In Defence of What, Exactly?

On Cass Sunstein's unconvincing case for liberalism

Cass Sunstein has just published a new book called On Liberalism: In Defence of Freedom. If you’re unfamiliar with Sunstein, he’s a well-known Harvard Law professor was once a significant figure in the Obama administration and is married to former American UN Ambassador (and purported “humanitarian superstar”) Samantha Power. In other words, he’s someone who hails from the most elite tier of the liberal intelligentsia. This, in and of itself, is a fun thing to chew on given that he’s also been known to write incandescently stupid articles like this:

In any case, I haven’t yet read Sunstein’s new book. But, based on the description offered by the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner at the beginning of his latest interview, I feel like I already have:

Sunstein has written a new book, called “On Liberalism,” which is a defense of the idea of liberalism at a time when Sunstein believes it is under threat from both the right and the left. The book barely mentions Donald Trump or contemporary politics, however, and instead provides a defense of a general liberal belief system, which Sunstein breaks down into eighty-five features. Sunstein’s conception of liberalism is quite capacious; it includes New Deal liberals and so-called classical liberals, including Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Nozick, as well as politicians such as Ronald Reagan.

What Chotiner describes here builds on a New York Times essay of Sunstein’s from November 2023 which I wrote about in Jacobin (and which follows below). Reading the interview itself, by the way, only affirmed my existing view that Sunstein is an intellectual mediocrity. The vision of liberalism he offers Chotiner is politically and philosophically all over the place, and I’d argue the only thing that really holds it together is less a coherent set of moral and ethical commitments than the deep sense of solidarity the author feels with fellow elites across the partisan divide.

Incidentally, the part of the interview that most seems to be making the rounds on social media comes when Chotiner asks his interlocutor about his and Power’s mutual friendship with the butcher of Cambodia himself, Henry Kissinger. Truly, it’s an exchange that must be seen to be believed.

An excerpt:

CHOTINER: In terms of human rights, I’ve always found it a little bit puzzling, given what you write, and given who your wife is, that you two were so close to Henry Kissinger. Of all the pre-Trump political figures in America, he is the one I think of as in some ways the opposite of liberal, given his behavior toward the rest of the world.

SUNSTEIN: I’ll tell you a story. I wrote a book a few years ago on Star Wars. We invited Dr. Kissinger to my Star Wars book party, and he said, “You wrote a book about Star Wars? Why’d you write a book about Star Wars?” He was puzzled and courteous, but really confused. And then he came to the book party, which was quite generous. He was a busy person.

CHOTINER: But, despite his busyness, he came to the book party.

SUNSTEIN: Yeah, and then I gave a talk on Star Wars, and he came up to me afterward and he said, “Oh, I see why you wrote a book on Star Wars. There’s a lot there. It’s, like, about families and it’s about governments and freedom.” The amount of curiosity and generosity that he showed was incomparable. I don’t know anyone who showed that level of curiosity and generosity. And we really got into Star Wars. He just wanted to think about it. I know there are strong views about his career, and I’m hardly an expert on his career.

CHOTINER: But your wife is one of the great human-rights experts in the world. I asked you about him being anti-liberal, and your response was that he was very nice to you about your book.

SUNSTEIN: About Star Wars.

CHOTINER: It is certainly a touching story. But that’s not totally an answer to the question.

SUNSTEIN: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. What he would think of this book I’d love to know.

CHOTINER: But no second thoughts about being friends with him or anything?

SUNSTEIN: I feel generally very grateful for friendship, and he was, when I knew him, a person of immense kindness. Those who think of him as someone who was something horrible or worse, I don’t know what to say about that.

Sunstein, evidently feigning earnestness here, is also being morally evasive. He is no doubt perfectly aware of Kissinger’s crimes and — far from being complacent or ignorant — he and Power are probably just okay with them. In any case, Sunstein’s defence of liberalism is about as unconvincing as his argument that it’s okay to be friends with war criminals because they like happen to like the book you wrote about Star Wars. It’s also, as I argue below, an excellent case study in how intellectually sclerotic the mainstream liberal project has really become.

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Last month, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein published a lengthy defense of liberalism in the New York Times, most of it consisting of a numbered list detailing the various commitments Sunstein argues make up the liberal tradition. At least some of his premise is fairly noncontroversial. Sunstein begins by observing that liberalism is under siege from both sides throughout much of the world:

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.

Sunstein is broadly correct that anti-liberalism is on the march. But, partaking in some vintage horseshoe theory, he more than once implies there’s some equivalence to be drawn between its left and right versions.

Here I can only offer the standard rejoinder that those of us on the left generally want greater democracy and abundant universal public goods, whereas liberalism’s critics on the right seek theocracy, legalized racial discrimination, and minority rule. The left is critical of liberalism because we think its idea of human freedom is fraught and incomplete, and because it’s increasingly become associated with resistance to progress and the preservation of hierarchy. The right, for its part, thinks liberalism is still both too egalitarian and too democratic. Clearly, these critiques are not the same and are radically different in their implications.

Still, what’s most puzzling about Sunstein’s portrait of liberalism is how unbelievably broad it is. The exact meaning of almost any political label is always going to be somewhat fluid and contestable, and can sometimes be fairly assigned to people whose commitments vary. What it means to hold a particular political identity is also highly context specific and prone to variation across time and place.

Notwithstanding these caveats, however, Sunstein’s definition of liberalism casts a net so wide that it’s fair to ask whether what he’s describing actually constitutes a coherent political project at all.

The liberal, according to Sunstein’s thirty-four theses, believes in economic redistribution but also may reject it (16). The same applies to the administrative state, about which liberals can and do vigorously debate “climate change, immigration, the minimum wage, free trade,” and whether regulations like those that make seat belts mandatory are a bridge too far (17). Philosophically speaking, liberals might follow classical exponents of their traditions like John Locke or Adam Smith and neoclassical ones like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, for whom property rights are sacrosanct, or left liberals like John Rawls, whose famous treatise A Theory of Justice kept open the possibility of social ownership of the means of production (21). A liberal might adore Ronald Reagan or hate him, and the same applies when it comes to Franklin Roosevelt.

In defense of this broadness, Sunstein cites Rawls’s notion of a “political liberalism” that rejects capital-T truth and instead finds consensus between people who hold diverse viewpoints. His, he says, is a liberalism “meant to accommodate people with very different views about fundamental matters [that] can easily be supported by people on the left, the right and the center” (19). It’s by no means clear how this principle applies to many of the conflicting polarities in liberal thought he includes elsewhere (it’s obviously impossible to reconcile, say, Hayek’s view of the state with Rawls’s, or Reagan’s with FDR’s).

There are also plenty of instances where it’s fair to ask whether actually existing liberalism lives up to some of the noble aspirations that Sunstein invokes. Human rights, which he cites as a core commitment at the very outset of his list, do not appear to be top of mind among senior officials in the Democratic Party who are currently ignoring the pleas of innumerable human rights organizations about the horrors being inflicted by Israel in Gaza. In practice, the mainstream liberalism of today more or less rejects economic redistribution except in the form of tax credits and means-tested benefits that barely alter the macro-distributive picture, if they even support it at all.

A further problem, related to much of the above, is that many of Suntein’s purported theses are so abstract that it’s unclear what exactly they mean. Those of us who aren’t open authoritarians all broadly embrace concepts like pluralism, tolerance, civic open-mindedness, and constitutional limits on abuses of power by both individuals and the state. Realizing any these things in policy or practice, however, is much more complicated, and requires a level of specificity incompatible with broad generalization.

If there’s a coherent thread to be found in all this, it might be that members of the liberal intelligentsia like Sunstein ultimately view their political identity as a matter of disposition rather than something distillable to clear moral or ethical premises. Among other things, this helps explain the incessant liberal collapsing of left and right into the same monolithic illiberal tendency. When your vision of politics is primarily an affective one, and premised on the rejection of ideology, it becomes a whole lot easier to conflate the two (to wit: the left and right both stage mass rallies in which people express anger at perceived injustices, ergo they must be the same).

It also goes some way toward explaining why Sunstein’s portrait of liberalism is so unhelpfully broad. Faced with mounting critiques from the left and the right over the past decade or so, many liberal intellectuals have retreated into abstraction and, as a consequence, have ended up with an unhelpfully zero-sum understanding of their own tradition. As Samuel Moyn argued in an essay last summer:

In books like Patrick Deneen’s best-selling “Why Liberalism Failed,” there was an up-or-down vote on the liberalism of the entire modern age, which Mr. Deneen traced back centuries. In frantic self-defense, liberals responded by invoking abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy” and “truth,” to which the sole alternative is tyranny, while distracting from their own errors and what it would take to correct them. Both sides failed to recognize that, like all traditions, liberalism is not take it or leave it. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; liberals can revive their philosophy’s promises only by recommitting to its earlier impulses.

In effect, this is exactly what those of us on the socialist left seek to do. If elements of the liberal tradition can be found in both nineteenth-century colonialism and the best parts of the French Revolution, there is simply no reason to treat it as something uniform. If liberalism has made vital contributions to egalitarian thought and been complicit in the likes of imperial violence and war, why not simply take the former and reject the latter? And if there are obvious conflicts or contradictions to be found in the liberal tradition, why not simply choose the better side, stake out a position, and defend it?

Democratic socialists view certain parts of liberalism as necessary but insufficient. They have also, fairly in my view, come to associate its modern political incarnation more with reflexive conservatism and deference to elites than with equality or progress. As Irving Howe put it nearly seventy years ago, after acknowledging liberalism’s “obvious and substantial benefits,” including “mak[ing] us properly skeptical of the excessive claims and fanaticisms that accompany ideologies”:

Liberalism dominates, but without confidence or security; it knows that its victories at home are tied to disasters abroad; and for the élan it cannot summon, it substitutes a blend of complacence and anxiety. It makes for an atmosphere of blur in the realm of ideas, since it has a stake in seeing momentary concurrences as deep harmonies. In an age that suffers from incredible catastrophes it scoffs at theories of social apocalypse — as if any more evidence were needed; in an era convulsed by war, revolution and counterrevolution it discovers the virtues of “moderation.”. . . Liberalism as an ideology, as “the haunted air,” has never been stronger in this country; but can as much be said of the appetite for freedom?