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Give liberalism credit. It takes a lot to bring together high-brow intellectuals of the postliberal right and the postmodern-progressive left. Yet they make common cause, if largely unbeknownst to themselves, criticizing liberalism for systematically debasing American politics and desiccating the nation’s moral life.

The shared deficiencies of their critique of liberalism bolster the postliberals and postmodern progressives’ peculiar fellowship. Both identify liberalism as the principal source of the agitation and acrimony plaguing America while obscuring liberalism’s defining features. And while a romanticized past enthralls the postliberals and a transcendent future intoxicates the postmodern progressives, both imperiously demand that politics yield the kind of sublime satisfactions and lofty attainments found in the realms of ethics, friendship, love, art, and faith.

The liberalism that postliberals and postmodern progressives target is classical liberalism, or what might more aptly be called the modern tradition of freedom. The tradition came into its own in the 17th century with the publication of John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689) and “Two Treatises on Government” (1690), which maintain that human beings are by nature free and equal and that Christianity and human reason alike teach toleration. America’s founders crystallized central elements of the tradition in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence, which holds that human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights, that government’s primary task is securing those rights, and that government’s just powers derive from the consent of the governed. The tradition gives rise to conservative and progressive priorities for advancing the public good: The conservative side emphasizes that limited government gives free individuals expansive room to cherish their families, maintain their communities, and serve God as conscience dictates; the progressive side stresses that the state must combat poverty, ignorance, disease, and infirmity to enable all citizens to enjoy freedom and partake of self-government. The tradition’s key ideas and institutions – and the debate between its conservative and progressive branches – continue to underwrite American constitutional government and, to a considerable extent, rights-protecting democracies around the globe.

Surely, though, where there is smoke there must be fire. That liberalism is under siege on both flanks must reflect a fatal flaw in conception or baleful defect in implementation.

For postliberals and postmodern progressives, the fatal flaw in conception and the baleful defect in implementation spring from liberalism’s abandonment of the good life.........

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