As democracy in America faces mounting pressure from rising inequality and populist backlash, it’s clear that, to save it, drastic steps will need to be taken. In his new book, Freedom for All: What a Liberal Society Could Be, UVM political science professor Alex Zakaras makes a compelling argument that the solution lies in a revitalized liberal tradition that doesn’t just confront that inequality but also empowers citizens and boldly reimagines the American social contract.

We sat down with him to talk about what’s at stake and his vision for a more just and democratic society.

College of Arts and Sciences: How would you define the term “liberalism”?

Alex Zakaras: This is an important question, partly because we use this term in different ways. In American politics today, the term “liberal” is often used to describe people who are politically left. But when historians and political scientists use the term, they're usually talking about something else. They’re referring to a political outlook defined by a shared goal and a shared set of political strategies. The shared goal is freedom: Liberals want to create conditions under which people can live freely. They care a great deal about personal freedoms in particular, such as freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, and freedom of religion. Liberals also tend to agree on a set of strategies designed to achieve that goal, including constitutions and individual rights overseen by independent judiciaries, the rule of law and democratic accountability, checks and balances, a free media, and a market economy.

Liberalism defined in this way is a fairly big tent: it includes people on both the right and the left. Ronald Reagan was a liberal in the sense I've just defined, and so was Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, those two would have disagreed about a whole lot of things, but the disagreements would have unfolded within the liberal tradition. The liberalism I defend in the book is a left liberalism in the style of FDR, but it's important to see there are other competing versions out there, too.

CAS: What are the most prominent criticisms of liberalism?

AZ: Since World War II, there's been a broad intellectual consensus around liberal ideals in the West, but that consensus has really started to fracture in the last decade or two. The most important source of that fracture has been the rise of a new, emboldened, illiberal political right, both in Europe and in the United States. One common refrain you hear from them is that liberalism celebrates individual freedom and choice at the expense of all other human values, and that this relentless celebration of individual choice erodes the bonds— of traditional family, of community and Christian culture, of national solidarity—that hold society together.

CAS: How have the proponents and defenders of liberalism fallen short in recent years?

AZ: Over the last decade, and especially since the current administration took over in January, we've seen many scholars and pundits step forward to defend liberalism. And for good reason: Liberal institutions in our country—like the rule of law, the free media, checks and balances—are under attack right now in a way they haven’t been since the Red Scare in the 1950s.  

My worry about these defenses of liberalism is that they’ve often taken a reactive, defensive posture. Their emphasis is on protecting our liberal inheritance from these attacks. And don’t get me wrong: Protecting our core liberal institutions is vitally important. But it’s also not enough, because it makes the populist right look like the agent of change and liberal opponents look like defenders of the status quo. And I don’t think we can afford to position ourselves as defenders of the pre-Trump status quo, because that status quo was already broken in fundamental ways. A great many people were deeply dissatisfied with that version of America: working class families who’d been left behind by our economy; young people growing up with a sense of impending doom because of the climate crisis, the Great Recession, and the opioid crisis; Black Americans who were suffering abuse and brutality at the hands of police; and more.

So, there is a great deal of hunger for change in our society. The populist right has harnessed that hunger for change. Proponents of liberalism, on the other hand, have sometimes struggled to articulate a clear vision of the future they want, a vision that’s bold and compelling to people who have been dissatisfied with the American status quo for some time.  

CAS: Your book defends what you call “radical liberalism.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

AZ: In the book I offer my own version of a political impulse that's been around since the founding of our nation and has been supported by abolitionists, feminists, labor activists, and civil rights advocates. It’s defined by three things.

First, radical liberalism takes human equality seriously and looks to extend the promise of freedom to everyone in society on equal terms, with an emphasis on expanding freedom and opportunity for those who have the least of it.

Second, it embraces what I would call a “robust” ideal of human freedom. Radical liberalism says that freedom—the kind really worth having—means the power to make choices. If we understand freedom in this way, it's clear that we're freer when we have access, for example, to good schools and affordable healthcare and childcare, and when we're paid a livable wage.

Finally, radical liberalism is committed to popular mobilization and building grassroots citizen counterpower to the wealthy interests that, throughout our country’s history, have fought tooth and nail against the policies needed to protect the freedom of working people. 

CAS: This topic of unequal power and its effect on democracy is a key theme in your book. Why is it so important?

AZ: The idea of democracy promises us, among other things, equal voice in collective decision making. But the wealthy bankroll our political parties and our politicians. They pour billions into our election cycles. They own giant media companies and control the tenor of our public debates. Their corporations often operate above the law. They have huge discretionary power over their employees and the communities in which they operate. This massive power imbalance has contributed to Americans’ loss of faith in their political institutions. 

Anyone interested in saving liberal democracy in this country has to think about how to build and mobilize countervailing power among citizens. First on the list is trying to rebuild the power of organized labor in this country, which has atrophied dramatically in the last 50 years. Only around six percent of private sector workers in America are unionized, which is way lower than the numbers in other affluent democracies—where, not coincidentally, workers have better wages, better healthcare, generous family leave and vacation, and other things that that many people in our society can only dream of.

CAS: You argue in the book that the American social contract is fundamentally broken. Can you say more about that?

AZ: The truth is that our society has undergone profound changes over the last 45 or 50 years, and these changes have been really good for rich people and really bad for most Americans. They include the truly obscene levels of economic inequality we're living with today, the erosion of economic mobility, a sharp rise in economic insecurity, and tremendous concentrations of power in the hands of the wealthy and big corporations. Currently, the richest 400 families in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of American families. Or consider this: The top 10 percent of American families own 93 percent of the stock market! We should remember this next time anyone tries to use the stock market to gauge how well our economy is doing. 

But it's not just inequality—it's also economic insecurity. People’s earnings are more volatile, their jobs are less secure. There's a lot of good research showing that this affects not just the poor but middle-class families as well. One way of measuring insecurity is to look at things like personal bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures, and evictions. All of these have gone way up over the last several decades.

This is what I mean when I talk about the social contract. It’s very clear that Americans want to live in a society in which, if you work hard and save, you can get ahead, buy a house, send your kids to college, afford healthcare, and enjoy a measure of economic security. But this promise has really unraveled for a huge number of people.

CAS: You suggest that social media companies have played a part in the dismantling of our democracy. What has their role been?

AZ:  The media has a very important role to play in liberal democracy. It has to keep citizens informed so they're aware of what's actually going on around them and can hold public officials accountable. As our media landscape changes, we need to keep asking ourselves the question, is our current media well equipped to serve these core democratic roles? And the clear answer today is no, it isn't.

Imagine that you were designing a democratic society from scratch, and you knew you needed a free and independent media. Next, imagine somebody comes forward with a proposal: Let’s have people get their news from huge, monopolistic social media platforms that are controlled by multi-billionaires who can determine with a tweak of the algorithm what people see and don't see. And let's give these multi-billionaires no incentive or legally enforceable obligation to serve the public interest by promoting accurate information or responsible journalism. Let's also let them hide their algorithms so that people can't see how they're being manipulated. Finally, let’s allow them to eat up all the advertising revenue that used to sustain local journalism, so there aren't many reporters left on the ground to cover things like zoning board, school board, and city council meetings that affect people's everyday lives. 

If someone were to make that proposal, you would laugh them out of the room, right? But it’s what we’ve backed ourselves into. Truly revitalizing liberal democracy will have to involve making deep changes to our media environment and forcing social media companies to be accountable to the public interest. 

CAS: In the current political climate, liberalism is struggling. How realistic is your vision for radical liberalism?

AZ: You're absolutely right. Liberal democracy is under attack, and there are days when I'm pessimistic about its survival. But most days I'm not, and the reason is that this administration is overreaching in many ways. The people calling the shots in the White House today are right-wing ideologues whose views lie way outside the American mainstream. Americans don't want Marines deployed to their neighborhoods against the wishes of mayors and governors. They don't want masked agents stuffing people into unmarked vans or dragging kids out of their beds and zip-tying them in the middle of the night. They don’t want a king or emperor—they want a president who's not above the law and who operates within a system of checks and balances.  And they don't want the cost of living to keep rising because of exorbitant tariffs.

So, I think there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when this administration’s allies and enablers will be swept from power decisively. When that moment comes, we're going to have a real opportunity to make a significant course correction—and we have to be ready for it. There are going to be a lot of voices in that moment calling for a moderate, centrist politics and a return to “normalcy.” But we can’t afford to do that.

To save liberal democracy in this country, we have to make deep and significant changes to our economy and political system. We need to repair our social contract in fundamental ways. And we have to do that by attacking the profound inequalities that are pulling our country apart. This book, in a sense, is meant to prepare us for that moment, that opportunity, should it arise. And I think it will.