Prior to Kanye West, Lawrence Dennis was America’s most famous Black fascist.

Born in 1893, Dennis had European features and light skin that allowed him to pass for white, which he did for nearly his entire life. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, served in the US military and diplomatic corps in the 1920s, and then emerged as a prominent journalist and public intellectual around 1930. His primary interest: what he saw as the looming collapse of the American economic and political model.

The twin shocks of World War I and the Great Depression proved, in his mind, that the liberal capitalist political order was doomed. The future, he thought, might be either fascist (his preference) or communist. Liberalism was on its way to extinction, its obsessions with individual rights and freedoms preventing it from adapting to a new world that demanded total states. He advanced this basic claim in a series of books and essays so prominent that, in 1941, Life magazine named him “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist.”

“I find the liberal theory and practice inadequate both to what I consider to be social requirements and to my own personal requirements… It has failed. It has proved inadequate. Therefore, by the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, it is doomed,” Dennis wrote in a 1935 essay titled “Fascism for America.”

The coming decades would, as we all know, embarrass Dennis’s predictions. Yet for the past 10 years, strikingly similar arguments about liberalism’s obsolescence have played a defining role in American intellectual life.

The early 21st century, much like the early 20th, was defined by a series of shocks — 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 victory. These events led a rising chorus of intellectuals on the right and the left to insist the liberal political order was on its last legs. Something new was coming. Whatever it was, it would obliterate the hidebound liberalism buckling at Trump’s feet.

Liberals, caught off-guard by events, started to wonder if their enemies had a point. In 2018, a right-wing assault on liberal politics — political theorist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed — became a surprise bestseller. Deneen’s radical argument, that “the only path to liberation…is liberation from liberalism itself,” earned him a place on Barack Obama’s list of the year’s best books.

In a 2019 article examining the rise of these arguments, I labeled the current era an “anti-liberal moment.” Critics of liberalism on the left and right were finding mainstream success, and liberals appeared unable or unwilling to properly defend against their critiques.

Yet I believe this period is ending — in fact, it may have ended already. The anti-liberal claims that liberalism has “failed” are looking increasingly like Lawrence Dennis’s predictions of its doom in 1935: wildly premature.

Of course, there is no parallel modern event to the source of Dennis’s humiliation: allied victory in World War II. Politically, liberalism is still in crisis, with President Donald Trump engaging in a multipronged offensive against the American constitutional order. Between Trump’s illiberalism and the success of similar leaders abroad, it’s far too early for liberals to declare “mission accomplished.”

What’s happening now is something more subtle, more inchoate: a kind of intellectual vibe shift. Anti-liberal forces that once seemed ascendant are weakening, and illiberal ideas are losing their luster. Prominent thinkers on the right and left, even some once seen as radical critics of liberalism, are reemphasizing liberalism’s virtues.

Perhaps surprisingly, the political crisis of liberalism caused by Trump is a major cause of liberalism’s improving intellectual outlook.

Defining liberalism

Philosophically, the term “liberalism” refers to something quite different than the “liberalism” discussed in American politics. Prior to Trump, the vast majority of Republicans were philosophical liberals — and many still are.

Liberalism in the philosophical sense is the broad family of political doctrines that center on equality and freedom: holding that the purpose of politics is to enable each and every citizen to live life according to their own vision and values.

Institutionally, liberals believe that realizing these values requires democracy, the rule of law, and strong legal rights to protect individuals from abuse by the state. Liberalism, in this sense, is the philosophical underpinning of democracy as we understand it today — operational in contexts as diverse as the United States, Japan, and Namibia.

While liberals agree in broad strokes about the purpose of politics, they often disagree among themselves on what their doctrine entails. There are liberal socialists and liberal libertarians, liberal cosmopolitans who support open borders and liberal nationalists who endorse tight restrictions on immigration. What they share is a commitment to resolving these disagreements through the liberal democratic process — through elections, free debate, and peaceful activism.

Non-liberal political theories, by contrast, reject one or more of liberalism’s premises. Perhaps they hold, on religious grounds, that people should not be free to live life as they choose, but instead pushed toward living according to religious scriptures. Perhaps they do not believe that individuals deserve the right to criticize the state, as was the case under Soviet Communism or fascism.

Being non-liberal is not merely about criticizing the political status quo, but about attacking the basic premises that underpin liberal democracy itself.

Although the anti-liberal right has a newly powerful adherent in Vice President JD Vance, the administration’s record has divided its leading intellectuals and alienated liberals who used to give their ideas a respectful hearing. Simultaneously, the Trump administration’s naked authoritarianism has made leftists who once thought critiques of Trump’s “fascist” tendencies hysterical realize that maybe the liberals had a point.

Yet there are reasons to think that this is not just a temporary backlash, but reflective of anti-liberals’ deeper intellectual defects. The right’s anti-liberals are on weaker ground than their political success suggests, and the left’s anti-liberals may have barely existed in the first place.

The shifting intellectual winds are not proof that liberalism will ultimately triumph. Whether Trump succeeds or fails in fatally undermining American democracy will almost certainly hang on things less abstract than argument in academic journals and little-read Substacks.

Yet ideas do matter. The influence of radical thought on Trump’s second-term policies vividly illustrates that political leaders and their staff pay more attention to these debates than you might think. The end of the anti-liberal moment could, for this reason, mark the beginning of a new era of liberal flourishing — if liberals can develop new answers of their own.

Sohrab Ahmari and the weakening of the postliberal right

Six years ago, journalist Sohrab Ahmari was at the cutting edge of right-wing intellectual radicalism. A Catholic convert who had adopted his faith with proverbial zeal, he had come to see modern social liberalism as an abomination that corroded the traditional values and social solidarity that made a good society possible.

He once, famously, declared the idea of drag queen story hour “demonic” — a sign of liberalism’s moral poverty. If liberalism meant drag queens reading to children, he said, then “to hell with liberal order.” He turned this revulsion into a credo, most notably in a vituperative essay blasting the center-right evangelical and religious liberty litigator David French. By asking the state to provide Christians freedom, rather than by seeking to make the state itself more Christian, French and his ilk were creating the conditions for their own extinction. The religious right could not exist within liberalism, per Ahmari’s view, but rather was pitted against it in a death struggle.

“Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism,” he wrote.

These arguments put Ahmari at the forefront of a new intellectual movement — the “postliberal” right.

Together with a mostly Catholic group of thinkers, including Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule, Ahmari led an assault on liberal ideas of tolerance and pluralism. Their most notable adherent was Vance, also an adult convert to Catholicism, who openly describes himself as a “postliberal” aiming to tear down........

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