The Flaw of Post-1960s Liberalism
American exceptionalism is rooted in individual initiative. Americans have a cultural belief in self-determination. America is the place where people can make the best of themselves.
Over the past few decades, America’s can-do culture has been corroded by a sense of futility. The failures are clearly visible in institutional ineptitude—say, the inability to modernize infrastructure or to fix poor schools. But the cultural rot is more pernicious. Americans no longer believe we can make a difference, or build a better future. We feel disempowered. Watch what you say. Just follow the rules. Instead of striding towards our goals, Americans increasingly feel like rats in a maze. Many turn to MAGA.
In a provocative column, “Why I Am Not a Liberal,” David Brooks cites studies showing that giving money to the poor doesn’t lift them out of poverty. That’s because “rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability.” Liberals can’t achieve their goals, Brooks concludes, until they “promote the traditional values and practices that enable people to rise.”
Brooks is correct, I think, and he also touches the raw nerve of populist resentment. The liberal phobia to being “judgmental” is a main cause of America’s cultural rot. Since the 1960s, liberals have built a legal operating framework that suffocates individuality—explicitly designed to replace human judgment with prescriptive rules and objective proof.
America’s can-do culture is disappearing in legal quicksand—dense rulebooks, lengthy legal processes, and a cacophony of claimed violations of individual rights. Americans no longer feel free to do what they think is right, or even to be themselves in social interactions.
The conceit of the modern state is that it is objective, untainted by subjective judgments. Who are we to judge? But the beauty of life isn’t objective. The magic of accomplishment is usually dependent on the unique traits of each person. How do you prove that a teacher is ineffective? Governing well hinges on subjective judgments about tradeoffs. How do you prove that the benefits of a new transmission line outweigh the harms of building it through a pristine forest? How do you prove what’s moral, or what’s selfish?
Public and private choices are unavoidably subjective—an irreducible amalgam of perceptions, instincts, experiences, values, biases, and more. These judgments can be judged by others, and, in government or other institutions, readily overturned up a hierarchy of authority. But good judgment is rarely susceptible to objective proof.
Governing without human judgment is like wearing a blindfold. Focusing too much on legal compliance, as one study found with nursing homes, actually causes failure. Without tradeoff judgments, as with infrastructure permitting, legal processes can go on for a decade or longer. Take away subjective judgment, and objective metrics become synonyms for failure—as with grade inflation and meaningless high school graduation rates.
Success, like human judgment, is unavoidably a mix of circumstances and personal characteristics. It almost always boils down to the particular person. That’s why job-training programs rarely work unless a particular trainee is apprenticed to a specific employer, who sees that he/she is up to the job.
Straining daily choices through a legal sieve deadens the human spirit. Worse, using law to mediate personal interactions unplugs the accountability that energizes America’s can-do spirit. American initiative is not just daydreams, but the pressure to perform in the eyes of those around us. American exceptionalism is a coiled spring—we are free to act because others are free to judge how we act. Take away their judgments about right and wrong, and we get legal bickering and paralysis.
Addressing populist resentment, as I argue in my forthcoming book Saving Can-Do, requires restoring our freedom to do what we think is right, and to judge others on the same basis. The proper role of law is not to replace subjective judgments, but to provide a legal framework that, by defining the scope of freedom and official authority, empowers subjective judgments and values. That’s the architecture of a free society.
– Philip
Lou Zickar reviewed Saving Can-Do for The Ripon Forum, writing that it “is a slim volume....But don't let its modest size fool you. This book packs a powerful punch.”
In GoLocalProv, Bob Whitcomb writes that Saving Can-Do is a “common-sensical and psychologically astute book to address the public anger and frustration about the failures and paralysis of government at all levels.”
Tevi Troy cites our work in his essay detailing the history of public unions' pursuit of power: “The [1978 Civil Service Reform Act] was a major step toward the current era in which, according to Philip Howard’s 2023 book ‘Not Accountable,’ ‛the abuse of power by public employee unions is the main story of public failure in America—worse even, I believe, than polarization or red tape.’”
Father George E. Schultze, SJ cites Not Accountable in his essay on public unions for The Catholic World Report.
FandomWire writes that “King of the Hill” writers read The Death of Common Sense“to get into the skin” of protagonist Hank Hill.