Social liberals often endorse incremental reforms that leave the deeper architecture of exploitation intact. They champion diversity initiatives in corporate boardrooms without questioning capitalism itself; they support modest police oversight while rejecting demands to radically shrink or abolish carceral systems. Their solutions treat symptoms, not causes.

Closely tied to this is a liberal fetishization of civility and “both sides” dialogue. Liberals often scold direct action or disruptive protest as too confrontational, even as such tactics have been historically indispensable to civil rights, labor, and anti-colonial movements. They call for unity, but unity on whose terms? Typically, on terms that maintain existing hierarchies.

Social liberalism frequently stops at personal virtue or symbolic alignment. One donates to a nonprofit, posts solidarity hashtags, or shops “ethically,” feeling morally complete without engaging in collective struggle that challenges property relations or power structures. This is an ethics of spectatorship rather than participation. It does not threaten entrenched interests or build alternative institutions capable of supplanting them.

Most troubling, liberal progressives often move to co-opt or sanitize radical demands. The labor movement, abolitionist campaigns against police and prisons, Indigenous land struggles, and climate justice movements have all faced efforts by liberal institutions to water down their goals into more comfortable, system-compatible reforms. In doing so, liberals function as buffers that protect the status quo from deeper rupture.

A politics serious about human flourishing requires breaking with the limits of social liberalism. It demands an orientation toward collective action, structural analysis, and solidarity with all oppressed peoples — rather than prioritizing one’s own comfort or the approval of existing institutions. This means embracing disruptive tactics when needed, investing in mutual aid and cooperative economies that prefigure a post-capitalist society, and being willing to redistribute power and resources, not just to diversify who holds them.

The goal cannot merely be a kinder, more inclusive version of neoliberal capitalism or a slightly less carceral state. It must be the dismantling of all systems that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few, whether through racialized policing, exploitative labor markets, or environmental extraction.

Social liberalism’s deepest flaw is that it confuses the appearance of progress with the substance of transformation. In doing so, it perpetuates injustice under a veneer of benevolence. The crises of our time — ecological collapse, rising fascism, vast inequalities of wealth and power — cannot be solved by moderate tweaks. They demand a fundamentally different society built on solidarity, democracy, and collective ownership of our shared future.

The task before us is stark: choose the uneasy work of true emancipation, or remain sheltered in the fragile comfort that liberal moderation provides. History shows that moderation in the face of injustice is never neutrality; it is complicity. Serious politics requires that we side unambiguously with the oppressed and organize, disrupt, and build until the structures of exploitation fall.