Mike Brock writes:

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

And right now, a strange paradox confronts us: at the precise moment when everyone declares liberalism dead or dying, the liberal tradition is displaying more intellectual vitality than I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

The despair is everywhere. Establishment liberals mourn the end of technocratic consensus. Progressives declare the Enlightenment project failed. Conservatives celebrate democracy’s inevitable collapse. Neo-reactionaries publish blueprints for what comes after. Even defenders of liberal democracy often sound like they’re performing last rites rather than mounting genuine defense.

But something else is happening beneath the surface of this despair—something the mourners cannot see because they’re grieving the wrong death.

Let me be precise about what we’re losing. The consensus liberal settlement of roughly 1980 to 2016 assumed that markets would naturally promote democratic values. That technological progress would naturally disperse power. That economic growth would create conditions for healthy distributional politics—debates about how to allocate resources within a stable democratic framework.

This settlement believed expertise should guide policy, that institutions were fundamentally sound and just needed competent management, that history had essentially ended with liberal democracy’s triumph, and that the main work was optimization rather than defense of the framework itself.

That settlement is dead. And it deserves to be.

Because it wasn’t liberalism—it was liberalism’s corruption. A slow-motion abandonment of liberalism’s foundational insights about power, wrapped in the language of markets and progress and expertise. [Continue reading…]