When I was studying political science in graduate school I saw liberalism as an obvious good: of course society should champion progress above all else, of course traditions should be tossed out if they stand in the way of happiness, of course the ultimate goal should be maximizing individual freedom.
When I say “liberal” I don’t mean Democrats, I mean the dominant political philosophy of the modern Western world. Liberalism is a philosophical tradition rooted in the Enlightenment, built on the idea, among much else, that liberty is the highest good and that the government’s role is to protect personal rights without pushing any particular moral vision. America was built on liberal principles. In the 20th century, a semantic drift shifted “liberal” into a catch-all reference for left wing or Democrat, but both parties, Democrat and Republican, for all their surface-level conflict, still operate within the liberal frame.
And, for a while, it seemed like America’s liberal experiment was a resounding success. We built an unprecedented standard of living, won World War II decisively, stood down the Soviet Union, and put men on the moon. For decades, it felt like history itself was on our side.
But over time, cracks began to emerge.
Progress and Disintegration
Liberalism says governments should be neutral but, in practice, America’s liberal framework was inhabited by a culturally cohesive people largely united by Christian belief and Anglo-European social norms. But over time, the underlying moral consensus this provided began to fade. Modernity, both its technologies and evolving beliefs, encouraged atomization and a focus on self-fulfillment. As immigration rates surged, America came to be seen less as a homeland with a shared culture and more as an abstract idea, while assimilation gave way to a multicultural ethos that dissolved earlier notions of unity.
In politics, some Democrats championed the dissolution of social norms head-on, while some Republicans made such an idol out of small government that they struggled to stand for anything. Ultimately, though, human nature being what it is, liberalism often functioned more as a set of platitudes than a genuine desire to keep government morally neutral; both sides were more than happy to promote their ideological agenda.
What united both parties was a belief in progress. Progress was the golden ticket that would allow liberalism to evade the historic grievances between the lower and upper classes. Progress, both economic and social, meant an ever-expanding menu of products and lifestyles for people to choose from, keeping them preoccupied so elites could maintain their rule. In this way, liberalism functioned as a managerial system to safeguard elite rule under the guise of neutrality and individual rights.
Liberalism began in a culturally cohesive, morally grounded soil. When you live in a homogenous society with a robust set of shared values, it is difficult to imagine that society itself could ever come so undone. But liberalism is a powerful acid.
Over time, America’s cultural cohesion began to unravel. The things that make life meaningful do not survive on neutrality; when a society stops tending to its traditions, the traditions disappear. The more fragmented a society becomes, the more trust collapses and conflict escalates, so people to turn to the state, giving it ever more power and recourse to referee every dispute. And so, ironically, America’s obsession with freedom ended up resulting in less freedom.
Woke Orthodoxy
Into the unraveling America, woke progressivism marched. It took advantage of liberalism’s rejection of shared truth by providing a new moral regime that used the old language of rights to justify coercion and control. (I know we aren’t supposed to use the word ‘woke’ anymore, but I’m going to because it’s useful shorthand everyone will understand.)
Woke progressivism sees society as a system of oppression. Everything – race, sex, sexuality – is viewed through the lens of power, always asking who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. It aims to dismantle traditional structures and norms in the name of equity - even attempting to dissolve the limits of biology in the name of freedom. It operates with moral absolutism - policing speech, thought, and behavior to enforce ideological conformity. It is incapable of building or seeking truth, because it is premised on critique and destruction. It’s ultimate offering is chaos.
Woke progressivism has been useful for the establishment. Democrats internalized its language in order to denounce the American population for supposedly being racist, sexist, and homophobic and so justify the need for the enlightened elite to maintain power and reeducate them. Republicans depict “wokeness” as a bogeyman they need even more power to fight, instead of acknowledging it has become a luxury belief very beneficial to the elite class. Together, the liberal establishment benefits from this cyclical deployment of – and fight against – woke progressivism in a way that reinforces their power.
The liberal state and America’s preeminent institutions have become their own moral regime, one that enforces the new orthodoxy of self-invention, fluid identity, and unending progress. And it punishes dissent from that orthodoxy with increasing force. The result of all this is not a flourishing society of free individuals, but a society of atomized consumers, addicted to novelty, suspicious of each other, and increasingly incapable of sustaining the very freedoms we claim to cherish.
A Post-Liberal Future
To critique liberalism is not to deny the good that has emerged from it: valuable insights about the dignity of the person, the dangers of tyranny, and the need for liberty. And critiques are not a call to turn back the clock, but a first step toward imagining a way of seeing through the liberal delusion.
The liberal delusion is the belief that freedom can be the ultimate goal of a society. This delusion makes an idol out of liberty for it’s own sake. It is the notion that if we simply protect rights and step aside, good will emerge on its own. But societal flourishing is not self-sustaining, it needs tradition, faith, duty, and belonging. Liberty is good not because it allows us to do anything, but because it allows us the freedom to cultivate virtue. Liberty must be freedom for something greater. Without a cohesive transcendent order to ground it, freedom becomes fragmentation, which leads to nihilism and conflict, which erupts into a chaos that requires heavy-handed control. In this, the pursuit of liberty above all else is the very thing that destroys liberty.
Today, many believe that the failings of liberalism have become so egregeious and inescapable that “the debate is over, and political-liberalism-as-theory lost.” The rising wave of populism across the West is often acknowledged as liberalism’s death-knell; only time will tell if these post-liberal hopes will be realized or if they will be yet another false promise recuperated into the liberal machine.
One of the proposed alternatives to liberalism is common good conservatism as articulated by Patrick Deneen in his book Regime Change. This is an approach to politics and culture that reorients toward the cultivation of the common good. This is not a return to authoritarianism, but a return to the idea that freedom is not the absence of restraint, but the presence of purpose. Rather than attempting to be a neutral arbiter of fragmented pluralism, in common good conservatism the state promotes virtue by encouraging a vision of the good-life. This is a framework that rewards and encourages that which builds prosocial capital: families, churches, local communities, and more.
A post-liberal order would recognize that a good society forms people, rather than merely freeing them. It would also begin to rebuild what liberalism has spent decades tearing down: reverence, rootedness, and responsibility. In practice, this could mean policies that support marriage and child-rearing, like family tax credits and paid parental leave. It could mean restoring trade protections to rebuild local manufacturing so that working-class communities aren’t gutted by globalization that destroys their way of life while lining the pockets of the rich. Schools would reprioritize civic education and classical literature, not identity politics and activism. In short, the state would drop the pretense of neutrality and begin tending to the foundational flourishing of the nation by disincentivizing the corrosive and incentivizing the good.
To be sure, I have reservations about Deneen’s thinking. But it is easy to critique a regime, much harder to put forth alternative visions, so I appreciate any attempt because it is a crucial step toward our recovery.
Ultimately, we need to see through the liberal delusion that tells us freedom is the ultimate goal, and begin the work of imagining a different kind of future. Most people want family, faith, and a place to stand - and increasingly, they are turning back to those things. All across America, green tendrils are breaking through cracked concrete: homes centered on faith, communities rebuilding what was lost, lives reoriented toward meaning. What we need now is for that quiet blooming to ripple outward into our institutions and into our government so that it remembers it is supposed to be for the people, by the people. The soil is ready. It is time to plant something enduring.
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