Ryan Avent on the crisis of liberalism:

Just why the liberal world has found itself in crisis is a matter of active debate. There are voices on the right arguing that liberalism was never a particularly good idea in the first place: that people need to be ruled, or that true fulfillment only comes through celebration of god and tribe and tradition. As someone who very much enjoys thinking for himself and making his own choices I find these arguments unappealing at a gut level, but they also fail to reckon with liberalism’s overwhelming record of delivering the goods. The world we seem determined to put behind us is the richest, most just, and most free that people have ever created, by miles and miles. Not free and just and rich enough! But we should allow ourselves to accept that with liberalism we really seem to be onto something.

Our crisis is a different beast. We’ve had our troubles, but they pale in comparison to those of a century ago. The world we are dismantling would seem an eden to the people of the early 1900s. This is not a crisis of material desperation. Instead, today’s illiberalism is rooted in the desocialization of large swathes of the population. And it is amplified into a dire threat by the cynicism and moral apathy of a very broad class of elites. A critical mass of us can be all too easily suckered, and a critical mass of us believe that only suckers make sacrifices for the greater good.