If Liberals Get Tougher, What Will They Become?

It’s sometimes said that a liberal is someone who doesn’t know how to take their own side in a fight. Yet a fight has come to us. Forces opposed to the liberal vision of peace, prosperity, and dignity for all have risen across the world and have been undoing, day by day, advancements toward that vision made by previous generations of liberals. Those who hope to reverse this slide now face the desperate question: What is to be done? 

There is emerging in the public sphere a sense that the friends of liberal democracy need to adopt a much tougher and more combative orientation to our political present. Liberals, it is said, need to fight. Samantha Hancox-Li argues that liberals should adopt a “war mindset”; Joseph O’Neill calls for Democrats in Washington to adopt a “politics of raw power”; and M. Steven Fish makes a case for liberals to adopt a nationalist “politics of dominance.” These examples could be endlessly replicated. In short, we see everywhere calls for liberals to harden themselves and do politics in a more assertive way. 

My concern here is with how this fight agenda, whatever its specific content, is likely to reshape the kind of people liberals are, or imagine themselves to be. “Hardening” oneself has profound implications for the virtues and habits that liberals have long identified as necessary for bringing about a less violent, more prosperous, and freer world. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, emphasizes empathy as a core liberal virtue that consists in the cognitive habit of entering imaginatively into the perspectives and lives of others. Yet this is exactly the kind of capacity we would expect the fight agenda to attenuate. How, then, can liberals fight—and yet remain liberals? 

Consider, first, an ancient bit of wisdom that says how we do things constitutes us as agents or actors of a particular kind, with a particular character. If we act bravely, we gain the habits and instincts that make us brave people. Doing brave things makes future bravery come to us more naturally—it becomes familiar to us, and we come to enjoy it. That familiarity and enjoyment close a habituation loop, whereby virtuous action begets yet further virtuous action. However, the same process operates for vices. If we act greedily, we become greedy people, and greed comes to us more easily by the same mechanisms. What we’re talking about here is the making of character by habituation—the self-reinforcing sum of acting consistently in a certain way. 

Since virtues are positive habits of character, and vices are negative ones, habituation is the font of virtue and vice. What we do makes us, over time, better or worse people by accustoming us to those ways of acting, making them instinctual, even automatic. A virtuous person does good things largely because they come to them easily and naturally, perhaps even without thinking about them. Bad or evil actions come naturally to a vicious person, who must by contrast act against their character if they are to behave well. Habituation carves grooves or ruts in our ways of navigating the world, like a well-worn road, leading us to make better or worse contributions to it. 

What does all this have to do with liberals fighting? Because of habituation, the fight agenda will not remain a simple matter of political strategy, picked up instrumentally for the needs of the moment and as easily discarded when its usefulness has subsided. If liberals fight, it will make them different people, at least insofar as they have not been fighting the same way before. They will become different sorts of political actors, with different virtues and different vices. 

This likelihood of character change should concern us, but it should not give us pause about the fight agenda. I assume that the fight agenda—whatever goes into it or comes out of it specifically—is necessary for the present moment. The question is how it is going to affect us. Consider Democratic efforts in states like California, Virginia, and New York to imitate the one-sided gerrymandering Republicans have deployed with gusto since at least 2010. Though the leaders of these efforts, like Gavin Newsom, articulate a strong case for it in terms of defending democracy from an increasingly autocratic administration, none could deny that its ruthlessness feeds a ravening demand among the anti-Trump coalition for moves from Democrats that make Republicans hurt. That imperative must have been a considerable part of its attraction for many of the sixty-four percent of Californian voters who approved Proposition 50 in 2025. As such edifying fights like these proliferate, it is likely that more liberals will come to take delight in them, closing a perverse habituation loop between their enjoyment and inflicting harm on their political opponents. 

So, what I want to examine is what the fight agenda is likely to do to the liberals who pursue it: what will happen to their character? A careful assessment of this question can perhaps help us prepare to sidestep obvious pitfalls and, hopefully, remain versions of ourselves we can recognize and be proud of. 

Although liberals disagree among themselves about which virtues are required for bringing about the world of peace and justice they aspire to, there is a small core over which rival accounts overlap. This core can be comprehensively summarized by two virtues: toleration of social plurality and mutual forbearance in politics. Together, these core virtues constitute the beating heart of what it means to be a liberal, and it is these that I fear are threatened by adopting the fight agenda. 

Toleration of social plurality does not mean celebrating difference or accepting a relativism about the truth of one’s own fundamental commitments, but rather only a rejection of imposing one’s own perceived superiority on others by force. So long as we possess the habits of body and mind that move us to favor getting along even with perceived inferiors and coexisting amidst wide social differences, we have the core liberal virtue of tolerance.

Mutual forbearance encompasses both a rejection of violence and a willingness to shoulder costs or losses rather than escalate political conflict endlessly. Although actors with this quality may press their advantages hard in ordinary politics, they will forbear to press them to their utmost, to the point of violence or the extinction of political opposition, in the expectation that other players of the political game will do likewise. Liberals try to be good neighbors, in other words, and are willing to accept occasional rudeness from those around them out of a general compassion for others, rather than inflating their sense of self by cutting others down. They will be prepared to lose rather than unleash a spiral of intensifying conflict, and they will expect the same from others. 

Toleration of plurality entails a moderation in one’s sensitivity to offensive forms of social difference. This moderation means we do not habitually respond with violence, harassment, or extreme anger to the mere existence of people living or acting in ways we find abhorrent (barring violent abuse of others, of course). We ought not fly into a murderous rage when someone appears in public wearing distinctive religious, ethnic, or political garb, for example. Such moderation allows us to share public spaces even with those we strongly dislike. 

Mutual forbearance also entails a kind of moderation. This is not as much a matter of our passions, however, as of our rational responses. Mutual forbearance calls less for justice—the virtue of rendering to people, more or less strictly, what they’re owed—than for compassion, equity, liberality, grace, or charity—virtues which yield to others somewhat more than they strictly deserve. It requires us to be able to be open-handed with those we differ from politically, even intensely so. Enthusiasm for justice (in the narrow sense) may, in other words, need to be moderated for liberal politics to proceed. 

The fight agenda threatens to flatten both these virtues and transmute them into something quite different. Fighting entails identifying an enemy against whom one fights—here, we can simply call them the enemies of liberalism. Liberalism’s enemies will tend to clump up among certain social groups and are to be found in certain specific political movements. To fight them will almost certainly involve weakening one’s habits of toleration toward these groups and movements. 

What might that look like? A glance at social media—often better avoided—suffices to populate one’s imagination. Dehumanizing rhetoric toward the enemy is to be expected, as well as stoking emotions of anger and reactions of disgust to social symbols and institutions associated with them. Once habituated to these reactions, they become automatic and obstruct the sharing of the public sphere; it is, after all, hard to share public spaces comfortably with those you have learned to hate. 

Members of these groups and movements may also be held up for ridicule and singled out for abuse. A public outpouring of cruelty is thus very likely to follow adoption of the fight agenda among liberals. Such practices, particularly when public, blunt the empathic or sympathetic feelings that liberals often otherwise deploy to reinforce toleration. 

The publicness of this behavior is key. People mostly learn what norms they should follow by observing what other people like them are doing. If prominent liberals come to publicly adopt rhetorical practices that reflect attitudes of contempt and disgust for enemies, it must be expected to set off a cascade of shifting attitudes in that direction as liberals update their sense of how people like them think and talk about their political rivals. 

Once that cascade is initiated, and the virtue of tolerance against liberalism’s enemies weakens, mutual forbearance is not far behind. Once the enemy is named and sentiments of intense animosity are mobilized against them, it simply will not make sense to forbear to escalate conflict with them. Even if liberals hold out hope for reconciliation and defection from the ranks of the enemy, such hope must not obstruct the imperative of victory. This is what the fight agenda is all about.  If they are truly enemies of liberalism—if their success has come to count as liberalism’s defeat—then of course liberals should do all that’s in their power to obstruct and combat them. 

An escalatory logic is thereby unlocked that mutual forbearance would ordinarily negate. Liberals are no longer willing to absorb losses in political fights with their enemies toward the reaching of compromises—compromises with the enemy are mistakes, perhaps signaling disloyalty or even treason. Intolerance among the liberal coalition for some of its own members would then be expected to rise, targeted at those who hold onto tolerance and forbearance toward the enemy. Though those erstwhile allies may practice politics as good liberals ordinarily should, in a political moment when the fight agenda is appropriate, their persistence in the old ways is foolish, even dangerous—and so good fighting liberals cannot tolerate it. As Andrew Sabl argues, a wartime mentality flattens pluralism and narrows tolerance.¹

The fight agenda may thus turn liberals, characterized at minimum by tolerance and forbearance, into something else. Having been pulled toward the abyss, they are now poised to fall into it. Optimistically, in place of tolerance and forbearance, we would expect to find in fighting liberals virtues associated with combat: courage, loyalty, ironclad commitment, and fortitude or persistence. 

Yet, as I’ve just emphasized, we would also see vices among fighting liberals: intolerance, at least of liberalism’s enemies, and perhaps those who fail to fight them hard enough; severity and relentlessness in their conduct of politics, at least against those enemies and their fellow-travelers; cruelty, perhaps, to that enemy and, probably inevitably, toward those who fail to recognize the enemy for what they are (in the eyes of the fighting liberal). These vices, and more, are likely to be taken into the hearts and inculcated into the habits of those liberals who adopt the fight agenda. 

A common objection to the kind of concern for character, virtue, and vice that I’ve shown here is that it is self-absorbed and fails to take seriously the stakes of morality and politics. Worrying about what kind of person the political moment requires us to be, when that moment is dire, seems on this view indulgent, irresponsible, and inappropriately self-concerned. This sort of virtue ethical approach appears to turn weighty or even life-or-death questions of how we should live together into a matter of one’s own personal moral purity. It switches the focus from how one’s actions affect others and the world to how they affect one’s own moral character—and it doesn’t get more self-involved than that. 

Yet it’s still worth taking stock of these matters, if only because they bear on whether we’ll be able to successfully pursue the fight agenda. If its pursuit is too ugly or if those prosecuting it become strange (or “deranged”) to their would-be allies because of a transformation of their character—and so of their outward tendencies and manners of speech—the effort may falter. Indeed, liberal devotees of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear,” which elevates cruelty as the highest evil against which liberalism rebels, may be especially put off by the transformations likely to follow from the fight agenda. Fighting liberals will nonetheless need the support of such liberals, as well as of those who haven’t yet fully gotten the message about the need for a fight. 

If we imagine a spectrum of change from the status quo ante of liberal virtue discussed above to the virtues needed for a fighting liberalism, actual liberals themselves will almost certainly be found clumped up at different levels of development along it. To keep them all moving along together in politics, at these different levels of “fightingness,” will require some appreciation for possible lines of fracture. 

The conduct associated with the fight agenda is likely to be highly visceral, evoking immediate reactions of gratification or disgust. Consider two examples: the conduct of Representative Al Green (D-TX) and anti-Trump protests like the Women’s March and No Kings rallies. Green captured headlines by heckling Trump at his 2025 State of the Union speech, for which he was subsequently censured by the Republican-controlled House. Liberal reactions to Green’s disruptive speech split between those attracted to his fighting spirit and those turned off by its incivility and lack of decorum, reflecting a potential fissure the fight agenda might widen. A similar divide could be seen among those attracted to the popular antics on display at both the Women’s March in 2017 and the No Kings rallies in 2025 and those who cringed in embarrassment at their earnestness. 

Liberals and their potential allies will be attracted or repulsed by the fight agenda in ways like this before they can even think about it. The last thing fighting liberals need is other liberals turning away from the fight agenda just because it offends their sense of political aesthetics—that is, of what they think an attractive politics should look like. 

So, even as liberals turn to fight, they should attend to how the fighting is likely to appear, including to outsiders, while avoiding the trap of respectability politics. Activists, particularly in the Black freedom struggle, have long been told they must eschew tactics and modes of self-expression that would alienate mainstream audiences. Yet maintaining such “respectability” can come at the price of effectively signaling the seriousness or stakes of the struggle and leaving potentially effective tactics untried. Fighting liberals should therefore be at pains to highlight, and reiterate, why they fight. When choosing tactics, especially escalations, they must be careful to match their justifications to their actions. But this should not be done to assuage popular opinion or to instantiate fairness for its own sake—nor even to forestall retaliation—but rather mainly to keep liberals and their allies together and on the same page in the fight. 

It might be that habits of tolerance and forbearance are sufficiently deep in the liberal character that the dire consequences I suggest here will not come to pass. I certainly hope that’s so. I hope that liberals can pursue a fight against the enemies of liberalism without ceasing to be recognizable to themselves and others. In becoming the kind of liberals who know how to take their own side in a fight, we must endeavor never to lose sight of the possibility of a return to a politics of tolerance and mutual forbearance. It would surely be perverse for liberals to fight and win, only to find that they themselves ended up casualties of the conflict.