Liberalism

Liberalism, at least some version of it, remains the best option for organizing modern society. The real question is which version of liberalism is best. In this symposium, a variety of authors take up the idea of Augustinian liberalism.

Daily protests in Hong Kong have been going on for more than two months, leading a top Chinese official to declare that the city is experiencing its worst crisis since the former British colony returned to China in 1997.

According to Jonah Goldberg in Suicide of the West, the death of the country will not be the result of civil war but the culmination of a steady rot of the ideas and institutions that produced the liberty and prosperity of the West.

While there are many nuances and side issues in the debate between David French and Sohrab Ahmari, the crux of the disagreement appears to be a general clash between two opposing political philosophies adopted by religious believers: Catholic integralism and classical liberalism.

Paul Miller: I don’t want bureaucrats in Washington, DC, to develop a blueprint of the correct form of national culture we’re supposed to identify with. Any effort to do so will inevitably, and justifiably, backfire.

A consolidating liberal empire faces an inevitable difference of interests with maritime great powers and nation-states. But it lacks either will or capability to enforce a new order.

Kirkpatrick has since passed from the scene, but her influence lives on, as evidenced in Robert Kagan’s exhaustive essay “The Strongmen Strike Back.”

Robert Kagan is correct that there are political movements that oppose neoliberal and neoconservative universalism. Authoritarianism is one of them. So, too, is Tocquevillian liberalism.