Liberalism is on the ropes across the globe today. By this I don’t mean liberalism in the American sense– where “liberal” and “left” are synonymous– but in the historical and theoretical sense: in short, liberalism is an ideology that believes in a series of inalienable rights, such as free speech, freedom of religion, etc. It insists on formal political equality— all should have the same political rights— without placing the same emphasis on economic equality, though liberalism includes positions ranging from high-tax and strong social safety net left-liberals to anti-regulation right-liberals. Liberalism has never met all of its promises, and it has been widely criticized for everything from racism in its foundations to turning a blind eye to inequality. We should, nonetheless, be very sorry to see it go– I do not think something better is going to replace it any time soon, and liberalism’s decline is making it harder to get to something better. 

Liberalism’s current crisis comes from problems that appear in its earliest days, back in the late 17th century, in the work of one of its founding figures: John Locke. The theologian BB Warfield once said that the Protestant Reformation was “the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace–” which insisted human beings are too sinful to be saved without God’s grace– “over Augustine's doctrine of the Church–” which held that the united institutional church was necessary for salvation. What we are witnessing now is the triumph of John Locke’s theory of the mind over John Locke’s theory of politics. 

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The crisis of liberalism’s most central issue is rising xenophobia. Liberalism is continually failing, or outright folding, in response to anti-immigrant politics specifically. From the US to Japan to the Netherlands, rising far right sentiment depends upon hatred of immigrants. Many liberal political parties have decided either not to reject xenophobia or to explicitly embrace it. Britain’s Labour is a particularly disgusting example. With the far right party Reform rising in polling, Labour hopes to outflank them by “stopping the boats.”