Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Liberals have a dismissive-avoidant attachment style. At least that is what you learn if you let an ideal-typical liberal find out his attachment style online, in a psychological relationship attachment-type test with the LLM of his choice. Where does the liberal fear of commitment come from?
Is liberalism perhaps too autonomy-oriented, too rational, too neutral, or too critical after all? Is liberal thinking at all open to emotional closeness and affectivity? Or does one enter into a Faustian bargain by doing so? When this issue speaks of a good life, fulfilling relationships, including emotionally intense ones, are certainly part of it. Fortunately, psychology tells us: one’s own attachment type is not set in stone; it can be changed.
Secure liberalism(!) That could be the name of the project that equips liberalism with a secure attachment style. In its double meaning, „secure liberalism” can be read as a call for a new consolidation of liberalism and at the same time, quite descriptively, as a „securely attached liberalism”. In this charming sense of the word, then, the point is to open liberalism further to social bonds without necessarily having to sacrifice any of its striving for autonomy. Following Ralf Dahrendorf, one could also say: it is about turning liberalism from a matter of the head into a matter of the heart.
But how can that succeed? And why now of all times? The current diagnosis of a „crisis of liberalism” can be read as a (renewed) backlash against modernity. Modernity – Weber’s disenchantment of the world, understood as a process – is not only the turn away from the metaphysical, but first and foremost the dissolution of social bonds. Pars pro toto: attachment to place gives way to the Anywhere, traditional images of the family and gender roles become in need of justification, relationship status is made flexible, religion is less central. In return, the modern person successively gains more freedom to shape his own biography. Modernity as a lived liberal programme of emancipation.
Reaction
Intellectual backlashes against this movement are by no means new: today it is the „postliberals”, yesterday, in more moderate form, the communitarians, and the day before yesterday the leading minds of the Conservative Revolution. They can be read as an expression of the boom of an otherwise more or less latent critique of modernity. Liberalism, as the intellectual foundation of modernity, is always quickly identified as the main enemy. The topoi of the backlash remain the same too: atomisation of society, disorientation through the loss of what has grown „organically”, or soullessness through consumerism. According to this diagnosis, then, liberalism founders on itself and leaves people behind with a disoriented attachment style.
The condemnation of modernity then often turns into rather vague political ideologies that prepare fertile ground for authoritarian politics. They postulate, mostly in their right-wing variant, overcoming the diagnosed disorientation through dogma and the sacralisation of „natural” communities and manners. Without wanting to overstretch the relationship analogies, discontent, resentment, and the urge for certainties then lead into those toxic relationships with demagogues that we find today in the USA, observed until recently in Hungary, and will probably continue to see in the future.
Criticism of the caricatures of liberalism that the authors of the backlash construct, only to torch them at once with full ceremony, is justified. But the psychological longing behind it, and the resulting, currently observable political potency of the backlash, should be reason enough to undertake a productive self-critique.
Reflection
This self-reflection can at the same time be formulated as the foundation of secure liberalism. The necessary analytical framework is offered by the concept of life chances developed by the liberal sociologist Dahrendorf. Life chances, Dahrendorf’s attempt at a political and social theory of progress and freedom, consist of a function of options and ligatures. Simplified, the more intuitive concept of options describes the room for decision available to individuals in their respective social position. Ligatures are somewhat harder to grasp. In the abstract, they denote those identity-forming social bonds that give meaning to the decisions to be taken. Ligatures are the guardrails of social life. Classic examples are belonging to a place of residence or a club, family ties, traditions, or gender.
The typology of ligatures is a topic in its own right. Three characteristics matter, though: first, ligatures create bindingness in action. They are the points of orientation for the decision to be made. Second, they work latently; for the individual, ligatures are often self-evident. Third, there is initially an inverse relationship between options and ligatures. Ligatures must, so to speak, be diluted so that new options can arise.
Dahrendorf, who always thought in terms of options, saw early on in the process of what I call dilution the danger of anomie, a world without a foothold. This is the turning point from which the destruction of ligatures leads to the decisions to be made becoming increasingly meaningless for individuals, because they take place in a growing social vacuum. In this way a bridge can be built to the backlash’s disorientation hypothesis. Put pointedly: free choice becomes a practical torment. Then people estranged from the world seek refuge in the invented belongings of fundamentalisms, the total ligatures of the closed society. Freedom turns into unfreedom.
The need for ligatures in order to make meaningful use of options differs from society to society and from time to time. But that also means there are times when the demand for ligatures is greater than the need to expand options. A situation in which liberal thinking has a hard time, but which it must deal with, and to which secure liberalism offers an answer.
Reform
If one follows this analysis, modern liberalism already has a normative goal: expanding options. A secure liberalism turns against this imperative of options; instead it asks about the sweet spot between ligatures and options and looks for modernity-resilient ligatures.
This sweet spot differs from individual to individual and, at the level of society as a whole, surely depends heavily on socio-economic conditions. On top of that come optionalised ligatures: through dilution, many of the old bonds have become practical options. One goes in search of a „new family”, reflects on one’s own gender identity, switches one’s favourite football club, decides against having children, or converts to a new religion. This creates pressure to justify oneself. The otherwise latent ligature becomes, more and more often and for more and more people, a reflexive decision.
A secure liberalism can deal with this in two ways. On the one hand, one can try to make certain optionalised ligatures self-evident again. Such a re-ligaturisation, even if only performative, would have to rely on the sheer power of emotion paired with a hefty dose of unquestioned authority. That hardly squares with the use of practical reason. But it is precisely this irrationality that also opens the door to what Sven Gerst has called dark liberalism, since the latter is meant to give up the primacy of reason.
Or else one creates conditions in which the bonds retain their meaning-giving function and their affective potential even though they must be consciously chosen. This programme, however, is at first a markedly „thinner” secure liberalism. If one wants to supplement a liberal social order in the spirit of this approach in order to ward off anomie, one quickly arrives at the classic topics such as education, institutions enriched by soulcraft, the promotion of culture and voluntary work.
To make secure liberalism stronger, then, what is needed are modernity-resilient ligatures that can withstand modernity. These are ligatures that can on the one hand give people orientation, on the other hand create deeply felt belonging, and on top of that are compatible with many choices. Unlike optionalised ligatures, they still work latently but are no longer reflected upon. Modernity-resilient ligatures are still more given than chosen.
Liberal virtues are readily brought into position for this task. But virtues too often lack affective potential. The Ukrainian Воля (Volia) is a better example of a modernity-resilient ligature. Воля can be translated with the words „freedom” and „will”. For Ukrainians, however, Воля is more than a concept. Whoever refers to Воля often justifies his own social engagement by it or draws psychological resilience from it. Воля is a moral intuition and has become an attitude to life. At the collective level, this shared point of reference has given rise to an identity-forming and largely shared Воля narrative. Воля motivates engagement for freedom, gives meaning, and on top of that is an intense feeling; the ideal-typical modernity-resilient ligature.
Realpolitik
The logical consequence of these considerations would be to proclaim the emergence of modernity-resilient ligatures as a fundamental goal of liberal realpolitik. The problem of ligature dilution can at least explain some prominent phenomena of practical politics: the growing number of swing voters, the electoral success of vibe politics, or the culture war, read as a conflict over the optionalisation of ligatures. Under these conditions, however, the more interesting practical question is perhaps not how to create ligatures, but how to make communicative use of the high political and affective potential of ligatures in a liberal sense.
For liberal political semantics this is genuinely challenging. Ligatures are often made politically effective through an apologia of the normal, through the articulation of a need for continuity, or by reference to pre-moral intuition: it is so because it is so. Liberals have no language for this. Armin Nassehi has called this lack of adequate concepts for referring politically to ligatures the conservative problem of reference. Liberals have an equivalent liberal problem of reference. What could a liberal treatment of this problem look like?
Liberal positions must find a new kind of legitimation, one that argues primarily in terms of bonds, yet without essentialist mystification. The recipe: a pre-moral intuition – the need for recognition, say, or empathy – is rhetorically interwoven with a suitable ligature in order to justify one’s own programme.
So is it liberal to argue for rearmament as a pure status and prestige project (intuition) of the nation (ligature)? Probably not. To justify a pension system fair to future generations not with intertemporal freedom but with sacrifice for one’s own children? I am not sure. Arms deliveries to Ukraine out of loyalty to a European neighbour? Perhaps more so. Framing self-determined dying as a way of caring for family and friends? More interesting still.
Even if caution is called for: beyond the slippery slope of the apologia of the „normal”, there are ways to integrate these concepts and make them usable for liberal positions.
People will not lose their need for belonging. In times of backlash against modernity, that too often leads down authoritarian paths. Secure liberalism is the approach for a liberal therapy against this. By overcoming liberal fear of commitment and integrating social belongings into a normative telos for liberal thought and action, secure liberalism also offers a suitable framework for reflections on the good life. Freedom, in any case, remains the first and highest goal.
So liberalism can change its attachment style. Whether a secure liberalism can also develop enough practical political clout to succeed? Now is the time to try it out!
