The Henhouse Liberalism Built

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

The premise of Matthew Yglesias’s “The fox in liberalism’s henhouse” is announced in its title. Liberalism is the henhouse; something has gotten in. The something is an updated anti-racism, drawn from critical race theory and intersectionality, that has spread through liberal institutions while quietly replacing their premises—groups displacing individuals as the unit of moral concern, “neutral” rules reread as instruments of domination, justice redefined as the rebalancing of group power rather than the protection of everyone’s rights. It does not arrive the way Marxism or nationalism did, with manifestos and parties. It seeps in through HR trainings, campus workshops, and newsroom style guides: a copy of a copy, passed among people who could not cite the original texts and do not feel the need to.

It is a careful account of how the fox behaves. What it never quite asks is where the fox came from—and the answer, I think, is that there is no fox. The henhouse produced this itself.

Yglesias is right that the source texts present themselves as anti-liberal. The standard CRT primer says outright that it questions the very foundations of the liberal order; the anti-oppression trainings really do file “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “urgency” under the heading of white-supremacy culture, recasting as pathologies the traits an earlier liberalism counted as virtues. But institutions do not adopt theories. They adopt procedures. What a foundation or a newsroom metabolizes from these texts is never the critique of the liberal order itself—that part is left on the seminar table—but a new etiquette the order can absorb without strain: a workshop, a style guide, a hiring rubric. The doctrine is radical on the page and liberal in operation. This is the thing Yglesias has caught, and he has mistaken its costume for its body.

The observation is not new; it is the argument the socialist and Black left has pressed for decades. Adolph Reed Jr. and Nancy Fraser, from somewhat different positions, each described a politics that took capitalist markets and the basic institutions as given and confined itself to disparity, representation, and access—the questions that press hardest on the professional and managerial fractions of women and minorities seeking the full value of their class position, and least on the working majorities whose difficulty is the job itself, the rent itself, the school itself. In that form the language of race and gender justice functions as the left wing of neoliberalism: a moralized extension of anti-discrimination law, carried by nonprofits and personnel departments, spoken as a dialect of status among the credentialed. Its horizon is not the overthrow of the order but advancement within it. It asks who rises inside the house, not how the house is built.

None of which makes the right’s campaign against DEI a service to anyone. Even the clumsiest diversity programs answered real inequities in work, housing, and health, and the corporate enthusiasm that followed 2020—however much of it was liability management dressed as conscience—at least forced uncomfortable questions. The crusade now waged against it by Trump and Musk proposes no better universalism. It removes even the modest instruments institutions had for acknowledging racism, on the theory that in a society that has formally disavowed its caste arrangements, any notice of race is the discrimination that remains.

I encountered this anti-racism not in a personnel module but as a college freshman, in a summer program for the socially conscientious. We read about power and privilege and performed the now-canonical privilege walk—step forward if your parents went to college, back if you had ever skipped a meal to save money. It was instructive to watch my wealthier and whiter classmates draw steadily ahead while I fell behind, and instructive for them to see the distance laid out on the floor. It was also the first time I had words for something I had felt without naming: that I had been tracked into the whiter, more affluent classes of my public schools at some disadvantage I could render only as “my parents don’t really take vacations.” To recast that as a patterned matter of race, class, and migration rather than private luck was, for a moment, a genuine education. The exercise did what radical pedagogy hopes to do. It made a structure visible.

Then the program ended, and the limits of the form became visible too. A college cannot instruct its students to organize a union or fight for a bill without compromising its tax status and its self-image; what it can offer is the examined conscience. So the energy of that revelation drained into a secular catechism of self-scrutiny and confession, and the question shifted from what we might collectively demand to who I was in the hierarchy and how I ought to speak. In the institutions most of us entered afterward—universities, foundations, newsrooms—those were the available instruments. One could issue a statement, redesign a training, revise a rubric. One could not readily alter who owned what, or what passed into law. The culture obliged: an entire media economy arose to convert the identity turn into product, trafficking in small shocks of recognition—27 Signs You Grew Up Like This—that the reader could brandish as evidence of a self. A politics of the subtle slight suited the machinery exactly. It felt insurgent and consisted, for the most part, of recognition in place of any rearrangement.

Here the essay’s two villains turn out to be one. The campus activist conducting the privilege walk and the party strategist who speaks fluent inclusion while leaving the distribution of wealth untouched appear to be antagonists—the insurgent and the establishment she denounces. They are in fact dialects of a single condition. Both offer recognition because neither can any longer offer redistribution. The activist has the tools her institutions permit; the strategist has the tools a donor coalition permits; and in both cases the symbolic flourishes precisely where the material has been foreclosed. To see how that foreclosure happened, one has to recall what liberalism was briefly able to do, and stopped.

American liberalism has always been, by the lights of its most serious Black critics, at once indispensable and insufficient—its rights and neutral rules necessary, and hollow wherever a racialized economy still decides where one lives, who does the policing, and what work is on offer. Suspicion of liberal neutrality is not an import; it grew on native ground. And for a few decades liberalism answered that suspicion with more than a workshop, under pressure from two directions at once. From the economic side came the example of European social democracy, which, as Adam Przeworski argued, treated parliaments and constitutions not as ends but as instruments for taming markets and building welfare states. America produced no mass party of that kind; instead an elastic liberalism absorbed fragments of the critique—the regulatory state, the New Deal, the Great Society—while keeping rights and markets at its center. Bayard Rustin gave the synthesis its clearest American statement from within Black politics: a self-described socialist, he held that the freedom struggle required jobs and freedom together, civil rights joined to full employment, strong unions, and a generous floor. It was that combined pressure that moved Lyndon Johnson to declare, at Howard in 1965, that freedom was “not enough”—that the country owed “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

The synthesis frayed and then dissolved. The unions and mass organizations that had supplied its pressure withered; the Democratic Party turned to donors, consultants, and professionals; contests once settled along lines of economic interest came to be settled along lines of culture. In presidential politics the party has been led not by its economic left but by Obama, Clinton, Biden, and Harris—figures fluent in the grammar of diversity who left the structure of ownership very nearly as they found it. Politics grew exquisitely symbolic, symbols being cheap to manufacture, and correspondingly powerless, since the levers over investment, prices, housing, and wages now sat elsewhere. That is the vacancy the identity left was summoned to fill, and the same vacancy in which an identitarian liberalism came to flourish at the center of the coalition.

It is in this light that the casting of the young as the great postliberal menace looks least convincing. The millennials and members of Gen Z so charged came of age after the civil-rights era and beneath the long shadow of Obama, instructed that the decisive battles had already been won, and then discovered that mass incarceration, school segregation, and a widening inequality had not only survived but were frequently administered by the very institutions claiming to have transcended them. By the time they reached working life the old toolkit was spent: the landmark statutes were enacted, Congress had become an engine of deadlock, and no one could seriously propose a new Voting Rights Act or a program of full employment. When structural reform is unavailable, attention migrates to conduct and culture—to the microaggression, the panel’s composition, the disputed word. Meanwhile the largest prison population on earth, a handful of men holding more wealth than the bottom half of the country, and a generation priced permanently out of a home are seldom filed under “illiberal” at all. Nor is the phenomenon, at bottom, a rebellion of the young from the left: in 2016 and 2020 the young broke heavily for Bernie Sanders, the supposed class reductionist, and many of the sharpest identitarian attacks on him issued from older and more moderate quarters whose economics had stayed put while their vocabulary modernized. What Yglesias describes is less a campus fashion than the house manner of a set of institutions—newsrooms, foundations, universities, NGOs, personnel offices—that happen to lean Democratic.

Palestine is the clarifying case, and it cuts against the diagnosis. It was not postliberal radicals who did the most to keep Palestinians outside respectable politics but liberal and center-left institutions—campaigns, leading newspapers, universities—for which the Palestinian voice was simply too charged to handle. At the 2024 Democratic convention the uncommitted movement secured a genuine first, an official panel on Palestinian human rights, whereupon, by several accounts, the planners balked at seating a Jewish speaker and pressed for an all-Arab and all-Muslim arrangement—converting a dispute over American policy and American weapons into a tableau of Muslims and Arabs narrating their suffering while everyone else looked on from a safe remove. The maneuver is the thesis in miniature. The only register in which these institutions can hear a Palestinian is the register of recognition—who counts as fully human, who is admitted to the circle of sympathy—because the other register, the one concerning arms and policy and power, is precisely the one they have closed. The structural question goes unasked because asking it would cost something.

For all that, Yglesias is right to be uneasy about what the style does to the liberal habits of free expression, due process, and the judgment of persons one at a time. The clash of values is real; if one believes that rights and general principles are how a plural society quarrels without dissolving, one must say so, and be prepared to tell one’s own side when an idea is merely bad. To make group identity the master key to moral standing, or to convert every disagreement into a referendum on who has been made to feel unsafe, does corrode the thing. But the group-as-trump-card is not a disease of the left alone; it reaches its purest form on the nationalist right, in a Zionism that offers the identity of one people as the final answer to any universal claim. The logic Yglesias fears is general, and he has met only its left dialect.

Michael Dawson’s Black Visions preserves a richer inheritance than either of the poles between which Yglesias moves. Its “disillusioned liberalism” keeps faith with rights and courts and constitutional protection while withdrawing trust from the white-run institutions expected to honor them unpressured; its “radical egalitarianism” goes further, drawing on Reconstruction, the industrial-union upheaval of the thirties, and the welfare-rights tradition to insist that Black freedom requires a broad and universal redistribution—of work, housing, income, and power—and not merely a shield against discrimination. That is, more or less, what mid-century liberalism was compelled to wrestle with when labor pressed from one side and the freedom movement from the other. The politics Yglesias dislikes is what is left of that wrestling once the synthesis has collapsed and only its vocabulary survives.

Two generations were told the great contests were settled, watched the settlement curdle under a liberalism grown managerial and defensive, and went to work in institutions whose only instruments were the training, the statement, and the hiring decision. Liberalism prevailed on paper and then stopped. Into the empty room rushed a flattened, forwardable anti-racism, radical in its phrasing and powerless in its effect.

If liberalism means to survive its own offspring, reproach will not be enough. It will have to recover what it was learning between the thirties and the sixties under pressure from without and within: to take the socialist and anti-racist demands seriously enough to alter who holds power and what the powerless are guaranteed, while keeping faith with rights, due process, and free inquiry. Short of that, its objectivity will go on sounding like a joke and its rights will go on reading like paper, and the henhouse will go on producing the thin and frustrated politics that Yglesias, having named the symptom, has taken for the disease. There was never any fox. There was only the house, and what it had stopped being able to feed.