A stimulating piece, but I think you've misdiagnosed the patient. You're right that liberalism lost its aesthetic when it abandoned project for procedure — but your implicit cure, some reawakening of collective civilisational will, concedes too much to the post-liberals. Liberalism's aesthetic greatness was never the product of collective virtue. It was the product of freed individuals, and specifically freed *elites*, making their mark on the world.
Consider the Sydney Opera House. When Jørn Utzon won that competition, the public largely despised the design. The same hostility greeted the neo-Gothic ambitions of lower Manhattan and the early skyscrapers that punctuated Melbourne's skyline in the interwar years. The masses didn't build those things. Ambitious men with audacious patrons did — often in spite of popular sentiment. The lesson isn't that society needed to collectively believe in something grand. It's that the right individuals were sufficiently unshackled to impose their vision on a resistant world, and history vindicated them.
The middle class has never driven aesthetic progress. Left entirely to their own preferences, they will reliably choose comfort, familiarity, and inoffensiveness — the IKEA catalogue as civilisational philosophy. This isn't a moral failing, it's simply a fact about how aesthetic risk-taking works. Great architecture, like great science, is always a minority sport.
What changed after the mid-20th century wasn't that liberalism lost its *spirit*. It's that it progressively destroyed the institutional conditions under which exceptional individuals could act. Zoning laws, heritage overlays, participatory planning processes — all well-intentioned, all catastrophic in their cumulative effect. The decisive voice in shaping the built environment is no longer the ambitious architect or the politician willing to stake his reputation on a vision. It's the retired homeowner who attends every council meeting and whose highest aesthetic principle is that nothing should change. The result is a built environment optimised for the absence of objection: conformist, inoffensive, and therefore utterly without character.
And this is before we even get to the environmentalist ethic that now functions as a hard ceiling on human ambition. We are told we must not only constrain ourselves for the benefit of our neighbours, but for the benefit of nature itself. The ban on GMOs is perhaps the clearest emblem of this: a civilisation that once aspired to transcend biological limits now treats the modification of a grain crop as hubris requiring prohibition. Previous generations of scientists and engineers understood themselves to be in a heroic contest with natural constraints. We've replaced that with a theology of limits dressed up as ecological responsibility.
To restore liberalism's aesthetic is not to summon some collective civilisational virtue. It is simply to restore the conditions under which exceptional individuals can act: gut the planning system, abolish the veto power of the neighbourhood objector, and discard the environmental ethics that treats human ambition as inherently suspect. Then point the liberated ambition outward — toward the Outback, toward the lab-grown protein vat, toward the supercritical CO₂ turbine that makes our current energy infrastructure look like something from a Victorian engineering textbook.
The great liberal aesthetic wasn't built by a confident civilisation. It was built by confident *men*, in a civilisation liberal enough to let them.
But of course this would be the opposite of modern “liberalism”. Which is anti-male, anti-accomplishment, and anti freedom.
It’s a jobs program for lawyers, public sector unions, guilds at the government teet, and ethnic vote banks. It sees great men as nothing more than a problematic revenue source to be harvested.
“Abundance” is just a buzzword, a belief that everything that ails the Democratic Party could be fixed by having the governor abolish single family zoning (hint, localities will just find some other way to keep the poors out, which is why California housing starts aren’t up). Try actually addressing the reason people fled to the suburbs. In Florida , where they actually do that, people build.
You know my kids school is beautiful. They just finished this stunning mural at the entrance. The gardens and the woods are wonderful. The kids have fun and freedom all day.
Of course it’s a private school. Paid for with school vouchers in the far right hell hole of Florida. Where the local liberals are complaining about how people are fleeing public schools now that have to compete with people who get even a fraction of the funding to choose an alternative.
That’s the kind of structural change we need. Liberalism is never going to build anything but a concrete prison for revenue source storage (children) to make sure you can pay off two twenty year pensions and have zero cost share healthcare for life. It’s a racket. A political machine. And it’s going to give you machine outcomes.
Maybe back in the day when government was 10% of gdp, we had little infrastructure, and women and minorities couldn’t vote there was some low hanging fruit out there for public works.
But today? Remember that the civil rights crowd literally protested the moon landing (white man project) because it wanted more welfare spending on the inner city. That’s modern liberalism.
Your right that it was structural changes that are the big deal, but in the case of the USA you have what those changes are wrong. Of the whole list of accomplishments of Liberals he has only welfare, and all the rest also happened prior to WW2 and there is a key meaning there, each thing he lists other than welfare (which happened after WW2) well those things happened before WW2 and as such were the product of a federated, lower case “d” democratic order that combined widely diffused fiscal power and authority (the fed gov remained the smallest of the three gov levels for tax intake amount and much of the new deal stuff was locally directed), locally anchored party machines, decentralized banking/finance ecosystems, regionally sourced procurement with variation, etc. The WPA murals, libraries, courthouses, and New Deal infrastructure you refer to, and I;m referring to financed federally New deal stuff, were designed, negotiated, and executed through very plural local and state institutions; they were an instance of embedded civic sovereignty not a centralized hegemony. Even the TVA operated through intense local contestation, revision, and override; it was not a technocratic command center and it happened inside a politically negotiated regional system, also the tva only happened in six states and there is no comparable program anywhere else.
As an old architect I was curious to read your essay. Art reflecting life or something? I'm not sure what architecture reflects nowadays, I hope not life, but then what? The buildings that are now considered cutting edge are anti-rational. Perhaps starting with Zaha Hadid, or earlier Michael Graves, they are things that are weird, and that is their goal, to be perceived as weird. Some apocryphal story of Ms. Hadid, who made her name by doing spectacular drawings of weirdly angled buildings, etc., being given her first real commission and being astounded when told that of course the floors in the building would have to be level. What!!??! Or perhaps that does reflect exactly the kind of politics we have these days. What??!!!?? It has to . . . work?
Great piece. When I think of liberalism I think of the mansion blocks of Chelsea in London, or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As Samuel Hughes points out, the beautiful parts of today's cities were often built in the 19th and early 20th centuries by private developers. https://substack.com/@scphughes/p-186303405
Liberalism turned leftward in the 1960s thanks to the Great Society and the Warren court which soon infected other English speaking democracies. I have been reading Dominic Sandbrook's history of the UK in the 1970s and the country was essentially ungovernable from about 1970 given the prevailing ideology on left and right at the time. True liberalism was by then thought of as "Gladstone or Manchester Liberalism" and effectively had no supporters left in the senior levels of government until Thatcher came in.
Commenters from Fareed Zakaria to Ruy Texeira to the abundance guys are asking if Democrats/liberals can demonstrate that they are competent to govern. Can they just get the trains to run on time?
Who cares if it's beautiful? Just make it work. If you can't even do that, get out of the way and let the other guys take their shot.
I would argue that liberalism, as an intellectual force, was always counter-balanced by the conservative disposition. I hesitate to use the term “conservatism” because conservatives are not ideologues. They identify as conservatives because they have a certain disposition — one might even call it an aesthetic disposition — that informs their better judgment. And judgment, as this essay eloquently points out, is essential to the good life.
This is well written and thoughtful, I agree in some of the biggest ways, however there is an issue throws it off in at least one big sense, every liberal accomplishment that you list except for the welfare state was almost entirely done by people who werent Liberals as I think your defining them or any way that can make them fit the Liberal socio-political project that we have today, those things were the product of a federated, lower case “d” democratic order that combined widely diffused fiscal power and authority (the fed gov remained the smallest of the three gov levels for tax intake amount and much of the new deal stuff was locally directed), locally anchored party machines, decentralized banking/finance ecosystems, regionally sourced procurement with variation, etc. The WPA murals, libraries, courthouses, and New Deal infrastructure you refer to, and I;m referring to financed federally New deal stuff, were designed, negotiated, and executed through very plural local and state institutions; they were an instance of embedded civic sovereignty not a centralized hegemony. Even the TVA operated through intense local contestation, revision, and override; it was not a technocratic command center and it happened inside a politically negotiated regional system, also the tva only happened in six states and there is no comparable program anywhere else.
Welfare was done by Liberals in strong sense and by this time Liberals were doing lots of other things, But that they even could shows that things had changed alot and also suggests that the real inversion inversion had already begun, and also sullies that big thing of the welfare state because once the distributed base eroded, via financial centralization, administrative consolidation, regulatory harmonization, the displacement of local capital formation, and lots more, this made it so that welfare shifted from complement to substitute.
A stimulating read - thanks. But, as a resident of LoCali, I can’t help but note that the very basic role played by bottom-line thinking $eem$ unacknowledged. Here in the land of sunshine and real-estate development aesthetic considerations generally take a back seat to hypothetical budgets. At one time that was great - at least for Bauhaus fans - until it became pervasive and drab and the cutting-edge got dull. But in terms of rational decision making it’s undeniably cheaper, which dovetails nicely with our Century 21 reality. So here we are. Might as well pretend we love it!
Problem is for every Sydney opera house there are 10 Boston city halls.
I was in Chicago and saw Obama's mausoleum. It's in a great location in a park near Lake Michigan and the stately Museum of Science and Industry. They could have built something extraordinary there but the building is head scratchingly ugly.
A stimulating piece, but I think you've misdiagnosed the patient. You're right that liberalism lost its aesthetic when it abandoned project for procedure — but your implicit cure, some reawakening of collective civilisational will, concedes too much to the post-liberals. Liberalism's aesthetic greatness was never the product of collective virtue. It was the product of freed individuals, and specifically freed *elites*, making their mark on the world.
Consider the Sydney Opera House. When Jørn Utzon won that competition, the public largely despised the design. The same hostility greeted the neo-Gothic ambitions of lower Manhattan and the early skyscrapers that punctuated Melbourne's skyline in the interwar years. The masses didn't build those things. Ambitious men with audacious patrons did — often in spite of popular sentiment. The lesson isn't that society needed to collectively believe in something grand. It's that the right individuals were sufficiently unshackled to impose their vision on a resistant world, and history vindicated them.
The middle class has never driven aesthetic progress. Left entirely to their own preferences, they will reliably choose comfort, familiarity, and inoffensiveness — the IKEA catalogue as civilisational philosophy. This isn't a moral failing, it's simply a fact about how aesthetic risk-taking works. Great architecture, like great science, is always a minority sport.
What changed after the mid-20th century wasn't that liberalism lost its *spirit*. It's that it progressively destroyed the institutional conditions under which exceptional individuals could act. Zoning laws, heritage overlays, participatory planning processes — all well-intentioned, all catastrophic in their cumulative effect. The decisive voice in shaping the built environment is no longer the ambitious architect or the politician willing to stake his reputation on a vision. It's the retired homeowner who attends every council meeting and whose highest aesthetic principle is that nothing should change. The result is a built environment optimised for the absence of objection: conformist, inoffensive, and therefore utterly without character.
And this is before we even get to the environmentalist ethic that now functions as a hard ceiling on human ambition. We are told we must not only constrain ourselves for the benefit of our neighbours, but for the benefit of nature itself. The ban on GMOs is perhaps the clearest emblem of this: a civilisation that once aspired to transcend biological limits now treats the modification of a grain crop as hubris requiring prohibition. Previous generations of scientists and engineers understood themselves to be in a heroic contest with natural constraints. We've replaced that with a theology of limits dressed up as ecological responsibility.
To restore liberalism's aesthetic is not to summon some collective civilisational virtue. It is simply to restore the conditions under which exceptional individuals can act: gut the planning system, abolish the veto power of the neighbourhood objector, and discard the environmental ethics that treats human ambition as inherently suspect. Then point the liberated ambition outward — toward the Outback, toward the lab-grown protein vat, toward the supercritical CO₂ turbine that makes our current energy infrastructure look like something from a Victorian engineering textbook.
The great liberal aesthetic wasn't built by a confident civilisation. It was built by confident *men*, in a civilisation liberal enough to let them.
Great post!
Thanks!
But of course this would be the opposite of modern “liberalism”. Which is anti-male, anti-accomplishment, and anti freedom.
It’s a jobs program for lawyers, public sector unions, guilds at the government teet, and ethnic vote banks. It sees great men as nothing more than a problematic revenue source to be harvested.
“Abundance” is just a buzzword, a belief that everything that ails the Democratic Party could be fixed by having the governor abolish single family zoning (hint, localities will just find some other way to keep the poors out, which is why California housing starts aren’t up). Try actually addressing the reason people fled to the suburbs. In Florida , where they actually do that, people build.
You know my kids school is beautiful. They just finished this stunning mural at the entrance. The gardens and the woods are wonderful. The kids have fun and freedom all day.
Of course it’s a private school. Paid for with school vouchers in the far right hell hole of Florida. Where the local liberals are complaining about how people are fleeing public schools now that have to compete with people who get even a fraction of the funding to choose an alternative.
That’s the kind of structural change we need. Liberalism is never going to build anything but a concrete prison for revenue source storage (children) to make sure you can pay off two twenty year pensions and have zero cost share healthcare for life. It’s a racket. A political machine. And it’s going to give you machine outcomes.
Maybe back in the day when government was 10% of gdp, we had little infrastructure, and women and minorities couldn’t vote there was some low hanging fruit out there for public works.
But today? Remember that the civil rights crowd literally protested the moon landing (white man project) because it wanted more welfare spending on the inner city. That’s modern liberalism.
You write so mopey
Maybe!
Your right that it was structural changes that are the big deal, but in the case of the USA you have what those changes are wrong. Of the whole list of accomplishments of Liberals he has only welfare, and all the rest also happened prior to WW2 and there is a key meaning there, each thing he lists other than welfare (which happened after WW2) well those things happened before WW2 and as such were the product of a federated, lower case “d” democratic order that combined widely diffused fiscal power and authority (the fed gov remained the smallest of the three gov levels for tax intake amount and much of the new deal stuff was locally directed), locally anchored party machines, decentralized banking/finance ecosystems, regionally sourced procurement with variation, etc. The WPA murals, libraries, courthouses, and New Deal infrastructure you refer to, and I;m referring to financed federally New deal stuff, were designed, negotiated, and executed through very plural local and state institutions; they were an instance of embedded civic sovereignty not a centralized hegemony. Even the TVA operated through intense local contestation, revision, and override; it was not a technocratic command center and it happened inside a politically negotiated regional system, also the tva only happened in six states and there is no comparable program anywhere else.
The Sydney Metro is a miracle. Not only is it a huge infrastructure project that looks good and was completed on time, it actually works.
As an old architect I was curious to read your essay. Art reflecting life or something? I'm not sure what architecture reflects nowadays, I hope not life, but then what? The buildings that are now considered cutting edge are anti-rational. Perhaps starting with Zaha Hadid, or earlier Michael Graves, they are things that are weird, and that is their goal, to be perceived as weird. Some apocryphal story of Ms. Hadid, who made her name by doing spectacular drawings of weirdly angled buildings, etc., being given her first real commission and being astounded when told that of course the floors in the building would have to be level. What!!??! Or perhaps that does reflect exactly the kind of politics we have these days. What??!!!?? It has to . . . work?
I don't think the lack of bold aesthetics has much to do with "striving" or muscular or energetic anything.
Most of it is just plain old boring happenstances.
For instance, the sheer brilliance of 60s and 70s musical progression happened because of a confluence of things:
- electricity
- relatively cheap instruments/equipment
- the rise of individual expression coupled with how easy it was for a group of misfits to get together and just play
- the economics of seeing local bands, supporting their development
- cheap rent in cities
- the prolonged education of the youth and reduced need for doing actual work at a young age
- the relatively limited set of other options people had for entertainment
- recorded music being a massive money spinner
No one was striving or muscular or had a vision. It was just a confluence of things that enabled it to happen.
And when it comes to aesthetics, ordinary people are voting with their purchases: they want the bland Ikea look.
And more recently, Federation Square was built in Melbourne. It was bold, visionary, a statement; and it's absolutely fucking ugly.
I dont think we are disagreeing that beauty is incidental to worthy enterprises
Great piece - and it applies to personal aesthetics too. Two-thirds of Australian adults are overweight or obese.
People are just so damn ugly. The fact they don’t care is even uglier.
Great piece. When I think of liberalism I think of the mansion blocks of Chelsea in London, or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As Samuel Hughes points out, the beautiful parts of today's cities were often built in the 19th and early 20th centuries by private developers. https://substack.com/@scphughes/p-186303405
Liberalism turned leftward in the 1960s thanks to the Great Society and the Warren court which soon infected other English speaking democracies. I have been reading Dominic Sandbrook's history of the UK in the 1970s and the country was essentially ungovernable from about 1970 given the prevailing ideology on left and right at the time. True liberalism was by then thought of as "Gladstone or Manchester Liberalism" and effectively had no supporters left in the senior levels of government until Thatcher came in.
I'm sorry, but I can't stand this stuff.
Commenters from Fareed Zakaria to Ruy Texeira to the abundance guys are asking if Democrats/liberals can demonstrate that they are competent to govern. Can they just get the trains to run on time?
Who cares if it's beautiful? Just make it work. If you can't even do that, get out of the way and let the other guys take their shot.
Could even add the Sydney Harbor Bridge as an example.
A lot of Melbourne and Sydney CBD are built beautifully, at the peak of a more confident age
Cargo cult aestheticism.
Just start building, bro, please, bro, some factories and we'll be alive again and making Socialist Realist murals, bro.
Well, no. When your soul is dead, you're not gonna make babies or art.
A phenomenal essay.
I would argue that liberalism, as an intellectual force, was always counter-balanced by the conservative disposition. I hesitate to use the term “conservatism” because conservatives are not ideologues. They identify as conservatives because they have a certain disposition — one might even call it an aesthetic disposition — that informs their better judgment. And judgment, as this essay eloquently points out, is essential to the good life.
Thank you sir
> The Abundance people aren’t wrong, they’re just missing the aesthetic dimension
Check out “Works in Progress” and “the American Housing Corporation” for specifically Abundance liberalism-related aesthetics.
Both have the kind of commitment to beauty within their specific niches that just might galvanize liberals to make something grand again.
This is well written and thoughtful, I agree in some of the biggest ways, however there is an issue throws it off in at least one big sense, every liberal accomplishment that you list except for the welfare state was almost entirely done by people who werent Liberals as I think your defining them or any way that can make them fit the Liberal socio-political project that we have today, those things were the product of a federated, lower case “d” democratic order that combined widely diffused fiscal power and authority (the fed gov remained the smallest of the three gov levels for tax intake amount and much of the new deal stuff was locally directed), locally anchored party machines, decentralized banking/finance ecosystems, regionally sourced procurement with variation, etc. The WPA murals, libraries, courthouses, and New Deal infrastructure you refer to, and I;m referring to financed federally New deal stuff, were designed, negotiated, and executed through very plural local and state institutions; they were an instance of embedded civic sovereignty not a centralized hegemony. Even the TVA operated through intense local contestation, revision, and override; it was not a technocratic command center and it happened inside a politically negotiated regional system, also the tva only happened in six states and there is no comparable program anywhere else.
Welfare was done by Liberals in strong sense and by this time Liberals were doing lots of other things, But that they even could shows that things had changed alot and also suggests that the real inversion inversion had already begun, and also sullies that big thing of the welfare state because once the distributed base eroded, via financial centralization, administrative consolidation, regulatory harmonization, the displacement of local capital formation, and lots more, this made it so that welfare shifted from complement to substitute.
I don't know why the disdain for mixed developments. The great bustling cities of the East and West are so lively *because* of mixed zoning.
Yes on reflection I agree with that
A stimulating read - thanks. But, as a resident of LoCali, I can’t help but note that the very basic role played by bottom-line thinking $eem$ unacknowledged. Here in the land of sunshine and real-estate development aesthetic considerations generally take a back seat to hypothetical budgets. At one time that was great - at least for Bauhaus fans - until it became pervasive and drab and the cutting-edge got dull. But in terms of rational decision making it’s undeniably cheaper, which dovetails nicely with our Century 21 reality. So here we are. Might as well pretend we love it!
Problem is for every Sydney opera house there are 10 Boston city halls.
I was in Chicago and saw Obama's mausoleum. It's in a great location in a park near Lake Michigan and the stately Museum of Science and Industry. They could have built something extraordinary there but the building is head scratchingly ugly.
They also hated the Eiffel tower when it was proposed...
I know an old French guy who said that when they took away the 2024 Olympic torch they should have taken the Eiffel Tower with it...