Liberalism, Heal Thyself

Democratic voters watching election returns, November 2016. (Photo by Drew Angerer.)

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Across the United States and Europe, a striking shift is underway. After years spent defending liberal democracy against populism and illiberalism, a growing number of liberal thinkers have turned to a different question: what should liberalism become in response to its crisis? New books, conferences, manifestos, and policy agendas increasingly speak not of resistance but of renewal. The language has become one of reconstruction.

But there is a tough question to ask: Is contemporary liberalism genuinely reconstructing itself, or is restoration simply speaking the language of reconstruction?

The difference matters. Restoration is comforting because it promises return. It says that the old order was basically sound, that something external broke it, whether a hostile power, a demagogue, or a strongman, and that the task now is to put back what was displaced. Reconstruction begins from a less comfortable admission: that the old order was not simply defeated by its enemies, but helped create the conditions of its own defeat.

Three Interpretations of the Crisis of Liberalism

Every intellectual ecosystem looks unified from the outside and factional from within. As I read them, the three main currents of liberal renewal describe different diseases and therefore offer competing cures.

The first current can be called institutionalist-defensive, and it is the ecosystem’s center of gravity with a blistering self-confidence. Its programmatic agenda centers on courts, accountability, executive power, all that constitutes the machinery of democratic self-defense.

This current claims for itself the greatest moral clarity. Its theory of the crisis, however, is entirely exogenous. Liberalism, in this account, was a sound order breached by populist demagogues, illiberal disinformation, Moscow and its clients; the task is to repair it and strengthen its defenses. For all its rigor about the machinery of democratic self-defense, this liberalism fails to ask the simplest question: why did it keep losing elections? It lost ground repeatedly, in free elections and across many democracies, to voters who understood what was at stake and still chose parties and leaders opposed to the liberal order. A politics that cannot explain its own electoral defeats except through the cunning of its enemies is not defending democracy.

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The second current is supply-side, and this one at least has a genuinely endogenous story. Its founding text is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, its philosophical companion Cass Sunstein’s On Liberalism, and its wager is concrete: liberalism lost people because it stopped delivering on housing, infrastructure, energy, visible material progress, and strangled its own capacity to build under proceduralism and veto points. To give credit where it’s due: this is a self-critique, and a real one. Liberal governance, not illiberal aggression, is the named defendant.

But this account of failure is material all the way down. Once the zoning permits clear and the trains run, the meaning-deficit is expected to resolve itself, as if political loyalty were a lagging indicator of construction output. The envisioned infrastructural reconstruction leaves liberalism’s social ontology untouched. The citizen remains a consumer of outcomes rather than a situated being formed by a certain vision of what should be a shared social life. Beneath the program is still, in effect, a rational-choice theory of allegiance: give people more housing, cheaper energy, and better infrastructure, and they will return to liberalism because the bargain has improved. In the end, this is less reconstruction than a social-democratic adjustment of neoliberalism.

The third current is philosophical, and seems to me the most interesting. Its question is the one the other two currents ignore: what does liberalism mean to the people who live under it? Not what institutions protect it, and not what outputs make it legitimate, but what kind of life it makes intelligible. The philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre answers that liberalism is already our ethos, a way of life rather than a mere framework. The critic Becca Rothfeld, reviewing the abundance canon in The Point, approaches the problem from the opposite direction: contemporary liberalism suffers from a visionary lack, an inability to say what a beautiful life would be. This debate puts liberalism itself on the examination table, and unlike the abundance agenda, which diagnoses a failure of delivery, it probes something closer to the doctrine’s soul. It asks whether liberalism has failed not only as a governing system, but as a moral and aesthetic sensibility.

Yet this current has its own blind spot, and it is sociological. The problem is that this account presents a particular class culture as liberalism itself. It reflects the habits of educated and mobile professionals, for whom changing jobs, places, identities, and ways of life can appear natural and liberating. Many people do not experience the world this way. They value continuity in work, family, place, and inherited forms of belonging, not because they fear freedom, but because these provide stability and meaning. What looks like openness from one social position can look like dispossession from another.

The three currents fall differently on the restoration/reconstruction scale. The first is restoration outright: it treats the crisis as an attack on a basically sound order. The second moves partway toward reconstruction by admitting failures of delivery, but it still accepts a neoliberal order in which the citizen has been reduced to a consumer. The third comes closest to genuine reconstruction because it asks what liberalism means as a way of life, but it still imagines that meaning from the standpoint of those already at home in liberalism.

What Would True Renewal Look Like?

Reconstruction requires an admission that some part of the defeat was earned. For such a mea culpa to matter, however, it cannot remain abstract. It has to take the form of reforms and renunciations one can test. A reconstructed liberalism must be able to name, specifically, what it declines to rebuild, as well as what it seeks to change. Not in the safe idiom of “mistakes were made,” but as actual commitments: which powers will not be recovered, which promises will not be reissued, which habits of rule will not return under the softer name of renewal.

The first renunciation is endlessness. Liberalism has long been most fluent in the language of expansion: more openness, more growth, more mobility, more choice, more self-invention. But much of the contemporary revolt against liberalism begins from the intuition that not everything can expand forever. A reconstructed liberalism would learn to speak of limits, ecological, technological, social, even civilizational, without equating finitude with retreat.

The second renunciation is technocracy as a substitute for democracy. The pre-crisis order too often treated legitimacy as something produced by correct procedures, expert management, courts, and platforms. But a politics administered from above leaves citizens experiencing democracy as something done to them, not something they practice. A reconstructed liberalism would have to rebuild the institutions where democratic agency is learned first: unions, schools, municipalities, civic and religious bodies, professional communities, and non-platform media. Without them, politics appears as a choice between bureaucratic management and culture war.

The third renunciation is innocence about power. Reconstruction must be able to name who benefited from the old settlement and who paid for it. It cannot be authored only by the mobile, educated, culturally affirmed class for whom liberalism is obvious. It has to ask why the same order appeared to others as déclassement, abandonment, or humiliation. That also means confronting the private powers liberalism too often treated as neutral: finance, philanthropy, universities, consultancies, and the technology platforms that now organize political reality itself. A liberalism that can regulate the state but not discipline the powers that shape everyday life has not reconstructed democracy.

My point here is not to add another set of points to the renewal industry checklist, but to make the word reconstruction meaningful, and answerable to something. Liberals should name what failed on their own side and let that reckoning shape the questions that follow. What does liberalism refuse to carry forward? How can it reinvent itself beyond limitlessness in an age of finitude? Can it recover democracy from technocratic management? Can it name the class and technological powers that shaped the old order and benefited from it? These are the questions liberalism will have to answer if reconstruction is to become a genuine reinvention rather than a brittle return to a failing order.

Marlene Laruelle is a professor at Luiss University, Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program, and an author at Vivatopia.

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