Liberalism Cannot Produce Outcomes Satisfactory to Liberals

and any sufficient equality of opportunity simply is an equality of outcome

This latest episode of Chris Hayes’s podcast Why is This Happening?, which I recommend in general, offers a good jumping off point for discussing American liberalism. In particular, in this moment where “Obamaism” is again being defended by those who place symbolism over substance, the podcast offers insight into why discussions of American liberalism oscillates between increasingly frustrated attacks for its deep inadequacy and stubborn defenses by those who think it has been unfairly maligned. In the podcast Hayes interviews Daniel Chandler, a London School of Economics-affiliated champion of liberalism, particularly as defined by the 20th century American philosopher John Rawls. The conversation reflects the quintessential condition of 21st century liberal/progressive Democrat/Labor politics: a couple of fundamentally good guys imagining a more just world that their core political philosophy has absolutely no ability to bring about.

So let’s start by talking about their discussion of equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. Hayes and Chandler both endorse the idea of equality of opportunity, with Chandler arguing that equality of outcome is more radical in its implications than socialist critics of liberalism tend to admit. This is, as you’d predict, expressed in relation to Rawls’s concept of FEO, which calls for meritocracy (as in, jobs go to those who perform best at those jobs) but only under those conditions in which everyone has an equal shot to become that person who performs best. This is typical of Rawls in that it advances a really lovely possible moral future that is sadly not achievable even under ideal conditions.

To set the stage I’ll first talk about liberalism’s constant foil, Marxism, which is a political school that most people strongly identify with equality and which actually has nothing to do with equality. I will probably be muttering “Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy” to myself in the nursing home in my final days. As anybody who’s read me for long enough is aware, Marxism is not committed to a goal of achieving equality of any kind, and to the extent that a Marxist society is one of greater equality this is epiphenomenal at best. In fact both Marx and Engels independently described why equality is a nonsensical political goal. As they pointed out, any difference between two people can be expressed as an inequality; a person who has blue eyes is unequal to a person with brown eyes, for example. Your immediate response may be to say, well, that’s trivial, who cares. The trouble is that we live in a lattice of interlocking influences and complex interactions which get sucked up into path dependence and self-perpetuating privilege, and this fundamental condition makes essentially all differences meaning-bearing. Tiny differences in our makeups and experiences have huge consequences in terms of our outcomes.

Maybe a waitress has beautiful brown eyes but is ignored by a rich man with a thing for blue eyes who, were her eyes his preferred shade, would have married her and pulled her family out of intergenerational financial hardship and into intergenerational wealth. Outsized consequences stem from seemingly meaningless personal characteristics all the time. Once you look at all of the innumerable influences on our material conditions you can’t stop finding differences that contribute to inequality. And of course there are more obvious examples: two people might have the exact same potential in computer science, but only one has a strong preference for computer science, and that difference can result in millions of dollars of difference in career earnings. But what determines that preference? Probably an immense amount of variables of small effect. And as any geneticist can tell you, many variables of small effect are harder to predict than few variables of large effect, to say nothing of what you can control.

The Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull production spent several weeks in New Haven, in the mid-2000s, as Yale was serving as a stand-in for Indy’s university. A lot of people in the state applied to be extras, which entailed dropping off a headshot and a resume. Someone I know of, who at the time was a school bus repairman, dropped off his materials in the hopes of spending a day or two making like $50 as an extra. But somebody in the production saw that he was licensed to drive a bus in Connecticut and asked him if he’d like to ferry around the cast and crew for a couple weeks. They said he would have to join the union and would receive union scale; he said yes, not knowing anything about Hollywood finances or how much that might be. A month after he had finished work he was astonished to receive a check for more than $65,000. He used that money to start his own business. If you run that guy’s life through the simulator several times, there’s many versions where he doesn’t get around to dropping off his resume on a lark and his life is utterly different. So tell me: what exactly does equality of opportunity look like when comparing those versions of his life to each other? When comparing him to another person of very similar background and talents who’s maybe a little too shy to take a flyer on being an extra in an Indiana Jones movie? All of this makes equality a really annoying goal to pursue.

Luckily for me, Marxism’s goal is not and has never been equality, of either opportunity or outcome. Marxism’s goal has always been a) to sever the exploitative relationship between labor and capital, which is the most basic facet of capitalist exchange and b) provide our people with what they need to live contented lives, drawing from what our people can produce thanks to their abilities. No needlessly complicated focus on equality required.

And I think that if you chew on it for a moment, this perspective shreds the very concept of equality of opportunity into little bits. I’m forever pointing out that marketable skills and abilities are a product of the context in which they exist. I’m very skeptical of AI-driven destroying the labor market anytime soon, but certainly there are jobs that are threatened. Maybe you’re skilled and experienced at reading legal documents for discovery purposes. If your career starts in 1985, you’re fine; if your career starts in 2015, you’re in trouble. But you can control neither when your born nor, ultimately, what you’re good at, which means there is no just desserts to be found here. A guy who was just the biggest and strongest guy in the village in 2024 BC might have been the most valuable and popular person in his community, but in 2024 AD he’s an impoverished day laborer. The influences on “opportunity,” meaning what is constitutive of an individual’s eventual outcomes, how we get from potential to reality, are impossibly vast, and the benchmarks for what constitutes success are endlessly shifting. So… what’s the point? How could you ever achieve equality of opportunity under such circumstances? Indeed, in order to achieve equality of opportunity, we would have to achieve equality of outcome anyway. The only way we would get equal opportunity would be to make people so substantively equal in condition that the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes would collapse.

Liberals tend to act like equality of opportunity is much more realistic and achievable than equality of outcome. But I think this is backwards. If we choose to define equality of outcome by saying “Everyone has to make no less than $X and no more than $Y,” it’s true that achieving that condition would be a hard political pull. But the parameters are definable and obvious and we would know when we achieved it. The levers we could pull to get there are clear, even if our current political system wouldn’t allow us to pull them. How would we ever know when we achieved equality of opportunity, given how immensely multivariate and subtle the influences on opportunity are? How would we prevent small random changes in our world from overwhelming our systems of equal opportunity?

The larger point is simply this. Contemporary American liberalism, by which I mean the substantive project of the American center-left that is meant to emerge from the philosophical underpinnings of classical liberalism, is a bizarre and jerry-rigged thing. It articulates a vision of the public good that I largely agree with, but it embeds that public good in a system that seems almost tailor-made not to produce that public good. It’s a philosophy of well-meaning proceduralists who want the best for everyone but who cannot admit to themselves that the procedure they worship is entirely incapable of resulting in the best for everyone. It is a belief in both a process (the rules of liberalism) and a product (the compassionate outcomes that contemporary liberals prefer) that are, inconveniently, mutually incompatible. And it’s hard for me to imagine someone who better exemplifies this tension than Hayes, a fundamentally good dude with a compassionate nature whose fretful attachment to the rules leaves him unable to really demand the moral outcomes that he deeply desires. Which is why I find him, and the cohort he represents, to be fundamentally tragic.

The podcast offers a useful frame for thinking about the wounded bird that is 21st century liberalism in another sense, too. At one point, the conversation about Rawls compels Hayes to assert that most of the people who think of themselves as socialists are just Rawlsian liberals who want a more muscular redistributive state; this claim has not been uncommon since the Bernie Sanders moment in 2016. Chandler likewise asserts that a genuinely Rawlsian liberal democracy would solve the moral problems we associate with capitalism. Hayes agrees, noting that what Rawls calls for would achieve something like Bernie Sanders socialism; it’s just that Rawls’s preferences are simply far outside of the scope of what’s achievable in American politics. To which I would say, that’s exactly the problem. The fact that what Rawls wanted and Hayes wants and Chandler wants and what Barack Obama and Kamala Harris want can’t be achieved within the framework of their preferred procedural framework is exactly why Bernie Sanders socialists actually are something different than Rawlsian liberals - because the former are sensible enough to have given up on the procedure.

Capitalism’s privileging of the profit motive and liberalism’s obsession with individual rights ensure that the system that produces decent liberal folk can’t actually produce a world of shared abundance and equal opportunity. Instead, it produces the stock market, legacy admissions at fancy colleges, Hollywood nepo babies, trust funds, compound interest, fighter jets built out of parts from all fifty states, capital gains taxes that are lower than income taxes, $60,000/year preschools, right to work states, credit scores…. It is not a coincidence that a liberal capitalist order always produces systems that preserve preexisting inequality. That is the function of liberal capitalism! And the only reason that system is defended by people like Hayes and Chandler, who are bright and give a shit, is because they were born in a late-Cold War era in which decent and responsible and Very Serious left-of-center folks had gotten religion and swallowed the propaganda that said that the first thing you had to be was anti-communist. They are Michael Harrington’s children, and like Harrington was they are trapped in a straightjacket of the inherent contradictions between the moral outcomes their hearts want and their attachment to a blinkered and limiting vision of how to be a responsible lefty, the kind who gets to work at MSNBC.

Hayes tells Chandler that he’s someone who is, ultimately, just a Rawlsian liberal. He shuns more complicated or boutique labels. Well, I reviewed Hayes’s first book Twilight of the Elites, Jesus, twelve years ago. And the core of my review was exactly this point: Hayes has always been someone who defined a moral vision of the world that I could get behind, but who was apparently incapable of recognizing the profound limits of his sunny attachment to the Way Things Work, the modern liberal dedication to democracy and rights and capitalism and all of that jazz. The question I tried to prompt in that review was, simply, what if you have to choose? What if you can’t have both the procedural formalities of capitalism - our mythical free markets - and also the lovely world of broadly-shared prosperity and social mobility that was championed at the recent Democratic national convention? The incentives not to ask that question are powerful. I have been harsh with Hayes in the past, too harsh, but only because I find his arc to be particularly sad. Hayes wrote several hundred columns for The Nation, and I’ve read them all, in part because he was always one of the few writers at that publication who really appeared ready to contemplate the obvious, profound limits of liberal democratic capitalism. As he moved to MSNBC and became more of a mover and shaker in the Democratic party, his comfort with The Way Things Work deepened in a way I find depressing. But he never lost the ability to conceive of a better world. He just lost the ability to be ruthlessly honest about what it would take to build it.

In that review, I wrote “Faced with evidence that points to an unthinkable rejection of a cherished set of norms, the evidence is ignored, denigrated, or suppressed.” And this, indeed, is the state of the modern liberal: attached as Hayes is to the idea that any post-capitalist approach to achieving justice is inherently unSerious, and desperately seeking to be perceived as Serious, the 21st century liberal constructs a series of overcomplicated rhetorical maneuvers to deny the limits of liberalism that are obvious even to himself. It’s a game of Three Card Monte where the dealer and the mark are the same person. Well, fine. But don’t expect everybody else to play! So many people have become something other than liberals in the last several decades because liberalism has failed, is failing, will continue to fail. And I think all of the various fretting about Obama and how change is made and how in the world we got to this whole crazy Bernie Sanders era of politics - an era, to be clear, that has produced a little bit of leftist rhetoric but which has resulted in pretty much zero leftist policy - I think it all comes back to this place, to this frustrating contradiction between what is respectable and what is potentially effective. Frustrating, precisely because I can’t indulge in disparaging the motives of people like Hayes or Chandler or all the many other decent liberals who make up the leftward flank of prominent political discourse. I would love to say that they’re corrupt or uncaring. The tragedy is that they are not.

In my review of Twilight of the Elites, I used the metaphor of Hayes looking around at a burning house, trying to figure out what to do. From the standpoint of a dozen years later, I would say that Hayes and American liberalism are still stuck in that burning house. “Well, I know we have to put out this fire,” they seem to say, “but it would be fundamentally unserious to try to put it out with water.”