Liberals Have Already Lost the Argument

On the center-left's past 40 years.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Last week, a major new publication entered the Substack world. Titled The Argument, helmed by former Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, and backed by a $4 million investment, this new daily newsletter has promised to be a new kind of liberal news outlet—one capable of competing and succeeding in today’s political world. Gone, Demsas has said, are the days of liberals defining themselves by what they oppose. Unlike the wonky policy blogs and haughty “apolitical” legacy outlets that have defined centrist and center-left writing during the Trump era, The Argument will be fiercely partisan and unapologetically willing to fight for what it believes in. To this end, it will actively court friction, controversy, and, well, arguments, both within its walls and outside them.

Through the first week of its existence, it is safe to say that The Argument has so far succeeded in its latter aim. Before it even published any articles, it was met with scorn and hostility from across the political spectrum. It’s a level of vitriol that I find hard to share. While I don’t expect to agree with much of what they publish, I can also recognize that’s also the point. Demsas has been pretty clear from the jump that The Argument is an opinion newsletter, not a straight news outlet. Some of the writers there are awful and hackish, while others are people I know to be insightful, good-faith actors (and friends). Because of this, I don’t think that it’s worthwhile to write off the publication entirely or put out something purporting to reveal what its own writers will gladly tell you: that it’s a liberal outlet meant to argue in favor of liberalism.

The far more interesting line of inquiry—one I haven’t seen anyone explore yet—is what The Argument and its statement of purpose says about how liberals see themselves today. While there has already been a very public debate over the future of the faction ever since the failure of the Biden administration, it has so far mostly focused on policy. Demsas, by contrast, introduced her new outlet by providing a new historical narrative purporting liberalism has gone wrong since its midcentury glory days. As one might anticipate, her diagnosis is that the tendency does not argue enough. As she puts it, modern liberals have adopted the small-c conservative role that the right once held seventy years ago: simply defining themselves in opposition to their opponents while failing to affirmatively argue for their beliefs. To Demsas, this is a massive disservice to a tendency that has given us everything good about America, from our independence to our multiculturalism to even our clean water. By seeking to “persuade” rather than “explain”—her words—she hopes to rebuild the kind of confident and compelling liberal movement that did all of these good things until it got arrogant.

It’s an admirable sentiment, but it is not a correct view of modern liberal history. When Demsas tells a story of a tendency that sparked the American Revolution and passed the New Deal simply resting on its laurels, she isn’t giving her side enough credit. The truth is that liberals have had a multitude of ideas over the past forty years. They sincerely believed in these ideas and argued in their favor against opponents of all stripes. They won elections off of them, put them in practice through countless pieces of policy, and promised America that these ideas would lead to a brighter future than anything the left or the right had to offer. They believed in them on the merits and argued for them on the merits. But these efforts failed, and it was because their ideas—ideas that they wholeheartedly believed in—were simply wrong.

This is the true basis for the crisis that liberalism is in today: the reason why its believers need to launch massive multi-million-dollar startups just to figure out what they believe in the first place. The story I will tell here is not the now-very-familiar history of the late 20th-century neoliberal turn, but the history of the hopes, aspirations, and sincere beliefs of those that founded it. It is an argument as to why the Third Way cannot be written off or ignored as a movement of cowardice and/or arrogance. It is why I believe that liberals, despite their best efforts, have dug themselves into a hole that they cannot simply argue their way out of, and it starts with the most interesting and influential presidential campaign you’ve never heard of.

1984: The Hart of the Problem

When the death of American social democracy arrived, it came wearing boat shoes.

AP Photo/Mark Elias. A photo taken of a March 1984 Democratic Presidential primary debate. Colorado Senator Gary Hart, center, is the star of our story.