Why is liberalism adrift? From social democracy to the Democratic Party liberalism: how parties learn to speak the language of constraint -- and what it costs them.

From the article:

In 1991 political scientist Adam Przeworski gave a talk to the Andalusian Confederation of Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party. Afterward, a senior party official walked him back to his hotel. Przeworski asked why there was, despite electoral success, a “widespread atmosphere of demoralization.” The official answered in Spanish: Nos hicieron hablar un idioma que no era el nuestro (“They made us speak a language that was not ours”).

At first glance, it sounds like a complaint about messaging. In Przeworski’s telling, it’s something closer to a diagnosis: what happens to parties founded to transform society when they become responsible, year after year, for keeping a capitalist economy running.

Przeworski has spent much of his career tracing how Europe’s socialist parties, born in the late 19th century with a visionary horizon of abolishing class and making “social revolution,” entered elections, won seats, and then governed.

Looking back, the trajectory from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth is stark. The Hague Congress of the First International in 1872 had proclaimed that the “organization of the proletariat into a political party is necessary to insure the victory of social revolution and its ultimate goal: the abolition of classes.” The first Swedish program specified that “Social Democracy differs from other parties in that it aspires to completely transform the economic organization of bourgeois society and bring about the social liberation of the working class.”

Governing forced translation. Parties that had promised a new order had to offer a program that voters would renew at the ballot box: “immediate improvements” that could plausibly be defended as steps toward a different society. Social democratic reformism, in his definition, was “the strategy of proceeding towards socialism by steps, and through electoral expression of popular support.” It was a wager that majoritarian democracy could serve as the vehicle of socialist transformation.

For a time, the wager worked. Social democrats built welfare states and labor-market institutions that turned growth into security and made redistribution feel politically sustainable. Przeworski treats the 1970s—Bretton Woods collapsing, the oil shock, stagflation—as the hinge because it forced parties to confront “distribution without surplus”: the moment, as Swedish prime minister Olof PaPalme puts it, when the absence of a “constant surplus” makes distribution “appreciably more difficult.” Even then, Przeworski notes, they didn’t capitulate immediately—they “desperately searched” for distinctively social-democratic responses—but the cushion that had made compromise easy was gone.

That story about voice has an American echo--not because the United States ever had mass social-democratic parties in the European sense, but because the Democratic Party did build, and still largely lives off, a mid-century settlement that thickened liberalism in practice: New Deal political economy plus civil-rights liberalism as an expansion of membership. A great deal of Democratic liberalism today is defensive in the literal sense: it is organized around protecting the institutional gains of that era--Social Security; Medicare and Medicaid; labor rights and the regulatory state; the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act; anti-discrimination law and due process guarantees--against austerity, privatization, and rollback. That defense is not trivial; without it, the floor drops out fast.

But it also has a political consequence familiar from Przeworski’s Europe: a governing class can begin to live on the victories of an earlier generation, treating inheritance as program. The party’s center of gravity shifts toward custodianship--guarding the settlement, protecting incumbents, policing coalition boundaries--while its forward-looking ambitions narrow. In that mode, negative partisanship becomes a substitute for a horizon: the case for power is increasingly that the other side is worse, not that this side can build something new.

For a time, New Deal and civil-rights liberalism could speak in a confident governing register because it was still constructing institutions that made citizenship materially and legally thicker. What’s fraying now is the assumption that the settlement can simply be defended and administered--that it can keep expanding, or even hold, without a renewed moral horizon, democratic institutions, and political economy capable of making those promises feel tangible under new conditions.
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That’s why “a language that was not ours” is more than a lament about moderation. It names a subtler kind of drift: a party (or coalition) continues to describe itself in an old moral register--solidarity, emancipation, reform--while the practical work it’s doing has changed into something else: managing constraints, calibrating trade-offs, administering scarcity. The rhetoric remains recognizable. The referent changes. Eventually even insiders can’t tell whether familiar words still describe a mission or have become a way of making peace with retreat.

Seen in that light, the post–New Deal and post–civil rights American trajectory looks less like a morality play and more like an unfinished settlement. The United States absorbed pieces of social democracy--union rights, social insurance, welfare-state scaffolding--without developing social democracy as an ideological framework, party form, and governing common sense. It then underwent a civil-rights revolution that widened formal membership in the republic without securing the long-term political and material settlement that might have made membership durable. The result is a center-left unusually anxious and articulate about rights and procedure and far less able--organizationally and ideologically--to speak in the language of social citizenship as the default measure of freedom.
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The trouble begins when the bargain stops delivering, or delivers unevenly, or delivers in ways that feel like insult: growth without security, productivity without wages, recoveries that show up in national accounts but not in kitchens. Parties face a choice they rarely narrate honestly. They can confront the investment veto more directly--through ownership, planning, coercive state capacity--or they can adapt to the veto and treat management as politics. Przeworski’s bleakness is not that adaptation happens once; it’s that it becomes habit. Leaders learn the tripwires. They learn that voters punish unemployment immediately and reward structural change slowly, if at all. They begin speaking the language markets reward: credibility, restraint, competitiveness. Because politics is rhetoric as well as budgets, the language doesn’t merely justify compromise; it hardens into a worldview.

It's very hard to capture the breadth and salience of this essay with excerpts. I encourage those interested in critiques of Western liberalism to read the whole thing, because it very effectively describes the dilemmas and failures of center-left parties in Europe and the U.S. It's impossible to "leave market liberalism alone" without the imagination and coordination to provide basic security to citizens. The disillusioning hollowness of party promises and performative practice is vulnerable to collision with the reality of citizens' daily struggles to meet their needs for food, housing, health, transportation, education, justice, etc. And that disillusionment gives space to exclusionary, zero-sum, right-wing populism.

There's a big expansion to my reading list based on the authors and books mentioned - this is a well-researched, carefully considered essay in political economy that I found very worthwhile. It also presents practical examples of Latin American governments operating with far lesser resources that are nonetheless showing vision and moral clarity in grappling with inequality under conditions of historical inequities.