In the last decade, especially since the Brexit referendum in the UK, it’s become obvious that political systems around the world are in the midst of a significant realignment. Parties, organizations, and even demographics that once stood for free markets and small government today champion protectionism and state institutions that muscle their way into the private sphere. In a move that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago, U.S. neoconservatives like Bill Kristol make common cause with liberal socialists and denounce what they term a “kleptocratic, autocratic cabal.” And some on the one-time granola left have joined biological essentialists on the right to oppose modern medical and pharmaceutical interventions. This has corresponded with a change in posturing by countries like Russia and China away from attempts to fit into the international liberal consensus. Today, these countries are better understood as Anne Applebaum has categorized them: as members of a movement seeking international legitimacy for autocratic governments.
This unfamiliar political landscape can leave some of liberalism’s defenders struggling to tell left from right. Understanding the role that principles play in politics can help to ground the defense of liberalism in a constantly changing world.
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Liberal politics are emergent and uncontrollable. Engagement should be thought out and deliberate, and it must reckon with our inability to control narratives, coalitions, and outcomes. Principles in politics provide coordination points around which an emergent politics can happen. That’s exactly why they’re necessary, even if they can’t provide the level of control some political actors might wish for.
Coalitions are a part of democratic politics—a hotly contested part in times of political realignment. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the enemy of an enemy is not always a friend. Especially among people and groups with a coherent vision for the world, there is a temptation to craft a prior, detailed, agreed-upon policy agenda for any political coalition—or to litigate the compatibility of potential partners fighting for a given political cause before the partnership can be formed. That temptation serves no one well.
In a conversation with The UnPopulist’s Shikha Dalmia, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie offered an alternative to granular, programmatic politics. What’s needed isn’t a judgement on the compatibility of policy agendas. “Inasmuch as you need something unifying, identify a set of principles.”
This is useful advice for liberals. With a vision of where liberals ought to go, individuals and groups can identify a set of politically relevant principles that support their vision. When those principles prove also to be politically salient, they can motivate many people in many ways without specifying a single, unifying vision.
Since liberalism insists on impartial government institutions, it needs liberals who bring aspirational visions for the world into persuasive, democratic politics. Understanding the role of principles in politics provides a framework within which liberals can set aside their qualms about combining ambitious visions of how the world should work with political action. Liberal politics constrains the pursuit of ambitious visions by insisting on the equal rights of dissenters. Liberal principles are needed both within those politics and to defend the institutions and values of an open society, which keep those politics liberal and give them their salutary effects.
What Principles Demand—and What They Don’t
Judith Shklar provides an example of how principles can influence politics in “The Liberalism of Fear.” Shklar argues for “putting cruelty first” as a principle of political morality that can unite a cluster of liberalisms, despite their being based on different premises and with different visions of an ideal world of free and equal people.
Shklar defines cruelty as “the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter.” It is relevant to liberals because the systematic fear of institutionalized cruelty makes freedom impossible.
What makes cruelty a public and political problem is that it is unavoidable in any politically organized society. Fear of cruelty is a result of “arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime,” as well as the “informal coercion and educative social pressures that even the most ardent anarchist theorists have suggested as acceptable substitutes for law.” The challenge presented by the liberalism of fear is therefore to minimize the capacity for cruelty that all social orders rely on.
Putting cruelty first means prohibiting it, except in cases where the potential for some cruelty can prevent greater cruelty. While universal, enforceable rules create a power imbalance that cruelty relies on, they may nonetheless be the best option when the alternative is the dominance of the strong, left unbound by such rules. It is inherently dangerous to liberty to create state power strong enough to impose rules on powerful individuals and groups. But state capacity, particularly in a liberal democracy, provides better protection for the weak—the likely victims of cruelty—than unconstrained, arbitrary power.
Shklar argues that the principle of minimizing cruelty means that liberals have to keep agents of the government—those who can command its monopoly on force—constrained by impartial, transparent rules. The liberalism of fear demands that the government and its agents be always on the defensive when it comes to their ability to use state power against anyone.
What makes this a principle and not a prescription is that Shklar doesn’t make demands about how that ought to be accomplished. Indeed, Shklar spends most of her essay explaining all the demands that the liberalism of fear does not make. It does not demand that liberals aspire to become Lockean rights-defending citizens or John Stuart Mill’s free people pursuing progress. It doesn’t require belief in natural rights, utilitarian calculations, or Kantian imperatives, and it can do without Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism.
Because it is liberal, the liberalism of fear has some demands for institutions—democratic government, the rule of law, and an institutional defense of the private sphere, including through property rights—without which liberalism is “doctrinally incomplete.” Further, that fear is a basic human experience makes its demands cosmopolitan and universal. But the liberalism of fear does not provide a single motivating good, a summum bonum, towards which liberals should work, nor does it demand any particular underlying philosophy for any individual’s liberalism. To demand either would restrict its compatibility with more particular strains of liberalism. Instead, the liberalism of fear is motivated by a summum malum, an evil that everyone recognizes and would avoid if they could.
The power to inflict cruelty inspires fear. That fear is physiological and universal; its presence makes freedom impossible, and the power that makes it possible is unavoidable. This makes the fear of cruelty an ever-present political problem, one capable of uniting liberals of many cultures and social statuses, and also one capable of explaining the history and purposes of liberalism in a way that can be relevant for the future.
Cruelty is always relevant to liberals; what varies is its political salience. Cruelty is less politically salient for secure people in stable liberal countries. But taking freedom for granted can atrophy political empathy for the weak. This explains why the weakest and most likely victims of cruelty might not be able to provide the politically rousing energy needed to mobilize around the liberalism of fear. Shklar suggests that this failure should shame liberals who let the victimization of minorities or outsiders slide, or even make excuses for it.
Whenever that atrophied empathy can be reinvigorated, or when enough people start to feel threatened, cruelty regains political salience. When it has salience, opposition to cruelty can draw together people with a variety of motivations and policy prescriptions.
The point of this overview is not that the liberalism of fear ought to be the motivating principle for building liberal alliances. Rather, Shklar illustrates how a political principle is something “around which liberalism can be built, especially at present.”
With that principle illustrated, though, liberals should make putting cruelty first a core principle. Cruelty is often the intended effect of applied political power. In Shklar’s present (1989) and our own, “We say ‘never again,’ but somewhere someone is being tortured right now, and acute fear has again become [a] common form of social control.” To this, liberals should add commitments to principles of liberal neutrality against corruption and personalism; of commitment to democratic government; and of cosmopolitan universalism in our politics. These are the principles that make up our commitment to the open society. They also speak to the specific challenges liberalism faces today.
Principles Enable Coordination
In his conversation with Dalmia, Bouie offers more examples of unifying political principles that can illustrate further. One is the role that opposition to the expansion of slavery played as the organizational lodestar of the nascent U.S. Republican Party. For those first Republicans, opposition to expanding slavery was more than an internally coherent mission statement. It also provided a guiding principle and a public-facing signal to sympathetic political actors and groups.
The principle of opposing slavery’s expansion made the Republican Party’s project legible to fellow travelers. What helped that principle seed a movement was its salience. The abuse of federal power by slave states against free states and the aggressive maneuvering by slave states to hold onto their disproportionate representation made stopping slavery’s expansion relevant to even the free northerners whose sympathy for enslaved Americans was insufficient to motivate them.
At the same time, abolitionists, for whom the Republican Party didn’t go far enough, nonetheless had a clear understanding that Republican candidates would fight the slave power. By attracting allies like abolitionists, free labor organizers, and northern opponents to overbearing southern demands for federal power, the Republican Party provided a coordination point around which groups could find one another, creating opportunities for cross-pollination and cooperation.
This is an underrated feature of clearly articulated political principles: Political participation is costly, and many citizens don’t have the resources or bandwidth to become deeply involved, even when they do have the inclination. When a group or institution stands behind a clear principle, it helps those who share that principle understand where to direct their limited resources, and creates spaces and places where sympathetic actors can meet, coordinate, and plan. When that institution is highly visible, as in the case of a successful political party, these effects are amplified, allowing the institution to influence both salience and accessibility.
In contrast to overlapping circles of activism around a clear principle, rationalized brokerage politics that tries to impose coherence and order onto activism should be expected to drown simple principles in convoluted, overhedged, soulless policy agendas, which try not to offend anyone and so inspire no one. These processes can also be hijacked by activists skilled at this kind of work, but whose message and goals are not the ones understood by and moving to the people who need to be mobilized.
A more contemporary example emerged during heavy federal immigration enforcement action in Minneapolis in early 2026. Locals united around a principle of protecting neighbors, with a shared, cosmopolitan understanding of who qualified as a neighbor. This simple and evocative message united people within and beyond Minnesota.
Motivated by protecting neighbors, activists could take many paths. Some chose a confrontational—ultimately dangerous—approach: monitoring, recording, and spreading the word about the movement of federal agents. Others focused on the likely victims of federal power: helping kids get to school, or delivering groceries and medication to people’s homes. Those too distant for direct action created protest art, sent money to local organizations, or contacted elected representatives on behalf of the Minnesota protesters.
A shared political principle provides a direction and a goal against which trade-offs can be understood. Motivated by this commitment, individuals and groups work in the same direction, coordinating when they can be connected and when it makes sense to do so. These efforts will also be tailored to the capacity of any given group of activists, allowing them to step in where they might otherwise be “priced out” by others’ politics.
The ability of any political principle to act as a coordination point depends not only on the high profile organizers behind it, but on its salience with ordinary citizens. It’s here that principles-based coordination demands that liberals demonstrate some faith in their fellow citizens.
Humility and Hope
A tricky thing about political coalitions is that they are emergent. This ordinarily puts them beyond the control of any individual or institution. Thinking about which principles to support helps to reckon with the reality that we cannot control which or whether the principles we support prove salient and so able to define emerging coalitions.
There’s an old concern, illustrated by those most frustrated by the political descriptors of “left” and “right,” about flattening the richness of the beliefs held by members of political coalitions down to only a few issues. Coalitions have to elevate some concerns and set aside others to allow people to work together towards any shared goal. There is a wish to do away with such flattening by eschewing coalitions and working with anyone who shares your goals on an issue-by-issue basis. This is a fine strategy for anyone motivated by a particular issue.
But when the motivating factor isn’t achieving change along a single margin but preventing norm or institutional collapse or facing a powerful political opponent, broader coalitions that are appropriate for facing these challenges will tend to emerge around the principles salient for the most people. It’s hard to know what those principles will be ahead of time. Shklar’s insight, along with the costliness of politics, gives us some clues.
Actual or perceived danger to things that people value—such as threats to their freedom from fear—will tend to draw more people into political action. The issues that will mobilize less-political people are likely to be simple, intuitive, and easy to understand: Protect our Neighbors. Canada Strong. No Kings.
Simple, imprecise, and frankly vibes-forward principles may sound awful to those concerned about political coalitions. Everyone with a cohesive idea of how government should work (what Adam Smith called a “spirit of system”) will be disappointed by the inability of emergent, pluralist political coalitions to conform to their more detailed vision. The only people who are ever completely happy with the policy positions of a political coalition are those who let their coalition set their policy positions.
It is also worrying for those with a more conservative sensibility. Principles-only coordination lacks precision. It leaves the door open to pushes for substantial change, which can be bad as easily as good. Among those willing to entertain the possibility of dramatic political action, more conservative voices will be concerned about the relatively small influence of their personal beliefs on the political forces they seek to influence. Both worries can make forming political coalitions around mere principles pretty scary.
As an example, imagine someone relatively happy with the status quo before the ascent of illiberal politics. They might demand, as a price of their joining the coalition, that any coalition must resist calls for the dramatic changes that broad dissatisfaction might justify. Or they might oppose allowing those changes to proceed without careful direction through prior commitment to more specific policy goals.
Any particular person or group is certainly free to try defining their coalition ahead of time, but no one has that much control over politics. Abolitionism was the most moral of the motivating principles when the Republican Party emerged. But if abolitionism, or even just anti-slavery politics, had been enough to unite a critical mass, historians would be talking about what emerged from the abolitionist movement as the most consequential political institution of the era instead of the Republican Party. Contingent events brought them together, despite that party’s reluctance, at first, to declare for full abolition. The coalition the party had attracted was shaped by, and helped to shape, the direction the party would take. Opposition to slavery further influenced the direction of politics. But no person or group designed it.
There’s also the small matter that politics carries on regardless of how happy we are with it. Each of us weighs the costs and benefits of getting involved and making the changes we can. We can’t simply wait for the political environment to be right before systemic change can come to foundational institutions. In 2026, those changes are already happening, and they have been for some time. The challenge for liberals in this situation isn’t to set the stage, but to catch up with the contest for control of the process, and to fight to make it a liberal process.
Keeping that process liberal, defending the supporting structures of the open society, is our most urgent job. Without those supports, everything collapses, and it doesn’t matter anymore how unproblematic our partners, movements, or coalitions might be.
If the freedom of individuals can be better protected by a broader and more stable coalition than can be achieved through an issue-by-issue program, that matters. If systemic change is already happening, that matters, too. Political strategy is emergent and contextual; it’s not something that can be determined a priori.
That large-scale political action is emergent makes participation in liberal politics an exercise in both humility and hope. Emergent institutions should be familiar ground for liberalism. Social institutions that cannot be precisely directed are indispensable for a society of free and dignified people because under liberalism, no one commands or controls those institutions, nor the free people who administer them. There’s no reason political institutions, like activist groups, would be an exception.
Its emergent properties are precisely the reason that liberal democratic politics demands that we be willing to accept that sometimes we lose. We don’t get to specify the outcomes when we opt in. When we lose, we still try, as Adam Smith counselled, to bring about the best result the people can bear.
A framework for thinking about principles as coordination points in political participation is one step toward navigating uncontrollable liberal politics. It also has implications for how liberals should think about fighting for their ideas within coalitions, a subject I turn to in my next essay.
