Liberal Values, Rightly Understood
According to a 2020 survey, about two-thirds of Americans share basic values—including truthfulness, treating people equally, respecting common interests over party affiliation, and a desire for leaders to bring Americans together. Instead, the research group More in Common found, this “exhausted majority” is shoved into competing voting blocs by a relatively small number of extremists on both sides.
The disproportionate influence of extremists stems in part from a definitional bait-and-switch. Individual rights, for example, have been transformed into a concept of self-interested entitlement, in which personal interests take precedence over decisions by people with responsibility. In some circles, this solipsistic idea of rights is the essence of liberalism.
But, as Bloomberg columnist Frank Barry explains this week, liberalism used to mean “advancement of collective freedom and equality through government action. Liberalism meant empowering public officials, not handcuffing them.” Freedom in a crowded society requires guard rails and standards that everyone can rely upon. People need to feel safe. People need pride in joint endeavors, which requires mutual trust that everyone is pulling their weight. Authority is not the enemy of individual freedom, but an essential condition for freedom in any social and institutional setting.
Urban anarchy represents a breakdown of authority. San Francisco is the poster child for broken government—high taxes, poor services, and overrun by homeless encampments. But under Mayor London Breed, San Francisco voters recently approved two laws giving police and officials more authority to deal with homelessness, drugs, and crime. Liberal media was aghast at the “stunning rightward shift.” The New York Times headline was “Has San Francisco lost its liberal soul?”
Bloomberg’s Frank Barry describes how liberalism got turned upside down—from a governing philosophy that promotes the common good to a radical individual rights approach that trashes the common good. Barry cites Everyday Freedom as the source to understand how “loss of authority...has paralyzed government, demoralized the public, eroded public trust in institutions and fueled the anger and division promoted by Donald Trump.”
Nothing works, nothing broken can get fixed, unless people with responsibility have authority to roll up their sleeves and start making new choices. As Philip Howard argues in Everyday Freedom, this requires a simpler framework in which our safeguard against bad authority is accountability—not, as today, paralytic red tape and individual rights to veto common rights.
Frank Barry concludes his Bloomberg column with this endorsement of Everyday Freedom: “The problem of lost freedom is so endemic that we often fail to notice it, which is why Howard’s book is invaluable. At only 84 pages, it can be read in one sitting. I did, and I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever felt frustrated by government—and anyone who believes, as it seems most San Franciscans do, that the true soul of liberalism is worth saving.”
In his Substack The Government We Deserve, the Urban Institute’s Eugene Steuerle endorses the reform vision in Everyday Freedom: “Letting Leaders Lead.”
In his essay about the elements of a healthy community, Stephen Wunderli in the Washington Examiner cites Everyday Freedom, saying, “Philip K. Howard summarizes a solution to our angst-ridden and divisive culture.”