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.