Part 7: Renewing Liberalism - Two Linked Battles
Reclaiming Freedom at Home, Projecting Strength Abroad
Liberalism today finds itself caught in a double-fronted struggle: on one side, a corrosive internal ideology, Oppressionism, that weaponizes moral urgency to enforce conformity and silence dissent; on the other, confident authoritarian states that seize on the internal fractures to claim that liberal democracy is bankrupt and chaotic.
Yet it was liberal democracy that ushered in the modern era’s greatest leaps: democracies do not wage war on one another; they have driven unparalleled waves of economic growth and technological innovation; and the freedoms they enshrine, from the right to speak and assemble to the protection of private enterprise, have underpinned some of humanity’s most enduring achievements in science, art, and culture, as well as the stability that lets societies prosper and flourish.
The twin pressures faced by liberal democracies are not neatly separable. Oppressionism’s excesses, from campus speech codes to social-media shaming mobs, become the evidence authoritarian regimes hold aloft to justify their own order-and-hierarchy model, while authoritarian propaganda seeps back into Western discourse, lending fuel to grievance politics at home.
Oppressionism thrives on framing every critique of its purity tests as bigotry or oppression. In doing so, it has hollowed out liberalism’s moral vocabulary, driving universities, media organizations, and corporations to police ideas rather than entertain them. The result is a chilling of inquiry, an erosion of due process, and a fragmentation of social trust into narrow identity tribes.
As institutional legitimacy drains away, liberal democracy’s economic dynamism falters: innovation stalls when researchers fear reputational ruin; businesses hesitate to invest amid ever-shifting compliance demands; top talent drifts to environments where debate is less fraught. Culturally, soft power dims when Western arts and ideas feel hypocritical at home, creating a vacuum that authoritarian actors readily fill with a compelling vision of stability. Militarily and strategically, a citizenry weary of domestic strife shrinks from international commitments, weakening our collective resolve.
Abroad, authoritarian states marshal the very worst spectacles of Oppressionism, including public purges, forced confessions, ideological witch-hunts, to argue that liberalism’s pluralism inevitably collapses into chaos. They offer an alternative narrative: that order is best maintained through centralized authority, traditional values, and unyielding unity. In this new era, liberal democracy cannot simply replay the Cold War script of system-vs-system; it must outcompete rival moral architectures on every battlefield of law, education, media, diplomacy, and corporate governance.
The revival of liberal democracy must begin with a clear diagnosis: naming Oppressionism for what it is: a decentralized moral crusade that substitutes purity tests for plural inquiry and paints any dissent as bigotry. Only by reclaiming the domestic narrative can liberalism start regaining its voice and place in the political discourse. It must underscore how Oppressionism, whether through campus speech codes, corporate conformity campaigns, or social-media shaming mobs, has sapped the economic dynamism by chilling innovation, eroded our cultural influence by hollowing out soft power, and strained our military resolve by fracturing social cohesion. Recognizing these harms in precise, concrete terms is the first step toward neutralizing them.
With that moral clarity in hand, liberalism must re-anchor its institutions through the reforms including enshrining robust speech-and-inquiry protections, rebuilding due-process safeguards in universities, media and courts, and instituting independent review bodies and stakeholder-driven governance across the public and private sectors.
At the same time, it needs to frame authoritarianism not as an alternative to Oppressionism but rather as the other face of the same coin: an order-obsessed model that exploits our internal weaknesses to claim that hierarchy and enforced consensus are preferable to messy freedom. By positioning itself as the principled alternative to both coercive purity and centralized authoritarian command, liberalism can regain the initiative from the far right by offering a positive vision that channels legitimate grievances into open debate rather than coercion.
Finally, these domestic and international efforts cannot stand alone. They must fuse into a single, coherent strategy in which internal renewal empowers external resistance, and vice versa. In knitting together these threads of reclaimed narrative, institutional reform, principled positioning, and coordinated global action, liberalism can experience proactive resurgence, offering a living vision that outcompetes both Oppressionism’s moral authoritarianism and the repressive authoritarianism of rival regimes.