Liberalism is clearly on the ropes.

To many, the threats come from outside and are to be found in populism, authoritarianism, misinformation, polarization. But Michael suggests that the wounds are self-inflicted. 

Liberal societies have promised freedom, equality, openness, choice, and individual autonomy. Many now look around and see loneliness, social decay, family breakdown, institutional sclerosis, and a rudderless politics incapable of uniting people around any shared purpose.

The institutions that once gave liberal societies coherence — churches, families, local associations, stable communities, inherited norms — are now shadows of their former selves. And many of these mediating institutions did not come from liberalism. They preceded it and operate according to a different logic. One in which freedom is not the primary value, sought as an end in itself, but is seen as a means to higher ends. Obligation, loyalty, sacrifice, authority, piety, ordered to the common good – all of these things are necessary for human flourishing, and have withered under an excessive pursuit of freedom.

Michael Bonner argues that liberal societies are like orphans who have forgotten their parentage. Liberalism depends on moral, philosophical, and theological foundations it did not create and can no longer fully explain. Detached from those foundations, freedom has become unmoored, and with it our social connection.

Without social connection, there is no society. Liberalism’s answer to this problem – to the breakdown of social bonds that it has wrought, has too often been more of the same: more autonomy, more choice, more mobility, more discarding of norms. In other words, the very things that dissolve common culture, settled communities, and shared moral life.

The liberal state claims neutrality. But no state is neutral. In practice, liberalism enforces its own moral anthropology through law, education, bureaucracy, and elite institutions. It replaces older religious and communal authorities with expert, therapeutic, and administrative entities that promote its theology of unrestrained freedom.

In spite of these failings, we should not be overzealous in critique of liberalism, because the alternatives are not so simple.

Other countries claim to offer tradition, order, or civilizational resistance to liberal decadence. But they are not great models of true community or rightly ordered freedom. Much of left- and right-wing populist movements, too, risk offering false promises: refounding societies on new values, vast redistribution schemes and new hierarchies in the name of social justice on the one hand; revival built on strength and force of technological dynamism, national strength, or raw political will, on the other. The most prevalent forms of both are conspicuously devoid of doctrine, virtue, religion, moral formation, or the common good. They are intensely practical, oftentimes transactional and animated by a spirit of vengeance.

I ask Michael whether cultural renewal in western countries can be had without stronger common values, less pluralism, thicker institutions, and some recovery of religious truth?