Adrian Wooldridge’s “The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism” will be published on April 21. This op-ed was adapted from an article in UnHerd.
The signs of liberalism’s senescence are everywhere. In Britain, Keir Starmer won a historic mandate in the 2024 election, only to rapidly turn himself into the most unpopular prime minister on record. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz looks like a Starmer-in-the-making, while France’s President Emmanuel Macron is in the twilight of his presidency.
And yet the problem is deeper than bad leaders. It’s the problem of a decrepit regime — a collection of functionaries and placeholders who’ve reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation and are now incapable of running the world they have made. Like all elites, they developed the habit of back-scratching and logrolling. And, like all elites, they soon lost touch with the people beneath them.
That explains the striking number of destructive liberal policies that have wreaked havoc across the West. San Francisco, a bastion of social liberalism, is so addled with homeless encampments and drug addicts snorting fentanyl in public that even many progressives have had enough. Sweden, once a byword for social harmony, is now known for chronic gun violence, thanks to the proliferation of immigrant gangs. The northern British cities that powered the Industrial Revolution are plagued, in their ethnic enclaves, by cousin marriage, honor punishments and grooming gangs. The response of all too many liberal intellectuals to these tragedies is to demand more of the policies that led to them in the first place.
This has provoked a growing number of intellectuals, on both right and left, to proclaim the death of liberalism. The most familiar argument explaining its demise is the Marxist one that liberalism is a ruling-class trick, and that the harsh realities of exploitation and imperialism underlie elites’ treacly words about “freedom” and “democracy.” A more interesting, and more influential, argument is being made by the New Right — many of whom call themselves “postliberals.” They argue that liberalism proved a disaster not because good ideas were badly applied, but because liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.
In his 2018 book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” political theorist Patrick J. Deneen wrote: “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them.” Liberal regimes succeeded when they were disciplined by traditional ideas about virtue and civility. But liberals’ core belief — that we are all rights-bearing individuals, answerable primarily to ourselves — inexorably destroyed the civilizational constraints that gave it strength.
The bulk of these postliberals are headquartered in the United States. A group based in the Claremont Institute in Southern California relentlessly attempts to expose the faults of the “liberal regime.” There are so many products of the Claremont Institute in the White House, the administration and Congress that they are fondly known in some circles as “Claremonsters.” Vice President JD Vance declares himself to be a postliberal. The idea has plenty of supporters in Britain, such as James Orr, a Reform Party adviser and Cambridge philosopher of religion, who propose a faith-and-flag-based conservatism as a solution to the disillusionment of modern life.
Their critique predominates at a time when the current liberal establishment is the most decadent it has ever been, and the forces of illiberalism are stronger than at any time since the 1930s. The country with the world’s second-biggest economy, China, is ruled by a Marxist dictator; the world’s biggest democracy, India, by an illiberal strongman; its most battle-tested war machine, Russia, by a man who wants to bury the liberal order; and its most important liberal power, the United States, is, at best, an uncertain friend of the liberal order that it created after World War II. Donald Trump is an instinctive rather than a cerebral politician, but almost all his instincts are illiberal, sometimes astonishingly so. He has not even bothered to pay lip service to international law in his wars of choice in Venezuela and now Iran and the wider Middle East.
Yet the postliberal influence owes much more to luck than substance. Postliberals fail to address the material problems that plague the postindustrial wastelands they decry. They have no answer to the question: What happens to populism when it is undisciplined by liberal constraints? The experience of the 1930s suggests nothing good. It is time to mount a defense of liberalism before it is too late.
Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been associated with the shrinking role of the state in both markets and morality. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair produced a widely admired bourgeois-bohemian (Bobo) synthesis by combining the Thatcherite deregulation of the economy with the 1960s deregulation of morality. The postliberal argument’s strength is its recognition that this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.
But the Bobo synthesis is only one possible manifestation of liberalism. You can have big-government liberalism as well as small-government liberalism, moralizing liberalism as well as permissive liberalism. All are linked by three core beliefs: that society starts with the individual rather than the collective; that truth is reached only through open debate; that power is so dangerous, it must be divided and constrained. Anything that prevents individuals from flourishing, ideas from clashing and power from being constrained, is illiberal.
During its long history, liberalism has suffered from several near-death experiences, but it has always revived by addressing new problems in new ways while staying true to its fundamental principles. The worst of these episodes occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when liberalism risked being stamped to death by jackbooted fascism or communism.
“The liberal state is destined to perish. All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal,” proclaimed the Italian socialist-turned-fascist Benito Mussolini. But the Allies proved him wrong by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, constructing the Iron Curtain and remaking the world according to a new collection of liberal principles. In the 1970s, the postwar regime gave way to stagflation and bureaucratic sclerosis, only to revive under the influence of the neoliberal revolution.
It’s understandable that people are angry with the liberal establishment and disillusioned with centrist promises. But the alternatives from both the right and the left are certain to be worse. During his first term, Trump catered to his billionaire friends, entrenching crony capitalism and passing big tax cuts, while providing his populist base with rhetorical puffballs. He didn’t even make significant progress with his “beautiful wall” at the border with Mexico. During his second term, with the old Republican establishment sidelined and both postliberal and illiberal thinkers in the ascendant, he is creating chaos in the Middle East, sending stock markets into a tailspin.
Meanwhile, in Britain, Reform’s economic policies are an unsustainable mixture of Thatcherism and left-wing statism. Yet the party remains steadily and comfortably atop opinion polls, though it faces the considerable challenge of sustaining its popularity until the next general election, which doesn’t have to be held until August 2029.
The radical left, whether in the U.S. or Britain, is even more impractical, compiling laundry lists of lavish spending funded by taxes on billionaires that they imagine would pay for it all. The radical left is also blind to the problems created by mass immigration, half-hearted integration and the development of parallel societies.
The only way forward is to reinvent liberalism just as thoroughly as previous generations of liberal reformers did to address new problems, while discarding established shibboleths if they happen to get in the way. Such a reinvention must start with three strategies: rethink, reposition and rearticulate.
Rethink
Today’s liberals need to break with their four-decade fixation on economic and moral deregulation. The release of millions of U.S. government investigative files regarding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have not only exposed how many neoliberal heroes — a tech billionaire here, an illustrious economist there — have feet of clay, but also the moral hollowness of a philosophy of self-indulgence and self-gratification that lies at the heart of the Bobo culture.
Today’s liberals must also reapply the core principles of liberalism as they encounter old sins in new forms. The tech giants are amassing market dominance of a sort the world hasn’t seen since the late-19th-century robber barons, and they are using that dominance to misinform and manipulate the public. Left-wing identitarians are offending the basic principles of individualism by continuing to treat people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals, or by canceling those who hold views that violate leftist orthodoxy.
Reposition
The biggest weakness of today’s liberals is that they have become the establishment — and they have all the attendant weakness of an establishment. Radical liberals must challenge this establishment with vigor. Why have the heads of universities betrayed the sacred principle of free speech? Why does groupthink pervade nongovernmental organizations?
Every successful reformulation of the liberal creed, from the New Liberals, through the managerial capitalism of the 1940s, to the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, has involved the sweeping away of a decadent elite and the creation of a new cadre of reformers. They must muscle aside this establishment — that is, the Davos establishment — before the populists do it for them. Liberal reformers also must be willing to forge alliances with groups that their elders have made a career out of demonizing. Certain conservatives turned out to be right about pornography and libertinism. Some socialists were right about the dangers of the overconcentration of economic power. Liberalism has a wonderful history of reviving itself through unexpected alliances.
Rearticulate
One reason liberals were so successful in the past is that they were so good at communicating. John Stuart Mill was a master of clarity. Abraham Lincoln wrote like an angel. William Gladstone held his audiences enthralled for hours. Today’s liberals have entirely lost the art. Officials sound like Soviet-era bureaucrats. Academics write for constipated referees who hold their fates in their hands.
There are two reasons for this failure: Being the establishment, liberals largely talk to each other rather than to the public; being a decadent establishment, they don’t really believe what they are saying. They parrot formulaic phrases much as Soviet bureaucrats did — to protect themselves from criticism and curry favor with the even more powerful. The simple fact of breaking with the establishment should be enough to take care of the dead-prose problem: Once people start believing what they say and start speaking to the public, they discover the language they need.
Once they’ve recovered their spirit, reformer liberals should take to the public square. Diplomats need to be willing to advance the case for freedom and religious toleration in the United Nations and other forums. Politicians need to speak out more loudly against illiberal practices such as shouting down speakers in universities or persecuting those whose criticism of Islam is treated as blasphemy.
Liberalism properly conceived is the only reasonable solution to the great problems of modernity: how to live together in a pluralist society and how to preserve social cohesion while unleashing individual talents. It is time to begin the patient but exhilarating work of renewing liberalism for a new age. Centrists of the world, unite!
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