2.4 The Missing Adversary

How Liberalism’s Rivals Returned Not in Opposition, But in Disguise

From Hollow Victory to Adaptive Opposition

In the previous chapter, we saw how liberalism, once the ideological victor of the Cold War, entered a period of visible decay. Its three central pillars, moral authority grounded in the universalist language of rights, economic legitimacy built on market openness and global integration, and democratic contestation sustained through genuine political competition, no longer stood intact.

The End of the Hegemonic Era was not a collapse, but an unmasking. Liberalism persisted, but not as a living doctrine. It continued out of habit, unchallenged and unexamined. It was a system without conviction, still walking, but already hollow.

And yet, ideological dualism never truly disappeared. It simply went underground.

This chapter traces how the adversary returned, not as open confrontation, but as strategic adaptation. In two distinct but converging forms, opposition to liberalism reconstituted itself beneath the surface.

The first came from abroad. Authoritarian regimes, rather than resisting liberal norms outright, adopted the language of openness, rights, and rule of law, but only as performance. In some cases, such as China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, this outward alignment masked the construction of alternative political models. They played along just enough to integrate into global systems, all while building alternative models beneath the façade: order without rights, prosperity without freedom.

The second form came from within. After the collapse of Marxism as a political force, its adherents did not disappear. They migrated into theory, disproportionately into the humanities and social sciences, shifting from party politics to the institutions of cultural production. They no longer organized revolutions. They occupied seminar rooms instead. They no longer sought to overthrow liberal democracy, but to reinterpret it, seizing its moral language and subtly rewriting its purpose. This was not a campaign. It was an infiltration. A long march through the institutions, following the path first sketched by Antonio Gramsci.

Opposition had not ended. It had simply changed form. It watched. Learned. Adapted. And returned. Not as an ideological alternative, but as a force embedded within the very structures it once sought to dismantle.

This is the story of how liberalism’s missing adversary never truly left, only changed costume, shifted terrain, and waited for its moment to re-emerge. And it was in the university, the least defended and most influential of liberal institutions, that this quiet return first took root.