The Inner Life of Liberalism

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you might’ve noticed common threads in my writing on liberal virtues , on sympathetic joy , on social conservatism as suffering , on the ethical disaster of Twitter/X , on what happened in Minneapolis , etc. Lately, those have all been coming into focus, or coherence, forming an intellectual project or perspective I’m calling the Inner Life of Liberalism.

The short version: liberalism is not merely a set of principles, institutions, or policy positions but a lived practice. It’s a constellation of everyday habits of attention, perception, sympathetic imagination, and engagement that shape who we become as people and, in the aggregate, determine the health of free societies. The same practices which help make our own lives happier and more flourishing—noticing more, attending to others with genuine care, cultivating discernment, finding comfort in complexity and pluralism rather than demanding conformity—are also the practices that sustain and strengthen liberal democracy. And the disintegrative practices that fragment and degrade us personally are the same ones corroding our politics and political institutions. This coherence has been developing in ongoing conversations with my friend Jason Canon ( @uncanonical.net ).

Here’s the main thrust of how I’m thinking about it: If you ask most people who think seriously about liberalism what it takes to sustain a free society, they’ll talk about institutions: constitutions, courts, elections, the rule of law. Or they’ll talk about principles: individual rights, tolerance, equality before the law. These matter enormously. But they leave something out.

They leave out you. What you do every day. How you pay attention to the people around you. Whether you practice genuine curiosity about lives different from yours or retreat into the comfort of your own certainties. Whether the media you consume and the communities you inhabit are training you to see others as full human beings or as threats, annoyances, or abstractions.

This isn’t fuzzy self-help. The liberal tradition has always had thinkers who understood that free societies depend on the character and habits of the people within them. Somewhere along the way, many lost track of this. The result was a liberalism that could tell you what institutions to build but had much less to say about what kind of people you'd need to sustain them.

One result is that the question of character and virtue—what kind of person should I be? how should I live?—got ceded to conservatives. And their answers, too often, involve cultivating or inculcating values and perspectives that, I think, lead us away from flourishing and away from a society best able to support it.

Correcting this means showing that liberalism has its own rich account of the inner life, and it’s time to recover it. Not by importing moral substance from conservatism, but by taking seriously what was always there: that the practice of paying attention—really attending to what’s in front of you, to who is being harmed, to where your own ideological filters are distorting your view—is both the foundation of an ethical life and the foundation of a liberal society.

I think this also explains something about our current illiberal moment. People who held all the right liberal principles found ways to support deeply illiberal things. How? Because principles alone are underdetermined. They can always be reinterpreted. What you need, alongside principles, is the trained capacity to notice when you’re violating their spirit and to care that you’re doing so, and that capacity comes from practice, not from having read the right books.

The good news—and this is what excites me most—is that the practices which build this capacity aren’t grim obligations. Instead, they’re the very practices that make your life better. Paying attention to others’ experience. Finding genuine delight in the diverse ways others pursue happiness. Choosing communities that help you see your blind spots. Stepping away from platforms that train you toward cruelty and callousness. These aren’t sacrifices you make for the sake of political liberalism. They’re how you build a good life. And it turns out that a society full of people building good lives in this way is a liberal society, whether or not anyone in it has ever read a word of political philosophy.

Jason and I recently recorded a conversation about all of this for my ReImagining Liberty podcast. Give it a listen if you’re curious where this is heading:

ReImagining Liberty 098: The Practice and Inner Life of Liberalism (w/ Jason Canon) - Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog

A podcast conversation.