Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
The German freedom movement sits in a job interview. Question: „What is your greatest weakness?" Answer: „After the past decades I am perhaps a little too spoiled by success. Also [tries in vain to smile modestly]: I admit, my personality is very demanding and many-sided."
Looking at the bloodless remains of the German freedom movement, this is not just a meme. The dominant idea is the comforting expectation that things will sort themselves out again if one only communicates the same content correctly. But liberalism is no natural consequence of history. While the liberals jet from one Quo-Vadis-Liberalism? conference to the next, the enemies of the open society have long been playing in another league. Left and right ignite the hearts of the young generation: with narratives that seem to offer answers to the problems of our time. With long breath and an understanding of the competition of ideas that has been completely lost on the liberals.
In the search for a narrative that makes liberalism competitive again, those who do not want to settle for this state of affairs should pick up Tolkien’s classic The Lord of the Rings. Not, however, to find their own comfort in the David-against-Goliath story of an alliance of free peoples against authoritarian Mordor. Outsider status alone is no guarantee of success. The decisive motif of the book is not one of the great battles, but a single, almost unavoidable question: why does one not simply use the ring, power in stylised form, oneself to defeat evil?
A temptation liberals have to face. The envy of other schools of thought, which are explicit about their claim to power, is understandable. After all, it is sheer power that allows authoritarians of every colour to rouse the masses with seemingly simple solutions. Calls for a Dark Liberalism, however, do not only play with fire, as Sven Gerst sums up. They bring liberalism onto a playing field on which it has nothing to win and everything to lose. A liberalism that strives for power would end like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: a corrupted and split personality that has forgotten who it once was.
Because the central historical insight for liberalism reads: the problem is not who bears the ring, but that the ring exists. Freedom does not fail first because of bad rulers, but because of the existence of power that bundles itself in the hands of a few. The early liberals knew that. Madison recommended in the Federalist Papers as a construction principle: „ambition must be made to counteract ambition”, freedom arises where power meets power. His comrade Jefferson observed: „The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” And Acton put it sharply: „Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Freedom does not arise where one governs well, but where power is distributed, avoidable, and never final.
Liberalism does not need to deny itself to win young minds and hopeful hearts again, and to oppose authoritarianism effectively. A liberalism wholly oriented toward avoiding and fighting unavoidable power lets the culture war be the culture war. It is forward-looking; the defining ideal of a world in which human beings have been doing better for centuries, and in its opposition to power as sexy as the ‘68ers.
That means a real turn away from the sad liberal reality of past decades, in which liberalism kept making its peace with power as long as that power was directed against the larger enemy of the moment. True to the motto „the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, the freedom movement lost direction:
The radical and principled neoliberalism of Hayek, Thatcher, and Reagan withered over the years into an ideas-less pro-business conservatism. Dismissive toward every reference to the excesses of economic concentrations of power, liberalism lost a whole generation to the climate movement and a re-strengthened left. Perhaps the heaviest blow to liberal credibility, however, is the drift of considerable parts of the freedom movement to the right, and the hope to find there allies in the „culture war” against the supposedly woke mainstream.
Anyone who, as a consequence, sees liberalism as a slightly more market-friendly version of Red-Green may have his heart in the right place, but is just as much on the wrong track. The permanent public oscillating of liberalism and its representatives in Germany, the ridiculous infighting between „libertarians” and „social liberals”, are symptoms of the same illness: instead of working with principles, one wears oneself out on enemies.
As a consequence, not much is left of liberalism beyond good stories, and so it finds itself again in the situation Hayek already described in 1949: „We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty.”
An anti-authoritarian liberalism, fully focused on the avoidance of unavoidable power, could be this intellectual adventure. It could free itself from the BWL-Justus image of the German liberal movement, which is rightly accused of clientelist politics, detachment, and a lack of principle. And it could win the hearts of all those young people who want to make the world more just.
For that, one would have to develop a programme that appears to the present as obscene as Olympe de Gouges’s demand for women’s suffrage or William Wilberforce’s fight against slavery seemed to their contemporaries. Starting points would arise where unavoidable power is not questioned.
One of the least questioned concentrations of power is the state monopoly on education. State schools are unavoidable for almost everyone, except for a very small group that can afford otherwise. Their design is politicised right into the classroom, and the results are dreadful, in the literal sense of the word: here the most enthusiastic beings in this world are structurally trained out of their curiosity.
The same goes for law. Bruno Leoni argued back in 1961 in Freedom and the Law that law is discovered, not made, through the resolution of concrete disputes, through Common Law, custom, and private arbitration. A centralised legislative system is subject to the same epistemic limits as a centrally planned economy. Overlapping polycentric legal orders, based on sector-specific private courts, are today, however, accessible only to the very few: the private legal orders in the New York „Diamond District”, in the global cotton B2B market, or in the market for high-quality art show how efficient and effective non-state orders can be.
Even more obscene is migration: citizenship means a birth monopoly. Anyone born in the wrong country is permanently and forcibly excluded from better institutions, markets, and chances. State migration prohibitions are structurally the same as a cartel preventing market entry. In a sector where „trillion-dollar bills lie on the sidewalk”, there would be enough potential surplus to privatise migration and internalise the externalities that arise.
And finally the credit and money markets, where a banking licence today means the licence to print money. In hardly any private sector is the power imbalance between customer and provider as large as in the financial sector; opaque regulation makes it a lucrative sector for power accumulation. That also means: when something goes wrong, losses are socialised through the state. A technological way out exists: cryptography enables self-custody and so the efficient storage and transfer of wealth without an intermediary, without a bank, without state approval. Transparent, publicly verifiable protocols replace trust in opaque cartels.
The basic formula of this liberalism is simple: it trusts the individual and his unbounded creative power and distrusts, without exception, every unavoidable concentration of power. It does not play along with the game of authoritarians and statists, who every four to five years take power from each other. In the next job interview, that sounds like this: Question: „What is your greatest weakness?” Answer: „I do not want the job. I am only here to tell you that no one should have it.”
