Becca Rothfeld’s Fanciful Demands of Liberalism (Peter Berkowitz, March 29, 2026, Real Clear Politics)
For postliberals and postmodern progressives, the fatal flaw in conception and the baleful defect in implementation spring from liberalism’s abandonment of the good life. Liberalism’s focus on freedom and toleration, they say, betrays at best a deplorable indifference to citizens’ well-being, spiritual and material. To counter liberalism’s concentration on the formalities of rights, institutions, and laws, postliberals envisage a government that unabashedly molds citizens’ souls. To correct liberalism’s acceptance in the name of liberty of social and economic inequalities, postmodern progressives want the state to aggressively regulate commerce and industry, redistribute wealth, and allocate benefits and burdens based on group membership. Neither postliberals nor postmodern progressives give much attention to the bleak historical record attesting to government’s woeful lack of competence to care for souls and to centrally plan social and economic life.
Postliberals and postmodern progressives wrongly suppose that by its very nature a limited government devoted to securing political and economic freedom must demote moral and intellectual virtue, subvert community, and repudiate faith. The American founders saw matters differently. For them, a government that safeguards individual rights keeps cultivation of the virtues, care of the soul, and religious obligation where they belong – in the hands of individuals, families, houses of worship, and civil society’s myriad voluntary associations.
Neither Left nor Right can accept that Man is Fallen. They believe putting them in control would perfect us.