Liberalism’s Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Why the crisis everyone mourns reveals liberal tradition at its most vital

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

And right now, a strange paradox confronts us: at the precise moment when everyone declares liberalism dead or dying, the liberal tradition is displaying more intellectual vitality than I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

The despair is everywhere. Establishment liberals mourn the end of technocratic consensus. Progressives declare the Enlightenment project failed. Conservatives celebrate democracy’s inevitable collapse. Neo-reactionaries publish blueprints for what comes after. Even defenders of liberal democracy often sound like they’re performing last rites rather than mounting genuine defense.

But something else is happening beneath the surface of this despair—something the mourners cannot see because they’re grieving the wrong death.

What’s Actually Dying

Let me be precise about what we’re losing. The consensus liberal settlement of roughly 1980 to 2016 assumed that markets would naturally promote democratic values. That technological progress would naturally disperse power. That economic growth would create conditions for healthy distributional politics—debates about how to allocate resources within a stable democratic framework.

This settlement believed expertise should guide policy, that institutions were fundamentally sound and just needed competent management, that history had essentially ended with liberal democracy’s triumph, and that the main work was optimization rather than defense of the framework itself.

That settlement is dead. And it deserves to be.

Because it wasn’t liberalism—it was liberalism’s corruption. A slow-motion abandonment of liberalism’s foundational insights about power, wrapped in the language of markets and progress and expertise.

The Founders understood what consensus liberals forgot: that concentrated economic power threatens democratic governance just as surely as concentrated political power. They wrote taxation and commercial regulation into the Constitution not as controversial innovations but as responses to clear historical lessons. The British East India Company had demonstrated how unchecked economic power could undermine political liberty.

Within three years of the Constitution’s adoption, Congress was already exercising these powers—standardizing weights and measures, regulating railroads, imposing banking regulations. Not accidents or overreach, but recognition that markets work best when embedded in democratic institutions that prevent dangerous concentrations of private power.

This sophisticated understanding persisted through much of American history. Progressive Era trust-busting, New Deal financial regulations, post-war corporate governance rules—all reflected the insight that market freedom and democratic governance require each other. That letting private power grow unchecked eventually destroys both.

The consensus liberals lost this insight. In their enthusiasm for markets and skepticism of state power—hardened by valid critiques of Soviet central planning—they collapsed a crucial distinction: the difference between legitimate democratic oversight of markets and authoritarian control of the economy.

They began treating any state action to check private power as a step toward communism. They assumed market success would naturally promote democratic values rather than recognizing that markets are tools that can serve democratic or authoritarian ends depending on whether democratic power constrains economic power.

The result? Forty years of letting economic power concentrate while telling ourselves this was freedom. Watching tech platforms evolve from champions of openness into threats to democratic discourse while celebrating disruption. Allowing wealth to reach levels that make democratic accountability difficult while insisting this was meritocracy.

We moved from healthy debates about distribution—how to allocate resources within a democratic framework—to dangerous fights about power itself—who controls whom, and whether democratic majorities have authority over concentrated private interests at all.

That consensus is dying. The question is what comes next.

What’s Being Born

Here’s what the mourners miss: liberalism isn’t dying. It’s remembering what it is.

At its core, liberalism begins with a simple but revolutionary recognition: human beings are fallible, disagreement is inevitable, and yet we must organize society together. This creates what I call the fundamental liberal problem: How do conscious beings pursue truth and build institutions across disagreement, uncertainty, and difference?

Every other political philosophy tries to solve this problem by eliminating it. Authoritarians impose uniformity through force. Religious fundamentalists appeal to divine revelation. Technocrats defer to expert knowledge. Revolutionary movements promise to eliminate the structural contradictions that make disagreement necessary—so that after transformation, genuine conflicts of interest will cease to exist.

But liberalism does something different—it builds systems that work because people disagree, not despite disagreement. It provides a framework for collective reasoning that allows people with fundamentally different worldviews to cooperate, compete, and even change their minds through peaceful means.

This is liberalism’s genius, and it’s what we’re rediscovering: that the framework enabling disagreement matters more than winning any particular disagreement. That protecting the conditions of democratic reasoning is more important than optimizing outcomes within those conditions. That power must be constrained—whether public or private—to preserve the possibility of reasoning together.

The intellectual renewal happening now recovers insights consensus liberals abandoned. We’re rediscovering that:

Expertise should inform democratic choice, not replace it. The distinction between facts and values, means and ends, isn’t technocratic obstruction but epistemic necessity. Experts can tell us what different policies would achieve. They cannot tell us which achievements to pursue. That’s the democratic choice that no amount of sophisticated analysis can eliminate without eliminating democracy itself.

Market success requires democratic constraint. Markets are powerful tools for innovation and prosperity. But their tendency toward power concentration requires active counterbalance. This isn’t anti-market—it’s pro-market in the deepest sense, ensuring markets serve their proper function rather than undermining the democratic framework that makes legitimate markets possible.

Representation requires genuine relationship. You cannot represent people by optimizing positions through focus groups and polling. You represent by being accountable to constituents whose values may differ from national consensus, by maintaining connection to places rather than just platforms, by accepting that democratic legitimacy comes from actual participation rather than expert determination of what people should want.

The framework is more fragile than we assumed. The conditions that make democratic reasoning possible—shared capacity to perceive reality, trust in institutions, commitment to shared procedures, acceptance that power must be constrained—these aren’t natural or automatic. They’re achievements that require constant maintenance against forces that would tear them apart.

These aren’t new insights. They’re recovery of what early liberals understood and consensus liberals forgot.

The Politics of Power vs. The Politics of Distribution

Understanding this renewal requires grasping a distinction consensus liberals collapsed: the difference between distributional politics and power politics.

From roughly 1945 to 2016, American politics primarily engaged in distributional debates. We argued about healthcare policy, education funding, environmental regulation, tax rates. These were legitimate disagreements within a shared framework—debates about how to allocate resources and regulate their use for common good.

Consensus liberals failed to see how their very success in these distributional debates was gradually undermining the power structures that made such debates possible. By assuming markets would naturally disperse power, they allowed economic power to concentrate until distributional questions became power questions.

When oligarchs can capture regulatory systems, when tech platforms can shape electoral outcomes, when concentrated wealth can buy political influence—you’re no longer arguing about how much to tax or regulate. You’re arguing about whether democratic majorities have authority to constrain private power at all.

This is the shift from distributional politics to power politics. From debates within the framework to fights about the framework itself. From disagreements about policy to disagreements about whether democratic procedures bind everyone or only constrain some while exempting others.

The neo-reactionaries understand this distinction perfectly. When Curtis Yarvin argues democracy is “inefficient,” he’s not making a distributional argument about resource allocation. He’s making a power argument: that democratic accountability itself is an obstacle to rule by qualified elites. When Peter Thiel declares “freedom and democracy are incompatible,” he’s not debating tax policy. He’s rejecting constitutional constraints on private power.

They’re not trying to win distributional debates within liberal democracy. They’re trying to replace the framework with explicit hierarchy where power determines outcomes rather than being constrained by democratic choice.

The liberal renewal happening now recognizes this for what it is: not a policy disagreement but an assault on the framework that makes policy disagreements negotiable rather than existential.

Why This Feels Like Death

If liberalism is renewing, why does it feel like collapse?

Because renewal requires letting go of what was comfortable. The consensus liberal settlement offered stability, predictability, the sense that fundamental questions were settled and only technical details remained. Politics became management. Expertise became authority. The “end of history” suggested democratic triumph was permanent and only required competent administration.

That comfort is gone. We’re back to recognizing that democratic self-governance is precarious, that the framework requires active defense, that power concentrations threaten liberty whether they’re public or private, that no amount of expertise can substitute for democratic choice on questions of value and purpose.

This feels like loss to those who believed consensus liberalism was liberalism itself. They’re experiencing the death of technocratic management and mistaking it for the death of the liberal tradition.

But liberalism was never supposed to be comfortable management. It was always supposed to be ongoing struggle to maintain conditions enabling peaceful disagreement. The Founders understood this. Progressive Era reformers understood this. New Deal architects understood this.

Consensus liberals forgot it. And now we’re remembering.

The intellectual vitality I see isn’t naive optimism about outcomes. It’s clear-eyed recognition that the framework matters more than we realized, that defending it requires more than voting and hoping, that expertise serves democracy rather than replacing it, that markets require democratic constraint rather than naturally promoting democratic values.

This is liberalism returning to its nature. And that return, however uncomfortable, represents vitality rather than death.

The Epistemic Crisis

Perhaps the clearest evidence of liberal renewal is how seriously people are taking the epistemic crisis—the systematic destruction of conditions that make democratic reasoning possible.

Consensus liberals treated this as a technical problem: better fact-checking, improved media literacy, platforms tweaking algorithms. They couldn’t see it as the fundamental threat it is because their framework assumed rational discourse would naturally prevail in free markets of ideas.

The renewal happening now recognizes something deeper: that algorithmic curation isn’t just amplifying pre-existing beliefs but destroying the cognitive infrastructure required to form coherent beliefs at all. That social media platforms don’t just enable discourse but engineer addiction to patterns of engagement that make sustained reasoning impossible. That epistemic collapse isn’t a bug in the system but a feature profitable to those who designed it.

Jon Stewart recently described social media as “ultra-processed speech”—engineered in laboratories to bypass the deliberative capacity that democratic reasoning requires, just as ultra-processed food is engineered to bypass satiety signals that regulate healthy consumption. Both exploit evolutionary vulnerabilities we’re not equipped to resist through individual willpower alone. Both require structural intervention rather than just better individual choices.

This isn’t despair about human nature. It’s recognition that democratic self-governance requires epistemic conditions, and those conditions are being systematically destroyed by systems designed to maximize engagement regardless of consequences for collective reasoning.

The vitality lies in taking this seriously—not as unfortunate side effect but as existential threat requiring structural response. Not better media literacy training but democratic constraint on platforms profiting from epistemic collapse. Not individual responsibility but collective action against concentrated power weaponizing human cognitive vulnerabilities.

The Return to Republican Virtue

Another dimension of liberal renewal is the recovery of republican tradition—the recognition that democratic self-governance requires active citizenship, not passive consumption.

Consensus liberals treated politics as something done by professionals while citizens watched and occasionally voted. They optimized for what focus groups said voters wanted rather than creating conditions where citizens could develop capacity for democratic participation. They treated expertise as authority rather than as service to democratic deliberation.

The renewal happening now recovers what the Founders understood: that republican self-governance doesn’t happen automatically through institutional design alone. Jefferson insisted that public education was essential not just for economic opportunity but for cultivating the civic capacities democracy requires. An educated citizenry capable of reasoning together, detecting tyranny, and participating meaningfully in self-governance—this was the foundation of the entire republican project.

Jefferson believed the schools should teach not just reading and writing but the civic republican culture necessary for free people to govern themselves. That citizens needed capacity to recognize when power was being abused, to deliberate about common good, to participate in the ongoing work of maintaining democratic institutions. This wasn’t indoctrination—it was recognition that democratic self-governance is a practice requiring cultivation, not a natural state that emerges without effort.

Consensus liberals abandoned this insight. They assumed institutional structures would maintain themselves through procedural inertia. That markets and technology would naturally promote democratic values. That expertise could substitute for civic capacity. That citizens needed only to vote occasionally while professionals managed everything else.

The renewal happening now recognizes what Jefferson knew: that the conditions enabling democratic reasoning must be actively cultivated. That citizenship is practice requiring education and experience. That the framework doesn’t maintain itself but requires conscious choice by people capable of understanding what they’re maintaining and why it matters.

This isn’t nostalgia for 18th-century town halls. It’s recovery of the insight that republican self-governance requires citizens capable of the work—capable of distinguishing genuine expertise from authoritarian claims to superior qualification, capable of recognizing when concentrated power threatens liberty, capable of reasoning together about common good even when they disagree about particulars.

The despair brigade says this is impossible—that people are too polarized, too fragmented, too algorithmically captured to practice democratic citizenship. But this mistakes effects for causes. People aren’t naturally incapable of democratic reasoning. They’ve been systematically deprived of conditions that make it possible—including the civic education Jefferson insisted was essential.

The task isn’t changing human nature. It’s restoring conditions where human capacities for reasoning together can function. This requires more than structural reforms—it requires recovering the Jeffersonian insight that democracy depends on cultivating civic capacities, not just designing better institutions or optimizing policy outcomes.

What Consensus Liberals Actually Lost

Let me be specific about what died and why its death represents renewal rather than collapse.

They lost the distinction between market efficiency and economic power. Markets are excellent at allocating resources and driving innovation. But that efficiency doesn’t prevent—it often accelerates—dangerous concentrations of power. Consensus liberals treated market success as inherently democracy-promoting rather than recognizing that markets require democratic constraint to serve democratic ends.

They lost the distinction between expertise informing choice and expertise replacing it. Technical knowledge matters. But on questions of value and purpose—what we should optimize for, what kind of society we want—no amount of expertise can substitute for democratic deliberation. Consensus liberals let technocratic management replace democratic navigation.

They lost the distinction between legitimate democratic oversight and authoritarian control. Not all state economic action is equivalent. Democratic constraint on private power to prevent its concentration differs fundamentally from state control of economy for authoritarian ends. Consensus liberals collapsed this distinction, making any democratic check on private power seem like a step toward communism.

They lost the distinction between distributional debates and power struggles. Healthy democracy requires settling power questions enough to focus on distributional questions. Consensus liberals failed to see how concentrations of private power were transforming distributional debates into power struggles—until the framework itself became contested.

These losses weren’t inevitable. They resulted from specific intellectual errors compounded over decades. Errors we can now see clearly and correct.

That correction—that recovery of distinctions consensus liberals collapsed—is what liberal renewal looks like.

The Complementarity Framework

Perhaps the deepest renewal happening is recovery of liberalism’s core insight about complementarity: that seemingly opposing forces require each other rather than needing resolution.

The conservative impulse responds to genuine human need for stability, continuity, predictability. The progressive impulse responds to genuine demands for justice, inclusion, adaptation. Both are legitimate. Both respond to real features of human existence.

The question isn’t which impulse is correct. The question is whether we can build systems that honor both through democratic navigation rather than through technocratic choreography or authoritarian imposition.

Consensus liberals forgot this. They tried to eliminate tension through expert management—determining the “optimal” balance between stability and change, between tradition and justice, between competing values. But optimization requires already knowing what to optimize for, which is exactly what democratic deliberation must determine.

The renewal happening now recovers the insight that democratic framework exists precisely to hold these tensions productively. That the center isn’t a position between extremes but the space where different impulses can contest without force. That politics isn’t about eliminating disagreement but about maintaining conditions where disagreement remains productive rather than destructive.

This applies to the relationship between markets and democracy, between expertise and choice, between efficiency and legitimacy, between individual liberty and collective obligation. These aren’t opposites requiring resolution into synthesis. They’re complementary aspects requiring integration through democratic institutions that honor both.

The despair comes from thinking these tensions are problems to be solved. The vitality comes from recognizing they’re features to be maintained—that attempting to eliminate them destroys the very conditions that make liberal democracy work.

The Conditional Nature of Hope

I’m not offering guaranteed success. The threats are real. The forces arrayed against democratic self-governance are powerful and sophisticated. The outcome genuinely uncertain.

But uncertainty isn’t reason for despair. It’s the condition that makes choice meaningful.

If liberalism’s death were inevitable, there’d be no reason to resist. If oligarchic consolidation were guaranteed, accommodation would be the only rational response. If authoritarian triumph were predetermined, we might as well prepare for what comes after.

But none of these are inevitable. They’re outcomes that become more or less likely depending on choices made now—individually and collectively.

The intellectual renewal I’m describing matters precisely because it changes odds. Not by guaranteeing victory but by making resistance coherent rather than merely reactive. By providing frameworks that help people understand what’s happening and what’s required. By recovering insights that help distinguish genuine defense of liberal framework from defense of its corruption.

Philosophy doesn’t change material conditions directly. But it changes how people understand those conditions, which changes what actions seem possible, which changes what actually becomes possible.

This is why liberal renewal matters: not as source of optimism about outcomes but as recovery of intellectual tools necessary for defending framework under hostile conditions. Not as guarantee that holding the center will succeed but as recognition that the center can only hold if we choose to hold it consciously, understanding what we’re defending and why it matters.

What This Requires From Us

The liberal tradition offers no salvation. Only a framework for reasoning together when no one has final truth. Only institutions designed to remain open to correction when everyone is fallible. Only the difficult work of maintaining conditions where peaceful disagreement remains possible.

This isn’t less than revolutionary transformation or reactionary restoration. It’s more difficult than either. Because it requires holding tension rather than collapsing it. Accepting that we must navigate uncertainty together rather than imposing certainty through force. Recognizing that the framework enabling us to reason together matters more than winning any particular fight within that framework.

The renewal happening isn’t about returning to some idealized past. The consensus liberal settlement is gone and shouldn’t be restored. What needs recovering are insights that settlement abandoned—about power requiring constraint, about markets requiring democratic direction, about expertise serving rather than replacing choice, about the conditions that make democratic reasoning possible.

This recovery is already happening in the intellectual work being done by people who recognize what consensus liberals forgot. In the distinction between politics of distribution and politics of power. In recognition that epistemic collapse isn’t technical problem but existential threat. In understanding that representation requires genuine relationship rather than algorithmic optimization. In recovery of insight that concentrated economic power threatens democratic governance as surely as concentrated political power.

These aren’t marginal academic debates. They’re recovery of intellectual foundations necessary for defending liberal framework against forces that would replace it with explicit hierarchy.

The despair brigade says this is too late, that damage is done, that restoration is impossible. But they’re measuring the wrong thing. They’re mourning death of consensus liberal comfort and mistaking it for death of liberal tradition itself.

What’s dying deserves to die. What’s being born deserves our defense.

The Ground Still Holds

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And conscious beings reasoning together across disagreement is more valuable than any particular outcome that reasoning might produce.

These truths hold not because authority declares them but because they cohere with reality in ways that sophisticated arguments cannot eliminate.

The liberal framework isn’t dying. It’s fighting. Not perfectly, not everywhere, not with guaranteed success. But fighting—which is what living traditions do when they remember what they are.

The sufferable is becoming insufferable, which creates not despair but activation. The comfortable settlement is collapsing, which reveals not death but vitality—the return to liberalism’s nature as ongoing struggle to maintain conditions for peaceful disagreement.

The wire still holds. Not because forces trying to break it are weak. But because enough people have chosen to walk it together, consciously, understanding that the framework matters more than we realized and that defending it requires more than we assumed.

This is what liberal vitality looks like: not the comfortable management consensus liberals offered, but the difficult work of maintaining framework that makes management possible. Not the end of history they promised, but the ongoing negotiation that history always required. Not the optimization they delivered, but the democratic combat they evacuated and must now restore.

The crisis everyone mourns reveals something the mourners cannot see: that liberalism at its most threatened is also liberalism at its most clear about what it actually is and why it matters.

Not a political position but the framework that makes political positions possible. Not market fundamentalism but recognition that markets require democratic constraint. Not technocratic management but acknowledgment that expertise serves rather than replaces democratic choice. Not the end of history but the permanent work of maintaining conditions where conscious beings can reason together when no one has final truth.

This is liberalism remembering itself. And that memory, however uncomfortable, represents not death but the vitality required for what comes next.

The center holds because we choose to hold it. The framework survives because we refuse to surrender it. And liberalism lives because enough people recognize that the alternative—rule by those claiming superior qualification to determine how others should live—is unthinkable.

May courage carry us forward. May clarity guide our steps. May love for the framework that makes reasoning together possible sustain us through the difficult work ahead.

The circus continues. The wire remains. And liberalism’s death—like so many deaths declared prematurely—has been greatly exaggerated.

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