Liberalism in Europe is showing unmistakable signs of exhaustion. In Britain, Keir Starmer secured a historic mandate in 2024 only to become the most unpopular prime minister on record, while his party finished a distant third behind the Greens and Reform UK in the Gorton and Denton by-election, a seat Labour had held since 1931. In Germany, Friedrich Merz risks following a similar trajectory, and in France Emmanuel Macron enters the twilight of his presidency with his reform agenda stalled.
The crisis runs deeper than leadership
The problem is not merely a generation of weak candidates. It is a decrepit regime, a class of functionaries and placeholders who have reaped the benefits of four decades of economic and moral deregulation but now prove incapable of governing the world they created. Like elites throughout history, they developed habits of mutual back-scratching and logrolling, and like elites throughout history they lost touch with the societies beneath them.
The consequences are visible across the West. San Francisco, once a bastion of social liberalism, now contends with homeless encampments and open drug use on a scale that has alienated even progressive voters. Sweden, long a byword for social harmony, records the highest rate of death by shooting in Europe, driven by immigrant gang violence. In the northern English cities that powered the Industrial Revolution, ethnic enclaves grapple with cousin marriage, honour-based abuse and grooming gangs. The response of many liberal intellectuals has been to demand more of the policies that produced these outcomes.
The postliberal challenge
This vacuum has emboldened critics on both Right and Left to proclaim liberalism's death. The Marxist critique, that liberal freedom masks exploitation and imperialism, is familiar. More influential today is the "postliberal" argument, advanced by thinkers such as Patrick Deneen, whose 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed contends that liberalism succeeded too well. Its core belief in the rights-bearing individual, answerable primarily to the self, inexorably eroded the civilisational constraints, virtue, civility, community, that once gave it strength. The result is endemic self-indulgence, anomie and a meritocratic aristocracy that possesses all the aloofness of the old nobility with little of its noblesse oblige.
"Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them."
The postliberal movement is headquartered in the United States, clustered around the Claremont Institute in Southern California. Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, argues that the state's purpose is to promote good government rather than protect liberty as an end in itself. The US vice-president identifies as a postliberal, and so many Claremont alumni populate the White House, administration and Congress that they are nicknamed "Claremonsters".
Britain has its own postliberal currents. James Orr, a Reform UK adviser and Cambridge philosopher of religion, and Reform MP Danny Kruger advocate a faith-and-flag conservatism rooted in the thought of Roger Scruton. A parallel tradition, Blue Labour, includes Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, John Milbank and Philip Bond, though John Gray, perhaps the most significant intellect in this circle, has recently distanced himself.
Illiberal winds rising globally
The postliberal critique gains traction because the liberal establishment is at its most decadent, in the words of historian John Patrick Diggins, "few live for liberalism, but many live off it". Meanwhile, illiberal powers are ascendant as at no point since the 1930s. China, the world's second-largest economy, is ruled by a Marxist dictator; India, its largest democracy, by an illiberal strongman; Russia, its most battle-tested military power, by a leader intent on burying the liberal order. The United States, architect of the post-1945 liberal system, has become an uncertain friend. Donald Trump governs on instinct rather than theory, but almost every instinct is illiberal. He has declared that the only constraint on his actions is his own conscience and has dispensed with even lip-service to international law in conflicts from Venezuela to Iran and the wider Middle East.
Why postliberalism offers no viable alternative
Yet the postliberal moment owes more to luck than substance. Its proponents fail to address the material problems of the post-industrial wastelands they denounce. Deneen's follow-up, Regime Change: Towards a Post-Liberal Future, is notably short on workable policies. They have no answer to the question of what happens when populism operates unconstrained by liberal guardrails; the 1930s suggest the answer is nothing good. It is time to mount a defence of liberalism before the window closes.
What liberalism actually is
Any defence must begin with definition. For forty years liberalism has been identified with shrinking the state in both markets and morality. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair forged a widely admired "bourgeois-bohemian" synthesis combining Thatcherite economic deregulation with 1960s moral deregulation. The postliberals are right that this synthesis now generates more problems than benefits.
But the "BoBo" synthesis is only one manifestation. Liberalism can accommodate big government as well as small, moralising as well as permissive. John Maynard Keynes was no less a liberal than Friedrich Hayek. All variants share three core commitments: society begins with the individual, not the collective; truth emerges through open debate; power is dangerous and must be divided and constrained. Anything that prevents individuals from flourishing, ideas from clashing, or power from being checked is illiberal.
Historical precedent: liberalism revives by reinventing
Liberalism has faced near-death experiences before and revived each time by addressing new problems in new ways while staying true to its principles. The most relevant precedent is New Liberalism, which emerged in the late 19th century when Victorian laissez-faire risked being swept aside by organised labour, mass parties and authoritarian states. Thinkers such as T.H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse and Graham Wallas envisioned a more interventionist liberal state that did not sacrifice individualism or divided power. Politicians including David Lloyd George, R.B. Haldane and Winston Churchill revived the moribund Liberal Party and laid the foundations of the welfare state. The First World War and Labour's rise caused the Liberal Party's "strange death", but liberal ideas were absorbed by both major parties under Keynes and William Beveridge.
In the 1920s and 1930s liberalism risked being stamped out by fascism and communism. "The liberal state is destined to perish," proclaimed Benito Mussolini. The Allies proved him wrong by defeating the Axis, constructing the Iron Curtain and remaking the world on liberal principles. In the 1970s the postwar order succumbed to stagflation and bureaucratic sclerosis, only to revive through the neoliberal revolution.
The populist alternatives are worse
Anger at the liberal establishment is understandable. But the alternatives from Right and Left are certain to be worse. During his first term, Trump catered to billionaire allies, entrenching crony capitalism and passing large tax cuts while offering his base rhetorical gestures. He made no significant progress on his "beautiful wall". In a second term, with the old Republican establishment sidelined and postliberal thinkers ascendant, he is creating chaos in the Middle East and sending markets into a tailspin. In Britain, Reform UK's economic programme is an unsustainable mixture of Thatcherism and left-wing statism.
The radical Left is equally impractical. The Green Party's platform, presented by Laura Spencer, the victorious candidate in Gorton and Denton, reads like a student union wish list: spending funded by taxing billionaires, legalisation of drugs and pornography, and environmental measures as an afterthought. The radical Left also ignores the problems created by mass immigration, half-hearted integration and parallel societies. Spencer dismissed immigration concerns as "racism", distributed campaign literature in Urdu and extracted political capital from posturing over Gaza. The noisy clash between far Left and far Right often distracts from the collective work of fixing governments that require concerted effort and careful thought.
Three strategies for renewal
The only path forward is to reinvent liberalism as thoroughly as previous generations did, discarding shibboleths that obstruct solutions. Failure means being swept aside by radicals; half-measures risk making matters worse. The last attempt at a radical centre, Macron's presidency, only deepened France's divisions. His failure stems not only from personal vanity but from his reliance on yesterday's solutions, economic deregulation, rather than today's problems: centre-periphery tensions and the failure to assimilate immigrants. Liberals must be bolder, more self-critical and more consistent.
First: rethink
Today's liberals must break with four decades of fixation on economic and moral deregulation. The Epstein affair provides both reason and spur. The revelations exposed not only the clay feet of neoliberal heroes, from tech billionaires to celebrated economists, but the moral hollowness of a philosophy of self-indulgence at the heart of BoBo culture.
Liberals must also reapply core principles to old sins in new forms. Tech giants are amassing market dominance unseen since the robber barons and using it to misinform and manipulate citizens. Left-wing identitarians violate the principle of individualism by treating people as group members rather than unique individuals, applying different standards to different groups and cancelling heterodox opinions.
The greatest weakness of contemporary liberals is that they have become the establishment, heads of Oxbridge colleges, quangos, the BBC, with all an establishment's attendant frailties. Radical liberals must challenge this establishment with the vigour of Greens and Reform, but in the name of liberal principles. Why have university leaders betrayed free speech? Why has the grooming-gang inquiry stalled in procedure? Why does groupthink spread through NGO circles?
Every successful liberal reformulation, New Liberalism, managerial capitalism of the 1940s, the neoliberal revolution, involved sweeping away a decadent elite and forging a new cadre of reformers. Today's radical liberals must displace the Davos establishment before populists do it for them. They must also forge alliances with groups their elders have demonised. Conservatives such as Scruton were right about pornography and libertinism. Some socialists were right about excessive concentration of economic power. Liberalism has a rich history of revival through unexpected alliances.
Second: reposition
Liberals must stop talking only to each other. Officials sound like Soviet-era bureaucrats, replacing "the laws of dialectical materialism" with wooden phrases about diversity as strength. Eurocrats have invented a private language of "attestation" and "decommitting". Academics write for captive referees. Corporations produce bureaucratic blather. Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is better known for theatrical stunts than for any argument.
Two causes underlie this failure. First, as the establishment, liberals speak to peers, academics to academics, Eurocrats to Eurocrats, not to the public. Second, as a decadent establishment, they do not believe what they say. They repeat formulae to protect themselves from criticism and curry favour with the powerful. Breaking with the establishment would solve the dead-prose problem: once people believe what they say and speak to the public rather than experts, they rediscover the language they need.
Third: re-articulate
Liberals were once masters of communication. John Stuart Mill wrote with clarity. Abraham Lincoln wrote like an angel. William Gladstone held audiences for hours. Today's liberals have lost the art entirely. Reformed liberals must take to the public square. Diplomats must advance the case for open societies and religious toleration at the UN and similar forums. Politicians must speak out against illiberal practices, shouting down speakers at universities, persecuting those accused of blasphemy against Islam in schools, arranged or cousin marriage.
What passes for liberalism today is a ghost of its former self. But liberalism has revived from near-death before, precisely because liberals rediscovered the ability to reapply their philosophy to fresh problems and frame their arguments for a new world. Properly conceived, liberalism remains the only reasonable answer to the great questions of modernity: how to live together in a pluralist society and how to preserve social cohesion while unleashing individual talent. Ignore the siren voices of postliberalism. Resist the superficial glamour of twin populisms. The patient, exhilarating work of renewing liberalism for a new age begins now.