> Barack Obama included Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018) in his annual list of recommended books; meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has gleefully pronounced liberalism “obsolete.” The right accuses liberals of promoting selfish individualism and crass materialism at the expense of social cohesion and cultural identity. Centrists claim that liberals’ obsession with political correctness and minority rights drove white voters to Donald Trump. For the newly resurgent left, the rise of demagoguery looks like payback for the small-government doctrines of technocratic neoliberalism—tax cuts, privatization, financial deregulation, antilabor legislation, cuts in Social Security—which have shaped policy in Europe and America since the eighties.<p>Liberalism according to the New Yorker doesn’t seem too preoccupied by disambiguating wildly different concepts assigned the same term. Of these, probably the most overlapping are the Obama, Putin and supposedly “resurgent left”—but as a leftist I generally encounter criticism much closer to those attributed to either the right or centrists.<p>I’m not sure there’s much value continuing to read the article, it’s already so incoherent.<p>So I’ll just observe what’s coherent: liberalism, as identified by Obama and Putin and (to an extent) the “left” is a governing organizational principle. Its hallmarks are basically the intersection of republican and libertarian (the state is not autocratic, its purpose is to wield only so much power as necessary to ensure it continues to wield only that much power, no more and no less). Obama and Putin rightly observe that that model of government is failing. The “left” insofar as it’s the progressive end of the mainstream is understandably fixated on the inevitable laissez faire aspect of this principle and its capture.<p>The incoherent parts: characterization of the center and right are <i>accurate</i> portrayals of their reaction… to some other concept of liberalism that more closely reflects internal politics where “liberal” means something like “center-right” on a cultural spectrum, and has almost nothing to do with the concept of liberalism the Economist is historically concerned with. Not to “whatabout” this incoherency, but the actual left is almost entirely firmly on the other side of this cultural divide, much moreso than it concerns itself with historical liberalism. (To our detriment, I’ll add.)<p>Edit to add: we’re on the correct side of the divide, the detriment is our lack of concern for historical liberalism. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect we’ll soon find ourselves on the wrong end of illiberalism while being on the right moral side of history.