The Masses and the Market

Reform or Revolution?

Western liberalism is in decline, challenged by rising authoritarianism on the Right and the Left. Since January 2025, Trumpism is generally perceived as the greater threat by American liberals, but the political power of the progressive Left is moving beyond its traditional redoubts in the media and academe. And for the time being, liberals are struggling to mount a coherent response.

By “liberals,” I mean those—from the Reaganite Right to the social-democratic Left—who value the basic institutions of Western society: electoral government, a free press and academy, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, private property, and a market-based economy with a safety net. The progressive Left, on the other hand, sees these institutions as obstacles to be overcome or destroyed in pursuit of a revolutionary agenda designed to completely reorder American society. As former New York Times opinion writer Pamela Paul argued in 2023:

In an increasingly prominent version of the progressive vision, capitalism isn’t something to be regulated or balanced, but is itself the problem. White supremacy doesn’t describe an extremist fringe of racists and antisemites, but is instead the inherent character of the nation.

And once one gives up on capitalism and the virtues of liberal institutions, assaults on equality under the law, basic property rights, and free speech inevitably follow. As two German conservatives have noted, today’s progressives embrace a “political ideology that questions the foundations of pluralism and democracy,” and favour a post-national “politics of identity and minority entitlements.”

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