Nobody is more convinced of the decline of liberalism than liberals themselves. In Western countries, the past decade has seen a veritable avalanche of essays and books raging at the dying of the light. A rough consensus has taken hold that the world is witnessing the end of an age. The liberal ascendancy that followed the American triumph in the Cold War—with the subsequent expansion of both democracy and free markets—is now over. (The terms “liberal” and “liberalism” here denote the larger political and economic philosophy and should not be confused with their frequent use in the United States to describe left-wing views.) By all empirical measures, democracies are backsliding around the world. Governments are raising barriers to trade and migration. And right-wing populist political movements once deemed fringe are taking center stage. Under President Donald Trump, the United States has resolutely turned its back on its role as the champion of the so-called liberal international order. American officials now trumpet an aggressive nationalism, dismissing long-espoused commitments to democratic norms, individual liberties, and human rights.

Various inflection points tend to punctuate this narrative. Chief among them is 2016, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union (an act often understood as a public rejection of a technocratic liberal project) and when Trump first won election in the United States (similarly understood as the popular rejection of out-of-touch liberal elites). The rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan set back liberalism outside the West. The 2008 financial crisis revealed the imbalances of global capitalism, and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its integration into the international trading order helped hollow out the industrial workforce in many Western countries. One can delve further back still to the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, after which wage growth in the United States and elsewhere slowed tremendously, or to the tumult of the 1960s, which weakened the sway of traditional social institutions.

Whatever the chronology, the diagnosis is often the same: liberalism ate itself. The success of the twentieth century soured into the disarray of the twenty-first. Prosperity bred inequality and the concentration of wealth, individualism bred anomie and the disintegration of traditional community, and democracy bred mistrust and polarization. Liberal elites professed toleration, equality, and openness, but they seemed unwilling to apply them consistently. A sharp divide grew between winners and losers. As the British columnist Adrian Wooldridge puts it in The Revolutionary Center, “Liberalism’s triumph has been the common man’s loss.” The Turkish American economist and Nobel Prize laureate Daron Acemoglu sounds a similar note in his exploration of the crisis, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? “Liberalism’s current failures,” he argues, “are related to its abandonment of the working class.” According to this narrative, economic neglect ushered in the rise of decidedly illiberal forces, such as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement in the United States. Wooldridge also flags assorted strongmen and Islamists as challenging liberalism from the outside. But the difficulties that now haunt liberal democracies, the authors claim, come more from within than without.

The necessary recalibration, according to both Wooldridge and Acemoglu, would have liberals embrace more left-leaning economic policies to redress the damage done by decades of runaway neoliberalism and shift rightward on matters of culture. They suggest focusing on “working-class priorities,” in Acemoglu’s words. These include, for Wooldridge, stronger borders, limits on immigration, and the need for cultural assimilation; for Acemoglu, a greater emphasis on local community and attention to concerns about immigration; and for both, an impatience with the focus (often in elite circles) on issues of sexual self-determinism and racial identitarianism.

With these suggestions, the authors join many other liberal thinkers who have sought to make sense of the dashed promise of the post–Cold War liberal ascendancy. But their fixation on the ills of liberalism makes them miss a deeper truth. The alienation and unrest palpable in liberal democracies are not particular to them. Similar dynamics are present in ostensibly illiberal countries, such as China and Russia. Today’s crises don’t land squarely at the feet of a beleaguered liberalism. And that means that the prescription is, at best, limited. The current turmoil reflects a far larger breakdown, one that can be addressed only by embracing the universal, cosmopolitan principles at the heart of liberalism, not by turning away from them.

In many conventional narratives, the two decades from 1989 to 2009—roughly spanning the defeat of communism and the global financial crisis—often appear as the golden age of liberalism. This era saw the dominance of centrist politics in most parts of the world, including the tenures of U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It also saw the accelerating interdependence of global markets, steep reductions in global poverty, a rise in the number of liberal democracies, significant openings in India and other once shuttered economies, deeper European integration, more permissive regimes of legal migration, the growing multiculturalism of societies in places such as the United Kingdom, the retreat of many forms of racism, the expansion of women’s rights, a worldwide reduction of violence, and—one might even add—a general lightness of being.

Neither Wooldridge nor Acemoglu see that era as some halcyon time. Instead,........

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