Liberalism’s enemies are having second thoughts

Prior to Kanye West, Lawrence Dennis was America’s most famous Black fascist. Born in 1893, Dennis had European features and light skin that allowed him to pass for white, which he did for nearly his entire life. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, served in the US military and diplomatic corps in the 1920s, and then emerged as a prominent journalist and public intellectual around 1930. His primary interest: what he saw as the looming collapse of the American economic and political model. The twin shocks of World War I and the Great Depression proved, in his mind, that the liberal capitalist political order was doomed. The future, he thought, might be either fascist (his preference) or communist. Liberalism was on its way to extinction, its obsessions with individual rights and freedoms preventing it from adapting to a new world that demanded total states. He advanced this basic claim in a series of books and essays so prominent that, in 1941, Life magazine named him “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist.” [Image: American diplomat, consultant and author Lawrence Dennis walks to court during the Sedition Trial on May 9, 1944, in Washington, DC. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/DennisLawrence_01.png?quality=90&strip=all] “I find the liberal theory and practice inadequate both to what I consider to be social requirements and to my own personal requirements… It has failed. It has proved inadequate. Therefore, by the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, it is doomed,” Dennis wrote in a 1935 essay titled “Fascism for America.” The coming decades would, as we all know, embarrass Dennis’s predictions. Yet for the past 10 years, strikingly similar arguments about liberalism’s obsolescence have played a defining role in American intellectual life. The early 21st century, much like the early 20th, was defined by a series of shocks — 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 victory. These events led a rising chorus of intellectuals on the right and the left to insist the liberal political order was on its last legs. Something new was coming. Whatever it was, it would obliterate the hidebound liberalism buckling at Trump’s feet. Liberals, caught off-guard by events, started to wonder if their enemies had a point. In 2018, a right-wing assault on liberal politics — political theorist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed — became a surprise bestseller. Deneen’s radical argument, that “the only path to liberation…is liberation from liberalism itself,” earned him a place on Barack Obama’s list of the year’s best books. In a 2019 article examining the rise of these arguments, I labeled the current era an “anti-liberal moment.” Critics of liberalism on the left and right were finding mainstream success, and liberals appeared unable or unwilling to properly defend against their critiques. Yet I believe this period is ending — in fact, it may have ended already. The anti-liberal claims that liberalism has “failed” are looking increasingly like Lawrence Dennis’s predictions of its doom in 1935: wildly premature. Of course, there is no parallel modern event to the source of Dennis’s humiliation: allied victory in World War II. Politically, liberalism is still in crisis, with President Donald Trump engaging in a multipronged offensive against the American constitutional order. Between Trump’s illiberalism and the success of similar leaders abroad, it’s far too early for liberals to declare “mission accomplished.” What’s happening now is something more subtle, more inchoate: a kind of intellectual vibe shift. Anti-liberal forces that once seemed ascendant are weakening, and illiberal ideas are losing their luster. Prominent thinkers on the right and left, even some once seen as radical critics of liberalism, are reemphasizing liberalism’s virtues. Perhaps surprisingly, the political crisis of liberalism caused by Trump is a major cause of liberalism’s improving intellectual outlook. --- Defining liberalism Philosophically, the term “liberalism” refers to something quite different than the “liberalism” discussed in American politics. Prior to Trump, the vast majority of Republicans were philosophical liberals — and many still are. Liberalism in the philosophical sense is the broad family of political doctrines that center on equality and freedom: holding that the purpose of politics is to enable each and every citizen to live life according to their own vision and values. Institutionally, liberals believe that realizing these values requires democracy, the rule of law, and strong legal rights to protect individuals from abuse by the state. Liberalism, in this sense, is the philosophical underpinning of democracy as we understand it today — operational in contexts as diverse as the United States, Japan, and Namibia. While liberals agree in broad strokes about the purpose of politics, they often disagree among themselves on what their doctrine entails. There are liberal socialists and liberal libertarians, liberal cosmopolitans who support open borders and liberal nationalists who endorse tight restrictions on immigration. What they share is a commitment to resolving these disagreements through the liberal democratic process — through elections, free debate, and peaceful activism. Non-liberal political theories, by contrast, reject one or more of liberalism’s premises. Perhaps they hold, on religious grounds, that people should not be free to live life as they choose, but instead pushed toward living according to religious scriptures. Perhaps they do not believe that individuals deserve the right to criticize the state, as was the case under Soviet Communism or fascism. Being non-liberal is not merely about criticizing the political status quo, but about attacking the basic premises that underpin liberal democracy itself. --- Although the anti-liberal right has a newly powerful adherent in Vice President JD Vance, the administration’s record has divided its leading intellectuals and alienated liberals who used to give their ideas a respectful hearing. Simultaneously, the Trump administration’s naked authoritarianism has made leftists who once thought critiques of Trump’s “fascist” tendencies hysterical realize that maybe the liberals had a point. Yet there are reasons to think that this is not just a temporary backlash, but reflective of anti-liberals’ deeper intellectual defects. The right’s anti-liberals are on weaker ground than their political success suggests, and the left’s anti-liberals may have barely existed in the first place. The shifting intellectual winds are not proof that liberalism will ultimately triumph. Whether Trump succeeds or fails in fatally undermining American democracy will almost certainly hang on things less abstract than argument in academic journals and little-read Substacks. Yet ideas do matter. The influence of radical thought on Trump’s second-term policies vividly illustrates that political leaders and their staff pay more attention to these debates than you might think. The end of the anti-liberal moment could, for this reason, mark the beginning of a new era of liberal flourishing — if liberals can develop new answers of their own. Sohrab Ahmari and the weakening of the postliberal right Six years ago, journalist Sohrab Ahmari was at the cutting edge of right-wing intellectual radicalism. A Catholic convert who had adopted his faith with proverbial zeal, he had come to see modern social liberalism as an abomination that corroded the traditional values and social solidarity that made a good society possible. He once, famously, declared the idea of drag queen story hour “demonic” — a sign of liberalism’s moral poverty. If liberalism meant drag queens reading to children, he said, then “to hell with liberal order.” He turned this revulsion into a credo, most notably in a vituperative essay blasting the center-right evangelical and religious liberty litigator David French. By asking the state to provide Christians freedom, rather than by seeking to make the state itself more Christian, French and his ilk were creating the conditions for their own extinction. The religious right could not exist within liberalism, per Ahmari’s view, but rather was pitted against it in a death struggle. “Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism,” he wrote. These arguments put Ahmari at the forefront of a new intellectual movement — the “postliberal” right. Together with a mostly Catholic group of thinkers, including Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule, Ahmari led an assault on liberal ideas of tolerance and pluralism. Their most notable adherent was Vance, also an adult convert to Catholicism, who openly describes himself as a “postliberal” aiming to tear down the “regime” (by which he means the American liberal elite). [Image: JD Vance greets University of Notre Dame professor of political science Patrick Deneen before a panel discussion on regime change and the future of liberalism at Catholic University in Washington, DC, on May 17, 2023. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/AP23188630609311.png?quality=90&strip=all] Yet around the time the movement managed to place one of its own on the GOP ticket, Ahmari started to have second thoughts. In the spring 2024 edition of the liberal journal Liberties, he published a piece on “the poverty of the Catholic intellectual tradition” that read like a renunciation of his former radicalism. Catholics who believed that “the whole order, the whole regime, is corrupt” — as he once did — were guilty of adopting a “dogmatic ahistorical posture” and fostering “an unhealthy and philosophically indefensible revulsion for the nation and its traditions.” Instead of radical critique, he argued, the Catholic right needed to develop an appreciation for what was good about the American political order. “Critical patriotism and a return to the American center — the vital center redux — should be our watchwords, and this implies, first and foremost, a recognition that American democracy is itself a most precious common good,” he concludes. When I spoke with Ahmari in May, he told me he did not regret his prior positions. He still believes, as a philosophical matter, that secular liberalism’s preoccupation with the individual inhibited its ability to address collective problems. However, his practical politics have shifted profoundly. He believes the task is not tearing down the current liberal democratic order, but improving it. Once a Trump booster, he told me that his politics more closely resemble those of the New Deal tradition in America or Europe’s center-right Christian Democrats. “The fundamental difference is that I [now] think the existing order is the best we could hope to achieve in our historical horizon,” he told me. Ahmari’s new moderation is a notable data point indicating postliberalism’s decline: It is never a good sign when one of an intellectual movement’s leading lights abandons its core vision. There are others. Kevin Vallier, a philosopher at the University of Toledo and critic of postliberalism, has tracked the number of essays published by postliberal publications and the interest in those publications’ output on social media. Both metrics indicate decline. “They’re just doing a lot less ideological work, and it’s getting a lot less engagement,” he tells me. Even some postliberals agree. In a 2024 essay, Vermeuele wrote that he had “lost interest in the liberalism debate,” and moved on instead to “applied practical projects” such as developing a “classical legal theory,” a stance he believes is widely shared within the movement. “The debates over high liberal theory that seemed so gripping in recent memory are no longer of much relevance,” he wrote. Vermeule claims the decline in postliberal theory is, in part, a reflection of their success. And there’s an element of truth to this: At a moment where postliberals are staffing the Trump administration, it makes sense that their intellectuals would spend more effort on practical politics than on philosophical fencing with liberals. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/GettyImages-2214264559.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/GettyImages-2217978066.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Yet his victory dance, published a year before Trump was inaugurated, was premature. In fact, the Trump administration’s anti-liberal record has seriously damaged the credibility that movement had spent years building up. In the spring, the New York Times’s David Brooks wrote an angry column calling postliberalism “the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy” and blaming it for “the moral rot at the core of Trumpism.” He denounced its adherents by name: “Years ago, I used to slightly know both Deneen and Vance. JD has been in my home. We’ve gone out for drinks and coffee. Until Inauguration Day, I harbored him no ill will,” Brooks wrote. “But over the past four months, a small cabal at the top of the administration — including Trump, Vance, [Stephen] Miller and the O.M.B. director, Russell Vought — have brought a series of moral degradations to the nation.” Why postliberalism is in decline Brooks’s column points to perhaps the most obvious reason behind postliberalism’s intellectual decay: their close association with the unpopular Trump administration. Much as it was interesting and edgy to debate American fascism right up until the US entered World War II, the mainstream fascination with the forbidden postliberal vision has difficulty surviving a war where its political champions are busy demolishing the foundations of American democracy and civil liberties. Postliberalism has, intentionally or not, linked its future to the Trump experiment. If these four years end with Trump leaving office amid policy disaster and bottom-scraping approval ratings, postliberalism could suffer the same intellectual discreditation as neoconservatism did after the Iraq debacle. But postliberalism is also facing internal pressures on the right, fissures that are weakening its intellectual coalition even as it ascends to power. One such fissure, per Ahmari, arises from economics. While the postliberal movement is best known for its radical social conservatism, it also advanced a more interventionist approach to the economy. Its view of liberalism as disinterested in “the common good” applied even more cleanly to laissez-faire economics than it did to secular social liberalism. From this point of view, the Trump administration’s record is dismal. Its attacks on the welfare state and regulatory agencies contravened the letter and the spirit of a postliberal economic vision. This was a major reason why Ahmari, in particular, has grown further apart from pro-Trump postliberals like Deneen and Vermeule: He has come to believe that the GOP cannot be a vehicle for meaningful economic reform. “We always said that it would be easier to move the Republicans left economically than the Democrats right culturally. And I just don’t see the first half,” he tells me. While economics split the movement’s leadership, culture is weakening its rank-and-file foundations. The postliberal base has always been college-aged men or recent college grads, who gave it strength in factional right-wing disputes and enhanced its mainstream cachet: It always helps to be able to claim the mantle of the right’s intellectual future. Yet recently, Ahmari has noticed young men flocking to an even more extreme faction — explicitly anti-democratic, often-racist thinkers he terms “Nietzschean” or “barbarian.” Tech monarchist Curtis Yarvin, fascist Bronze Age Pervert, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and even increasingly radical Tucker Carlson have figured out how to outflank the postliberals from the right. [Image: Nick Fuentes, the leader of a Christian-based extremist white nationalist group, speaks to his followers in Washington, DC, on November 14, 2020. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/GettyImages-1229647854.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Intellectually, these figures are lightweights. Deneen and Vermeuele are attempting to make rigorous and well-considered arguments; the “barbarians” are not. Yarvin, their most “serious” thinker, has lost whatever rigor he once had. Their rise suggests that postliberalism always had shallow foundations. Its success among the youth came less from the strength of its arguments than from the sense that it was the most radical option available. But when outright bigotry became more normal in right spaces, postliberals lost that relative advantage. In the drive to be the most “based,” Hitler worship would always trump political Catholicism. “In terms of online purchase, that has taken off a lot more,” Ahmari says, adding that he has become so critical of this group that some on the right probably think he sounds like a “progressive scold.” But if forced to choose between a right where the extremists call the shots, and an alliance with liberals and the left, Ahmari knows where he would stand. “I will happily join an old-school united front against the barbarians,” he tells me. “Skull-measurers, IQ-worshippers — it’s really the most terrifying politics there is.” The left’s fizzled challenge to liberalism Samuel Moyn is one of the foremost left-wing critics of Trump-era liberalism. A law professor at Yale, Moyn co-authored a 2017 New York Times op-ed warning of the risks of “tyrannophobia” — “the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions.” Tyrannophobia, he and co-author David Priestland argued, historically had “a tendency to redirect our attention from underlying social and economic problems [which have] often been the real source of danger.” In their view, the liberal reaction to Trump was falling into this pattern: “It is easier to believe that democracy is under siege than to acknowledge that democracy put Mr. Trump in power — and only more economic fairness and solidarity can keep populists like him out.” Moyn fleshed this critique out in his 2023 book Liberalism Against Itself. An intellectual history of the “Cold War liberalism” embodied by figures like Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar, the book argues that their preoccupation with the specter of totalitarianism led them to embrace a tyrannophobic politics that abandoned core liberal commitments to social equality. For the past decade, he has insisted that we have been living through a similar error — that liberals describing Trump as an authoritarian or “fascist” were overstating his dangers. And, in doing so, they were throttling the prospects for the emergence of a more authentically left-wing Democratic Party that could fight Trump and win. These arguments helped burnish Moyn’s reputation as a fierce critic of liberalism; a recent Liberties essay on his work was titled “The Anti-Liberal.” Yet, as the essay notes, Moyn has always seen his project not as an attempt to destroy liberalism but to rescue it. “My view is that liberalism deserved another chance in the face of its right-wing opponents,” he told me in a June conversation. He saw his critique, along with those from other left-wing radicals, as an “an occasion for diagnosing genuine shortcomings — not the ones the right charged — and, in a sense, to save liberalism from itself.” This has been a consistent theme in Moyn’s work. But now he is more contrite. In the wake of Trump’s naked second-term authoritarianism, he now says that “he’s willing to concede that maybe we went too far” — that tyrannophobic liberals may have had a point. “I didn’t adequately [foresee] all of the future dangers that came later. I have to own that,” he told me. [Image: The New York City Pride March on June 29, 2025. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/GettyImages-2222775686.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] In this sense, Moyn is like Ahmari — both admitting that their prior attacks on liberalism were at least somewhat too aggressive. But the differences between the two men mirror differences between the modern right and left more broadly, and explain why left anti-liberalism, which recently seemed ascendant in a manner similar to postliberalism, has undergone a very different sort of decline. Postliberalism was, at least at one point, a genuine alternative to liberalism. But left anti-liberalism was always overstated — not only by the left’s centrist critics, but often by leftists themselves. Its weakening is less a story of a decline than the popping of a bubble. The late 2010s and early 2020s saw the rise of two distinct, but related, strands of radical left-wing politics. One was socialist, taking class and economic inequality as its primary interests; the other centered on identity-based oppression. The first, Moyn’s faction, rose alongside Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary bid. The second rose in the late-2010s “Great Awokening” and peaked around the 2020 George Floyd protests. Both movements took inspiration from academic and activist radical circles in which the words “liberal” and “liberalism” are used as slurs. “The Marxist superego has defined the left so deeply,” Moyn says, “that it’s very hard to say a good word about liberalism.” These movements’ vocal distaste for “liberals,” oft-expressed on social media and in podcasts, gave the rising left a veneer of philosophical radicalism — one convenient both to the leftists and their foils on the center and on the right. For both the socialist and identity-based left, attacking “liberals” was a way to distinguish their politics from hated figures like Hillary Clinton. For their enemies on the center and right, the anti-liberal discourse was proof that these movements were dire threats to American freedom. Still, the left of the late 2010s and early 2020s never produced a sustained alternative to liberalism as a philosophy. There were no serious efforts during this time to challenge liberalism’s view that individual freedom was socially vital, and that liberal limitations on state power — like, say, First Amendment protections — were necessary. There was no figure akin to Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s radical professor who attacked liberal tolerance and championed violent revolution — let alone any prominent Stalinists or Maoists. While Vermeule and Deneen were advancing radical alternatives to liberalism from the right, the left generally offered radical-sounding critique paired with reformist policy. This can be seen in their choice of champions — figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and (most recently) Zohran Mamdani, all democratic socialists who respect election results and advance policy agendas that would do little to challenge the basic foundations of American liberalism. It can also be seen in the reformist policies the modern left champions: ideas like minimum wage hikes and police reforms that, while perhaps misguided, were enacted through the democratic process and posed no threat to its continued survival. [Image: New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani speaks to supporters during an election night gathering on June 24, 2025, in New York City. Mamdani was announced as the winner of the Democratic nomination for mayor in a crowded field in the city’s mayoral primary. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/GettyImages-2221991702.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] It’s not that the modern left is incapable of anti-liberal politics. At several points over the last 10 years, some in their ranks have advanced ideas and taken actions that were genuinely illiberal. But these tendencies have either fizzled out or were always overstated. One example, on the socialist left, was a sub-faction that valorized a politics of cruelty and personal viciousness. This so-called dirtbag left, revolving around the Chapo Trap House podcast, not only made a sport of demonizing their enemies but actively celebrated efforts to harass and intimidate their political opponents into silence. It was a profoundly and proudly illiberal political style, one opposed to the open debate and mutual respect that liberal political culture depends on. Yet the dirtbag tendency no longer plays a pivotal role in the modern left, and the energy that once surrounded it has largely dissipated. Some of its defining voices have become apolitical or, like the hosts of the Red Scare podcast, defected to Trumpism. Chapo still has a sizable audience, but its once-precipitous growth has halted. The equivalent phenomenon on the identity left would, in theory, be “cancel culture”: a catch-all label used to describe everything from college students violently silencing right-wing speakers to campaigns to get journalists fired when their writing contravened left-wing pieties. For roughly the past 10 years, but especially in the wake of the Floyd uprising, voices on the center warned that this aggressive species of “wokeness” posed a mortal threat to American liberalism. Yet there was always less here than met the eye. There was never an organized ideological hub, akin to the dirtbag left, that openly and proudly celebrated illiberalism as a political virtue. There were, instead, individual instances encouraged by local student groups and decentralized social mobs — a problem, to be sure, but not one unique to the identity left. The best available systematic data showed that the scope of this problem was dramatically overstated — with Trump’s current crusade against higher education showing us what genuinely dangerous illiberalism in that sphere looks like. Today, with the overall phenomenon of “wokeness” in clear decline, you scarcely hear about the left’s cancel culture anymore. Even observers who formerly fretted about left-wing intolerance — like sociologist Musa al-Gharbi — have now concluded that the problem is in the past. Why the left’s anti-liberalism was a mirage This conclusion — that left anti-liberalism was a paper tiger — was not exactly what I would have expected a few years ago. On the one hand, I’m not surprised that “wokeness” and “cancel culture” were never the threat to liberalism they were hyped up to be. I said so at the time, repeatedly. While there are many persuasive criticisms of left-wing politics during “peak woke” — like its embrace of substantively bad policies like educational detracking — these are very different from the claim that wokeness is destroying basic philosophical commitments to liberalism. Events since have shown they did not. What does surprise me, however, is that the socialist left did not produce something akin to postliberalism: a systematic alternative political vision that challenged core liberal premises about the need to restrict government power over the individual. The Marxist tradition has a long track record of theorizing such alternatives, and the anti-liberal moment was ideal conditions for such a systemic challenge to catch fire in American intellectual life. But this never happened. Why? Part of the answer rests in the anti-liberal left’s political weakness relative to the postliberal right — a weakness on display as early as 2020. Sanders’s primary defeat was a devastating blow for the dirtbag left, which had hitched their political and intellectual wagons to his success. And some disastrous illiberal experiments during the George Floyd uprising — most notably, the brief-lived anarchist revolution in central Seattle — discredited the idea that identity left activists should be going beyond reformism. More recently, the shock of the Trump administration’s naked authoritarianism has prompted critics of anti-Trump liberalism — not just Moyn, but also prominent political theorist Corey Robin — to admit the president represents a true authoritarian crisis. There is no time for anti-liberalism when fascists are at the gates. But I think there’s something more philosophical at work here as well. Both sub-factions of the American radical left have reconciled themselves to operating within liberalism in a way that their peers on the right simply have not. The full-spectrum failure of communist authoritarianism, ranging from economic catastrophe to mass murder, prompted a searching rethink of the older left’s critique of liberal democracy as a bourgeois fiction. Today, modern leftists overwhelmingly affirm the value of democratic elections and individual rights protections. While calls to end capitalism are omnipresent on the radical left, few believe this can be accomplished imminently — instead proposing a more gradual series of reforms through the liberal-democratic process designed to make society more equal and, in the long run, open up the horizons of political possibility to deeper structural change. Moreover, much of the modern left focuses its critical attention on neoliberalism: the post-1970s laissez-faire worldview embodied by Reagan on the right and Bill Clinton on the center-left. But attacking neoliberalism is entirely possible within the confines of a broadly liberal politics — a point Joe Biden demonstrated when he adopted “postneoliberal” economic thinking on issues ranging from trade to anti-trust. So while the postliberal right talks openly of “regime change” as a near-term goal, the radical left calls for police reform and free public buses in New York City. The right is postliberal, the left is post-neoliberal. This form of radicalism does not, at least in the near term, actually threaten to topple liberalism. The attacks on “liberals” are either an imprecise shorthand for criticisms of the centrist Democratic establishment, or else a kind of irritable mental gesture lacking philosophical substance. The point is not that there is no radical left in America. Rather, it is that the radical left’s frequent use of “liberal” as slur masks deeper concessions to liberal politics. Where do we go from here? With postliberalism looking increasingly unattractive, and the left offering no clear and compelling alternative to liberalism, liberals have an opening to reinvent themselves. Such a new liberalism would not merely attempt to rebut its opponents or “defend democracy” from Trump, but rather develop a new articulation of its own ideas to address modern problems. The most promising sign, at present, is the rise of “abundance liberalism” — a new liberal economic vision that has found its clearest expression in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book. Abundance liberals believe that government can and should accomplish great things: Their mantra is “a liberalism that builds.” Their core insight is that the barriers to building are not merely a lack of ambition or adequate spending, as some leftists suggest, but rather government itself. In their view, the state has so hobbled itself through well-intentioned regulations — like zoning restrictions and lengthy environmental reviews — that it simply cannot deliver what citizens want of it. To save the liberal project, they argue, we need to repudiate some of its past accomplishments. What makes abundance liberalism philosophically notable is not its bundle of policy ideas per se. It’s that abundance represents an attempt to operationalize liberal principles in order to address one of the most distinctive social challenges of the 21st century: the collapse of government legitimacy. [Image: A protest outside of the Massachusetts State House on February 5, 2025. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/GettyImages-2197248006.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Part of what fueled the Trump movement, and the anti-liberal intellectual tide that came with it, was a sense that people were fundamentally dissatisfied with the way politics worked. The postliberal right blamed this dissatisfaction on liberalism’s attack on traditional moral values; the left blamed it on rising inequality under neoliberalism. Abundance liberalism, by contrast, locates this legitimacy crisis in a gap between what people expect of government and what it actually does. Its solution to this problem is rooted in a liberal theory of power — a point Klein made explicitly in a recent New York Times column responding to his left-wing critics. A wholesale reconstruction of liberal politics, though, would be a broader project than even abundance liberalism’s call for major policy reform. It would require a new ideological story about what our society is for and what it is about — one that can command basic allegiance from people who disagree profoundly on everything ranging from zoning reform to abortion. Liberalism does not, at its heart, aim to be one political doctrine among many (in the sense that abundance liberalism competes with other economic visions, like postneoliberalism). Liberalism instead hopes to define the very system through which political disagreement happens: to create institutions, like elections and a free press, that guarantee that citizens can participate as equals in the political realm and live private lives as they so choose. John Rawls, one of 20th-century liberalism’s giants, defined political liberalism as an attempt to create “a just and stable society of free and equal citizens who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines.” Such a liberalism should be able to command basic allegiance from everyone who believes their fellow citizens deserve basic respect and reciprocal rights — a group that ranges from conservative Catholics like Ahmari to democratic socialists like Moyn to left-liberal technocrats like Klein and Thompson. The greatest task of modern liberalism is to discover the political technology necessary to build this consensus liberalism: to develop ideas, narratives, and policies addressing the specific frustrations with the political status quo that gave rise to the anti-liberal moment in the first place. What such a liberalism might look like is still unclear. But the rise of abundance liberalism shows that American liberals retain the capacity to think creatively about adapting their basic principles to changing circumstances. As their rivals weaken, their ambitions should widen accordingly.

This moment demands more than headlines

Liberalism’s enemies are having second thoughts