Inheritance of Equals: A Case for Liberal Socialism

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

… make it a government of the people, by the people and for the people, and for all the people, each for all and all for each … (Frederick Douglass, “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” 1867)

That each individual is afforded a fair opportunity to develop their personality and individual faculties freely. That society comprises free and equal beings, where freedom means freedom from undue interference, freedom from domination and oppression, freedom of collective action and self-governance, and freedom to develop and expand human capabilities. That neither one’s family and place of birth determine one’s destiny, nor bad luck nor the normal human range of vice and folly. That no person or cabal has overwhelming, unchecked power by means of wealth or influence, no matter how attained. These are the sentiments undergirding liberal socialism.

The cruel lawlessness of the Trump-Musk regime will eventually pass. With it, the institutional liquefaction will cease, and some new constitutional configuration will settle into place. Things literally cannot go on as they have before the present democratic crisis—things have been broken and will have to be put back together somehow. There is opportunity in this. Ideas that were unthinkable even a decade ago may see their chance in the sun.

It is time for liberal socialism.

Democratic when the world’s democracies are on the defensive, resolutely liberal when politicians and electorates are eager to throw vulnerable groups like immigrants and trans men and women to the wolves, and suspicious of concentrated wealth when the fascist vanguard is led by billionaire oligarchs—liberal socialism is the antithesis of MAGA. As a political faction, liberal socialists are a bulwark against fascism, and constitute the natural anchor of a popular front antifascist coalition, smoothing antagonisms between mutually suspicious leftists and liberals. My purpose with this essay is to make liberals and socialists intelligible to one another. A vocal adoption of the liberal socialist moniker itself connects ideas and partisans long thought unbridgeable.

But isn’t liberal socialism an oxymoron?

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. No, liberal socialism is not an oxymoron. Though distinct traditions, liberalism and socialism are both broad and varied, with significant overlap. Liberal socialism sounds untenable, if not contradictory, due to our collective hangover from the Cold War. For most of the 20th century, the dominant strain of socialism was that of the USSR, the global superpower that represented a genuine threat to the US and the liberal democratic world broadly. 

Soviet socialism wasn’t the fun kind. It involved one-party dictatorship, violent domestic repression and imperialism abroad, and forced collectivization of agriculture that led to deadly famines. The central planning at the core of Stalinism led to rolling economic catastrophes across decades. Liberals really did have the socialists’ number in the theoretical “socialist calculation debate,” but the proof was in the empirical pudding. The later, even deadlier example of Maoist communism only hardened liberals against socialism. These horrors didn’t stop socialists in the First World from taking their ideological cues from the Soviets and the CCP.

Who could blame the classical and conservative liberals of the 20th century for thinking of socialism as inherently antiliberal given these examples? But with the fall of the Iron Curtain socialists have largely moved away from central planning and violent revolution and toward democratic values. Now, the greatest enemy of liberal democracy is the oligarch-sponsored reactionary right, an enemy shared by socialists. There is every reason for the liberal and the socialist to reappraise their relationship.

Do you even read theory?

Liberalism defines itself in terms of freedom, and liberal socialism is no different. But the freedom of liberal socialism is ambitious and expansive, mingling and interpenetrating with equality like a yin and yang. We will see that equality is necessary for and constitutive of freedom, and vice versa.

But first, the libertarians are right: freedom from interference is a genuine kind of freedom. There is such a thing as going about one’s own business, and interfering with that business requires compelling reason.

Republicans (that’s a small-r) have long described freedom as freedom from domination. No person should be subject to the arbitrary will of another, whether that external will has good or ill intentions. These kinds of freedom can conflict. The struggle for freedom from domination has been interpreted in various times and places as interfering with the property rights of the slave owner, or the private domain of the husband.

Oppression is disadvantage experienced by individuals owing to their perceived group memberships that arises from systematic patterns of privilege and prejudice. If the free development of each is to be the condition for the free development of all, then freedom from oppression is crucial. Oppression is distinct from domination because domination can be purely personal. Freedom from oppression is often set in opposition to freedom from interference because oppression can be achieved by the unknowing and unwilling actions of people going about their business. Liberation from oppression requires interference.

It’s helpful to think of freedom as the ability to make our agency impact reality. But we have designs on the world we can’t realize by individual action alone. They must be achieved by collective action or not at all. Thus freedom to act in coordination with others is necessary. This is democracy expressed in terms of freedom. Collective decision-making is an obvious vector of interference of the individual and of oppression. This kind of freedom is the hardest to harmonize with naïve liberalism as it leads us to a politics of inevitable conflict.

In the above I’ve borrowed heavily from the liberal theorist Sharon Krause. But I’ll add one more freedom that Krause elides: freedom as capability. New abilities to be and act in the world are real extensions of freedom. The airplane opened the wide world to us. With the Internet, we could communicate and commune with others in a way that was impossible before. With the birth control pill, women were liberated from their wombs in a practical way that feminist awakening alone could never achieve. Modern hormone therapy and gender-affirming care allow countless individuals—cis and trans alike—to be who their true selves in a way they recognize. This is, perhaps, the most abstract kind of freedom theoretically while being simple to understand in practical life: the washing machine is freedom. Yet new technologies, both social and material, also offer new possibilities for interference, domination, oppression, and coordination.

Liquidating the plutocrats … as a class.

Liberals can often be relied on to defend civic equality—equal political rights and formal equality before the law. Liberals also at least pay lip service to social equality, the idea that one’s various identities and social groups should not bear an overly deterministic relationship to one’s life outcomes. In practice, of course, conservative and moderate liberals often buy into narratives that demonize, denigrate, or blame various groups. The conservative work ethic that blames the poor for not working hard enough while assuming the rich deserve their wealth is a good example of this.

By contrast, traditional liberals, with some exceptions, have often failed to see economic equality as a genuine value that is distinct from economic sufficiency and protection from elite predation. If everyone has enough (by some standard), and the wealth of the rich was acquired without violence or fraud, then that wealth must be legitimate. Besides, economic equality is inherently unstable. The moment individuals begin trading or even just using their resources for different purposes, inequality emerges.

A key pillar of liberal socialism is that stark inequality itself is an evil that demands rectification and guarding against. I say stark inequality because, of course, some differences in wealth and income are inevitable and benign. But logarithmic differences in wealth, where lone persons command wealth comparable to the incomes of whole nations, signal disordered political economies and represent intrinsic threats to political order.

Libertarians sometimes argue that inequality of this magnitude cannot arise but by corruption and crony capitalism, and so these problems should be addressed directly rather than attacking the symptom—wealth inequality. There’s some truth to this, but it shifts the burden of justification from the plutocrat to the egalitarian reformer who must show in detail how an individual’s wealth accreted unjustly. Meanwhile the plutocrats use their vast resources to dazzle and confuse a public already predisposed by human nature to fawn over the rich and powerful.

In reality any extreme concentration of wealth both hails from injustice in the past and portends injustice in the future. It’s a brute fact of history that if you go back far enough (you usually don’t have to go back very far) you will find conquest, exploitation, and rapine. The “original positions” of all social contract theories just abstract away from this reality of unequal regimes. But this fact alone gives no direction for the future. We can’t go back. We don’t want to. 

But even if massive wealth somehow managed to concentrate itself into the hands of a few lucky or exceptional individuals by innocent means, injustice would inevitably follow. It’s a time-tested proverb that power corrupts, and vast wealth surrounded by lesser means is a kind of power. Its very presence in one set of hands constitutes domination—the rest of us rightly tremble that on a moment’s fancy the billionaire will turn his awesome materials on some office or tribe that offends him.

Philosophical and religious traditions across the globe and spanning millennia have all warned against economic inequality, from the ancient Hebrews, Christians, and Platonists, to Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. These traditions talk about the psychological risks of extreme wealth. It becomes addicting, an obsession whereby no amount of wealth is ever enough. The truth of this is evident in the uniform tendency for the ultrarich to squirrel away their wealth in tax havens and exploit every possible loophole in the tax laws. Those who have literally more wealth than they could consume in several lifetimes can have no purpose other than the pleonectic quest for more and status competition with other billionaires. 

Billionaires live in warped social environments where they're unable to have authentic human relationships. They don’t have to interact with normal people in their everyday lives. Everyone they interact with only does so because of their massive wealth, either because they have been directly hired by the billionaire or because they are a representative of some organization or government asking for money. Everyone is sucking up. Even if one of a billionaire’s legion of hirelings wanted to be honest, the risk is too great to say anything the billionaire might not want to hear—everyone is expendable and can be replaced. It’s too easy, too tempting to surround oneself with sycophants.

Think of concentrated wealth as just another dangerous thing that calls for social precaution and control. Liberal democracies regulate the use and ownership of firearms because they’re inherently dangerous. Many weapons and firearms we ban outright. A billionaire is like an individual owning a massive arsenal of modern military weaponry, from machine guns and bazookas to tanks and submarines—even nukes—all with absolute impunity. At any moment, these private armies could cause untold carnage. Even if these weapons are never used, their mere presence in the hands of someone unaccountable to the public is a threat. The rest of us have to walk on eggshells. 

It’s no exaggeration to compare centibillionaire wealth to this kind of private military. The proof surrounds us. Elon Musk has used his billions to turn a valuable public forum into a Nazi propaganda outlet. He has used his Starlink satellites to influence global geopolitics. He interfered in the 2024 US election by bribing voters and violating campaign finance laws and tried to influence the 2025 German elections. Legal accountability is virtually impossible because he can exhaust all adversaries with lawsuits, countersuits, and endless appeals, making a sham of legal equality. And he's used his influence with President Trump to gain an unconfirmed, illegal position of undefined authority in the government. When you are wealthy enough, you are as a nation unto yourself.

The liberal socialist understands economic equality broadly as wealth ranging from no less than enough to thrive as a respectable member of one’s community to strictly less than what one could use to dominate and destabilize the political order. Economic equality within this range is less a constraint on economic liberty and more the precondition for the wide-ranging freedom liberal socialists value. In order to secure freedom from domination, tax and fiscal policies should directly aim to erode high concentrations of economic power, including by progressive wealth and inheritance taxes. We can limit the kinds of industries that wealthy persons can own simultaneously to prevent oligarchic control of media and defense conglomerates. And wealthy individuals who are presently using their immense resources to attack democracies, should simply have their wealth nationalized.

A better way is possible.

Wealth inequality is just one gross power differential. We can generalize to other kinds of power that fuel domination and oppression. Liberal socialists focus on empowering labor relative to capital, workers against owners and bosses, both within firms and across economic sectors.

Workplaces can be sites of tyranny where workers have virtually no control over their environments or the direction of their work. Bosses can be petty, domineering, and cruel. Workers have little recourse because of the steep cost of quitting—potential poverty and loss of healthcare for example—and the uncertainty of finding better alternatives. Bosses can even interfere with workers’ private lives outside of work, retaliating against political activism and social media activities. As Elizabeth Anderson notes in Private Government, bosses and capitalists act toward workers in ways that we would describe as dictatorial in a political context, yet we spend about a quarter of our lives at work. That’s a quarter of a person’s life where they're expected to take tyranny on the chin.

Rectifying the power imbalances that make such tyranny possible requires reforms both inside and outside the workplace. Labor unions should be easy to organize, encouraged by policy, and protected by law. We can require firms of a certain size to include labor representation elected by workers on the board of directors. Sectoral bargaining can protect similar workers across an economy, decreasing inequality and narrowing gender and racial wage gaps. And workplace regulation should ensure people can go to work without fearing for their life and limb.

Whether firms succeed through peerless innovation or through crony capitalism, concentrated power in the market is just as dangerous as concentrated power in government or civil society. We can use anti-monopoly policies against market dominance that inhibits competition. The purpose here isn't to punish or champion any firm, but to establish a market that efficiently serves the public.

It’s important to build up the economic power of the least advantaged apart from and prior to the wage relation. Experiments consistently reveal that a basic income of some kind—UBI, negative income tax, etc—improves recipients’ lives without perverse behavioral effects. A guaranteed income gives you a way out of oppressive situations, whether that’s a bad boss, an unsafe job, or an abusive home life. No one should be forced to take on dangerous or demeaning work in order to keep a roof over their head or food on their kids’ plates.

While a basic income can help sustain you, it can’t supply the kind of peace of mind a flush bank account or a prosperous family can. It also does little to address wealth inequality, which depends on the actual assets households own. Such assets—land, homes, businesses, stock portfolios, etc—pass from one generation to the next, piling wealth on wealth. The black-white racial wealth gap in particular has doggedly persisted over decades because of the systematic historical exclusion of blacks from asset bonanzas (like the Homestead Act), exclusion (red-lining), or basic violence and expropriation (like the Tulsa massacre). We can address this directly by a citizen’s stakeholder grant of some amount large enough to buy a modest home or a college education, to be bestowed some time early in life. Without getting into the weeds of funding—as JM Keynes said, “anything we can do, we can afford”—the first place to look is inheritance taxes, land value taxes, and wealth taxes that will erode concentrated wealth.

A final policy I want to consider for power-sharing is the public option economy. A public option is a service provided directly by the government as an alternative to similar services available on the market. The post office, public schools, and government-funded science are examples. Arguably public libraries are another in that they provide books, media, Internet access, and simple public space that would otherwise have to be rented. A public option in healthcare grants economically advantageous scale and universal coverage. Public option banking provides basic financial services to the underbanked without usurious interest rates or hassle. Public options in social media could provide an alternative to networks and algorithms that profit by manipulating our personal data and behavioral patterns. 

Even if various fees and taxes (nothing is free) are involved, the purpose is not profit but public service. The idea isn’t necessarily to replace private provision, which has its own advantages, but to provide an alternative, explicitly in the public interest with universal access central to the mission. Not every industry needs a public option—far from it. We can shape the public option economy with a mix of the economist’s usual bag of tools—market efficiency, public goods, externalities and the like—with democratic feedback. As several of the examples above suggest, public options are often popular, and very often taken for granted to the point of people forgetting they’re something called a “public option” at all.

It’s fair to ask how so-called liberal socialism is really socialism at all, rather than just another reformist left liberalism. One answer is simply that there is no hard difference between liberal socialism and left liberalism, no magical moment where reform transforms into revolution. But I hope it’s becoming clear how a naïve “social ownership of the means of production” definition of socialism is met—from a certain point of view. First, like many liberals have held from the beginning, property rights are not absolute. They are socially determined and must ultimately bend to social purposes. Second, unlike many liberals, we see economic inequality as a serious danger to a free democracy that demands direct policy attention. Third, basic incomes and asset grants literally socialize the income and wealth of society, turning the means of production into a source of rents for all. And the public option economy socializes parts of the economy without the destructive consequences of central planning.

Okay, Liberal.

Yet liberal socialism remains unmistakably liberal, even capitalist. If we take the dread c-word to indicate an economic system where there is private ownership of business and capital and these private owners pursue profit, then it’s consistent with everything written above, and there is no fundamental contradiction between capitalism and socialism.

But this needlessly needles the left. Surely if it is anything at all, capitalism is a political system that favors the interests of capitalists. Fine, then liberal socialism will maintain an entrepreneurial market economy. We keep this system because it delivers the goods—at scale. As liberals, we’re right to emphasize this, even while as socialists we emphasize the state’s entrepreneurial research and engineering efforts. These are complementary, not oppositional. The kind of society Marx imagined, where work would no longer be bled out of human beings by the cruel lash of necessity, can only rise out of the abundance—green, of course—of a liberal market order.

Liberal markets are also a matter of personal freedom. Trading, bartering, saving, buying, and selling—even our labor—is something humans are naturally predisposed to, and the attempt to suppress these dispositions tends to lead to violence and oppression. Bettering our condition and that of our family and loved ones is likewise natural and salubrious.

Most socialists have no particular allergy to markets as such—Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are on a Fight Oligarchy tour, not an Abolish Markets tour. So it’s worth spelling out the market’s humanistic value. The market is a place where people from all kinds of backgrounds, nationalities, and religions come together in peace for the express purpose of fulfilling each other’s needs and desires. The market economy is an extended order of peaceful cooperation. When exploitative conditions and relations of domination are barred from taking hold, there’s nothing left for the socialist but to celebrate the diversity and creativity of the market.

But the market in a large commercial society like ours is also a place to find oneself. There are many more varieties of employment and diversion in the cosmopolitan commercial society than in the tribe or commune, more opportunities to, as it were, fish, hunt, herd, and criticize, just as you like. There too are more fashions, cuisines, disciplines, and niche interests on display.

Solidarity, identity politics, antifascism—but I repeat myself.

Along with the dazzling difference that comes with commercial modernity come opportunities for the privileged and powerful to exploit those differences, turning people against one another whose rational interests and values should align. Exploiting wedges between people is how power and inequality entrench themselves. Solidarity, the key social virtue of socialism, requires reaching across social differences and standing together against the narratives and ideologies that justify privilege and divide the laboring classes.

The contours of inequality and oppression differ from one society to another based on their own historical contingencies. In America, antiblack racism shapes life outcomes from the racial wealth gap and incarceration rates to maternal mortality and life expectancies. It also profoundly shapes politics, providing the animating force behind both political parties, their respective agendas, and their compromises with each other. Much of the late 20th century conservative movement in the US can be understood as a backlash against the greater inclusion achieved by the Civil Rights Movement, just as Jim Crow can only be understood as a backlash against Reconstruction and MAGA as the same spirit of slavery reasserting itself in response to the advent of the first black president.

Patriarchy is an even older and more powerful obstacle to solidarity and egalitarian freedom than race. It artificially divides labor into masculine and feminine categories and extracts the latter (reproductive labor, domestic labor, and the care of children and the infirm) almost always without financial reward. Patriarchy shapes the kinds of personal and economic lives both men and women can lead, offering leadership to men and lower-paying, lower-prestige jobs to women. Patriarchy even adapts to lower the relative wages and esteem of professions when women begin to move into them in large numbers.

Misogyny punishes women who step out of acceptable social positions, with insults and character assassinations lobbed at women who seek positions of authority or who challenge the moral standing of men. This has world-shifting political force. As the modern economy has evolved toward more service sector and office jobs, and away from jobs requiring more sweat and sinew, women across the rich world have found themselves able to advance in social standing and economic independence—many no longer need men in any economic sense. This has resulted in a global backlash that has opened up the hearts and minds of men to once fringe reactionary political movements that promise to return men to a nostalgic world where women (and disfavored minorities) treated men with the respect they believe is their birthright. These movements would rather burn democracy to the ground than counsel young men to engage women as independent equals.

These reactionary movements always involve anti-immigrant politics. Immigrants are the human symbol of changing society, and change is portrayed as the problem. This is the root of the matter. The bad economic arguments and concern-trolling about immigrant culture are just fig leaves to cover the feeling that immigrants are taking away from white men the society that once belonged to them without question.

For any liberal socialism to succeed at reining in inequality, it has to tackle the particular obstacles confronting different groups in society. In the case of racism that may mean reparations or affirmative action. Ignoring race or pretending at “colorblindness” in favor of some imagined proletariat untouched by racial politics can only cede narrative framing to rightwing parties ready and willing to appeal to racial resentment. For women, that may mean quotas for public office to ensure equal representation, or a public option for childcare to foster fuller participation in the economy on more equitable terms. The closed border looms over immigrant heads’ like the sword of Damocles, subjecting immigrants to the mercy of more powerful employers, landlords, and fickle voters. Only a firmly open border with a clear path to citizenship for all who desire it truly respects the immigrant as a worker and human being.

Reactionary movements are never abstract. They draw on the particular social cleavages already extant in society, the deep ravines in our collective consciousness cut by generations of resentment over race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and immigration. The parts of our brains that are constantly sizing up where we and everyone around us perches on the social ladder light up when someone acts out of place; it registers as a moral transgression. This status sensitivity informs our prejudices against disfavored groups, which take on a moral character. Gender roles and sexuality are thus thick with moral valence. Affirming the status of the privileged patriarch is a kind of piety—perverted, but no less felt in our moral senses. 

Liberal socialist solidarity calls for climbing out of the ravine of resentment. Identity politics is the hard, committed work of disenchanting the moral mythologies of white male status and resisting the baleful narratives arrayed against women and minorities. Solidarity movements that try to paper over identity will always slide back down into the ravine and break apart on the rocks.

This brings us to fascism, the spiritual dead end where these reactionary political movements lead. Fascism is the crescendo of reactionary resentment after it has discarded the niceties of democratic and liberal values. It is the political will to put women and minorities back in their place by force in order to reestablish old dominance hierarchies. Because these kinds of resentments—in gentler times the stuff of merely conservative but still democratic politics—are a human universal, the threat of fascism and its attendant horrors can never fully go away. It is not “Never again,” but “It will happen again, and we must gird ourselves against the darkness.”

Liberal socialism insists on an egalitarian free society—each for all and all for each. We have two nemeses: fascism—the rule of the herrenvolk patriarchs—and oligarchy—the rule of plundering plutocrats. These are timeless conflicts that sustain liberal socialism as a fighting creed, but in the present moment the fascists and the plutocrats have joined forces. Liberal socialists thus form a natural anchor for a popular front antifascist coalition. And the urgent goal is to make liberals and socialists intelligible to one another, our alliance obvious and natural.