Why has liberal democracy proved so helpless before the new authoritarianism? Why has liberalism failed to stem the tide of reaction now sweeping the world—here assuming the face of the MAGA movement and Trumpism? In a word: because its weakness is built in. Liberalism, in its moral, political, and economic forms, cannot realize the universality it proclaims. It conceives the self as a private owner of interests, the market as the form of reason, and justice as procedure rather than substance. The result is paralysis before the very forces it has unleashed. Authoritarianism is not liberalism’s opposite but its mirror—the return of myth in a world stripped of meaning.

To escape this trap, we must recover universality as the union of freedom and community. The point is not to rescue liberalism but to move beyond it: to rediscover within reason the demand for equality, and within equality the need for shared purpose.

Liberalism’s crisis is self-inflicted. It equates freedom with private will and justice with neutral rules. It celebrates equality while deepening inequality; it praises reason while hollowing it out. The modern right’s appeal is not an accident but the logical outcome of a creed that turned politics into management and citizenship into consumption. The spectacle is visible everywhere: a politics of technocrats unable to inspire, and populists who thrive precisely because they offer feeling where liberalism offers only process.

Born from the bourgeois revolution, liberalism once freed the individual from hierarchy. But its triumph concealed decay. Freedom was defined as the absence of constraint, not as participation in a common good. Once detached from any vision of the good, freedom collapsed into mere choice. The sovereign consumer replaced the citizen.

The market became our moral universe—the new religion of equivalence. It reduces all difference to quantity, turning value into price and persons into exchangeable units. Liberal reason, shaped by this logic, knows how to calculate means but not ends. Politics becomes administration; ethics becomes utility. We can measure everything except what matters.

This is why liberal democracy cannot inspire devotion. It offers no vision beyond consumption. To the disinherited it preaches........

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