project. We’re trying to get students to talk to each other who disagree and disagree deeply. I hope it helps. But I have no idea how to fix polarization. It seems to me that it’s a really deep problem, because we have a lot of citizens whose moral principles are just totally incompatible with one another.

I think the moral divide is bigger than it ever was. I don’t think that’s a totally new phenomenon, but I do think it’s gotten more pronounced. This divide centers around religious issues, secularism, sexuality, family, and gender. That’s all a big divide. And I don’t have a nice solution for that. If you think a promiscuous life is morally repugnant, and if you think a promiscuous life is the sort of right of every person to possess, there’s a really big difference. And there’s not a nice, easy way to solve that. 

I’m a Catholic, and there are massive disagreements even among Catholics about the extent to embrace modernity. 

What do you mean by modernity? Is it just the liberal order? 

I mean the modern world with all of its trappings, all of its charms – all of it. Modernity has got something in common with classical liberalism. But it’s everything – the art that we look at, the music we listen to, the TV we watch, the way we have relationships with each other, the way we get educated, the way we form political communities, the way we participate in politics. The whole big mess of things. 

Why do you think political discourse has broken down?

Itt seems to me that a lot of these old-fashioned simple social and political norms have broken down. The quality of the people who have gotten elected in the last 10 years is something else. Like Fetterman vs. Dr. Oz – you would never imagine in a normal political situation that either of these individuals should be a senator in the United States. I think there’s something that’s genuinely broken down, and Trump’s the most obvious example of that, but I don’t really know why. 

I haven’t thought it through, but part of the reason why is probably social media and the internet. But I also guess it probably has something to do with primaries. Primary elections are now designed so you get more extreme candidates and less reasonable ones. The people who would participate in them tend not to be the most politically involved or not the sober and sensible centrists.

When you see both the level of discontent with liberalism and horseshoe theory come into effect — such as what we saw in Weimar Germany in the 1930s— how do you defend liberalism against right and left wing extremism?

We know that the Nazis and the communists were both horrific criminals. If your choices of political order are Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or the liberal United States, no human being in his right mind would choose anything else besides the United States.

There is one simple thing that makes our situation different from Weimar Germany or pre Soviet Russia. Our economy is, for all its problems, much better than either of those economies were. We still have economic problems in this country, but they are different in kind. We still have enormous wealth in this country, and we’re a pretty prosperous people. 

In terms of holding back extremism and finding some unity, I think there’s a reasonable case for a robust patriotic liberalism. This entails just getting back to simple political thoughts –  like having patriotism, loving your country, thinking you have a duty to it, and seeing it as something that you want to be good and great.