Four Steps Liberalism Would Need to Take to Reinvent Itself

Embrace ideological competition, deep institutional transformation, a post–homo economicus vision, and a richer moral language.

I have spent much of this newsletter analyzing illiberalism and the political imaginaries that make it attractive. Readers often ask the inverse question: what should liberalism do? Here are my two cents, but with one important clarification. I am not writing as an advocate trying to rescue liberalism. I am approaching the question as an analytical exercise. My broader interest is in how political imaginaries evolve across ideological camps.

Liberalism has lost much of its capacity to produce a compelling image of the future. If it wants to become politically generative again, it will take more than better messaging, institutional defense, or a new policy package. It will require rethinking what social order it wants to build and what kind of future it can make desirable.

What follows, then, are four steps that, in my view, would be necessary for a genuine liberal reinvention. They are cumulative, and each is more demanding than the previous one. Most contemporary attempts at liberal renewal stop well before reaching the hardest questions.

Step one: admit you are in an ideological competition

Liberalism’s greatest handicap is its self-portrayal as a neutral position and of being somehow outside the political struggle. Liberals tend to see themselves as the adults in the room, the reasonable and evidence-based guys. Their domestic opponents, by contrast, are treated less as ideological competitors than as pathologies to be diagnosed and corrected. They are populists to be fact-checked, extremists to be contained, racists to be exposed, or citizens supposedly brainwashed by Russian propaganda and social media.

This posture has become a form of political blindness. Liberalism is no longer the only game in town. Its cultural hegemony has eroded, and competing visions of society are now on offer. Illiberalism, in particular, is not simply a collection of resentments or a malfunction of democracy. It proposes its own answers to questions of belonging and the good life. One may find those answers dangerous, but dismissing them does not make them disappear.

The first step toward liberal renewal is therefore remarkably basic: recognize liberalism for what it is, one way of organizing the social order among others. Once politics becomes an ideological competition again, neutrality is not an option. If your opponents arrive with a story about who “we” are, while you arrive with fact-checks, you have already lost half the battle.

The first step toward liberal renewal is therefore remarkably basic: recognize liberalism for what it is, one way of organizing the social order among others.

Step two: move from conservative to revolutionary

Here is the great inversion of our moment: liberalism has become the conservative force in Western politics. Its dominant political reflex is to defend the institutional order and call to return to some imagined moment before the current crisis.

But institutions designed for a different era cannot simply be treated as the final form of political modernity. The international order has changed, economic power has shifted, societies have been transformed by technology, globalization, demographic change, and new inequalities. To answer all of this with “defend the institutions” is to confuse liberal principles with the institutional arrangements that happened to embody them at a particular historical moment, and this moment is over.

To answer all of this with “defend the institutions” is to confuse liberal principles with the institutional arrangements that happened to embody them at a particular historical moment, and this moment is over.

This is politically costly. Why defend and call to return to something that failed? Defending the order as-is cedes the entire vocabulary of change to your opponents. Worse, it makes liberalism the owner of every grievance the order produces: declining representation, growing inequality, weakened public services, political impotence, and the widespread sense that major decisions are made somewhere beyond democratic reach.

As I already said, liberal renewal requires something closer to refoundation than restoration. This does not mean burning down every institution or embracing revolution for its own sake. There is a profound difference between saying “trust the experts again” and saying “these institutions no longer fulfill their purpose; they must be rebuilt, and here is how, by whom, and toward what ends.”

Unless liberals become credible agents of transformation, they will keep losing to forces both on the right and on the left.

Step three: break with homo economicus

I imagine this is painful to read for some. It is probably also the hardest step to put into practice. But here is my point: liberalism cannot seriously reinvent itself without breaking with one of its deepest anthropological assumptions: the figure of homo economicus. Neoliberalism radicalized this figure, but it did not invent it. The individual as rational chooser and optimizer runs much deeper in the liberal tradition.

The point is not to reject capitalism as a matter of principle, but to refuse the reduction of social life to the language of optimization, incentives, and other types of returns on investment. One reason illiberalism has become attractive is that it speaks directly to others dimensions of human experience such as belonging, rootedness, loyalty, dignity, and honor—however distorted these ideas may be sometimes.

Liberalism cannot seriously reinvent itself without breaking with one of its deepest anthropological assumptions: the figure of homo economicus.

The hard question is thus whether liberalism can develop a richer anthropology without destabilizing the social coalitions and economic arrangements that have sustained it for decades. Can actually existing liberal parties move beyond homo economicus without confronting the donor class, the professional classes, and the institutional ecosystems built around market rationality? I do not know.

But at a moment when economic and technological power is increasingly concentrated in a handful of tech and defense corporations, the issue is no longer only the survival of liberalism. It is also the survival of democratic sovereignty against forms of private power increasingly beyond meaningful public control. This is the elephant in the room, and pretending it is not there is already a way of answering the question.

Step four: give liberalism a moral language

This is the deepest layer. Liberalism has always understood itself as thin by design: it refuses to impose a single conception of the good life on everyone. That thinness is one of its great achievements but it is also partly a fiction.

Liberal societies do embody a vision of the good life, one centered on individual autonomy, choice, mobility, self-realization, and emancipation from inherited constraints. Liberalism has aligned itself not only with particular forms of family, education, and cultural openness, but also with capitalism itself and, more recently, with an economic order that has privileged market relations and competition over other ways of organizing social life. That doesn’t sound very “neutral.”

From there, two genuinely different paths are possible. The first is to build a thicker progressive liberalism, capable of speaking beyond the urban professional classes to working-class and peripheral constituencies as well. Such a liberalism would recover a language of belonging, dignity, solidarity, and common purpose, while remaining committed to rights and diversity. Its challenge would be sociological more than philosophical: to produce cultural values that are not confined to highly educated urban milieus, but can travel across class and geography.

The second path is different. Rather than thickening liberalism around a specifically progressive conception of the good, it would make moral pluralism itself the core commitment. Liberal institutions would remain thin in the sense that they would not privilege one substantive way of life over others, but the culture sustaining them would be morally thicker: it would affirm that multiple conceptions of the good can legitimately coexist within the same political community. That would include progressive visions of emancipation, but also more conservative visions centered on family, religion, tradition, or duty, provided they accept the reciprocal legitimacy of other ways of life.

The distinction, then, is between a liberalism that develops its own thicker progressive vision and seeks to make it socially broader, and a liberalism that defines the good society itself as one in which several visions of the good coexist. The first tries to win the cultural argument with a more inclusive progressive imaginary; the second changes the terms of the argument by making moral pluralism the substantive value to be defended.

The distinction, then, is between a liberalism that develops its own thicker progressive vision and seeks to make it socially broader, and a liberalism that defines the good society itself as one in which several visions of the good can coexist.

The sequence matters

These four steps are cumulative, and each is harder than the last. Recognizing the ideological competition costs little beyond a change of mindset; becoming a force of transformation means giving up the comfort of defending the existing order; breaking with homo economicus threatens the coalitions and social bases on which liberal parties currently depend, from the funding structure of the Democratic Party in the United States to many of the professional and institutional constituencies surrounding liberal and social-democratic parties in Europe.

Giving liberalism a moral language is harder still, because moral languages cannot simply be produced through a new party platform or commissioned by foundations. They have to grow socially and emerge through years of cultural production, schools, associations, religious and secular communities, local initiatives, online subcultures, and new forms of everyday sociability. They become persuasive when people encounter them as ways of living and imagining the future. This is necessarily slow and largely bottom-up work. Political leaders can amplify such a language once it exists, but they are rarely capable of inventing it from above.

That is why the fourth step may ultimately be the most demanding. The right spent decades building such milieus before many of their ideas became politically viable. Any serious liberal reinvention would require a comparable patience: not a communications strategy for the next election cycle, but the long construction of a cultural world in which a different liberal imaginary can become eventually common sense.

Any serious liberal reinvention would require a comparable patience: not a communications strategy for the next election cycle, but the long construction of a cultural world in which a different liberal imaginary can become eventually common sense.