Is the Owl of Minerva Flying?

Liberalism is dying—again. The demise of liberalism has been announced many times in the past. In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, Patrick J. Deneen asked Why Liberalism Failed (2018). R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor of the American Spectator, declared “the death of liberalism” well over a decade ago—almost thirty years after he’d augured the “crack-up of liberalism.” Near the end of the 1960s—with Richard Nixon in the White House and the New Left in disarray—the political scientist Theodore J. Lowi confidently predicted The End of Liberalism (1969). During the 1930s—when the Great Depression caused millions to turn to fascist or Marxist movements—liberalism seemed to be headed for historical oblivion. (To George Dangerfield, the liberalism of the thirties was a walking cadaver; in his view, “the strange death of liberal England” had occurred in the 1910s.) As Samuel Moyn observes at one point in his short but incisive book, “liberalism…is routinely said to be in crisis or even over.” Read Full Article »