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The End of Liberalism

Liberalism has generated its own undoing. As a philosophy and practical political project, one of its main aims was to overthrow the old aristocracy, in which one’s social station and political position was secured by birthright. No matter how much one strived—or how dissolute one became—one’s social and political rank could not be changed. This immutability was true not only in regard to one’s political position, but as a consequence that much of one’s identity was the consequence of birth. Liberalism proposed to overthrow thisancien régime and put in its place an order in which people, through their striving, ability, and hard work, could create an identity and future based upon the sum of their own choices.

Several hundred years into this experiment, we have witnessed firsthand the rise of a new ruling class, a “meritocracy” that has thrived under the conditions established and advanced by liberalism. Liberalism is today in crisis, not just because of the bad behavior of the new elite, but because its rise has corresponded with the attrition of institutions that benefited the lower classes while restraining the ambitious who wished to escape its restraints. The weakening of the family, neighborhood, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of “the many,” even as “the few” have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.

In the advanced liberal democracies across the world, working-class voters have risen up to reject the leaders who have regarded those who have been “left behind” with disdain and contempt. In response, liberalism has unmasked itself, revealing itself as an ideology that will force those who oppose it into submission, and advancing an increasingly “illiberal” liberalism. Efforts to limit the political power of the culturally dispossessed and economically disadvantaged—frequently by accusing majorities of being “antidemocratic”—increasingly reveal liberalism not to be a mutually shared comprehensive system that always allows self-determination, but rather a particular partisan set of commitments. The once unassailed public philosophy has been delegitimized.

As liberalism has careened toward its inevitable failure, politics across the Western world have been scrambled, no longer dividing between left and right liberals. Rather partisans who criticize the “people” (often composed of left and right liberals) and partisans who criticize the “elites” (today, most powerfully on the right, but also present on the left—for instance, Bernie Sanders and his criticisms of corporate elites) oppose each other. More than standing in opposition, they are in a vicious cycle as each side declines in virtue and strives for the destruction of the other, a cycle that will continue as long as liberalism remains the