Those of us who live in liberal democracies carry an image of what a decent state should do. It should protect rights, grow the economy, maintain order, uphold fairness and arbitrate disputes. But on life’s deepest questions – what makes a life worth living, and what sort of person one ought to become – it is meant to show restraint. The state should not privilege one vision of human flourishing, let alone promote it. That is for individuals, families and communities to decide. To borrow the Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s golden rule of politics: “Mind your own damn business!”
Consider birthrates. Across much of the wealthy world, they have fallen below replacement level. Fewer children mean fewer future workers, taxpayers and carers, and more pressure on pensions, health systems and aged care. Yet when liberal democracies encourage larger families, through baby bonuses or affordable childcare, they generally describe the goal as removing obstacles and expanding choice. Crucially, everyone should benefit: gay parents, straight parents, adoptive parents, biological parents, married parents, divorced parents – come one, come all.
Earlier this year, I saw a different approach in Hungary. Hosted by a thinktank aligned with Viktor Orbán, I interviewed leading figures from his Fidesz party before its defeat in April’s election. For them, demographic decline was existential, not technical. The family was where people learned to be Hungarian and acquired the virtues of love and fidelity – values so important that they are named in the constitution Fidesz enacted. The family also connects national survival to personal flourishing. One leading defender of Fidesz told me, with startling bluntness, that women without children tended to be miserable and unfulfilled. This was no random digression. What I call a “good life state” honours certain ways of living as superior and uses public power and money to promote them. A liberal state, by contrast, helps people pursue the lives they choose and refuses to rank them.
Fidesz lost the election, but the model it helped popularise has not disappeared. Politics is returning to its oldest – and for many, most fundamental – question: who decides what makes a life worth living? From Maga and Fidesz to Modi’s India, Xi’s China, Israel’s governing right and Iran’s theocracy, leaders and movements are treating the good life as a public affair. Law, education, welfare, incentives, penalties and national narratives advance particular ideals of human flourishing. Some are religious and others secular, but they are substantive, specific and impossible for an entire citizenry to share.
Liberals rightly find this abhorrent. Many of these regimes are already corrupt or repressive. Add the further mission of enforcing a vision of the good life and they become more frightening still.
Yet liberals should not be surprised or refuse to see what is happening. The liberal belief that decent states must avoid prescriptive visions of the good is historically exceptional. For most of human history, the good life state has been the norm. Aristotle’s claim that politics aims not merely at life but at the good life is only the most famous formulation. Confucian and Islamic political traditions likewise made moral formation a public task. Seen this way, post-liberals are self-consciously pre-liberal. They promise to return the state to a core task that liberals are supposedly too embarrassed, weak or polite to perform.
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The mainstream liberal commentariat condemns these movements as simply bad. Their leaders want power, money and impunity, while their followers are ignorant, frightened or resentful – or so the thinking goes. Much of that may be true. But if liberals cannot see that these movements also hold out genuine human goods – belonging, purpose, family, faith and recognition, however cynically packaged – they will remain stunned by their appeal.
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Has this wave reached Australia? We have been resistant, not immune. Pauline Hanson and One Nation are already learning to surf it. Hanson’s call for a “monocultural” Australia is not just an immigration proposal. It is a claim about which identities and loyalties deserve public honour, reinforced by positions on family, gender and religion. One Nation has yet to produce anything as coherent or ambitious as Fidesz’s program. But the direction is recognisable: government should do more than protect choice; it should tell us what a proper Australian life looks like.
What should the liberal answer be? Well, it can’t be to build a good life state of its own. That would sacrifice the freedom and pluralism it exists to protect. But neither can liberalism survive as a bloodless list of procedures and prohibitions. It needs an attractive moral and emotional vision of its own: fairness, freedom, irreverence and the adventure of living with difference. Those are not empty rules. They are elements of a common life worth loving. If liberals cannot say so – and make it credible in practice – authoritarians will make the good life state we hoped was past into our future.
