The Henhouse Liberalism Built

A response to Matthew Yglesias. What he calls “postliberalism” is often liberalism’s own elite, anemic offspring.

Matthew Yglesias’s “The fox in liberalism’s henhouse” tells a somewhat compelling story about how a certain style of “updated anti-racism” has spread through liberal institutions. In his account, ideas derived from critical race theory and intersectionality quietly displace liberal premises: groups, not individuals, become the basic units of moral concern; “neutral” rules are treated as covers for domination; justice becomes rebalancing group power rather than protecting everyone’s rights. This doesn’t arrive like Marxism or nationalism, with manifestos and parties. It seeps in through HR trainings, campus workshops, newsroom style guides, a “copy of a copy” circulating among people who can’t cite the original texts and don’t feel they need to.

He is right that many of those texts present themselves as anti-liberal. A standard CRT primer he cites frankly says it “questions the very foundations of the liberal order,” including Enlightenment rationalism and neutral constitutional principles. And when “anti-oppression” or DEI trainings describe “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “urgency” as elements of “white supremacy culture,” they do mark something: traits that earlier liberals treated as civic virtues are recast as obstacles to justice. What that story leaves out, though, is why this politics was so attractive to liberals themselves—and why, for all its radical language, so much of it looks less like a coherent postliberal alternative than like a cramped, elite form of liberalism.

For a long time, critics on the socialist and Black left have argued that what we now call “identity politics,” or what Yglesias identifies as “postliberalism,” is not primarily about overturning liberalism. It takes capitalist markets and core institutions for granted and turns politics into a fight over disparities, representation, and access. Those questions loom largest for professional and managerial layers of women and minorities, who want the full value of their class position, not for working-class majorities whose problem is the job itself, the rent itself, the school itself.

In that sense, the familiar language of race and gender justice often functions as the left wing of neoliberalism: a moralized upgrade to anti-discrimination law, carried by nonprofits and HR departments, expressed as a kind of status dialect among college-educated workers. Much of what Yglesias dislikes is a professionalized offshoot of the post–civil-rights legal order: the concern with bias and inclusion turned into policy, philanthropy, and elite etiquette. It sounds anti-liberal, but its horizon is recognizably liberal: it asks who rises inside the order, not how the order is structured.

None of that makes the right’s war on DEI a real favor to anyone. Even clumsy DEI programs emerged in response to real inequities in jobs, housing, health, and public life. The corporate DEI boom after Black Lives Matter was often about corporate liability and branding, but it also forced uncomfortable questions. The Trump-and-Musk crusade against these efforts is not about designing a better universalism. It is about stripping away even the limited tools institutions have for acknowledging racism and insisting that any attention to race in a nominally post-apartheid society like ours is itself discrimination.

I first met this “updated anti-racism” not in an HR module but as an incoming college freshman in a summer program for social-justice-minded students. We read about power and privilege and did the now-familiar “privilege walk”: step forward if your parents went to college, back if you’ve ever skipped a meal for money reasons, and so on. It was bracing to watch my wealthier, often whiter classmates move steadily ahead while I drifted backward—and bracing for them to see that gap mapped on the floor.

It was also the first time I had language for something I’d felt all my life. I had been tracked into the whiter, wealthier advanced classes in my public schools, vaguely aware I was at some disadvantage I couldn’t quite name. All I really had was “my parents don’t really go on vacation” or “we’re not from here.” Being able to narrate that as a patterned experience of race, class, and migration, not just my own private bad luck, was powerful. In that moment, the exercise did what radical educators hope this kind of popular education can do: make structures visible and intimate, generate empathy, and build a kind of mutual respect that “we’re all equal here” and high-school multiculturalism never quite produce.

Then the summer program ended. The college could not tell us to organize a union, join a tenants’ campaign, or fight for a particular bill without “politicizing” itself. So the energy from that revelation flowed into a kind of secular catechism: self-scrutiny, confession, rituals of listening and “checking your privilege.” The focus slid from “what should we collectively demand?” to “who am I in this hierarchy, and how should I speak?” In the professional worlds many of us entered—universities, nonprofits, media—those were the tools actually on offer. You could write a statement, redesign a workshop, propose a new hiring rubric. You could not easily change who owned what, or what laws got passed.

Capitalism adjusted easily to the new demand, and the media ecosystem reorganized itself around monetizing that identity turn. Identity became a business model. BuzzFeed and its imitators specialized in tiny jolts of recognition—“27 Signs You Grew Up Like This”—that people could circulate as badges of who they are. Corporate brands, prestige media, and political organizations adopted the same logic: content is most shareable when it helps you perform an identity. A politics centered on subtle slights and personal recognition fits that ecosystem perfectly. It feels radical, but it is largely a sophisticated form of liberalism: recognition without reorganization.

All of this sits on top of older fractures in liberalism. Black political thinkers have long argued that American liberalism is both indispensable and inadequate: rights and neutral rules are necessary, but hollow if a racialized political economy decides where you live, who polices you, and what work you can get. Suspicion of liberalism’s “neutrality” is not a foreign pathology; it grows out of that experience. Mid-century liberalism at its best tried to meet those critiques with something more serious than a privilege workshop. The New Deal and Great Society were imperfect attempts to integrate challenges to liberalism from more socialist and anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers—to say, in Lyndon Johnson’s words, that “freedom is not enough” without “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

From the economic side, social democracy emerged as a challenge to liberalism’s inability to cope with industrial capitalism’s inequality and concentrated power. In much of Western Europe, labor and socialist parties treated parliaments and constitutions not as ends in themselves but as tools to tame markets, build welfare states, and give working people real security. In the United States, there was no comparable mass social-democratic party. Instead, a broad, elastic liberalism gradually absorbed pieces of that critique—Progressive Era regulation, the New Deal, civil-rights–era social programs—while still centering individual rights, markets, and pluralism. Bayard Rustin stands in for that American synthesis from the vantage point of Black politics. He called himself both a socialist and a liberal and argued that the Black freedom struggle needed “jobs and freedom” together—civil rights plus full employment, strong unions, and a generous welfare state. That vision never quite solidified here the way it did in Europe.

That synthesis has badly frayed. Labor and mass parties have withered. Democrats lean on donors, consultants, and professionals. Elections that once split along economic lines now divide along cultural ones. In presidential politics, the party has been led not by its electoral left but by figures like Obama, Clinton, Biden, and now Harris—candidates who speak the language of diversity and inclusion while leaving the basic economic order largely intact. Politics has become exquisitely symbolic because symbols are cheap to produce, and maddeningly powerless because real power—over investment, prices, housing, jobs—sits elsewhere. This is the world in which the “identity left” Yglesias attacks takes root, and in which a parallel, identitarian liberalism thrives at the center of the Democratic coalition.

A brief look at Palestine and Gaza shows how tangled this becomes. It is not postliberal radicals who have done the most to exclude Palestinians from respectable politics; it has been liberal and center-left institutions—campaigns, major newspapers, universities—that treated Palestinian voices as too radioactive to touch. At the Democratic National Convention, the Uncommitted movement won a genuinely historic first: an official panel on Palestinian human rights. Yet party planners reportedly resisted including a Jewish speaker and pushed for an all-Arab, all-Muslim panel—turning a question about U.S. policy and arms into a tableau of “Muslims and Arabs” speaking about their pain, while everyone else watched from a safe distance. In that world, the only way for Palestinians to be heard is to speak the one moral language these institutions reliably recognize: the language of civil rights and inclusion, of who counts as fully human and who is allowed into the circle of empathy.

Yglesias is right to worry about what this style of politics does to liberal norms like free expression, due process, and judging people as individuals. There really is a clash of values here. If you think rights, neutral rules, and general principles are the only way a diverse society can argue without tearing itself apart, you have to say so—and you have to be willing to tell your own side that some ideas are simply bad ones. Treating group identity as the master key to moral standing, structuring policy around racial spreadsheets rather than concrete outcomes, or turning every institutional disagreement into a referendum on who feels “unsafe” corrodes the liberal project. You can see a version of that group logic in Netanyahu’s Zionism, which treats the identity of one people as the trump card over any universal principle.

To understand why this politics takes the form Yglesias dislikes, you have to look at when and where it emerges. The people most associated with it are often the college-educated children and grandchildren of the civil-rights and post-colonial era. They grew up being told they lived in “post-racial” democracies, with the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and global decolonization already in the rearview. Then they went to college or into the workforce and discovered that police violence, school segregation, and staggering inequality not only persisted but were often glossed over by the very liberal institutions that claimed to have moved beyond them.

By the Obama years, the classic liberal toolkit was exhausted. The big rights laws were already on the books. Congress had become a machine for gridlock, not for landmark legislation. If you can’t realistically imagine passing a new Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, or full-employment program, you stop arguing about those things and start arguing about behavior and culture. When structural reform is off the table, politics slides toward “microaggressions,” representation, and speech codes.

It is worth underlining that this mangled form of liberalism is not primarily a youth revolt from the left. In 2016 and 2020, younger voters broke for Bernie Sanders, the supposed “class reductionist.” Many of the sharpest identitarian attacks on him came from older, more moderate parts of the liberal coalition, whose economic politics were centrist but whose language had updated to the new anti-racist idiom. What Yglesias is describing is as much a house style of Democratic-leaning institutions—newsrooms, foundations, universities, NGOs, HR departments—as it is a campus fad.

So it’s striking that millennials and Gen Z—people who came of age after the civil-rights era and under the long shadow of Obama—are the ones being cast as the great postliberal threat, while the existence of the world’s largest prison population, three men holding more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined, or that few young people could ever own a home anymore, rarely gets described as “illiberal” at all.

They grew up in an era of peak political gridlock, when the Democratic Party’s liberalism was mostly managerial and defensive: negative partisanship against the right, technocratic stewardship of an unequal status quo, and a posture of guarding the gains of earlier generations rather than setting out a horizon for a different kind of society. That’s a far cry from the liberalism of the 1930s–60s, which, under pressure from socialism, anti-colonial struggles, and civil-rights movements, at least tried to imagine new arrangements of power and security.

Michael Dawson’s typology in Black Visions points to a better inheritance than the one Yglesias is focused on. His “disillusioned liberalism” still sees rights, courts, and constitutional protections as essential, but no longer trust white-dominated institutions to honor their own principles without constant pressure. His “radical egalitarianism” go further, drawing on Reconstruction, the CIO era, and the civil-rights and welfare-state struggles to argue that Black freedom requires broad, universal redistribution in jobs, housing, welfare, and political power, not just protection from discrimination. That is roughly what mid-century American liberalism at its best wrestled with: a New Deal order pushed by labor on one side and a Black freedom movement on the other, forcing liberal politicians and intellectuals to absorb socialist and anti-racist demands into something like a common project.

The worldview Yglesias criticizes is what you get when that kind of synthesis falls apart and only the surface language is left. Two generations were told that the great battles for equality had been won. They watched those promises curdle under Obama and post–civil-rights liberalism, ran up against a political system seemingly incapable of major reform, and went to work in institutions whose only real levers are trainings, statements, hiring decisions, and speech rules. Liberalism won on paper and then stalled in practice. Tumblrized anti-racism rushed in to fill the vacuum.

If liberalism wants to survive that, it can’t just scold. It has to relearn what the liberalism of the thirties through the sixties, under pressure from outside and within, began to do: take socialist and anti-racist critiques seriously enough to change who has power and what material guarantees people actually have, while holding fast to rights, due process, and free inquiry. Dawson’s disillusioned liberalism and radical egalitarianism are reminders that there are richer traditions to draw on than the classical liberalism or perverted identity politics Yglesias describes—traditions that insist on both formal rights and real redistribution. If those are ignored, liberal objectivity will keep sounding like a joke, rights will keep looking like paper, and the henhouse will keep producing the thin, frustrated politics that Yglesias is right to be worried about.