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You’ve probably heard it said countless times this year that the coming election will determine the future of “our democracy.” You’ve probably never heard it said so many times ... well, not since the last presidential election. Both sides of the partisan divide say they’re worried that “our democracy” will not survive if the results swing one way or the other.
But what do we all really mean by “our democracy”? For political theorists and historians, the word “democracy” is loaded with many meanings and describes a host of varied practices, such as voting for officeholders and directly voting on policy via referendums and initiatives. But Americans who wring their hands about “democracy’s future” are specifically concerned about whether America will continue as a liberal democracy. From the ancient Greek words “demos” (meaning “people”) and “kratia” (meaning “to rule”), democracy means “the people rule.” But how they rule, and putting a finger on just who those rulers are and what they think, are key to understanding how we think about democracy. A belief in liberal democracy entails a desire to connect democracy to liberal political philosophy. That means a respect for the rule of law, separation of powers, a belief in individual rights and a general support for free markets.
To be sure, there are tensions within the marriage of liberalism and democracy. For instance, how free should markets be if the people rule? Politicos and thinkers are constantly figuring out how to keep the relationship between liberalism and democracy harmonious. Of late, though, some are not so interested in preserving this marriage. On both the right and left, anti-liberalism (or illiberalism, or postliberalism) has taken root. Anti-liberals view liberalism, and by extension liberal democracy, as wrong or passe—too devoted to individual freedom. It’s not that anti-liberals are opposed to freedom, but they believe that there ought to be limits to freedom so that other, more important aspects of society might flourish. Anti-liberal Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, for one, has argued that the Constitution is about fostering the common good [ [link removed] ] and not primarily about protecting individual good.
Today, there is a wide range of thinkers on both left and right who are skeptical about liberal notions of freedom and democracy. They may not agree on what they want, but they have a common enemy—and that enemy is liberal democracy.
But frankly, I don’t worry that liberal democracy is under any real threat from this anti-liberal challenge. I recognize the vehemence of anti-liberals’ arguments, but I think they fundamentally misread American politics, culture and history. And as a result, they’re extremely unlikely to win over the hearts of a sufficient segment of Americans to amass the political influence and power they desire.
A Never-ending Dialogue
Among liberal ideals in America, there is nothing more robust than the notion of the rugged individual, making their way in the world. This person is, ideally, not buffeted by events, but is an author of their fate. A politics that fits such a person recognizes rights first—and this is evident in our founding documents. As historian Robert Kagan puts it, the U.S. Constitution is “a rights-protection machine [ [link removed] ].” The value of individual rights, and a government designed to protect them, comes through clearly in the Constitution.
The Founders’ great fear of tyranny led them to this commitment. While their experience with freedom under threat came from Great Britain, they understood that the world was replete with despotic regimes. It was a Madisonian insight that it isn’t just individual kings or tyrants who rob people of their liberties. As he most famously said in Federalist 55 [ [link removed] ], “Had every Athenian been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
But liberalism is only part of the American political story. There is also a strong tradition of community. As far back as the Mayflower Compact and the Puritans’ arrival in New England, America was a place for the religiously devout. This strain of Christianity was devoted to a commitment to our brothers and sisters, a commitment to a common good. In “A Model of Christian Charity [ [link removed] ],” Puritan leader John Winthrop wrote that “we must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour, and suffer together.” This part of the American story tells us that the common good is not simply the aggregate of many millions of individual goods; rather, it is decidedly collective and exists as something greater than the sum of its parts.
Together, the dual commitments to individualism and community make up the American political tradition. Yes, there will always be some dissonance in the choir that is America. If you spend any time on social media, you’ll easily find people hunkered down in their political silos. But it’s better to think of liberal and nonliberal forces being not at war, but in dialogue. That can be seen as beautiful in itself. As philosopher Immanuel Kant famously wrote [ [link removed] ], “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Rigidity, then, is the enemy of a liberal democracy’s commitment to the pursuit of a better society for everyone: We should never try to be too devoted to liberal or communal aspects of American political life. Instead, we should always be adjusting those elements of our civil culture to ensure that we never settle too far in either direction.
We are, as the historian Michael Kammen wrote many years ago, a “people of paradox [ [link removed] ].” We are religious and secular, materialistic and idealistic. We seek equality and exalt individual freedom and opportunity. Americans attend church and listen to the Sermon on the Mount and also value capitalism and tough competition. We long for the warm embrace of community, yet we fear that embrace will smother us.
This ongoing dialogue needs strong voices defending each side, not only because each side is vitally important to the American experiment, but because it is only through debate and argument that we can reach compromise on the divergent goals and ideals that each side represents.
Today’s Anti-liberals
Not all Americans share a commitment to keeping this dialogue alive—some fundamentally reject the American liberal democratic project. While the communitarian critique of liberalism has been around since the 1980s, anti-liberals have become more prevalent—and publicly vehement—in America in the past 10 years.
In the not-too-distant past, anti-liberal criticisms tended to come primarily from the far left. Often inspired by the socialist traditions of Europe, these critics subjected American liberal democracy to attacks that are not dissimilar to Karl Marx’s more universal critique of capitalism itself. This criticism is based on the belief that the entire edifice of American politics is founded upon a too-robust defense of our existing system of property rights.
For example, in a review [ [link removed] ] of economist Joseph Stiglitz’s 2019 book [ [link removed] ] “People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent” for the leftist magazine Jacobin, economist Max Sawicky denied the author’s assumption that competitive markets should be the basis of our economic system—a belief central to liberal democracy:
Instead of public adjuncts to predatory private-sector firms, we should be exploring replacements. Instead of leveraging private capital, we would like to leverage the inherent assets of the public sector, such as the powers to tax and to create money. Instead of a focus on decentralized, well-functioning markets, we need more attention to the scope for tenable economic planning.
To be sure, there still is a strong anti-liberal left. In addition to the economic argument, some on the progressive left are showing a disturbing opposition to civil liberties. Going back to John Stuart Mill, if not further, liberals of all stripes have viewed more speech as key to a healthy political society. But as we saw this past year on many college campuses, some who identify as leftists seek to stifle free expression [ [link removed] ].
Furthermore, many on the left say they’d like to see significant changes to our political institutions—abolishing the Electoral College and transforming the Supreme Court in fundamental ways. This isn’t inherently anti-liberal: The Constitution includes a mechanism for change via amendments, and we have in the past made important and necessary changes to it. But if the left is seeking to change the Constitution, it’s fair to ask if the desired changes align with a liberal understanding of the Constitution, or if they simply represent the left’s frustration with not achieving its goals by popular political means. Some left-wing critics of liberalism go even farther: In a 2022 New York Times essay [ [link removed] ], law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn argued that the Constitution reflects an outdated view of the past that we should no longer be held hostage to.
While the left has long had an anti-liberal strain, some of the most prominent criticism of liberalism in recent years has come from the right—led by writers such as Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, internet personality Bronze Age Pervert [ [link removed] ] (BAP) and author Rod Dreher. (Full disclosure: Deneen was a graduate school classmate of mine.) The right’s attacks on liberalism are usually religiously informed—for example, they revere the communitarian aspects of Catholicism (a movement known as integralism [ [link removed] ]) and maintain that liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights undermines the sense of community our society could have in an ideal (Catholic) universe.
While liberalism is the main focus of right-wing anti-liberals’ complaints, they’re not very keen to support democracy, either. In Deneen’s latest work, “Regime Change [ [link removed] ],” he champions something he calls “aristopopulism,” the idea that an educated elite that represents the interests of middle America ought to run things—acting like some sort of moral vanguard. The advent of aristopopulism, Deneen maintains, would end America’s “structurally liberal” history [ [link removed] ]. And while he may accept some plebiscitary approval from the populace, he has little regard for trying to make a genuine democracy work.
Similarly, another figure on the right, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, said [ [link removed] ] in a recent interview that “democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted.” (He went on to compare contemporary America to the Weimar Republic and then to praise the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was a prominent 20th-century philosopher who attacked liberals and became entangled with Nazism.)
Deneen wrote in his earlier and more nuanced evaluation of liberalism, “Democratic Faith [ [link removed] ],” that “modern deliberative liberalism lays claim to the most idealistic, even ‘religious’ transformative impulse ... It regards the prospect of universal reason and democratic deliberation as eminently realizable; it is not viewed as ‘utopian’ but as a practical goal.” But this oversimplifies liberals’ belief in progress, which is grounded much less in utopianism than in a pragmatic belief that problems can be solved with the right policy prescription. We can lessen poverty, provide clean food and water and find jobs for those in need. The main political goal of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson was to ward off tyranny, not create utopia. And the greatest liberal philosopher of recent times, John Rawls [ [link removed] ], was concerned about fairness, not endless social experimentation in search of a “religious transformation.”
At its core, liberalism has a sense of humility. Liberals know that our senses can fool us, and we understand that we should proceed with a sense of caution as we work to make the world just a little bit better. As philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre writes [ [link removed] ], “A liberal way of life should foster humility along with a reluctance to judge and scorn others.” He points out, however, that contemporary liberals often fail to live up to the idea. Indeed, one of the criticisms of liberalism is that its proponents are arrogant and condescending.
President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address [ [link removed] ], for example, expresses a boundless faith in our ability to solve problems. Liberals of the 1960s believed that economics, war and peace and social problems could be solved by the right government program. This kind of faith in liberalism as the default philosophy ran into many problems—the Vietnam War and the war on poverty are two examples of the failure to make the world bend to the will of American might and managerial skill. And that failure, at least in part, can be traced with hubristic confidence back to many liberals of that time.
In the years since, with geopolitical, social and economic strife becoming common states of affairs, we have lived in the world of the chastened liberal—one who hearkens back to the Founders’ sense that we can guard against tyranny, rather than create utopia. Indeed, contemporary liberalism, both as a general political philosophy and a more practical view of politics, should and usually does embrace the idea that we cannot know too much with certainty. That is hardly a utopian approach.
The Anti-liberal Window Is Closing
It appears that anti-liberalism in America is currently at a high-water mark. There is, for example, a not-insignificant segment of Americans who support the idea of stronger authority figures in politics: A Reuters/Ipsos poll [ [link removed] ] from earlier this year found that 52% of Republicans (and 29% of Democrats) believe we need “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.”
Why has there recently been an “anti-liberal moment” in America? Some observers, such as The Atlantic’s Tom [ [link removed] ] Nichols [ [link removed] ], say there are a lot of bored people out there looking to politics to air their grievances. But the reasoning isn’t the same for the anti-liberal intellectuals. Rather, they’ve been perhaps engaging in some intellectual window dressing, trying to paint anti-liberalism in an appealing light to build the basis for a broader political movement to gain power.
Or perhaps they truly believe that anti-liberal proposals offer the best solutions to the intractable and difficult problems that we continue to face. Inasmuch as there are some overly optimistic, progressive liberals who believe the right politics can solve all our problems, the anti-liberals are right to offer their critique.
While I disagree with anti-liberals, I do believe there’s one thing they get right. Their despair over the state of the country is, I suspect, based on the realization that they are running out of time to make their case. The simple fact is that Americans embrace personal freedom, and they are quite skeptical of efforts to take away freedoms. The reaction to the Dobbs decision has been about a woman’s loss of rights and freedom [ [link removed] ], not the immorality of abortion. Individual rights are paramount in this reaction—a fundamentally liberal response.
Furthermore, the longer a belief in a fundamental equality persists as a cherished value in this country—that all people have the right to speak freely, that all people deserve to be treated the same—the less likely it will be for anti-liberalism to take hold. Despite this anti-liberal moment, the arc of American history simply does not bend anti-liberals’ way.
William F. Buckley once said that conservatives ought to stand athwart history and attempt to stop it. But today’s anti-liberals believe that just stopping things won’t work to bring about the society they dream of. Anti-liberals’ case hangs on a bleak picture of America—one that requires us to fundamentally change our very system of doing things in this country. They need to turn the entire ship of politics around, and each day that fails to happen, their chances of political success diminish.
But liberal democracy is born in hope and optimism. This is reflected in many of our greatest leaders. Whether it is Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully,” FDR’s infectious enthusiasm, Eisenhower’s smile or JFK’s faith that problems can be solved, America looks to the future with confidence. This does not mean all problems can be solved—that utopia is just around the corner. But we have faith that the world can be improved and that we should strive for improvement. There can be less poverty, there can be long-term peace, there can be a place for everyone in the political world. Liberalism has often failed. But as Samuel Beckett wrote [ [link removed] ] in another context, the liberal project might be best summed up with, “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

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