Liberal political analysis is ordinarily based on a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and an assumption that domestic politics is the proper arena for democratic self-determination. But self-governing citizens have never exhausted the cast of characters who populate liberal states. Living alongside them there are often domestic aliens – permanent residents who are subject to the law, and may be protected by it, but who do not participate in making it. Refugees and remnants also inhabit liberal states. Whether citizens or not, they tend to bear the historical consciousness of victims or potential victims wherever they may live. A correlative fact is that in many now-liberal societies the meaning of citizenship itself is indelibly marked by the “missing” – the emigrant and the exile, the expelled and the extinct. Such identities – and the historical presence or absence of individuals who claim them – are generally regarded as messy details in the state-centered conceptual framework that dominates liberal political thought.

How do “ideas” help to account for political outcomes? The age-old question of the role of ideas has been given new life recently, partly in response to the imposing structure of theory that has been built around economic or rational choice explanations, with their emphasis on interests and material circumstances rather than ideas. Few outside of the most abstract economic model-builders hold that ideas have no impact on policies, but there is little agreement on how that impact occurs or on the observable criteria that would establish (or contradict) the impact of ideas.

On 30 May 1914, Theodore Roosevelt fired the opening shots of the midterm elections against the party of Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt framed the off-year elections as a referendum on the failures of the New Freedom, the Democrats' three-pronged program to curb the power of the trusts. Rather than bringing monopolies to heal, the former president asserted, Democratic policy had simply driven the economy into recession. “[T]he Democratic party,” Roosevelt explained on another occasion “has been engaged in what is fundamentally an effort to restore the unlimited competition of two generations back and to subject this to only an ineffective and weak government control”. To all, Roosevelt's counsel was constant: the prudent course of citizens that fall was to register a vote for social and industrial progress, to support the Progressive party candidate for Congress.

In the late nineteenth century, public outdoor relief came under severe and sustained attack from reformers. Municipal reformers attacked it as a source of machine patronage and corruption, and charity reformers saw it as the cause of pauperism and moral turpitude among the poor. But in New York City, the critical decision to cut the municipal program came not from the reformers, but from the city's Democratic machine, Tammany Hall itself. In December 1876, the machine administration of Tammany Mayor William Wickham and Boss John Kelly terminated municipal outdoor relief funding for 1877, except for the distribution of coal. The previous “reform” administration had, by contrast, kept the program intact.

The development of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been extraordinary. What started in 1975 as a minor amendment to a forget-table tax bill became in the 1980s one of the most popular programs in Washington. The national media and policymakers from both parties repeatedly praised the program. The New York Times, for example, hailed the EITC as “a wonderful but little-known anti-poverty weapon…the best means available for lifting the working poor out of poverty.” Republicans embraced the program as a superior alternative to welfare (meaning Aid to Families with Dependent Children), to a higher minimum wage, and to government-run day-care centers. President Bill Clinton made expanding the EITC central to his plans for reforming welfare, increasing the progressivity of the tax system, and improving the economic security of low-wage workers. One would be hard-pressed to find any government program that received such universal acclaim among political elites. By the early 1990s, it had become the policy equivalent of penicillin. Only in the spring of 1995, as congressional Republicans sought to balance the budget within seven years, did some policymakers seriously consider cutting this program.

Long ago, Louis Hacker noted the anticapitalist bias in American historiography. The tendency of capitalism, particularly marked after the advent of industrialization, to concentrate wealth and to turn that wealth into political power suggests the problem. The Declaration of Independence with its twinned affirmation of equality and liberty provided the ideological underpinnings for national unity. Both seemed threatened during the long transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy as the rich got richer and more and more of America's free citizens were exposed to the unfreedom of the workplace. Progressive historians who systematically analyzed the impact of industrial capitalism in the United States wrote out of sympathy with labor in its struggle for recognition, and no doubt Hacker was thinking of this tendency when he made his remark. This anticapitalist bias in the writing of American history has continued, only now historians decry the steady incursion of commerce and industry out of deference to a traditional way of life.