Americans aren’t used to having to defend democracy. It’s just been a given for so long. After all, it’s the country’s 249th birthday. But now, with experts warning that US democracy may break down in the next three years, many people feel worried about it — and passionate about protecting it.

But how do you defend something when you don’t quite remember the justifications for it?

Many intellectuals on both the left and right have spent the past decade attacking America’s liberal democracy — a political system that holds meaningfully free, fair, multiparty elections, and gives citizens plenty of civil liberties and equality before the law.

On the left, thinkers have criticized liberalism’s economic vision for its emphasis on individual freedom, which they argued feeds exploitation and inequality. On the right, thinkers have taken issue with liberalism’s focus on secularism and individual rights, which they said wrecks traditional values and social cohesion. The common thread is the belief that liberalism’s core premise — the government’s main job is to defend the freedom of the individual to choose their path in life — is wrong.

These arguments gained mainstream success for a time, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has documented. That’s in part because, well, liberalism does have its problems. At a time of rising inequality and rampant social disconnection, it shouldn’t be surprising when some people complain that liberalism is so busy protecting the freedom of the individual that it neglects to tackle collective problems.

But awareness of these problems shouldn’t mean that we give up on liberal democracy. In fact, there are very compelling reasons to want to uphold this political system. Because Americans have gotten used to taking it for granted, many have forgotten how to make the intellectual case for it.

It’s time to remember.

Liberal democracy does have a good defense. It’s called value pluralism.

When you think of liberalism, you might think of philosophers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or John Rawls. But, believe it or not, some people not named John also had very important ideas.

Prime examples include the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar, who are strangely underappreciated given their contributions to liberal thought in the Cold War period. Associated thinkers like

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