Liberalism has fallen on hard times. We are told that “liberalism has failed” and that we now live in a “post-liberal age.” Although even its partisans concede that “post-liberalism” is a slippery term, it nevertheless captures well enough an increasingly popular belief in the inadequacy of liberalism and its ensuing downfall.
Most prominently, post-liberals accuse liberalism of engendering social atomization, cultural fragmentation, and moral decadence. The result, paradoxically, is less freedom and less equality. Thus, under the banner of liberation, liberalism creates a system that is illiberal. So liberalism, as Patrick Deneen puts it, winds up failing precisely in the measure that it succeeds.
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