Friends ask me why I want to reclaim the hopeless word “liberal”. I will list a few answers.

• Liberalism is descriptive. Liberalism prioritizes individual freedom above all other political values, all its efforts are focused on protecting the freedom of all individuals within its domain, and all political problems are framed in these terms. To a liberal, there is no oppression of a group, there is oppression of individuals who have been classified as belonging to a group. Hannah Arendt spoke as a liberal when she said “the physical extermination of the Jewish people… was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism.”
• Liberalism is despised by exactly the right people. Now that the illiberal left has joined the illiberal right in heaping scorn on liberals, this is a perfect time to re-embrace liberalism as a political identity and to oppose the common illiberal tendencies of its critics. The differences between Trump supporters and social justice warriors are superficial. Both ideological tribes vocally identify as a category of person, defined against and opposing other categories of people — while never allowing themselves to notice that their core loyalty is to Identitarian ideologies that exploit identity and tribal resentment to advance the interests of those who ditto/re#hash/retweet the party line to signal that they are woke/red-pilled to the true truth. Each Identitarian denomination enrages and justifies the other, while failing to see its own role in the other’s intensification.
• Appropriating the liberal pejorative is the punkest option. It is a linguistic reclamation (apparently!) that defies antithetical assignment — that is, avoids the pitfall of positioning as a member of your enemy’s enemy, who is also an enemy). By doing so, you become a reviled outsider’s reviled outsider. The two most highly respected, most mainstream tribes of “reviled outsiders” competing for the status of most aggrieved and oppressed group in America, Trumpism and SJWism, will reject you with equal disgust. It’s hardly surprising they react the same: from a liberal perspective the two tribes are more alike than different, and what unites them is an incapacity to see politics in non-Identitarian terms. Both feel vastly superior to the strawman liberalism of their stunted imaginations and like to attribute their own confusions about liberalism to liberalism itself, seeing liberalism as a confused and unconscious agent of its antithesis. (Thus, “All politics is identity politics; you just can’t see it, silly liberal.”) Calling yourself liberal ensured wins you the honor of double-rejection, with nowhere to go. Punk.
• Liberalism is ripe for rediscovery and rearticulation. Liberalism luxuriated in hegemonic complacency throughout the second half of the 20th Century, and like all hegemonic successes became boring. Requiring no help, it stopped attracting intellectual help, and got neglected, dusty and stale. But under the grime is fallow soil and untapped reservoirs of inspiration.

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I have been wanting to present my view of liberalism in terms that have inspired me. The following is a hasty first draft. I’m publishing it for the sake of getting it out there. Expect revisions, because this is an obsession:

• Liberalism exists to maximize individual freedom.
• Liberalism strives for human identity, specifically on the right to individuality shared by all members of this universal identity group. This striving is never perfected and is subject to gross delusions and missteps, but the ideal stands.
• Liberalism frames political problems in terms of the ideal of maximizing the freedom of all individuals. Liberalism, left-leaning, right-leaning or centrist can be recognized through it use of liberal framing of political problems and solutions.
• One important and often overlooked form of freedom is freedom of judgment. Freedom of judgment means judgments can, will and ought to differ, even on core questions of freedom and infringement of freedom.
• These differences in judgment produce radically different practical worldviews (aka lifeworlds). These worldviews can produce radically different visions of life. They are the stuff of religious conversion. Those who have been “born again”, or “woke”, or “red-pilled” or “enlightened” only one time should attempt a second conversion in order to grasp what is meant by pluralism, which is a central deep fact of liberalism.
• When freedom of judgment leads even to different judgments pertaining to the limits of individual freedom (for the sake of individual freedom) there are no means for settling differences before they are hammered out with actual trial. Conflict is necessary for liberalism, and the principled embracing of this fact is agonism.
• Individual freedom of judgment necessitates democracy. Democracy is grossly imperfect but it is the best available means for achieving practical equality and symmetry of judgment. Nobody’s judgment can be privileged over another’s however much that judgment judges itself correct and proves its correctness by criteria and methods it judges sound.
• Freedom of judgment entails objective pluralism. People sometimes bat around the term pluralism, to mean diversity of feelings or opinions about objective truth, but this misses the point. Objectivity is a hard-won accomplishment — not a starting point, and certainly not a firm foundation, regardless of what fundamentalists of religion or science tell you.
• Because democracy is imperfect and because factions can form, consolidate power and use nondemocratic means — bullying, terror, commercial coercion, even legislation — all for righteous and necessary causes (national defense or civil right emergencies calling for emergency measures, because EMERGENCY!) — it is crucially important to allow individuals to form creative alliances to oppose what they view as oppressive forces.
• To feel entitled to assign individuals to groups, and to not only see them primarily in terms of their group membership, or to treat them as such, or to expect them to accept this identity assignment — but to require them to accept legal status as a group member whether they want it or not is a violation of liberal principle and indicates that some group has gained so much power that it no longer feels democratic obligation. Such groups — whether formally organized or organically united under common ideology — are ripe for being taken down a few notches until they regain humility and a sense of liberal mutuality.
• The right to self-determination of one’s own alliances and group identities is an individual right, as is the right to reject the identity claims of others. Any practical imposition of categorization on another individual ought to be resisted.
• And finally, in case any illiberals have made it this far and still mistake themselves for liberals, I will scare them off with this: liberals understand that the single most important liberal institution is the free market. Left-leaning liberals think the market must be regulated to some degree to preserve its liberal effect. Right-leaning liberals think the market is inherently liberal. But all liberals value the free market exclusively for how it supports liberalism.