Published on June 28, 2025 8:37 PM GMT
By 'bedrock liberal principles', I mean things like: respect for individual liberties and property rights, respect for the rule of law and equal treatment under the law, and a widespread / consensus belief that authority and legitimacy of the state derive from the consent of the governed.
Note that "consent of the governed" is distinct from simple democracy / majoritarianism: a 90% majority that uses state power to take all the stuff of the other 10% might be democratic but isn't particularly liberal or legitimate according to the principle of consent of the governed.
I believe a healthy liberal society of humans will usually tend towards some form of democracy, egalitarianism, and (traditional) social justice, but these are all secondary to the more foundational kind of thing I'm getting at, which traces back to ideas from Enlightenment philosophers and U.S. Founding Fathers.
Nor does "respect for property rights and individual liberties" imply orthodox libertarianism as the only compatible system of governance; in practice most people have a revealed preference for a fairly large welfare state and lots of state intervention in various aspects of society. These interventions are not necessarily incompatible with bedrock liberalism, but they do require some care - just because it would genuinely be in the national interest or majority interest for the state to intervene in some way, doesn't mean that an intervention is justified or legitimate under liberal principles. Advocates who want to respect and work within the framework of liberalism must make an argument for why a particular intervention is justified and not too onerous or restrictive, choose implementations that minimize the infringement on liberal principles, explicitly acknowledge illiberalism as a cost / tradeoff (even if they think it is worth paying), and work through existing democratic and constitutional processes to build consensus.
Anyway, hopefully that's enough background / gesturing; my actual point is that outspoken support for these principles appears to be waning in the US and around the world, on all sides of the political spectrum and in all strata of society (politicians, intellectuals, the general public, and in popular media, etc.)
I don't want to get too into the weeds on the object-level history / politics of this decline, but my own impression, at least in the US, is that this trend is currently somewhat worse on the mainstream right than the mainstream left, and that Trump has accelerated the decline (though Trump's own popularity is in part a reaction to illiberalism on the left).
This seems bad, especially as the responsibilities and size of governments around the world continue to grow, as they're faced with important policy questions around AGI, war / instability, falling birth rates, etc. All else equal, I believe it would be better for people and governments to work through these problems under the framework of liberalism than something else.
I do think there is hope though: I also believe that liberalism is still broadly popular among many factions of elites, even if there are fewer people who are outspokenly for it and fewer places where it can be taken for granted as a kind of shared background assumption in mainstream western politics, relative to other time periods in recent history.
A few thoughts on what could be done about this:
- Directly raising awareness / popularity of these principles among the general public seems pretty doomed. It's hard enough to get people to care about good policy and politics even when it's about very concrete kitchen-table stuff, without getting drowned out by culture war memes. Abstract principles of political philosophy are even harder to get mindshare for.(Re-)instilling these values in kids (through the education system and culture broadly or in one's own family) seems more plausible as a long-term solution, but perhaps not very useful / actionable unless you have relatively long AI timelines.
There are people and coalitions involved in politics with sensible policy positions who probably generally believe in and support these principles (e.g. various rat-adjacent bloggers, abundance / neolib people, anti-Trump neocons, some old-school / mainstream Democrats, a few old-school / liberty-focused Republicans, technocrats, EAs and rats generally, etc.).
Nudging / encouraging / reminding sympathetic elites and tastemakers to speak up for and support liberalism qua liberalism, whether it applies to their own pet policy agenda or not, could be effective at popularizing explicit support for liberalism on the margin.
Some examples of what the last bullet could look like:
- An economics blogger who writes about why tariffs are bad economic policy could also mention that Trump's recent implementation of tariffs was quite illiberal (imposed suddenly and unilaterally, without congressional approval, on flimsy national security grounds).
Abundance liberals and YIMBYs talking about housing policy often make the (correct) argument that deregulation and zoning reform are more effective ways to increase housing supply and prosperity vs. rent control.
But they could also mention (more frequently than they already do) that rent control is illiberal (e.g. unfair to property owners), not necessarily as a knockdown argument against it, but as a point / reminder that in a liberal society, an intervention like rent control requires ongoing justification and careful implementation. That is, even if it were in the national interest or majority interest, it requires balancing that with the cost of allowing the state to just take stuff from people, and proponents of rent control should be pushed hard to acknowledge that explicitly as a serious cost on its own terms.
(Lots of great bloggers that talk about these kinds of issues already do speak up for liberalism pretty strongly, but it seems worth encouraging and doing explicitly even more so.)
Perhaps a more salient example on LessWrong: @TsviBT's recent post makes an
excellent case for a relatively permissive approach to genomic engineering within a
liberal framework.
In a world where explicit support for liberalism becomes the default, any argument against the principle of genomic liberty that Tsvi outlines would have to start by acknowledging that Tsvi's position is a kind of default under liberalism, and then make the case for why it is worth restricting anyway, or why an ordinary / straightforward application of liberal principles doesn't apply.
This observation isn't exactly new to me, but it's been on my mind lately given various recent world events, so I thought I would write up my own thoughts on it. I've become increasingly convinced that one of the necessary ingredients for making AGI go well is to build a healthier and happier societies that are worth living in, both to make coordinating on a problem like AGI more possible, and to make delay more palatable. Better governance through widespread respect for liberalism seems like a key aspect of that.
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