Recent years have seen a veritable deluge of books, articles, essays, podcasts, and manifestos announcing a crisis of liberal democracy. Warnings have been growing that authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and even in the United States. Confidence in liberal institutions and trust in government are way down. Many Americans no longer feel confident that the next generation will live better than the one before. A particularly disturbing tendency among critics is to argue that liberalism itself — the commitment to individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and human equality — is to blame and should therefore be discarded. On the left, critics portray liberalism as inherently and irredeemably flawed. Its vaunted ideals, they argue, are often masks for elite domination and oppression. On the right, post-liberals argue that liberalism’s obsession with the autonomous individual has weakened religion, undermined family and community life, and eroded cherished cultural traditions, causing widespread moral degradation.
Against this trend stand the MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu and the historian and public intellectual Adrian Wooldridge. Their latest books, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? and The Revolutionary Center, do not deny that liberalism’s failures have given rise to serious problems. They argue, however, that these problems are not attributable to any inherent flaws. The crisis stems not from the success of liberal principles but from our careless abandonment of them. The task for us, therefore, is not to move beyond liberalism but to recover the principles that have been forgotten or distorted.
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