The Divorce Is Final

This is a response/reflection instigated by Michael Munger's "The Classical Liberal Diaspora" which you can read here: https://www.independent.org/wp-content/uploads/tir/2024/01/tir_28_3_08_munger.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawMVxaxleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFQRnRhZlZ2Y1lxU0puSERZAR6N5-i00TPhKohbD13BVG8xgPYws9qwUEyjztMEjPrhcw7LAk3MqnIJ-K8TzQ_aem_6HQPShTvEfdNSka7Ji6FJA

“What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism” - Friedrich Hayek

In his 2023 article ““The Classical Liberal Diaspora,” Michael Munger argues that the coalition that once gave classical liberalism a political home is dead. The divorce of conservatives and libertarians is final.

It was always a tense marriage, to be frank. As Munger lays it out, fusionism was the union of two tribes: the “traditionalists,” who stressed virtue and a transcendent moral order, and the “libertarians,” who made individual freedom their North Star. For decades, they held together, mostly because they had a common enemy in the Soviet Union. It was a pragmatic and uniquely American alliance.

But the divorce is final now. The common enemy is long gone, and the cracks that were always there have become chasms. The real accelerant, though, was the arrival of a new kind of public square which rewired our society. Social media didn’t just give us a new place to talk; it armed every user with a dart gun. The "like" and "share" buttons became tools not for connection, but for performance and punishment. This new reality created what Jonathan Haidt calls “structural stupidity,” an environment where nuance is a liability and compromise is suicide. A fragile coalition like fusionism, which depends on good faith and overlooking differences, simply cannot survive in a world where the loudest, purest, and most belligerent voices are rewarded with viral fame.

This digital pressure cooker, fueled by the anxieties of a generation raised online rather than in playgrounds, split the old coalition into two camps that are now completely unintelligible to each other. They live in different moral universes. On one side, you have a New Right that looks at the fusionist settlement with utter contempt. They see the libertarian obsession with individualism as the very acid that dissolved the culture they want to defend. As Munger notes, for this new right, the old constitutional order is, at best, a “marginally useful fiction” to be discarded in the pursuit of power. They want to seize the state, not shrink it. For them, Munger correctly observes, the choice is clear: “If liberty must be sacrificed to conserve virtue, that is a price well worth paying”. On the other side, the libertarians and classical liberals look at this populist, nationalist right and see a horrifying betrayal, the same statist impulse they’ve been fighting their whole lives, just draped in a different flag.

And let’s be clear, this isn't a problem unique to the right. A parallel crack-up is happening on the left. Their own tense marriage... between old-school liberals who believed in reforming American institutions and a new activist class that sees those same institutions as irredeemably tainted by capitalism and systemic oppression... is also on the rocks. The same digital dynamics apply: social media purity tests and the relentless pressure of identity politics make compromise look like a sellout. The center-left, which once preached incremental change, is being hollowed out by a progressive base that demands revolutionary purity, viewing figures from Obama to Biden with disdain. They, too, have their non-negotiable definition of virtue, and they, too, are increasingly willing to discard liberal norms around free speech and due process to achieve it. The entire American system of coalition politics is breaking down.

So here we are, scattered. And we have to admit... a lot of this is our own damn fault. This is the hardest truth in Munger’s essay. Libertarians failed to offer a compelling moral vision. We became, as he writes, “complacent about the mechanical creation of prosperity as if that were all there is”. We showed people spreadsheets of GDP growth and expected them to be grateful. We forgot that a rich society is a society that can afford to worry about its soul. Our "constrained vision" of government, while prudent, is a hard sell. It sounds tepid and second-best next to the fiery, emotional crusades of the illiberal left and right, who promise to seize power and remake the world.

Even the smartest attempts to forge a new path forward feel stuck in this trap. Thinkers like Sam Hammond, for example, have made a compelling, pragmatic case rooted in the economist’s ‘theory of the second best.’ He argues that in a world where a minimal state is impossible, a weak and incompetent government is the real threat to liberty because it creates the vacuum of trust that authoritarians rush to fill. He’s not wrong about the diagnosis. But Munger’s warning hangs in the air: “never build a sword so powerful that you don’t want to see it wielded by your worst enemy”. A more capable state is just a more powerful tool. In the hands of a post-fusionist right or an illiberal left, it’s a scarier weapon, not a solution.

The bleakness can be overwhelming. It feels like we’re stuck, destined to watch the woke scolds and the strongmen fight over the carcass of a free society. But what if we've been looking for the solution in the very place where the poison is brewed?

The idea of a new coalition, one based on permission and human dignity, is the right impulse. The immigrant family opening a restaurant, the suburban mom starting an Etsy shop—these are the heroes of a liberal society. But this coalition is a ghost haunting a machine. It cannot survive, let alone thrive, in the digital arena that acts as the primary accelerant of our discontent. A coalition based on good faith, nuance, and positive-sum creation is fundamentally incompatible with a public square designed for performance, purity-testing, and punishment. You cannot build a utopia of permission in an architecture of perpetual conflict.

The truly liberal and radical act, then, is not to find a better argument to win the flame war. It is not to formulate a cleverer tweet or a more devastating meme. The truly radical act is to leave the arena altogether. It is to deliberately disengage from the digital spaces that reward our worst impulses and to reinvest our time, our energy, and our identity not in our profiles, but in our places. The tangible, physical communities where life is actually lived.

This is where the real work of rebuilding a free and humane society can begin. It happens in PTA meetings and neighborhood barbecues, at the local library board and the volunteer fire department. It is in these spaces that we are forced to deal with one another not as avatars to be dunked on, but as fellow citizens with whom we share a leaky roof or a crowded intersection. It is here that trust, the essential currency of a functioning society, is forged through shared work and actual, face-to-face conversation. Virtue is not a political program to be imposed from on high; it is a habit learned among neighbors. Liberty is not an abstract principle to be debated online; it is the lived reality of being secure and respected in one's own community.

The divorce from our old political certainties is final. Perhaps the only way to build something new and lasting is to finalize our divorce from the digital pressure cooker that burned the old world down. The challenge Hayek laid before us to build a truly liberal radicalism will not be met with a new political party or a grand national strategy. It will be met block by block, handshake by handshake, by people who have the courage to log off and begin the quiet, unglamorous, and essential work of building a community worth living in.