Reinventing liberalism for the 21st century

IN SEPTEMBER 1843 James Wilson, a hatmaker from Scotland,

founded this newspaper. His purpose was simple: to champion free
trade, free markets and limited government. They were the central
principles of a new political philosophy to which Wilson adhered
and to which The Economist has been committed ever since. That
cause was liberalism.

Today liberalism is a broad faith—far broader than it was to Wilson.

It has economic, political and moral components on which different
proponents put different weights. With this breadth comes
confusion. Many Americans associate the term with a left-wing
belief in big government; in France it is seen as akin to free-market
fundamentalism. But whatever version you choose, liberalism is
under attack.

The attack is in response to the ascendancy of people identified by

their detractors, not unreasonably, as a liberal elite. The
globalisation of world trade; historically high levels of migration;
and a liberal world order premised on America’s willingness to
project hard power: they are all things that the elite has sought to
bring about and sustain. They are things the elite has done well out
of, congratulating itself all the while on its adaptability and
openness to change. Sometimes it has merely benefited more
visibly than a broad swathe of lesser souls; sometimes it has done
so at their expense.

Populist politicians and movements have won victories by defining

themselves in opposition to that elite: Donald Trump over Hillary
Clinton; Nigel Farage over David Cameron; the Five Star Movement
over the Brussels bureaucracy; Viktor Orban over George Soros,
who was not actually running in the Hungarian elections last April
but personifies that which Mr Orban despises, and is Jewish to
boot. The populists deride the leaders of the past as obsessed with
bossy political correctness and out of touch with what matters to
ordinary people; they promise their voters the chance to “take back
control”. Meanwhile rising powers—as well as Russia, which
though in decline is still dangerous—seek to challenge, or at least
amend, the liberal world order. And in the near future the biggest
economy in the world will be China, a one-party dictatorship. In all
these ways the once-barely-questioned link between economic
progress and liberal democracy is being severely put to the test.
The Economist marks its 175th anniversary championing a creed on
the defensive.

So be it. Liberalism has succeeded by serially reinventing itself

while staying true to what Edmund Fawcett, a former journalist at
this newspaper, identifies in his excellent history of the subject as
four key elements. The first is that society is a place of conflict and
that it will and should remain so; in the right political environment,
this conflict produces competition and fruitful argument. The
second is that society is thus dynamic; it can get better, and liberals
should work to bring such improvement about. The third is a
distrust of power, particularly concentrated power. The fourth is an
insistence, in the face of all power, on equal civic respect for the
individual and thus the importance of personal, political and
property rights.

Unlike Marxists, liberals do not see progress in terms of some

Utopian telos: their respect for individuals, with their inevitable
conflicts, forbids it. But unlike conservatives, whose emphasis is on
stability and tradition, they strive for progress, both in material
terms and in terms of character and ethics. Thus liberals have
typically been reformers, agitating for social change. Today
liberalism needs to escape its identification with elites and the
status quo and rekindle that reforming spirit.

Epic stale males

The specific liberal philosophy Wilson sought to promulgate was

born amid the tumult of industrialisation and in the wake of the
French and American revolutions. It drew from the intellectual
inheritance of Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and
Adam Smith. That tradition was further shaped by a series of
Victorian intellectuals, most notable among them John Stuart Mill,
which included this newspaper’s second editor, Walter Bagehot.

There were at the time liberal movements and thinkers throughout

continental Europe as well as the Americas. The first politicians to
claim the name, Spain’s liberales, did so in a short-lived era of
parliamentary rule after 1812. The creed was embraced by many of
the 19th century’s newly independent Latin American countries.
But the movement’s centre was Britain, the world’s predominant
economic and political power.

That liberalism was not today’s. Take foreign affairs. Victorian

liberals were often pacifists who welcomed the ties of trade but
eschewed military alliances. Later, a tradition of “liberal
imperialism” justified colonialism on the basis that it brought
progress—in the form of laws, property rights and so forth—to
peoples that lacked them. Few make either argument today. The
Economist was sceptical of imperialism, arguing in 1862 that
colonies “would be just as valuable to us...if they were
independent”. But “uncivilised races” were owed “guidance,
guardianship and teaching”.

Liberalism was not born with the umbilical link to political

democracy that it now enjoys. Liberals were white men who
considered themselves superior to the run of humanity in both
those particulars; though Bagehot, like Mill, supported votes for
women, for most of its early years this newspaper did not. And both
Mill and Bagehot feared that extending the franchise to all men
regardless of property would lead to “the tyranny of the majority”.

Or consider the relationship between the state and the market.

Liberals like Wilson had a near-religious faith in free enterprise and
saw scant role for the state. Early Economist editorials inveigh
against paying for state education through general taxation and
greater public spending on relief efforts during the Irish famine.
But in the early 20th century many European liberals, and their
progressive cousins in America, changed tack, seeing progressive
taxation and basic social-welfare systems as necessary
interventions to limit the market’s failures.

This led to schism. Liberal followers of John Maynard Keynes

embraced a state role in boosting demand to fight recession and
providing social insurance. As this newspaper noted on its
centenary in 1943, “The greatest difference...between the 20th
century liberal and his forefathers is the place that he finds for the
organising powers of the state.” Followers of Friedrich Hayek
thought those organising powers always overreached in dangerous
ways; hence the emergence of a “neoliberalism” interested in
radically curtailing the state.

The Economist has, at times, embraced elements of both, driven by

pragmatism and a sense of the present’s shortcomings as much or
more than by ideology. When we supported graduated income taxes
in the early 20th century, a position Wilson would have scorned, it
was in part because those taxes, a Liberal policy, were more to our
liking than the protectionist tariffs the Conservatives were touting.
After the Depression and the second world war we hewed to
Keynesian views that both allowed for significant state involvement
in the economy and saw value in liberal nations working together to
create a world in which their values could thrive. When we rebelled
against the subsequent state overreach to champion the
deregulation and privatisation that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan would later bring in, we were moved as much by the
failures of the status quo as by libertarian zeal.

The Economist of recent years has been a supporter of stable prices

and fiscal responsibility at home, of open trade and investment
internationally, and of the market-friendly cocktail of policy
prescriptions dubbed the “Washington consensus”. Amid today’s
distrust of liberalism—and liberal self-doubt—it is worth
remembering just how fruitful those positions have been. The core
liberal causes of individual freedom, free trade and free markets
have been the most powerful engine for creating prosperity in all
history. Liberalism’s respect for diverse opinions and ways of life
has whittled away much prejudice: against religious and ethnic
minorities, against the proposition that girls and boys should have
an equal opportunity to attend school, against same-sex sex,
against single parents. The post-war liberal world order has
contained conflict better than any previous system of alliances.
Liberalism’s principles, pragmatism and adaptability have
generated policies that solve practical problems while advancing its
core tenets.

Many liberals have become conservative

There is, in short, much to be proud of. But the liberal ascendancy
that came with the end of the cold war has been troubled. The
misguided invasion of Iraq (which this newspaper supported at the
time), and other failed interventions in the Middle East have
exposed the hubris and difficulty of military action in the pursuit of
universal values. The global financial crisis laid bare the dangers of
under-regulated finance. Liberal economists paid too little attention
to the people and places harmed by trade and automation. The
liberal world order failed to confront the epic challenge of climate
change or to adapt its institutions to the growing importance of
emerging economies. Liberal thinkers paid too little heed to those
things people value beyond self-determination and economic
betterment, such as their religious and ethnic identities.

These failures mean that liberalism needs another reinvention.

Those in favour of open markets and societies need to see off the
threat posed by those who value neither. They also need to do a lot
more to honour their promise of progress for all. That means being
willing to apply their principles afresh to the existing and emerging
problems of the ever-changing, ever-conflicted world.

It is a tall order. And it is made taller by the fact that this has,
indeed, been a period of liberal ascendancy. Liberals like Wilson
saw themselves, by and large, in opposition to entrenched elites.
Today that is hard for liberals to do with a straight face. They have
been the shapers of the globalised world. If it is a smallish number
of the rich, and a large number of the very poor, who have done
best out of that ascendancy, rather than liberals per se, liberals
have still done pretty well; it is not too wide of the mark to
caricature their views on migration as more influenced by the ease
of employing a cleaner than by a fear of losing out. The wars,
financial crisis, techified economy, migrant flows and chronic
insecurity that have unsettled so many all happened on their watch,
and in part because of policies they promoted. This undermines
their credibility as agents of change.

Worse, it can also, shamefully, undermine their willingness to be

such agents. Many liberals have, in truth, become conservative,
fearful of advocating bold reform lest it upset a system from which
they do better than most.

They must overcome that fear—or, if they cannot, they must be

attacked by true liberals who have managed to do so. As Milton
Friedman once put it, “The 19th-century liberal was a radical, both
in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in
the political sense of favouring major changes in social institutions.
So too must be his modern heir.” On the occasion of our 175th
birthday, we offer some ideas to meet Friedman’s challenge.

II
Free markets and more

“JESUS CHRIST is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ.” Even
by the standards of the 1840s, Sir John Bowring, a British
politician, made bold claims for the rock on which The Economist
was founded. But his zeal was of the times.

The case for getting rid of British tariffs on imported grain was not
a dry argument about economic efficiency. It was a mass
movement, one in which well-to-do liberal thinkers and progressive
businessmen fought alongside the poor against the landowners
who, by supporting tariffs on imports, kept up the price of grain. As
Ebenezer Elliott, a radical and factory owner, put it in one of the
poems that led him to be known as the “Corn Law rhymer”:

Give, give, they cry–and take!

For wilful men are they
Who tax’d our cake, and took our cake,
To throw our cake away.

When liberals set up the Anti-Corn Law League to organise

protests, petitions and public lectures they did so in the spirit of the
Anti-Slavery League, and in the same noble name: freedom. The
barriers the league sought to remove did not merely keep people
from their cake—bad though such barriers were, and strongly
though they were resented. They were barriers that held them
back, and which set people against each other. Tearing them down
would not just increase the wealth of all. It would bring to an end,
James Wilson believed, the “jealousies, animosities and
heartburnings between individuals and classes...and...between this
country and all others.”
The age of global trade ushered in by the free trade that followed
the repeal created a remarkable amount of wealth. Given that it
ended in the first world war, though, its record on reducing
animosity was, at best, mixed. The next great age of global trade,
which began after the second world war and grew into fullness with
the end of the cold war, did even better, bringing with it the
greatest reduction in poverty ever. Unfortunately there is still
significant cause for jealousy, animosity and heartburning among
those who live in places that lost out—enough of it that, amplified
by unscrupulous leaders with protectionist politics, it is putting the
remarkable gains of past decades at risk.

The modern era of multilateral trade negotiation was ushered in by

the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947. It was
based on the insight that unilateral tariff reductions, such as the
repeal of the Corn Laws, are unstable. The concentrated
displeasure of producers exposed to foreign competition is more
powerful than the diffuse gratitude of the mass of consumers, and
so tariffs get reimposed. If reductions are taken in concert with
foreign powers, some producers gain new foreign markets, thus
becoming supporters, and the international nature of the
obligations makes backsliding harder.

In 1995 the GATT became the WTO, and almost every country on
Earth now belongs to it. Tariffs are cut by negotiation and agreed
rates applied to all trade partners; a dispute-settlement system
authorises retaliation against miscreants. There are still high levies
on some goods, and many emerging economies, such as Egypt’s or
India’s, would benefit a lot if tariffs were cut further. But tariffs on
goods are in general no longer a big barrier to global commerce.
The best estimate is that getting rid of those which remain would
add only about 1% to global GDP.

Freeing trade in services, such as those of lawyers, architects or

airlines, would yield gains six times larger, maybe more. But the
WTO, for which nothing is settled until everything is settled, has
spent decades failing to reach big deals on services. Nor has it
succeeded in stopping China, which joined in 2001, from flouting
the spirit, if not always the letter, of its rules by shaking down
foreign investors for technologies it fancies and giving under-the-
table assistance to its own industries.

The trade system would benefit hugely from a grand agreement

forged between America, China and Europe that put multilateral
trade on terms appropriate for the 21st-century economy, and for a
world in which the biggest trader is not a free market. Terms
attractive enough that the rest of the world could be brought into
them would both require and allow substantial reform of the WTO.
Multilateral agreements in which groups of like-minded countries
forge ahead should lead the way. Working towards such a goal
should be at the forefront of trade policy.

Alas, the more urgent necessity is to ensure the survival of the

current system which, having been undermined by China, is now
under determined attack by America, once its greatest support.
Fighting to forestall losses is not as inspiring as fighting for new
progress. But it is yet more vital; backsliding is a threat to the
livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

By George he had it

Defending the existing trade system is thus a paramount goal. And

the gains it may yet offer, in services and elsewhere, are
substantial. But no one could claim that free trade has the capacity
to stir the spirit today in the way that the fight against the Corn
Laws did, nor that it offers as much scope for progress in an
already globalised world as in the mercantilist 19th century.
Modern liberals must look for new reforms where dismantling
barriers and increasing freedom will once again produce
transformative gains for individuals and society.

They are spoilt for choice: there is much to do, from rewriting
campaign-finance laws that give lobbyists disproportionate power
in politics to removing the implicit subsidies still enjoyed in parts of
the financial system. In both those cases, and many more,
concentrations of power allow the rigged markets and rent-seeking
that liberals abhor. But the cause of free trade was powerful in its
simplicity, and in that respect two new targets stand out.
One is the market in urban land; the other, the anti-competitive
economics of the modern economy, and particularly of the digital-
technology businesses that increasingly dominate it. In both cases
monopoly power distorts markets in ways that are economically
significant, politically potent and ethically unjustifiable.

Start with land. Most 21st-century productivity growth and wealth

creation will take place in highly productive cities. The world’s 50
largest conurbations house 7% of the population but account for
40% of gross product. The productivity gap between such cities and
poorer places has widened by 60%, on average, in the past two
decades, according to the OECD, and is still growing. Property
prices in leading cities have soared. In Paris, Hong Kong, New York
and London the median household spends on average 41% of its
income on rent, as opposed to 28% 30 years ago.

This is a huge windfall gain for a relatively small number of

property owners. It reduces the chances of prosperity for a much
larger number who are prevented from moving to high-productivity
cities offering better wages, and in doing so holds back the
economy. One study suggests America’s GDP would be 9% higher if
the less restrictive zoning laws of the median American city were to
be applied to the priciest, fanciest ones.

The best solution to this is not new: it was well known, and pursued
by liberals, in the 19th century. Tax landowners according to the
underlying market value of the land that they own. Such a tax
would capture for society part of the windfall that accrues to a
landowner when his local area thrives. Land taxes capable of
replacing all existing property taxes (which are raised on the value
of what sits on the land, rather than just the land itself) and then
some would greatly sharpen the incentive to develop. Because the
amount of land is fixed, a land tax, unlike most other taxes, does
not distort supply. At the same time, ease planning restrictions. It is
no good raising the incentive to develop if regulation then stands in
the way. But development rights have been so far collectivised in
many cities as to come close to undermining the very notion of
property. The curtailment of development rights enriches even
owners of vacant plots; if the windfall gains from soaring property
values are heavily taxed, NIMBYism will not be such a profitable
strategy. The problem is getting those owners to give up the
windfall and submit to a land tax in the first place.

The concentration of corporate power is a trickier problem. Returns

to scale and strong network effects—the more users you have, the
more you have to offer the next user—have encouraged
concentration in various industries built around digital technology,
and this encouragement has gone largely unchecked. One or two
giant firms dominate each segment: Google in search, Facebook in
social on one side of the Great Firewall, Alibaba and Tencent on the
other. In addition, by collecting ever more data on ever more users’
habits, and armed with ever better algorithms, the incumbents can
tweak their products to make them yet more attractive in various
ways.

This risks reinforcing, perhaps supercharging, a wider trend for

industries to be dominated by a few companies. In 2016 research
by this newspaper showed that two-thirds of America’s 900
industrial sectors had become more concentrated from 1997 to
2012. In 2018, in a similar analysis for Britain, we found the same
trend. It may help explain both higher profits and the squeeze on
labour that has seen the wages of the less-skilled lowered.

If there is an economic problem in need of radical new intellectual

approaches, this is it. The existing antitrust framework, created in
the progressive era and refined in the 1980s, cannot deal with the
nature of market concentration in the 21st century. The pace of
mergers has risen. Large asset managers hold sizeable stakes in
today’s big incumbent firms, and may encourage them to hoard
profits and adopt safety-first strategies. Tech-platform firms enjoy
network effects and are continually bundling more services
together. The spread of artificial intelligence will give even more
power to firms with access to lots of data.

Part of the answer is a tougher attitude to policing deals and to

ensuring that new firms are not unfairly squashed. But when it
comes to tech, something fresher and rooted in individual action
and competitive markets would be best. One approach is to
consider the data that users generate as a good they own or a
service they provide for fees.
As with land taxes, there will be intense resistance to newly
vigorous antitrust and competition law, or changes in the power
structures building up around data, however popular they may be.
Henry George’s call for a land tax, “Poverty or Progress”, sold more
copies in America in the 1890s than any other book save the Bible.
But the immense political power of landowners saw off the threat,
there and elsewhere. David Lloyd George, a Liberal chancellor of
the exchequer, put forward a land tax (with this newspaper’s
support) in his 1909 “People’s Budget”. It did not pass.

Still, more affordable housing, more choice, lower prices and better
jobs remain causes that people can get behind. And the ability of
popular movements to grow as never before with the help of both
social and mass media is one of the striking aspects of the modern
age. This has allowed dissatisfaction with today’s liberal elite to
mushroom; it might allow a liberalism of new reforms, new ideas
and new alliances to do so, too.

This makes keeping the digital sector open and competitive all the
more vital. Barriers to wealth-creation there are bad enough.
Dominant companies which might limit, or skew, free expression,
open deliberation and self-determination—encouraging “jealousies
and animosities” in the realm of ideas—are worse.

III
Immigration in open societies

THE bill in front of the House was a wretched thing, as the

opposition politician explained. It would “appeal to insular
prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and
to Labour prejudice against competition”. But he could see why the
majority party might like it. It would “no doubt supply a variety of
rhetorical phrases for the approaching election.”

Substitute the word “Mexicans” for “Jews”, and this might have
been a Democrat on the floor of the House of Representatives
denouncing this year’s Securing America’s Future Act, a hardline
Republican immigration bill. In fact they are the words of Winston
Churchill, in 1904, speaking from the Liberal benches in opposition
to the Aliens Bill that the Conservatives had brought before the
House of Commons. The bill was the first attempt to legislate a
limit to migration into Britain.

Immigration was as politically potent in the early 20th century as it

is in the early 21st. Previous decades had seen a surge of people on
the move across Europe. Millions had moved farther, heading
across the Atlantic to America: hundreds of thousands of Chinese
crossed the Pacific to the same destination. Xenophobic backlashes
followed. Congress passed a law prohibiting Chinese migrants in
1882. By the time of the Immigration Act of 1924 it had, in effect,
banned non-white immigration. It also curtailed the rights of non-
whites already there in the same ways as it did the rights of its
black population, with laws against miscegenation and the like. The
flow of migrants across Europe produced a similar reaction. In “The
Crisis of Liberalism” (1902) Célestin Bouglé, a French sociologist,
marvelled at how a modern society could spawn bigotry and
nativism. When Churchill mocked the idea of a “swarming invasion”
in 1904, Britain was the only European country without
immigration curbs; the following year it brought in its first.

Today some 13% of Americans are foreign-born; that proportion is

approximately what it was in 1900, but much higher than it was in
the intervening years. In 1965 it was just 5%: older Americans
grew up in a pretty homogeneous society that was hardly a nation
of immigrants. In many European countries the foreign-born share
of the population has surged. In Sweden it is 19%, twice what it
was a generation ago; in Germany, 11%; in Italy, 8.5%.

Open borders are rarely if ever politically feasible

The reactions have not been as harsh as they were a century ago.
Indeed, in America the appetite for more immigration has grown
even as the immigrants have arrived. In 1965 only 7% thought the
country needed more immigrants; 28% do today. But any liberals
feeling complacent are clearly not paying attention. Anger over
immigration has fuelled the rise of illiberal regimes in central
Europe; it is the main reason why right-wing populist parties are
now in power in six of the European Union’s 28 countries; it
explains much of the popularity of Brexit, and of Donald Trump.
Concerns are growing in emerging economies, too—from Latin
America, where the exodus of Venezuelans is roiling the region’s
politics, to Bangladesh, which is struggling with the arrival of
750,000 Rohingya fleeing genocide in Myanmar.

There are four reasons to expect the issue to get yet more divisive.
First, migrant flows are likely to rise. People in the global south are
still poor compared with those in the north; modern
communications make them very aware of this; modern transport
networks mean that, poor as they are, many can afford to try to live
the life they see from afar. According to Gallup, 14% of the world’s
adults would like to migrate permanently to another country, and
most of those would-be migrants would like to go to western
Europe or the United States. Over the coming decades the
consequences of climate change are likely to force large numbers
of people, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, to
move, and though most will probably not move all that far, some
will try to go all the way. Some will be welcome; ageing populations
in developed countries will need more working-age people to look
after them and pay tax. It is very unlikely that all will.

Second, the world lacks good systems for managing migration. The
1951 UN Convention on Refugees set up a liberal and eventually
near-universal regime for people fleeing oppression and other state
malfeasance. It is ambitious and (theoretically) generous. There are
no other mechanisms that give people general rights to seek their
fortunes abroad. The result is that refugees’ treatment frequently
falls far short of the legal rights to which they are entitled.
Meanwhile low-skilled people without family members in rich
countries with whom they might seek to be reunited have no way
in. So some seek refugee status on dubious grounds.

The wrong kind of liberalism

Third, the modern welfare state complicates the issues around

migration in a way that it did not a century ago. Illegal immigrants
are not entitled to such benefits. But refugees often qualify, as do
the children of people who have arrived illegally. The absolute level
of spending may be small; the perception of inequity, though, can
be beyond all proportion to the cost. People resent paying taxes to
fund benefits that they perceive as going to outsiders.
Fourth, liberal attitudes to immigration have changed. Liberalism
came of age in a Europe of nation states steeped in barely
questioned racism. Nineteenth-century liberals were quite capable
of believing that nations had no duties towards people beyond their
borders. The Economist, although it did not support the Aliens Bill
in 1904, made clear that it did “not want to see the already
overgrown population swollen by ‘undesirable aliens’”.

Much modern liberalism has a more universalist view, along the

lines of that enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. To some, this means that no controls on immigration are
justified: that a person born in Mali has the same right to choose
where to live as one born in Germany. Totally open borders are
rarely if ever politically feasible. But increased migration tends to
be seen as good in itself by today’s liberals. It removes barriers that
keep people from the lives they want, it produces more diverse
societies and it offers economic betterment to all. People who move
to places where they can be more productive realise almost instant
gains; higher shares of immigrants are correlated with higher rates
of entrepreneurship and dynamism. Economists estimate that, were
the world able to accommodate the wishes of all those who wanted
to migrate, global GDP would double.

A positive attitude to immigration pits liberals against many of their

fellow citizens—for all liberals, despite what anyone may say, are
citizens of somewhere—more than any of their other beliefs do. The
conflict is made worse by the fact that today’s left, including many
identified in America as liberals, has moved sharply towards an
emphasis on group identity, whether based on race, gender or
sexual preference, over civic identity. This leaves them leery of
imposing cultural norms, let alone a sense of patriotism.

The 19th-century assumption that immigrants would assimilate and

learn their new country’s language seems, to such sensibilities,
oppressive. Several American universities have declared the phrase
“America is a melting pot” to be a “microaggression” (a term in
pervasive use and taken by the majority to be innocuous but which
communicates a hostile message to minorities). It is hard, given
such views, for left-liberals to articulate a position on immigration
much more sophisticated than opposition to whatever restrictions
on it currently seem most egregious. The more opposition you
show, the better your credentials.

Trust, but E-verify

This is not a way to win. Liberals need to temper the most

ambitious demands for immigration while finding ways to increase
popular support for more moderate flows. They have to recognise
that others place greater weight on ethnic and cultural
homogeneity than they do, and that this source of conflict cannot
be wished away. They must also find ways for the arrival of new
migrants to offer tangible benefits to the people worried about their
advent.

People often dislike immigration because it exacerbates a sense

that they have lost control over their lives—a sense that has grown
stronger as globalisation has failed to spread its prosperity as fully
as it should have. Removing other barriers that get in the way of
self-determination for people already living in their countries is
thus both a good in itself and a way to lessen antipathy to
migration. But restoring a sense of control also means migration
has to be governed by clear laws that are enforced fairly but firmly.

Wary though liberals rightly are of state snooping, technology can

help with this in various ways. Fully 75% of Americans support E-
verify, a system that allows employers to check a worker’s
immigration status online. If the system is administered in a just,
efficient way and with proper procedures for appeal, liberals should
feel happy to join them.

One aspect of setting clear rules is reforming the international

system for refugees. In “Refuge” (2017) Alexander Betts and Paul
Collier, two British academics, argue for a complete overhaul. This
would include a broader definition of refugee status while
encouraging people who claim that status to stay closer to their
former homes. For this to work the refugees need to be integrated
into local labour markets; investment needed to further that end
should come from richer countries. At the same time, new avenues
need to be found to give people who do not qualify as refugees
some real hope of a legitimate route to wherever they want to go.
Then there is the question of distributing the benefits. Today most
of the financial gains from migration accrue to the migrants
themselves. Lant Pritchett of Harvard University reckons the
annual income of the average low-skilled migrant to the United
States increases by between $15,000 and $20,000. How could some
of those gains be shared with the hosts? The late Gary Becker, an
economist from the University of Chicago, argued for auctioning
migrant visas, with the proceeds going to the host state. In their
book “Radical Markets” Eric Posner and Glen Weyl argue that
individual citizens should be able to sponsor a migrant, taking a cut
of their earnings in exchange for responsibility for their actions.
There is a bevy of less extreme reform ideas, such as “inclusion
funds” paid for by a modest tax on the migrants themselves, which
would spend their money in the places where migrants make up a
disproportionate share of the population.

As well as taking a little more from immigrants, there will be

circumstances when the state should give them a little less.
Systems that offer migrants no path to citizenship, such as those of
the Gulf states, are hard for liberals to stomach, and that is as it
should be. But that does not mean all distinctions between migrants
and established citizens should cease the moment they leave the
airport. In America entitlement to retirement benefits kicks in only
after ten years of contributions; in France, we hear, no one gets
free baguettes until they can quote Racine. This is all entirely
reasonable, and not illiberal. All who have arrived legally, or have
had no choice in the matter, should have access to education and
health care. Other benefits may for a time be diluted or deferred.

Liberal idealists may object to some or all of this. But if history is a

guide, the backlashes that often follow periods of fast migration
hurt would-be migrants, the migrants who have already arrived and
liberal ideals more generally. Liberals must not make the perfect
into the enemy of the good. In the long run, pluralist societies will
accept more pluralism. In the short run, liberals risk undermining
the cause of free movement if they push beyond the bounds of
pragmatism.

IV
The new social contract

OTTO VON BISMARCK—no one’s idea of a liberal—started

Germany down the road to a welfare state in the 19th century.
Trade unionists across the world fought for them in the 20th.
Benito Mussolini built a fascist one. And James Wilson would have
hated the idea. But from Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909 to
FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s to Ludwig Erhard’s soziale
Marktwirtschaft in post-war West Germany, there was a distinctive
liberal cast to the creation of modern welfare states. William
Beveridge, the architect of the post-war British welfare state, was a
liberal and Liberal politician. (He was also a trustee of The
Economist.)

Some liberals, as well as most conservatives, grudgingly accepted

these reforms as the lesser of two evils. By sharing the benefits of
free enterprise more evenly welfare states could stave off the more
radical, and damaging, redistributive promises of fascism and, for
rather longer, socialism. But their creation was more than just a
way to maintain the conditions in which liberalism could flourish. At
their best and most liberal, welfare states cushion people from the
rougher edges of capitalism while still putting a distinctive liberal
stress on individual responsibility. They enhance freedom, enable
free enterprise and bring about a broader embrace of progress. Or
at least that is what their liberal creators believed—and what
today’s liberals need to make sure of.

Giving governments responsibility for the education of the young,

pensions for the old, financial support for the indigent, disabled and
jobless, and health care for at least some, and occasionally all,
required massive reforms, the details and ambition of which varied
in different places. Since their creation, though, welfare states have
changed rather little. Some countries have added benefits.
America, even before Obamacare, was incrementally expanding the
government’s role in health. Others, especially in Europe, have
trimmed them: less generous assistance for the unemployed, extra
conditions for welfare. But Beveridge would recognise today’s NHS,
and FDR would recognise America’s unemployment insurance.

This is not because everyone is satisfied with the status quo.

Conservatives contend that it dulls the edge of capitalism and the
urge for self-betterment. Those on the left see it as a flimsy and
patchy safety-net that needs expanding. Indeed, those
countervailing stances go a long way towards explaining why social
protection has changed remarkably little since the 1970s. The
problem is that while welfare states have stood still, societies have
not. And interventions originally intended to help people help
themselves have not always done so.

Welfare systems and tax regimes have lagged behind a changing

world
Far more women take paid work now than in the middle of the 20th
century. Far more households are headed by a single parent. Jobs
are much less likely to last for life, to start at nine or to end at five.
People are more likely to have more than one at a time. Some of
them like this, especially when one is a passion that the other
subsidises. Others resent working at unpredictable hours for little
money at the beck and call of more than one master. An OECD
study suggests only 60% of the rich world’s workforce has stable
employment. Most important, in terms of expense, health care is
getting costlier and people are living much longer.

The system has tried to cope, especially with the bits that most
drain the public purse. But the coping has been neither sufficient
(increases in retirement age have not kept up with increases in life
expectancy) nor popular (people, especially people likely to rely on
state pensions, do not like having the retirement age raised). As for
helping people to adapt to changes in the world of work, much too
little has been done. The greatly increased need for parental leave
and for some forms of child care has been scarcely addressed.
Workers desperate for new skills see public investment in
education overwhelmingly directed at the not-yet-employed.
Meanwhile the interaction of tax policy and welfare system often
makes jobs unreasonably unattractive. Nearly 40% of the jobless in
the OECD see a marginal tax rate of more than 80% when they
start work.

The failure of welfare systems to cushion the huge changes brought

about largely by liberal policies—on destigmatising single
parenthood as much as on trade—is one of the reasons people are a
lot less likely than they once were to trust liberals offering to fix
things. But things must be fixed. According to the OECD, the ratio
of working-age to retired people across rich countries is set to fall
from 4:1 in 2015 to 2:1 in 2050. Add on higher health-care costs
and spending on the old will soar as the number of workers to
sustain that spending plunges. If the failure to raise the retirement
age significantly is expensive today, it will be ruinous tomorrow.
And if workers are not made more productive, even the less-than-
ruinous expenses will be hard to pay.

UBI enchaîné

The erosive effects of robotisation and artificial intelligence on the

world of work are debatable and frequently exaggerated. But
though optimists think clever and more dexterous machines will
make most of their human colleagues more productive, rather than
redundant, they hardly see a return to the 20th-century world of
copious lifelong jobs. The coming decades will further strain
people’s ability to predict what skills they will need and how their
careers will evolve.

This means that a liberal rethink of the welfare state starts with
education. Thanks to earlier liberal reformers, who sought
universal schooling in the 19th century and welcomed greatly
expanded universities in the 20th, today’s states make their
educational investments mostly in people from five or six to 20 or
21. This no longer makes much sense. Pre-school interventions,
including many not specifically aimed at the classroom, do a lot
more for the life chances of poor children than spending on
universities does. And people can need training and further
education a long time after their years of university and
apprenticeship. There is a case for a big change in priorities here.

New approaches should lay less stress on existing institutions and

more on helping people take down the barriers that stand in their
way. The periodic “lifetime learning” credit that Singapore gives to
all adults to pay for training is one way forward, but things need to
go further, perhaps with lifetime vocational education taking the
place of a year or so’s support at university.

Then there is the challenge of curbing the continuous rise in

pension payments by focusing their benefits on the people who
need them most. Better educated, more skilled people are working
and living longer; the less affluent and skilled stop work earlier and
tend to live less long. (In America they are seeing their life
expectancy fall.) Pension policy should reflect this. It makes no
sense for rich workers to begin drawing a state pension in their
60s. They do not need the support and their long lives mean that
the state will end up paying out for years. There are people with
better claims on that money.

The greatest potential for reform, however, lies in consolidating and

reducing the distortions in the mass of other social-protection
schemes—unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and so
forth. In the past few years the idea of a “universal basic income”
(UBI) that would be paid to all, with no strings attached, has
generated a lot of debate, and significant support, both on the left
and the right.

Right-wing UBI supporters like it because an unconditional

payment does not affect people’s incentives to work; an extra job,
or an extra hour at work, does not reduce benefits. They also see it
as removing various distortions in today’s welfare states, slashing
bureaucracy and government snooping. Supporters on the left are
keen because they see UBIs as redistributive, egalitarian, welfare
enhancing and liberating. Enthusiasm for UBIs has spawned
pressure groups, public campaigns and randomised trials.

Many of the idea’s attributes appeal to liberals too. A UBI would

reduce the state’s interference in people’s lives. But from the
liberal point of view such gains must be set against two big
disadvantages, one a matter of principle, one of practicality. The
principle is that the 20th-century social contract from which the
welfare state was born was that the state would help people help
themselves, rather than just give them stuff: it should provide a
safety-net, not a platform scattered with silk divans. Liberals tend
to believe that people will be happiest if they can achieve self-
reliance. And, in practical terms, UBIs would mean either eye-
popping increases in tax or cuts in support for the genuinely needy,
particularly in countries where welfare spending is already
relatively targeted on the poor. In America a UBI of $10,000 a year
would require a tax take of at least 33% of GDP—less than the level
in many countries, but some $1.5trn more than the current 26%.
A more modest, but still radical, alternative is to replace today’s
welfare schemes with an expanded commitment to guaranteeing
minimum income through negative income taxes. First championed
by Milton Friedman, such taxes mean that the state tops up the
income of anyone earning less than a guaranteed minimum. Both
Britain and America have tax credits to top up wages along these
lines.

Because they avoid transfers to the rich, such schemes are

inherently cheaper than UBIs. A great deal could be achieved by
simultaneously overhauling payroll taxes (the form of tax that has
the greatest impact on low-income earners) so that the path from
receiving a top-up to paying taxes is much smoother, and perhaps
by broadening the eligibility criteria for the negative tax. There are
various forms of currently unpaid labour, most notably in caring,
that some societies might wish to support in such a way.

This, though, is only the beginning of the reform needed. Like

welfare systems, tax regimes have lagged behind a changing world.
Indeed, reform has often gone the wrong way. Over the past 40-odd
years taxes on capital have fallen, as have income taxes on high
earners. That made sense, considering the heights which the top
rates of those taxes reached. The benefits that accrue to society as
a whole from investment and well-rewarded work required that
taxes be reduced.

At the same time wealth taxes, particularly on property and

inheritance, have been reduced or eliminated in many developed
countries. As a result the share of tax revenue from property has
stayed the same and that from capital has fallen, even as the value
of property and the share of national incomes going to capital have
soared. Outside America, value-added taxes have been imposed on
consumption, producing a welcome increase in the tax system’s
efficiency but also making it more regressive.

In the 21st-century economy these shifts should be reversed.

Labour, particularly low-skilled labour, should be taxed less. Folding
payroll and other employment taxes into the income-tax system
would ease the squeeze for low-skilled workers. Shrinking the gap
between taxes on capital and taxes on labour would counter the
skew towards capital; and if capital investment were written off
against corporation tax, this would not need to deter investment.
Moderate inheritance taxes—a liberal invention, stemming in part
from a healthy distrust of the concentration of wealth and power—
should be maintained or reinstated, not least because they are
fairly efficient. Loopholes used to avoid them should be tightened
up. Property taxes should be reformed into land taxes. Taxes on
carbon and other negative externalities, though not a universal
panacea for the problems of climate change, would be a reform in
the right direction, too.

This adds up to an agenda for reform much bigger than the tax-and-
welfare tinkering seen over recent decades. In some ways these
changes are likely to be politically harder than the reforms which
built up the welfare state and the taxation systems which support it
in the first place. It is easier to build from scratch than to attempt
to change a huge and complex edifice on which millions rely, which
millions resent, and which all have opinions on. And all this needs
to happen in a world where the threat of socialism no longer scares
conservatives into taking the liberal side.

But if liberal democracies are to continue to provide progress for

their citizens they need a new form of welfare. And if they are to
afford that welfare reform, they need a tax system that is both more
efficient and better fitted to encouraging what society wants more
of and discouraging what does it harm.

Similar arguments apply to the other great innovation of the post-

second-world-war world: the international liberal order. It is
necessary to preserve it; it is perhaps harder to preserve than to
build; and there is no longer a socialist, or indeed communist,
bogeyman that can serve to unite liberals with all others committed
to private property and economic well-being. Indeed, there is what
some might see as a state-led post-communist siren instead. It is to
that challenge that we now turn.

V
A liberal world order to fight for
WERE a single document to mark the high-point of liberal-world-
order hubris, it would surely be “The End of History?”, an essay
written by Francis Fukuyama, an American academic, in 1989. Mr
Fukuyama’s question, posed a couple of months before the fall of
the Berlin Wall, was whether the world was seeing the
“universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government”. His answer was yes.

How extraordinary that seems in 2018. China, the world’s most

successful economy over the past 30 years and likely to be its
largest over the coming 30, is growing less liberal, not more, and
its state-led, quasi-capitalist illiberalism is attracting admirers
across the emerging world. In the Muslim world, and elsewhere,
ties of sect and community, often reinforced by war and the fear of
war, bind far tighter than those of liberal aspiration. On a measure
of democracy made by the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister
organisation, more than half of the 167 countries surveyed in 2017
were slipping backwards. The backsliders include America, where
the president seems to prefer dictators to democrats.

That is particularly worrying. America did more than any other

nation to create and sustain the order Mr Fukuyama celebrated. In
the 1940s it underwrote the Marshall plan and championed the
creation of the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT and NATO. It
cheered on the first moves towards European unity. Its armed
forces contained liberalism’s greatest enemy, the Soviet Union. Its
dollar underpinned the global economy. And because America was
founded on liberal values, this Pax Americana espoused liberal
values, even if it did not always live up to them.

Mr Fukuyama thought the end of the cold war would let the liberal
internationalist project move beyond its reliance on American
power. The prosperous examples of America, Europe, East Asia’s
tiger economies and a Latin America abandoning military rule,
along with a lack of alternatives, would bring the rest of the world
on board. So it did, to some extent, for a while. But it was far from
universal. And America has become an unhappy Atlas.

President Donald Trump’s rejection of the values underlying NATO

and the WTO has been remarkable, his spurning of America’s role
in maintaining them even more so. Yet his approach is not without
precedent, or support. In 2002, the outrages of September 11th
2001 still fresh in their minds and hearts, only 30% of Americans
agreed that “America should deal with its own problems and let
other countries deal with theirs”. But long, painful wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq have reinforced American scepticism about
interventions abroad that cannot be pulled off quickly and do not
seem vital to the national interest. By 2016, the idea of America
dealing with its own problems and leaving the rest of the world to
deal with theirs appealed to 57%. Younger people are astonishingly
insouciant about revanchist Russia and ascendant China. Only one
in two millennials think it is important for America to maintain its
military superiority.

Liberal ideals are worthless unless backed by military power

It is possible that the next president could swing in the opposite
direction, recognising the vital role its alliances play in American
security, seeking to reform rather than vilify international
institutions like the WTO and reinvigorating international co-
operation on climate change—a grave threat to the world order
which has been far less doughtily faced than that of communism.
But it is unlikely. So is any notion of Europe and other democracies
taking on the challenge. And even if either were to come about,
China would still represent a daunting challenge. Xi Jinping’s
determination to centralise power and to hold on to it indefinitely is
a large part of that. But Mr Xi may represent a deeper shift: one
made possible by the addition of digital technology to the apparatus
of centralised authoritarianism.

Liberals have long believed that state control eventually collapses

under its inefficiencies and the damage that the abuse of power
does to systems that lend themselves to it. But the enthusiasm with
which China has embraced digital living has given the Communist
Party new tools for political control and responsive tyranny. Cyber-
China may not have solved for all time the challenge of identifying
and quashing opposition without stirring up more of it. But its
efforts in that direction could last longer than hitherto imagined. It
would be a foolish mistake to base an international order on the
assumption that China will become more liberal any time soon.

Liberals also used to believe that autocracies might be capable of

one-off bursts of innovation, like Sputnik, but could not produce
technical progress reliably, year in year out. Yet in the past five
years, Chinese tech firms have generated hundreds of billions of
dollars of wealth. The protection afforded them by the Great
Firewall and government policy is part of that success, but not all
of it. China’s government is investing huge resources in tomorrow’s
technologies while its new digital giants make full use of the vast
amounts of data they have on Chinese needs, habits and desires.

Mr Xi sometimes stresses China’s commitment to peaceful,

harmonious development. But he then speaks more ominously
about “great-power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics”. On
climate change, or indeed trade, China talks warmly of the rules-
based global system. Yet it ignores international-court rulings
against its militarised island-building in the South China Sea and
blocks UN criticism of its abysmal record on human rights.

A reasonable forecast is that China will embrace international

collaboration where it sees advantage in doing so and act
unilaterally where its interests dictate. It will also devote some of
its burgeoning technological capabilities to new ways of making
war. If America continues on its current path it will do much the
same. This will not make the two equivalent. Though China’s
military capabilities will grow quickly, they will not match
America’s. And it will always be easier and wiser for liberals to
trust America to do the right thing in the end.

But if there is no clear international order, just big powers doing

what they want, the world will get more of the same as Brazil,
Indonesia, India, Nigeria and others increase in strength. Regional
powers rubbing up against each other unconstrained; nuclear
weapons; the destabilising effects of climate change: it might all
work out for the best. But that is not the way to bet.

Getting a League of Nations right

Faced with this uncomfortable reality, 21st-century liberals must

remember two lessons from the 20th. The failure of the League of
Nations between the world wars showed that liberal ideals are
worthless unless backed by the military power of determined nation
states. The defeat of communism showed the strength of committed
alliances.
Liberals should thus ensure that the states which protect their way
of life are able to defend themselves decisively and, when
necessary, to blunt the ambitions of others. America’s European
and Asian allies should spend both more, and more wisely, on their
arsenals and training their troops. Healthier existing alliances will
ease the creation of new ones with countries that have reason to
worry about China’s ambitions.

Military capabilities are crucial. Only with them firmly in hand can
the most be made of the world’s many mechanisms for peace. In
the cold war, the West and the Soviet Union had few economic
links. The big economies of the 21st century are highly integrated.
The gains to be reaped from working together to repair, reform and
sustain the rules-based trade and economic system are huge.

In this spirit China’s ambitions to make the yuan an international

currency should, in general, be welcomed—they will only serve to
hasten its economic liberalisation. The new Asian infrastructure
bank it supports is likely to prove a useful addition to international
finance. Some of the “One Belt One Road” infrastructure with
which it is forging links to the rest of Eurasia will be useful—
though the West needs to keep an eye out for cryptic militarisation.
A strong West can welcome China’s more forthright voice and
increased influence, while limiting the threats that it poses.

The strength which serves that end cannot be purely military, or

indeed purely economic. It must be a strength of values, too. At the
moment, the West is in disarray on this front. Mr Trump has no
values worth the name. European politicians are hard put to
maintain liberal values at home, let alone stand up for them abroad.
Nor do the leaders of India, South Africa, Brazil and the other big
democracies of the developing world go out of their way to support
abroad the values they espouse at home.

A decade ago the late John McCain proposed the idea of a “league
of democracies”. Such a league’s members might champion liberal,
democratic values and at the same time hold each other to account
in such matters. It is an idea worth revisiting as a credible and
useful alternative forum to the UN. The more clearly the people of
liberal democracies can show that their countries work well, and
work well together, the more secure they will feel, the more secure
they will be and the more others will wish to join them. The world
needs a vision of international relations which shores up,
promulgates and defends liberal ideals. If liberal nations look only
inward and give up either the power or the will to act, they will lose
the moment, and perhaps their future.

VI
A call to arms

OVER the past couple of years there has been a boom in gloomy
books with titles such as “The Retreat of Western Liberalism” or
“Has the West Lost It?”. Magazine articles routinely ask “Is
Democracy Dying?” (Foreign Affairs and more recently the Atlantic)
or “What’s killing liberalism?” (the Atlantic again). The cock-of-the-
walk confidence with which liberals strode into the 21st century
has given way to trembling self-doubt.

Good. A complacent liberal is a failing liberal. The crucial liberal

reinventions at the turn of the 20th century, during the Depression,
and in the stagnation and inflation of the 1970s were all
accompanied by books in which liberals (and sometimes a few
others) declared the creed to be in crisis, betrayed or dead. Such
restless self-doubt spurred the adaptability that has proved
liberalism’s greatest strength.

This essay has argued that liberalism needs an equally ambitious

reinvention today. The social contract and geopolitical norms that
underpin liberal democracies and the world order that sustains
them were not built for this century. Geography and technology
have produced new concentrations of economic power to tackle.
The developed and the developing world alike need fresh ideas for
the design of better welfare states and tax systems. The rights of
people to move from one country to another need to be redefined.
American apathy and China’s rise require a rethinking of the world
order—not least because the huge gains that free trade has
provided must be preserved.
The need for new thinking does not mean ignoring the lessons of
history. The 21st century brings some challenges not seen before,
most obviously and most worryingly climate change, but also the
prospects of intrusive new technologies of the mind. But inequality
of opportunity and the discontent it drives are not new. Nor is the
unhealthy concentration of wealth and power. That is why it is
worth dusting off 19th-century ideas, from vigorous competition
policy to the taxation of land and inheritance.

Whether it was the Anti-Corn Law League, America’s Progressive

movement, the architects of the Bretton Woods system or the free-
marketeers who urged the taming of inflation and the rolling back
of the state in the 1970s, liberal reformers at their best have shared
a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a determination to attack
established interests. That sense of urgency and boldness is
missing now. Liberal reformers have become liberal insiders,
satisfied beneficiaries of the world they have helped to build. Their
setbacks provoke despondency and panic more than determination.
They lack a motivator on a par with the fear (of socialism, fascism
or communism) or the trauma of failure (the Depression, the world
wars) that drove past reinventions. The threats of nationalism and
authoritarianism, though grave and pressing, seem less acute. The
success with which policymakers prevented the 2008 financial
crisis from spiralling into a global depression added to the
complacency and dulled the hunger for more radical reform—even
though the mishandling of the crisis in Europe led to many of that
continent’s current political problems.

Liberals need to shake themselves out of this torpor. And they need
to persuade others of their ideas. All too often, in recent years,
liberal reforms have been imposed by judges, by central banks and
by unaccountable supranational organisations. Perhaps the best-
founded part of today’s reaction against liberalism is the outrage
people feel when its nostrums are imposed on them with
condescending promises that they will be the better for it.

Liberals also need to look at the degree to which self-interest blunts

their reforming zeal. The people who produce and promulgate
liberal policy are pretty well enmeshed with the increasingly
concentrated corporate elite. Its well-heeled baby-boomer bloc is
happy to get pensions that economic logic says it should forgo. If
there is a greater liberal stronghold than the international
institutions which liberals need to reform, it is the universities that
they need to reappraise, given the urgent need to support lifetime
learning. Liberals have gained the most when they have taken on
entrenched power. Now that means attacking both their current
allies and their own prerogatives.

How do you kick-start a liberal reinvention? It may be necessary to

up-end traditional party structures, much as Emmanuel Macron has
already done in France. It may demand a new generation of
politicians who cannot be blamed for the way things are and
articulate better than today’s crop how things should be. But
whoever leads, they and their followers need to be willing to test
their ideas against others’ as forthrightly as possible.

That means free speech—a lot of it. And speech that is well
informed and in good faith, too. But as autocrats gain clout, the
room for free speech is shrinking. Only 13% of the world’s people
live in a country with a truly free press, according to Freedom
House. In America, Donald Trump’s pathological lying and constant
attacks on the media as “enemies of the people” and “fake news”
are taking their toll. But the fact-free world of paranoid fantasy that
right-wing media provide for his followers is a bigger problem.

So is the echo chamber afforded by social media—even when they

are not being manipulated by foreign powers. By reinforcing
people’s biases, they cut off the competition ideas need if they are
to improve. At the same time they discredit the compromise that
democracy needs. They relentlessly encourage a focus on the
identity politics that increasingly consume left-liberals, particularly
in America, drawing attention away from the broad canvas of
economic and political reform to the fine brush strokes of
comparative victimology. Online as elsewhere, identity politics have
obstructed robust debate and promoted soft censorship.

The Economist thus marks its 175th anniversary with wariness,

with optimism and with purpose. Wariness because not enough
people have grasped the scale and urgency of the reforms needed if
the values and insights that underpin our founding creed are to
flourish as they should. Optimism because those values are as
relevant as ever.
Purpose because nothing serves liberalism better than “a severe
contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an
unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. James
Wilson’s words are reprinted on the first page of his newspaper this
week and every week. We start our second 175 years with a
renewed determination to live up to them.