In 1950, Lionel Trilling argued that liberalism forms America’s sole intellectual tradition. Conservatives, by contrast, vent only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”. Fast-forward 75 years, and Trilling’s stinging rebuke could apply equally to The Argument, a Substack-based magazine newly launched to “make a positive, combative case for liberalism”.

Flush with $4 million in startup cash, The Argument appears to be a home for the so-called abundance tendency, a pundit-led movement that, depending on whom you ask, represents the best chance of saving the Democrats from Donald Trump — or a barely disguised attempt to revivify market-worshipping neoliberalism as the party’s dominant ideology.

The smart money is on the latter. Progressive critics point to The Argument’s neoliberal and libertarian funders, who include the heiress Rachel Pritzker and Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures, among others. They also highlight editor Jerusalem Demsas’s paeans to DOGE back when she worked for The Atlantic. But that’s neither here nor there. More damning are the dreary writing and lack of historical grounding on display in its launch material. These make it hard to imagine The Argument changing the media landscape on its own terms.

Witness Demsas’s opening editorial, headlined “How Do We Live With Each Other?” This is a crucial item for many small journals, expected to set the tone and memorably convey their intellectual and journalistic mission. It was hard enough to pull off in Trilling’s time, let alone in our era of media saturation and algorithmically ravaged attention spans.

Demsas begins with William F. Buckley’s founding of National Review in 1955 and his famous definition of conservatism as “standing athwart history, yelling stop”. That’s an already inauspicious manoeuvre, since it borrows another, older magazine’s tagline, rather than offering one of its own. Indeed, Demsas offers not a single sentence that might jolt or inspire — or even infuriate.

But there is worse to come. Demsas goes on to argue that Buckley-style negativism now defines liberalism as much as it once did conservatism. Fair enough, but here is how she puts it: “Revisiting how academics and thought leaders criticized (or sometimes praised) the conservative movement of the late 20th century for becoming defined by what it was not… it feels those criticisms could easily now be shifted against their former opponents.”

It feels like this isn’t grown-up prose, so permit me to translate: Liberals, who once criticised the conservative movement for defining itself only in the negative, now too often do the same thing. Elsewhere, Demsas tells us that “for all their obsession with Western culture and history, it often feels like none of the postliberal Right have done the reading.”

She makes it clear that The Argument is not only for liberalism, but opposed to the post-liberal trend in American intellectual life. Her definition of liberalism is cobbled together from John Locke and Judith Shklar to mean the “core freedoms to marry who [sic] you love, to read what you choose, and to speak your mind”. She supplements these negative liberties with some welfare-state provisions, thus setting The Argument apart from pure libertarianism.

The problem is that even liberal regimes and thinkers have never been pristinely liberal. Demsas attacks tariffs as a dangerous post-liberal obsession, blissfully ignoring the fact that trade protectionism was one of the foundational points of Alexander Hamilton’s vision of liberal statesmanship, or that the US economy has been tariff-protected for most of its history — not just during the “post-liberal” reign of the Orange Man.

Demsas rails against “anti-immigration attitudes” and pooh-poohs concerns about a lack of multicultural cohesion. Yet she’s seemingly unaware that many prominent liberals have shared these concerns: from Paul Krugman to the New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger to Barbara Jordan, a protégé of Lyndon B. Johnson and the first black woman elected to Congress from the South since the Reconstruction Era.

The Argument editorial dismisses the idea, foundational to classical philosophy, that individual autonomy and profit-seeking should be subordinated to the common good of the community. Yet none of the most serious liberal thinkers and statesmen thought the question was so easily resolved in favour of maximal individual autonomy. This was a weighty tension that drew their best intellectual energies.

By the end, it becomes all too clear that by “post-liberalism”, Demsas has in mind any argument or movement which departs from the neoliberal consensus of a decade ago. Lumping together various Left-populists, antimonopoly activists, socialists and communitarians, as well as post-liberal theorist Patrick Deneen, Trump appointee Stephen Miller, and online racists, is unbefitting of the tradition that she and her colleagues hope to renew. “It feels wrong,” as Demsas might say.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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