Classical Civic Liberalism: Borrowed Clothes (Part 1/n)
Liberty, bounded.
Most people inherit their politics the way they inherit their religion—family, geography, tribe. The rest pick a team somewhere along the way and spend decades defending positions they never really chose.
I got tired of the cognitive dissonance. I’d agree with a conservative here, a progressive there, then realize neither side’s framework actually fit what I believed. The positions were borrowed clothes.
So I did something embarrassingly earnest: I sat down and tried to figure out what I actually think is true about people and society. Not what sounds good. Not what my tribe believes. What I could defend if pressed. Then I reasoned outward from there.
What came out is something I’ve started calling classical civic liberalism—free markets and individual liberty, but bounded by the nation-state, grounded in functional communities, and skeptical of both progressive outcome-rigging and libertarian atomization.
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a working document—a way to sort through policy debates without consulting my tribal affiliations first. I’m sharing it because I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt politically homeless, caught between a Right that often ignores circumstance and a Left that often ignores agency.
Arnold Kling’s framework is useful here: progressives see the world through oppressor-oppressed, conservatives through civilization-barbarism, libertarians through liberty-coercion. Each axis captures something real. None captures everything. Building your own framework means refusing to pick just one.
The Framework
1. People are shaped by circumstances and defined by choices.
Where you’re born, who raises you, what opportunities exist around you—these matter enormously. Anyone who denies this isn’t paying attention. But they don’t erase agency. A just system acknowledges both: it works to improve the conditions people start in and expects them to own what they do from there.
Rawls had a phrase for this: the “social lottery.” The arbitrary circumstances of birth that shape your starting point. His concept of “fair equality of opportunity” has lexical priority over redistribution—fix the starting line before you worry about the finish.
But Rawls also understood that we don’t deserve our talents any more than we deserve wealthy parents. That produces humility, not nihilism. Michael Sandel’s point lands here: meritocracy becomes tyrannical when winners believe they fully earned their success and losers internalize their failure as deserved.
Amartya Sen pushed this further with his “capabilities approach”—what matters isn’t equal stuff but whether people have real capabilities to live the lives they value. That’s investing in inputs, not redistributing outcomes.
The synthesis: Circumstances shape starting points. Choices shape trajectories. Policy should address both—but in different ways.
2. Individuals flourish in healthy communities.
Agency means little if there’s nowhere to apply it. People need places with economic purpose—jobs, institutions, reasons to stay and build. Policy should strengthen these conditions, not sacrifice them for abstract efficiency or ideological goals.
Sandel’s critique of Rawls centers on the “unencumbered self”—the fiction that we can reason about justice as isolated individuals. We’re always already embedded in communities that shape who we are.
This isn’t new. Adam Smith—yes, that Adam Smith—understood it in 1759. His Theory of Moral Sentiments argued that morality stems from our social nature, from sympathy and the desire for approval from our peers. Everyone cites Wealth of Nations; TMS is where Smith makes the communitarian case that the vulgar libertarians miss. We’re not atomized utility-maximizers. We’re embedded social beings who need each other to become ourselves.
Tocqueville saw this in the 1830s. His observations about American “associations” weren’t just anthropology—they were a warning. He believed local institutions were essential bulwarks against isolated individuals submitting to a paternalistic state. Americans, he noticed, formed voluntary groups to solve problems wherever the French would find government and the English would find aristocracy.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is the empirical sequel: decades of data showing what happens when that associational life erodes. Spoiler: nothing good.
Oren Cass has contemporized this with “productive pluralism”—creating conditions where people of diverse abilities and geographies can form self-sufficient families and contribute to their communities. The libertarian says markets will sort it out. The progressive says government programs will fill the gap. Both miss something: communities aren’t just delivery mechanisms for goods and services. They’re the context in which human lives become meaningful.
A town where everyone commutes elsewhere for work isn’t a community. It’s a bedroom.
3. Communities require boundaries to function.
Mutual obligation depends on shared fate—shared laws, shared institutions, shared consequences. That accountability breaks down at scale. The nation is the largest unit where “we’re in this together” still means something. Beyond that, there’s no mechanism to ensure fairness or hold anyone responsible when the rules fail.
This is where I part ways with cosmopolitan liberalism. Not because I don’t value human beings outside my borders—I do—but because I’m skeptical that political solidarity can be maintained at the global level. When everyone is responsible for everything, no one is responsible for anything.
Edmund Burke understood this instinctively—his whole project was skepticism toward abstract universalism, toward revolutionaries who thought they could design society from first principles without regard for the particular communities people actually inhabited.
Michael Lind makes this case from a secular, class-based angle: “To date the nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people.”
Yoram Hazony argues similarly from a traditionalist position: the nation-state is the largest unit capable of genuine solidarity.
I’m aware this sounds like it could slide into ugly nativism. It doesn’t have to. The boundary I’m drawing is civic, not ethnic. It’s about shared institutions and reciprocal obligations, not bloodlines. The question isn’t “who looks like us?” but “who is in this together with us?”—where “together” means subject to the same laws, contributing to the same systems, sharing the same consequences when those systems fail.
4. Therefore, invest in inputs.
If circumstances shape starting points and communities enable agency, then the job of policy is to strengthen both beforethe race begins—education, infrastructure, stable families, economic opportunity in left-behind places.
Rigging outcomes at the finish line doesn’t fix anything upstream and breeds resentment downstream.
This is the policy orientation that synthesizes everything above. Rawls’s fair equality of opportunity, Sen’s capabilities, Cass’s productive pluralism—they all point toward front-loading investment rather than back-loading redistribution.
Tyler Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” rhymes with this: markets and capitalism are powerful, but they need a competent state to maintain the infrastructure and institutions that make them work. It’s not either/or.
The progressive critique is that inputs alone won’t overcome structural disadvantages. The libertarian critique is that government shouldn’t be shaping starting conditions at all. Both miss the point. The goal isn’t to guarantee outcomes or pretend starting conditions don’t matter. It’s to make the game worth playing.
A rigged casino isn’t fixed by giving losers their money back at the end of the night. It’s fixed by un-rigging the games.
What does “investing in inputs” look like?
Education that prepares people for actual work, not just credential accumulation. Freddie deBoer has written extensively on how our current system treats the four-year degree as the only path to dignity, which is both false and destructive—and the credentialism arms race makes everyone worse off.
Infrastructure that makes places economically viable, not just connected to places that are
Family policy that doesn’t penalize single-earner households
Economic policy that maintains domestic productive capacity rather than optimizing purely for consumption. Noah Smith has been tracking the early returns on industrial policy—and they’re more promising than the free-trade absolutists predicted.
Immigration policy that considers effects on existing workers and communities, not just GDP
These aren’t radical positions. They’re what most countries took for granted before the neoliberal consensus declared that markets would handle everything.
What This Means in Practice
Having a framework doesn’t tell you exactly what to think about every issue. But it gives you a way to evaluate positions that doesn’t require consulting your tribe first.
On trade: If communities need economic purpose and boundaries are where accountability lives, then trade policy should be evaluated by whether it strengthens or hollows out the places people actually live. Globalization optimized for consumer prices while treating American towns as acceptable collateral damage. Cass’s work on how trade policy affects communities, not just consumers, is worth taking seriously. So is Noah Smith’s analysis of what a genuine industrial policy might look like—and why both Trump’s tariffs-only approach and the old free-trade consensus miss the mark.
On student loans: If circumstances shape starting points and choices define outcomes, then loan forgiveness gets the sequence backwards. It transfers costs to people who chose differently—those who didn’t go to college, chose cheaper schools, or already paid their loans. That’s outcome-rigging for a favored group. Fix the inputs: reform how colleges charge, expand alternatives to four-year degrees, invest in community colleges and trades.
On immigration: I favor controlled immigration that considers effects on existing workers and communities. Not because immigrants are bad, but because mass influxes can suppress wages and strain institutions in places already struggling—and unlimited movement undermines the bounded solidarity that makes mutual obligation possible. Matt Yglesias has the best version of the pro-immigration case, and even he acknowledges that enforcement and selectivity matter for maintaining political support.
On welfare: A genuine safety net is justified—people fall on hard times through no fault of their own. But a system that indefinitely subsidizes non-participation undermines agency and hollows out communities. Welfare should be a bridge, not a destination. Time limits, work requirements where able, and investment in what makes work possible: childcare, transportation, training.
I’ll be working through specific issues in more detail as this project continues. The framework is the foundation; the applications are where it gets tested.
The Name
I’ve been calling this “classical civic liberalism”—a mouthful, but each word does work:
Classical in the sense of the older liberal tradition—Locke, Smith, Mill—before “liberal” became American shorthand for “left.” Individual liberty, property rights, free markets as defaults.
Civic in its insistence that these operate within bounded political communities. Shared laws, shared institutions, shared fate. The nation-state isn’t a necessary evil to be minimized; it’s the container that makes liberal freedom meaningful.
Liberalism because, despite my criticisms of both libertarians and progressives, I’m still working within that broad tradition. I believe in individual agency, skepticism of concentrated power, and the possibility of a society where people with different visions of the good life can coexist.
“Civic liberalism” already exists as a term—Thomas Spragens used it to argue against both libertarianism and egalitarian liberalism, emphasizing civic virtue and democratic ideals. I’m not claiming to have invented anything. But adding “classical” clarifies where I’m coming from: the older liberal tradition, updated for a world where atomized individualism has proven as hollow as top-down collectivism.
It’s neither libertarian (which treats individuals as the only relevant unit) nor progressive (which treats outcomes rather than inputs as the measure of justice). And it’s not nationalist in any ethnic sense—the boundary is civic, not blood. It’s about who’s in the system together, subject to the same rules, accountable to each other when things go wrong.
Other terms gesture at similar territory. Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty threads through all of this—I want the freedom from interference that classical liberals prize, but I recognize that freedom to flourish requires conditions that don’t appear from nowhere.
The point isn’t the label. It’s having a coherent framework that lets you think through problems rather than react to them.
Why This Matters
We’re living through a political realignment. The old left-right axis is breaking down. Education is replacing income as the primary class marker. The cosmopolitan-nationalist divide is replacing the labor-capital divide.
Most people are navigating this by instinct, picking teams based on cultural affinity rather than coherent principle. That works until it doesn’t—until you find yourself defending positions you don’t actually believe because your team believes them. Or until you’re find yourself questioning everyone around you’s political ranting because it’s so utterly and transparently devoid of any actual thought… just spouting whatever their favorite talking head or TikTok personality most recently told them.
The alternative is to build your own operating system. Figure out what you actually think is true about human beings and society. Reason outward from there. Accept that you’ll end up in uncomfortable places—agreeing with people you’re supposed to oppose, opposing people you’re supposed to agree with.
This is my attempt at that. It’s incomplete and probably wrong in places. Maybe this already exists either in name or philosophy. But the rigor of personal thought… that’s mine, which means I can actually defend it—and more importantly, I can revise it when I’m shown to be wrong.
That feels like progress.