Liberal
The New Deal Era under Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) represents Liberalism in action. FDR expanded government intervention through social security, banking regulations, and public works programs while maintaining a fundamentally capitalist economy. The administration increased executive power to address the Great Depression, though democratic institutions remained intact.
What it believes
Individuals first: conscience, speech, property, and due process secured by constitutional government, with power divided, offices term-limited, and the state confined to protecting the rights it did not grant but merely recognizes.
The appeal
It is the source code of every free society in this atlas — the innovation that power could be caged by parchment and courts. Most cells around it are amendments; this is the base document.
Where it breaks
Formal rights coexist comfortably with material misery and private domination — the sleeping-under-bridges problem — and proceduralism can lack answers when constitutional forms are captured in constitutional language.
Among its neighbours
The Social Liberal above adds the material floor this cell leaves to charity. The Labour Liberal beside it organizes the workplace liberalism forgot. Below, the Liberal Democrat is its modern electoral form. Marketward, the Centrist trades its principles for its poll numbers.
Figures — real and imagined — who share the Liberal base ideology. They differ only on the third axis: from radical to restorationist, each is a different face of a Liberal.
The company you keep.
The social axis (progressive ↔ traditional) splits Liberal into nine named shades. Take the quiz to find out which one is yours.
- Radical Liberal
- Progressive Liberal
- Reformist Liberal
- Heterodox Liberal
- Liberal
- Rooted Liberal
- Traditional Liberal
- Reactionary Liberal
- Restorationist Liberal