The disintegration of the liberal dream

Wake up, everyone

The liberal nightmare.
(Image credit: All images courtesy Getty Images.)

It's time for liberals to wake up from their utopian dreams. Because the ferocious politics that they'd hoped were relegated to the dustbins of history are back.

I don't mean politics understood as administrative problem-solving by barely distinguishable center-left and center-right parties. That technocratic style of politics has been the norm throughout the West (and beyond) since at least the late 1980s, when the Cold War came to an end, seeming to leave centrist liberalism as the only game in town.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.