Liberalism Is Losing the Imagination War

At HowTheLightGetsIn, I'll be arguing that the real crisis of liberal democracy is not institutional, it’s imaginative.

This weekend I will be in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, at HowTheLightGetsIn—the world’s largest festival of philosophy and music—speaking alongside Kishore Mahbubani, James Orr, Michael Ignatieff, Kathleen Stock, Philippe Sands, Simon Critchley, Thangam Debbonaire, and David Wengrow. The questions we will be discussing are the ones that have animated much of my recent work: what political futures are being built in the space liberalism’s retreat has opened?

The central argument I will be pressing across all my panels is one that many liberals find uncomfortable: the ideological challenges to liberalism are not all the same, and treating them as if they were is a mistake with real political costs. Some are cynical projects dressed in principled language. But others represent genuine intellectual attempts to name liberalism’s failures: its drift into technocracy, its primacy of individualism, its particular universalism, etc. The difference between these two kinds of challenges is not a trivial analytical distinction and is politically consequential. A liberalism that responds to both with the same reflex of dismissal has already conceded something important: it no longer trusts its own capacity to win the argument.

The Imagination War

Liberal democracy still has institutions and norms. What it is losing is the war of political imagination.

For most of the postwar period, liberalism could rely on a double legitimacy. First, it delivered: economic growth, the welfare state, social progress, expanded rights, etc. Second, it inspired: it offered a convincing image of the future, a direction of history, a sense that collective life was moving somewhere worth going. Both pillars have weakened. The institutional erosion gets most of the attention; the imaginative collapse less, though I think it is the deeper problem.

Political imagination is not the same as policy design. It is the capacity of a political order to make citizens feel that the future is something they can collectively shape, that politics belongs to them, and that the story their society is telling about itself is one worth inhabiting. When that capacity collapses, institutions become shells. People follow the rules without believing in them and vote without expecting change.

Liberalism is indeed now caught between two forms of fatalism. Technocratic fatalism tells citizens that politics is administration: choices are constrained by markets, expertise, supranational commitments, and the logic of competitiveness. Apocalyptic fatalism tells citizens that the future is already foreclosed and that what lies ahead is collapse, in whatever register: ecological, social, or democratic. Between the two, the space for democratic imagination shrinks to almost nothing.

Its opponents have no such problem. Illiberalism is imaginatively richer than liberalism right now, not because it is wiser, but because it is less inhibited. It promises not just fairer rules but a textured world where the nation is restored, the majority recognized, traditional values protected, sovereignty recovered, culture defended, etc. It offers many people a place in a story, even if that story also means writing out some of the characters.

This is the imagination war, and liberalism is not winning it.

The Thin/Thick Trap

Understanding why requires a distinction I will be stressing throughout my time at Hay: the distinction between thin and thick liberalism.

Thin liberalism is liberalism as rules: rights, independent courts, elections, pluralism, free speech, minority protections, the rule of law. It claims to be neutral between competing visions of the good life. It says: we are not imposing a particular way of living; we are only establishing the fair terms under which people can pursue different lives.

Thick liberalism is liberalism as a way of life: cosmopolitanism, expertise, individual autonomy, secular moral confidence, mobility, cultural progressivism, the belief that emancipation from inherited identities is the natural direction of history. It is a specific civilizational project with its own aesthetics, class assumptions, and moral hierarchies, as I have argued previously.

The crisis arises in part from the fact that liberalism keeps claiming to be thin while many people experience it as thick. It says, “we are defending neutral rules and protecting universal rights.” Its critics hear, “you are universalizing your own classed, secular, Western, professional worldview.” That gap is one of the powerful engines of the illiberal backlash. And it is a gap that liberalism largely refuses to acknowledge, because acknowledging it would mean accepting that its claim to neutrality is itself a political position.

The imagination war occurs on the terrain of this gap. Thick liberalism imagines a future that is in fact available only to some and desirable only to fewer. Thin liberalism imagines no future at all, only fairer rules for a future others will define. Neither is enough.

When Law Is Asked to Defeat What Politics Cannot

One of the clearest symptoms of the imagination war is what has happened to law. I will be exploring this in the session “Freedom, Democracy, and the Law” with Philippe Sands and James Orr. The festival’s abstract asks whether law remains a safeguard of democracy or whether it has become a political weapon, citing debates over Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

My argument will be that the rule of law has never been politically neutral, but it can still be institutionally impartial. Law always reflects a political settlement and a hierarchy of values. But impartiality, procedural consistency, independence, transparency, and proportionality remain meaningful democratic standards. The crisis of law is therefore not only juridical, but democratic.

A court decision can be procedurally correct and still be politically illegitimate in the eyes of millions. The problem is not that Le Pen or the AfD are innocent of everything they are accused of. The problem is that legal exclusion is being asked to do the work that political competition no longer knows how to do.

This is what I mean by law substituting for lost imagination. If liberal democracy cannot win the political argument, i.e. cannot persuade people that its vision of collective life is worth choosing, it is increasingly tempted to resolve the conflict through legal and institutional mechanisms. Each step may be legally defensible. Taken together, however, it reinforces the illiberal claim that liberal democracy operates not through fair rules, but through exclusion managed by credentialed liberal elites.

Illiberals’ accusations of lawfare are largely cynical: illiberal actors, when in power, are themselves the most prolific practitioners of politicized justice, which suggests their objection is not to the weaponization of law but to being targeted by it. But the accusation works because it targets a real vulnerability.

Illiberalism as Imaginative Project

On the panel “The Age of Illiberal Democracy” with Kishore Mahbubani and Michael Ignatieff, the argument will move from law to regime type.

“Illiberal democracy” can be a useful concept: it reminds us that liberalism and democracy are not the same thing, and that democracies can dismantle liberal protections while retaining electoral legitimacy. But it is not the most interesting concept, because it describes institutional arrangements but not social and cultural transformations.

The more interesting concept is illiberalism itself, uncontaminated by companion concepts. Illiberalism is not only, and not primarily, a kind of governance. It is rather a politico-cultural project, one that intends to build a new social order. It says that liberal democracy has produced fragmentation, moral relativism, and uncontrolled individualism. It has also weakened sovereignty and strengthened rule by unelected elites. And it promises restoration: the nation, the majority, traditional values, cultural rootedness, authority, and the sense that politics belongs again to the people.

This is why illiberalism is not a temporary blip. It is not the contingent product of a bad campaign, inflation, migration waves, or social media manipulation. It reflects a structural shift: liberalism is no longer the default normative system of Western politics. That historical configuration is over. Liberalism must now argue for itself, and argument requires imagination. The rise of illiberal democracies is partly explained by the fact that illiberalism is doing imaginative work that liberalism is not.

Rescuing Universalism from Ownership

The imagination war reaches its deepest level in the debate about moral universalism, which I will be exploring in “The Good, the Bad, and the Universal” with Kathleen Stock and Simon Critchley.

This debate approaches the same crisis at the level of morality. The question is whether moral universalism still holds. My position will be that universalism cannot survive if it remains unaware of its own historical and cultural thickness. Universalism in the form of moral lecturing by the West has suffered a historic defeat. It no longer convinces much of the world, not only because it has been applied inconsistently, but because it too often appeared as a Western vocabulary exported outward, rather than as a shared moral horizon built from many places.

A viable universalism today therefore has to be plural in genealogy. It has to be translated across civilizations and traditions, not merely exported as a ready-made Western language. We do need some universal moral horizon, because we share the same planet and because most societies still dream, in different vocabularies, of certain core humanist values: dignity, protection from cruelty, justice, freedom from domination, and the possibility of a meaningful life. But these universal values cannot be credible if they are detached from embedded and anchored experiences. They have to be rooted in different histories, religions, social worlds, and political memories.

The challenge is not to discard universalism, but to reclaim it from those who claim to own it. What we need is a plural universalism: capacious enough to defend our shared humanity, yet open enough to be voiced from many histories and reworked across traditions. This, too, demands imagination.

What I Will and Will Not Be Arguing

At Hay, I won’t argue that liberalism is fine and its critics simply mistaken, nor that the drift toward authoritarian rule and closure should be accepted. But neither will I suggest that liberalism merits rescue for its own sake. If it cannot reform and reinvent itself, it is unlikely to survive—and perhaps should not.

What I want to push for is a more imaginative post-liberalism: one that takes seriously the failures of liberal democracy without defaulting to the right-wing versions that currently shape the conversation. That dominance is not inevitable. Left, pluralist, and democratic possibilities remain largely unexplored—and may be where the most important intellectual work now lies.

The starting point is an honest reckoning with liberalism’s crisis, including its internal weaknesses and failures. It promised prosperity, yet growth became decoupled from living standards; it promised democracy, yet delivered technocracy.

Illiberal movements recognized this earlier than many liberals did, and have worked to build imaginative worlds that respond to people’s needs for dignity, place, continuity, and collective belonging—albeit imperfectly, and sometimes cynically or dangerously. Liberals, by contrast, have been slower to engage at this level.

The question is therefore what kind of politics deserves to survive after the end of liberal certainty, and whether liberals are willing to do the imaginative work that survival requires.