A tough take on "liberalism" (sorry for scare quotes; the labels mean so many different things, depending on perspective) in Unherd. I'm not familiar with the writer. His basic angle rings true, which is that, finally, "liberalism" itself may be revealed to be more utopian and idealistic than practical or pragmatic (akin to "communism," and the many attempts to use it as a governmental or societal framework). He uses the recent ousting of Assad in Syria and the government that's replaced him as a potential vision of "pragmatic" governance to come.

Long pull-quote:

"Broken, dejected, for the first time self-doubting, America’s liberal establishment has come to accept the extinction of its political order. Had they taken their project — or their right to eternal rule — as seriously as they claimed to, no doubt they would have chosen stronger candidates than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: that they could not do so itself speaks of a certain exhaustion. Beyond the rhetoric, at least as messianic and civilisational in scope as anything the further reaches of the Right could dream up, Left-liberalism — the last of the great 20th-century ideologies — possessed very little of substance to fight for. Bereft of ideas and confidence, American liberalism died from the head down: all that is left of it is an entrenched caste of bureaucrats to be weeded out and replaced. The old order is dead: but what is struggling to be born?

"...it is an obvious fact of our present political moment that anyone concerned with shaping the world they actually live in can only now engage with “the Right,” simply because “the Left” is both intellectually and politically defunct. We see this in the intellectual Left’s new engagement, part fearful but increasingly curious in its own right, with the ferment of ideas on the Right. What is the Left’s project, what are its big ideas now it has broken its political and intellectual power through its catastrophic self-derailment into identity politics? It is a difficult question to answer, but also a pointless one: it simply doesn’t matter, and is unlikely to for the next few decades at least. One might as well ask what is next for Baathism.

"Yet even still, “the Right” is, conceptually, an absolute mess.... Much of Trump’s initial appeal was that of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes, mockingly pointing out the nakedness of the West’s rulers. Had they taken the critique seriously — of their radical identity politics of race and gender, of their programme of economic self-destruction through a unilateral energy transition, of their commitment to an imaginary borderless Utopia in which the rest of the world dreams only of achieving its historic destiny as Western liberals — perhaps the destruction of their order would not be so total. The dying liberal order chose suicide through want not just of self-reflection but of pragmatism. And indeed, perhaps if the incoming order has a single defining characteristic, it is pragmatism rather than any coherent replacement ideology. Perhaps it is not just the great 20th century ideologies — fascism, communism, postwar liberalism — that are dead, but any all-consuming ideology at all.

...

"The 20th century liberal democratic model is going the same way as the great 20th century totalitarianisms it defined itself against. Yet — as reflected in liberal discourse where the assumption made is that politics is a binary choice between liberalism and fascism — liberals are still trapped in the 20th century, fighting ghosts, even as the world has already moved on.

...

"...The lanyard-wearing, security conference-attending clerisy of liberal Atlanticism now finds itself wedded to an order of purely homeopathic liberalism.

...

"...It is sadly ironic that while Syria seems to be acquiring pragmatic, post-ideological governance led by al-Qaeda veterans, Britain is still ruled by the arcane processes and ideological fixations of zealots. As in France and Germany, now rendered ungovernable by the last ideological spasm of Left-liberalism, its total commitment to mass immigration and its consequences as a moral end in itself — its last irreducible principle when all other goals and aspirations have been abandoned — will define British politics in the coming decades. European politics in the 2020s is largely the product of safe, orderly societies suddenly becoming not so; Americans, who are used to this lifestyle, thinking we’re being prissy about it; and European progressives, who are entirely America-brained provincials, are taking social cues from the imperial metropole rather than their own lived experience.

"Yet it is the liberal argument, that such a dramatic and socially-disruptive course of action is both natural and desirable that now requires defending — the pragmatic case is simply that the experiment has been tried and, as many warned, failed. Slowly, then suddenly, the progressives became marginal reactionaries and the dissident Right, the sensible pragmatists.

"...The previous model failed, but we live in a time of change: in Britain as in Syria, the people will tolerate experiments in governance that offer them prosperity, security and stability."

https://unherd.com/2025/01/liberalism-wont-survive-the-year/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&utm_source=UnHerd+Today&utm_campaign=bd495a7d59-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_01_06_10_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_79fd0df946-bd495a7d59-35522818