Are abundance and liberality two sides of the same coin?
Listening to Ezra’s conversation with Helena Rosenblatt, and then the recent Abundance follow-up episode with Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman, I kept thinking there’s a deeper tension inside modern liberalism that Ezra is circling around but hasn’t fully articulated yet.
For most of liberalism’s history, “liberal” didn’t just mean procedural neutrality or individual rights. Rosenblatt’s point is that the older liberal tradition (from Cicero to Tocqueville to Mill) was deeply concerned with the formation of citizens capable of self-government.
That tradition assumed free societies required certain civic and moral capacities, like self-restraint, public spiritedness, reciprocity, and democratic participation.
But after the catastrophes of the 20th century, liberal thinkers became understandably suspicious of any politics centered on “forming” people. This is the argument that Samuel Moyn makes in his recent book, Liberalism Against Itself (hopefully, Ezra will invite Prof. Moyn to his podcast).
Liberalism increasingly retreated into neutrality: protect rights, avoid coercion, let individuals pursue their own conception of the good life.
The problem is that the vacuum never stayed neutral.
Markets shape people. Social media shapes people. Consumer capitalism shapes people.
And this is where I think the recent Abundance debates become really interesting. In the recent episode, Derek Thompson acknowledged that concentrated corporate power is also part of the problem, not just bureaucratic sclerosis.
That feels important because neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic framework. It was also a formation project. It produced a certain kind of self: hyper-individualized, entrepreneurial, optimized for consumption, detached from durable institutions and shared civic life.
In other words, liberalism stopped intentionally forming citizens, but the market never stopped forming consumers.
And I increasingly think this helps explain why Ezra has become more interested in meaning, belonging, institutional trust, loneliness, and civic life over the last few years. A lot of people are not just materially dissatisfied. They feel socially unformed and existentially untethered.
That’s also why I think some conservatives might have been partially right about the diagnosis of liberalism's ailings (though often very wrong about the solutions, like abortion bans and anti-gay crusades): free societies actually do depend on institutions that cultivate democratic character.
Consider families, schools, unions, churches, civic associations, mentorship structures, and public service. These institutions (what we call "civil society") have withered on the grape vine over the past fifty years. We are, to borrow the words of Robert Putnam, "bowling alone" and doom scrolling ourselves into oblivion, one Netflix binge at a time.
So I guess the questions I’m left with after the Rosenblatt and Thompson episodes are:
Can liberalism recover a thicker vision of citizenship and civic formation without sliding into paternalism or authoritarianism?
And can it also produce material abundance alongside social abundance and generate the kinds of institutions needed sustain liberal democracy in the face of democratic backsliding and populist demagogy?
Curious what others here think about this interpretation and whether it's a fair reading of Ezra's recent work on this topic.