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For nearly a century, “liberal” has been one of American politics’ most loaded words—embraced, scorned, redefined, and, at times, abandoned altogether. In Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), historian Kevin Schultz traces the improbable career of the label from its Rooseveltian birth to its contemporary malaise, charting how liberalism’s signature achievements—regulating capitalism, expanding civil rights, fostering a broad middle class—coexisted with its blind spots and exclusions. Schultz argues that liberalism’s success sowed the seeds of its decline, as critiques from the Right, Left, and civil rights activists converged to fracture the mid-century consensus. In this conversation, Schultz and I explore liberalism’s etymology, philosophical underpinnings, and political fortunes in modern America—from John Dewey’s moral vision to Joe Biden’s fractious coalition.
What emerges is a sobering yet strangely hopeful history. Between Democratic Party insiders and democratic socialists vying for the future of a liberalism on the left, and the rise of a super online, so-called post-liberal right, liberals themselves appear in short supply. Even so, Shultz’s history suggests that liberalism’s adaptability, its unrivaled capacity to quell and incorporate dissent, may surprise us yet.
Jacob Bruggeman (JB): When did Americans start calling themselves “liberals”? And how different or similar were the early invocations of that name, or label, or identity in American politics?
Kevin Schultz (KS): This was one of the big surprises of my research. I had assumed there was this “long liberal tradition”—as we historians call it—in American history that goes back to John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But what I found doing this research is that, up until Franklin Delano Roosevelt, very few Americans actually called themselves liberals or embraced anything that was called “liberalism.”
Now today we might look back and say, “Well these ideas are now enshrined in liberalism, so they were liberals,” and that very well may be true. Still, what was interesting to me was that they never called themselves “liberal” at all. For example, in the 1872 election, there was the Republican Party and there was the Liberal Republican Party; and the latter party got destroyed in the election and never was seen from again. Or there was the National Liberal League and there were a lot of anti-Catholic liberal people. There are these little flashes in the pan that come and go and they have their own interesting history, and it helps code the word in certain ways in the United States.
But as far as having it be a sustained political philosophy that exists under the label “liberalism” in the United States, it doesn’t exist in American history until 1932, when Roosevelt gave a speech to defend the New Deal. He knew that he’d be excoriated for being Socialist or Communist, but he also didn’t want to come off as a defender of capitalism merely rebuilding the pillars that failed during the Great Depression. But he also didn’t want to be seen as an authoritarian, growing the size of government and taking away our freedoms. So he tried a few different words to describe his politics, and in the summer of 1932 he landed on the word liberalism, which he defined as a halfway spot between Communism and Fascism.
One of his advisors, a guy named Rex Tugwell, asked FDR, “How did you come up with this? It’s not a word that’s in common usage in American history or in the American political world right now,” and Roosevelt just looked at him, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Does it matter?”
That’s as good as it gets. That’s the start of American liberalism.
JB: I buy that FDR brings liberalism into modern America. But what was it about the early 20th-century American political scene, what was it about the particular demands segments of the American people made upon the state, that led FDR to become the first modern liberal? What background conditions and historical events enabled him to synthesize strains of thought into modern American liberalism?
KS: To answer this question, we need to examine the etymology of the words “liberal” and “liberalism.”
The words have their origins in the Latin liber, which means free. And so to free an individual, you or me, we need to combat against the prevailing conditions, whatever they might be, that are restricting our individual freedoms. So, in Shakespeare’s time, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the word liberal signifies a generosity of spirit or a generosity of wealth and a training in liberal arts education, which is a broad education, where we learn philosophy, literature, history, political science, and the hard sciences. The word conveyed a broad and generous understanding of the world. In the 17th and 18th century, it also signified religious tolerance. There is this notion that to be religiously liberal is to, if not exactly welcome Catholics and Jews or the “wrong” sorts of Protestants in Europe, that they shouldn’t necessarily be castigated or murdered or anything along those lines for not adhering to the truth with a capital T as one understands it. To be liberal then means to be tolerant of different religious faiths.
But it was during the great political revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries—which we most often think of comprising the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and of course the Haitian Revolution—when liberalism became a term used throughout Europe. It comes to signify political freedoms and a right to say who governs us, including representative governments and things like this. Liberalism was a reminder of how individual freedoms can be achieved beyond whatever it is that’s oppressing us, whether that’s the yoke of the Catholic Church over Europe, for instance, or kings and queens.
And in this moment too, John Locke introduced property as a way to embrace liberal freedom. And that’s because in the era of kings and queens, one way that an individual could showcase their freedom was through small-market capitalism, by being a small businessman and operating outside royal domains. This is where “economic,” or what some people call “classical,” liberalism is born, which introduces a friendly vision of capitalism as a way toward individual freedom.
This vision of capitalism leads to a mammoth shift in Europe in the late 19th century, but not so much in the United States, until Franklin Roosevelt comes about, and it becomes increasingly obvious that it’s no longer the Catholic Church or kings and queens that are oppressing people, but large businesses on the scale of the Industrial Revolution from the second half of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century. It was oligarchs, or “economic royalists,” to use FDR’s language connecting the royalism of kings and queens to the oligarchs, who were denying individual freedoms and preventing workers from having rights and the middle class from expanding.
And so, liberalism shifts again, as it had in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In the 19th and 20th and now 21st centuries, liberalism signifies something different, and that is the use of the government to counterbalance the overwhelming power of big business; a reliance on laws and rational thinking to allow individuals to achieve certain freedoms that would be denied by those who are just out to squeeze wealth from the individual worker. And this has been the underlying definition of liberalism since FDR tapped it in the summer of 1932.
JB: The sheer scale of state capacity on display in the New Deal remains very impressive. When you look back at FDR’s liberalism, what were its central accomplishments? What about it led historians like Gary Gerstle to argue that New Deal liberalism became a dominant “political order”?
KS: FDR realized that—this is another phrasing that I really like—regulated capitalism was probably the least worst way to structure a nation’s economy. And so in order to preserve capitalism, it needed to be regulated. And so that’s what the New Deal was.
He wasn’t mandating Moscow apartments where everybody would share the same square footage, but instead he was passing laws that built the suburbs and that allowed people to get higher education so that they could go on and make as much money as they wanted. There was a pretty stiff tax structure that went up as high as 94 percent for the highest earners in American life. At a metaphysical or philosophical level, he wanted to make sure that the economic inequalities of the earlier progressive-era period could no longer exist. At the very least, that the wealthiest people were taxed at significantly high rates, so that the benefits of capitalism would be shared all the way down the pike.
One of the things to remember about the New Deal is that it was designed to preserve a capitalist liberalism, a capitalist sense of freedom, but it was designed to ensure that those riches that were created by the system trickled down in a very significant way, not by hope or happenstance, but by government mandate, to ensure that it extended all the way throughout the American population.
JB: The liberal order bears enormous fruit in the ’50s and ’60s. At the same time, by the late ’60s, the liberal consensus started to crack up. So, just as liberals reached their zenith, what set the stage for their demise? Did the liberals’ signature accomplishments, totems of liberal hegemony, become portents of their own downfall?
KS: First, it is very important to pause over the real accomplishments of the liberal order. Not because I want to defend liberalism and not because I identify as a liberal—but let’s be fair.
The argument of the book is that FDR redefines political life in the United States, and both parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, align with this notion of liberalism that the government needs to be used to buttress the power of big business and can be used in a very powerful and significant way to regulate the economy. And to significantly govern Americans’ lives in ways that they hadn’t before. Dwight Eisenhower is on board with this plan. Both parties embrace what historians, Gary Gerstle especially, have called the New Deal order.
What were its accomplishments? Less income inequality than at any time in American history before or since. The crack up of liberalism, as you called it in your question, is actually where you get the greatest expansion of the American middle class that we’ve ever seen. Where you get this expansion of the middle class, you get higher education. Why? Because the government subsidizes education through the GI Bill, which was FDR’s thank-you present to the soldiers who fought during World War II. The GI Bill also prompts the expansion of home ownership, especially the development of the suburbs, because of guaranteed home loans. And pushing into other regions of American life, you get a regime of religious tolerance through Supreme Court cases, leading to the acceptability of Catholics and Jews as normative participants in American life. Today, in fact, our Supreme Court justices include six Catholics, one Jew, and only two Protestants. You also see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Now, of course, these weren’t just put through by white liberals. Black activists and an upswelling of the population played a large role. But the people who voted on these bills in the halls of Congress called themselves liberals.
JB: Let me push on this. Jefferson Cowie’s The Great Exception makes a strong argument that this period of equality was premised on a homogenous white labor force and low immigration. The New Deal moment of racial cohesion reinforced labor’s political power. In time, one of the Left’s major critiques of the New Deal was that it reflected a white liberal order.
What do you make of this? Winning World War II and saving capitalism is hard to beat, but does liberalism’s exclusivity diminish its accomplishments?
KS: Absolutely brilliant question. It’s something citizens of the world need to think about. But to start, recall exclusion in society was not merely the mid-century liberal’s creation. For example, one accomplishment of mid-20th-century liberals was the 1965 passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which opened up our immigration system. It allowed immigration from Asia, from Africa, and from Latin America in the way that the restrictive immigration policies of 1924, and especially 1929, prevented.
Still, it’s a fair question to ponder. Can the expansion of the welfare state, the expansion of government benefits to broad numbers of American people, the ability of a politician to get his or her constituents to listen to them, only be achievable during relatively homogenous periods, when there is low immigration? It’s a complicated question, and there is some research that shows, even in the 2020s, that you have the greatest expansion of the welfare state in northern European countries with relatively restrictive immigration policies. So is it true that to expand the welfare state, you need to have restrictive immigration policies? I don’t know the answer to that definitively, and I don’t know that we’ll ever know the answer.
But I do think your question suggests that if you cannot create this sense of unity in the country, it makes it far more difficult to create a sense of collective sacrifice. Not every wealthy American loved paying 94 percent. Still, a sense of contribution to a greater common cause, such as overcoming the Great Depression or defeating a foreign enemy in World War II, certainly seemed to help. It’s absolutely a great question worth pondering—not that very many people on the left are going to like the answers.
JB: It’s fodder for many dissertations. But let’s go back to the liberals’ fall from public grace. What prompted it?
KS: When I first wrote this book, a friend of mine said, “Why does everyone hate white liberals?” I didn’t have a ready answer, so I had to come up with one. The line I came up with was that the liberal died by assassination and there were multiple shooters.
At its peak, the mid-century liberal regime was all-encompassing and agreed to by both political parties, but people on the right and the left were critiquing the liberal order. The book details three lines of attack that start in the 1950s, if not before.
The first that I described comes from the Right: You get the likes of William F. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers, who were criticizing mid-20th-century liberalism as quasi-socialism and the road to Communism. The “liberal establishment”—which is a Buckley coinage—derided in the pages of the National Review, was really out to get you, so the Right needed to guard against liberalism because it represented a creeping erosion of freedoms. The most expansive book that Buckley ever wrote about his own political philosophy came in 1959 (he was a “salesman,” as he called himself; he wasn’t a philosopher, he let others do the heavy lifting), when he wrote Up from Liberalism. Buckley borrowed his title from Up from Slavery and made a very direct parallel between chattel slavery of the 19th century and 20th-century liberalism. So liberalism became the key enemy for those on the right. Goldwater might be the first moment of national success, but an engine of critiquing liberalism on the right revs up in the 1970s under Reagan.
A second line of critique comes from a similar engine on the left, emerging from the likes of Dissent magazine, which is a parallel to the National Review. Figures like Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Saul Alinsky, and thinkers on the left who argued that mainstream liberalism had tied Americans to the yoke of capitalism. In short, liberalism was too friendly with capitalists.
And then you get the third line of critique, from civil rights activists of the 1960s, people like James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Lorraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Now, Black Americans have always had a very cautious relationship with so-called white moderates. But there was this notion that maybe, just maybe, mid-century white liberals were going to bring about the true equality that Black activists had been fighting for for centuries. And starting in 1963 and 1964—you can see this exact moment in late ’63 and ’64—Black activists turned against what they saw as the limited possibilities and limited willingness of white liberals to truly bring about racial equality. Sure, the white liberals will pass laws that end segregation, but will they bring about economic and social equality in the United States? And they turn against them as well.
So liberalism came under fire from the Right, the Left, and civil rights advocates. We still see these three lines of attack today.
JB: You write that what an American thinks a liberal is tells you more about the thinker than liberalism. What do you mean?
KS: When I ask people to describe a liberal, their description usually has nothing to do with liberals themselves. The answers tell me more about their politics than it tells me about the politics of a liberal. I tell them what their politics are, and they’re usually surprised because I’ve figured out who they are based on their definition of a liberal.
Once these three lines of attack were expressed in America—be it by newspapers, magazines, a pillar of young YAF Republicans, or, on the left, Students for Democratic Society activists—critique was constantly pushing the liberal center. Anytime liberals made a mistake, there was a huge outcry suggesting that liberalism as a whole was faulty. In the 1960s and 1970s, on the left, the Vietnam War gets pinned—rightfully so—on Lyndon B. Johnson, who was achieving a lot of liberal policies through the Great Society. Nonetheless, all of those liberal policies were seen in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Revulsion at war on the left cast the entire liberal order as a failure because of this significant error that was Vietnam.
Parallels today are nowhere clearer than in leftist critiques of mainstream liberalism’s support for an expansionary Israeli military presence in Gaza. And I’m not saying either of these are right or wrong. I am saying that this line of critique has a history, and that history has grown to the level of caricature all too often. And so I worry that some of liberalism’s accomplishments are clouded by the caricatured-version liberals.
JB: Perhaps we are in an era of liberalism without liberals. As critiques of liberalism and liberals took hold, to what extent were liberals capable of integrating critique? Surveying the history, it seems at times an enjoyably ironic quirk of American history that liberal elites, whose philosophy presupposes an openness to internal critique, become so hardened against it as to jeopardize their power.
While I’m a fan of your pithy metaphor of the liberal’s “assassination” by multiple shooters, it strikes me on presentist grounds as political cope. To put it bluntly: Weren’t liberals’ failures more real than invented? Public perception of liberals as technocratic, bureaucratic, and spineless snowflakes a trope of their own making? Public backlash produced by bad or frustrated policy agendas that had real-world consequences?
KS: Absolutely, liberals made mistakes. Two of the biggest ones that provoked a lot of revulsion happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One was the way that the Vietnam War was managed, and LBJ certainly deserves a lot of critique for the expansion of the Vietnam War. The other one is the revulsion against the busing initiatives of the early 1970s.
For those who don’t know, in the 1970s this was an effort to create a more egalitarian society and listen to Black civil rights advocates who wanted to do more than merely take down segregation laws. Let’s see if Black people and white people will live in the same neighborhoods and then we can have racially blended schools. Well, Americans voted by their mortgage payments and they decided not. White Americans especially decided to move from neighborhoods where Black people were moving in. This happened in all regions of America. So the government is stuck and thinks, “Well, if kids can learn to get along with people of different race, then maybe we can end this deadly cycle. So let’s bus kids from predominantly white neighborhoods into predominantly Black schools and vice versa, and so the schools will be racially integrated, these kids won’t grow up as racists, and then they will solve the housing problem,” a theory that contained all sorts of flaws. First off, anytime you involve children, you’re going to get a huge response. And secondly, there was a shortcoming of liberals to recognize the politics at play in our society.
How did the busing issue play out? It wasn’t white people from rich neighborhoods who had their children bussed to poor Black neighborhoods, but white working-class kids who were taken from their working-class neighborhoods into Black neighborhoods, and vice versa. This prompted revulsion from the white working class against the liberal elites who tried to create equality in American life at the cost of my children and not their own children. The white working class felt like white liberals were elites, “limousine liberals,” driving around and sending their kids to private schools instead of actually enduring the consequences of their own actions. Rich neighborhoods don’t necessarily get the Black poor kids in this busing scheme, and so they don’t suffer the consequences. It’s the pure power politics you see over and over again in the history of American democracy, where wealthy people are saved from the consequences of policy, and the white working classes are left to suffer the consequences.
This was a real mistake of the postwar American liberals. One of the great things about liberalism is that it’s adaptable. It can see and own up to its mistakes and then shift. But liberals too often admit their mistakes and then they look wishy-washy, as if they don’t have a backbone or a foundational sensibility, as if they’re going to change course at the whims of whatever they heard most recently. And they get pilloried in the 1970s and in the 1980s. What do you believe in? Where are your deep-seated foundational beliefs? And so goes the history of liberalism.
Liberalism is a sensibility. It is something that signifies individual freedom, while acknowledging communal responsibility. It is not a set of policies, and so the policies are going to change and shift over time, and as it changes and shifts over time, the deep philosophical roots look like they’re loose or non-existent. And this becomes the basis of a critique that liberals are unmoored. They often lack capital-T truths, like blind nationalism or deep-seated religious belief. Liberalism has deep roots, but they appear amorphic, especially when it comes to the policy level.
JB: Do you think governing philosophies or “political orders” like liberalism are destined to rise and fall in such spectacular fashion?
KS: Governing ideology is always going to be susceptible to revolution or at least some transition. As a historian, it’s inevitable, but there is no timeline to that inevitability. Is it 50 years? Is it four years? Is it 400 years? We don’t really know.
We were living in a situation where many Americans loved liberalism, at least certain aspects of liberalism, but they didn’t call it by that name and hated liberals and pinned all the flaws of liberals on liberalism. Americans loved Social Security. They loved Medicare. They didn’t want to live in a military state. They loved free speech. They loved freedom of expression. They loved free worship They loved all these things in terms of our Constitution.
Today, the Trump 2.0 regime is attacking some of the signature components of American liberalism. We will see how the American electorate responds to that. Just yesterday, for instance, I saw a website called the “Typical Liberal,” which is a right-wing troll site with four million followers on Instagram and four million followers on TikTok. The host tests out a lot of right-wing talking points about culture wars issues and in one video, he explained what was in the Big Beautiful Bill. As I watched, all of a sudden the comment section was filled with MAGA folks turning against the host. They complained that they were sold on ending our debt, but with DOGE and Americans kicked off Medicaid, we’re still not saving any money. I saw in real time the comment section turn against this bill, and perhaps that’s because this bill is an attack on liberalism as a philosophy as we’ve come to know it, rather than just liberals.
JB: As you’ve embarked on the book tour, how are you interpreting the Left, Right, and center’s relationships to liberalism? On the one hand, the Right, which governed in the liberal tradition, has embraced postliberalism. But the more interesting case is the Democratic Party. On the one hand, a resurgent Left continues to critique liberalism, but a lot of intellectual energy in the “abundance” movement is trying to revive liberal governance, if not liberals themselves. How should we make sense of this?
KS: Right now there is a “civil war” going on on the left, and especially within the Democratic Party. Ranks of the center and far left are warring about which version of liberalism will win out, if we even want to use that word anymore.
This tension surfaced after the rise of Bernie Sanders; the turning point here was 2008, which saw both the birth of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement. This time also became Barack Obama’s moment, and what did he do? He saved the banks and rebuilt the structures of capitalism.
In the shadow of 2008, we’re witnessing the Left deciding which vision of American liberalism should be the rightful inheritor and which will be more electorally successful. But one of the beauties of the Right is they’ve castigated both the center and the Left alike as snowflake socialists who want everyone to be woke; “they hate our country,” to use a direct quotation from Trump.
I don’t know who will win in this inter-left struggle. But the Left has been most successful at bringing about its policy initiatives when the far left and the center left are united, as during the 1930s with huge amounts of New Deal legislation and in the 1960s when the Great Society built the welfare state as we know it.
JB: What do you make of the so-called “abundance” movement in all this?
KS: The abundance movement has historical precedence in the Atari Democrats in the 1980s. The group embraced Silicon Valley technologies, said manufacturing is dead, and sought to put resources in high tech as the way to the future. This is just another version of that. It has very limited capacity to succeed, despite their book sales.
But the fact that they are selling so many books suggests that there is a real yearning for a new articulation of liberal order. At the end of my book, I go through a few terminological phrases or words that might better mark a middling position between the center and the Left. I land by suggesting that perhaps it’s time for democratic socialism. Or perhaps “social democrats,” because “social” signifies a responsibility to community while “Democrat” is an individual word denoting one vote per person and a representative government.
It might be too hampered by the language of socialism. But nonetheless one of the most popular politicians in America right now by many polls is Bernie Sanders, and he calls himself a democratic socialist. If we want to look at the New York democratic mayoral election, we saw Mamdani win, and he calls himself a democratic socialist. And I want to pause there to talk about Mamdani because his platform is basically two sentences long, and I’m paraphrasing: “New York is too expensive. We want to make New Yorkers’ lives easier.”
Making Americans’ lives easier again would be a very effective political slogan, some version of that would be able to encompass both the centrist Democrats and the far left and create a credible coalition that might be able to make a plausible argument for liberalism. 
