The Death of Liberalism

The death of liberalism is not an explosion. It’s not a scandal, a conspiracy, or some epic historical event that demands commemoration. It’s a whimper. A slow fade into irrelevance, marked by polite nods at dinner parties and wistful New York Times op-eds.

Once, we were the steady, reasonable centrists, the progressives who believed in the angels of our better nature. We took Lincoln’s rhetoric and stapled it onto a vision of perpetual moral improvement — everyone holding hands, humming vaguely patriotic tunes, and moving gently toward justice. We didn’t want revolution; revolutions are too bloody. We wanted brunch with a side of incremental progress. It was all so very pleasant. But then 2024 happened, and nobody’s in the mood for pleasant anymore.

Liberalism, it turns out, was never built for the brutality of reality. It was the political equivalent of the friend who offers you chamomile tea when your house is on fire.

The right-wing had no patience for this nonsense and hit us where it hurt: everywhere. Conservatives turned culture wars into gladiator bloodbaths, wielding outrage like a chainsaw. We showed up with carefully researched studies on civic engagement and a vague sense of hurt feelings, blinking as if we couldn’t quite believe anyone would dare play dirty. And it worked — for the right, that is. They bulldozed over the niceties and rebranded liberalism as a weak, pearl-clutching disease. Nothing sticks like humiliation, and the right knew exactly where to aim.

But if the right bullied us into obsolescence, the left abandoned us entirely. The Left, the ones calling for mass systemic change, saw us for what we've become: the guardians of moderation, the people forever saying “not so fast” whenever anyone dared to demand a world that didn’t suck. To the left, liberalism wasn’t a stepping stone; it was a roadblock. Liberals were the ones who still trusted institutions, who couldn’t bring ourselves to question whether the machine we so lovingly oiled might be the problem. We stood for everything and nothing at the same time — clutching our tote bags full of good intentions while our house of cards came crashing down.

Now, liberalism is unmoored, a ship without a sail. Nobody knows what it stands for anymore, least of all liberals ourselves. There are no bold ideas left. There’s no gas in the tank for the next leg. There’s just toothless dismay at the cruelty of the right while being mildly uncomfortable with the demands of the left, saying “we should do something” but never quite agreeing on what or how. We've become a movement that doesn’t move.

So here we are. Liberalism hasn’t died with a bang or a roar; it’s been abandoned, left to drift in the tide of political history. Maybe someone will stumble upon it years from now, pull its bloated corpse from the water, and say, “Hey, wasn’t this supposed to save us?” But by then, no one will even remember what it was supposed to save us from.