Anglospherics

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH AMERICA THAT ELECTING A LIBERAL WOULDN’T FIX:

Let’s Not Grant the Postliberal Critique of Market Liberalism: Discontents with liberal modernity are perennial and a spiritual awakening won’t cure them (Jonathan Rauch, Dec 21, 2025, The UnPopulist)

Nineteen-seventy was a banner year for American cultural criticism. Blockbusters like Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock heralded a decade of introspection. Another bestseller, now largely forgotten, was by the American sociologist Philip Slater: The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. (You can read the 1970 edition here.)

Why, Slater asked, is America so prosperous, yet so unhappy? “Scarcity is now shown to be an unnecessary condition,” he wrote. Americans enjoyed an unprecedented bounty of choice—a bounty not only of consumer goods but also of lifestyles. Yet prices were high, services were deteriorating, the environment was suffering. Worse, “there is an uneasy, anesthetized feeling about this kind of life,” Slater wrote. “We … feel bored with the orderly chrome and porcelain vacuum of our lives, from which so much of life has been removed.” The blame, he charged, lay with an “old culture” which “has been unable to keep any of the promises that have sustained it” and “is less and less able to hide its fundamental antipathy to human life and human satisfaction.”

Revised in 1975 to reflect the end of the Vietnam war, Slater’s book made its way, by and by, into the hands of a certain teenager living in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. At 16, I thought the book was brilliant. I wasn’t alone. The Pursuit of Loneliness fed into a stream of national self-doubt that culminated in President Carter’s “malaise” speech of 1979. The country, said Carter, faced a

crisis of confidence … that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

In 1979, his diagnosis seemed right to me and a lot of other Americans.

And then … Reagan. Morning in America.

THE PLIGHT OF THE LAST MAN:

What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in a Death Spiral (David French, 12/14/25, NY Times)

While we talked about a number of issues, one theme was dominant — I refused to recognize that America was in a death spiral. The country was in crisis, and I needed to open my eyes, steel my spine and take the necessary, sometimes authoritarian, steps to pull it from the brink.

The core of their complaint was embodied by a quote from a novelist named G. Michael Hopf who wrote in his book “Those Who Remain”: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” […]

Americans live longer, enjoy higher median wages, live in larger and more luxurious homes, and enjoy more civil liberties and greater access to justice than even the recent past. The starter homes of the 1950s — tiny places that often lacked central air and other modern utilities — would be considered poverty-level accommodations now.

Violent crime is much lower than in decades past, the divorce rate has decreased from its highs in the early 1980s, and the abortion rate (despite recent increases) is far below its early 1980s peaks.

Let’s face it, folks have trouble making themselves the hero of their stories when we live such affluent lives in such easy times. Thus, they imagine apocalyptic dramas.

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

Liberalism, conservatism, and America’s vocabulary problem (Donald Bryson, November 18, 2025, Freedom Focus)

The word “liberal” comes from the Latin līber, meaning “free.” The original meaning of “liberal” was tied directly to liberty, not bureaucracy, and to the condition of free people, not to the expansion of state power. In forgetting this, we also forgot that many of the principles we cherish on the Right — individual rights, free speech, limited government, religious liberty, the rule of law — are not merely conservative impulses, but the core commitments of the liberal tradition from which our nation was born.

As James Madison argued in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. … In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The Founders understood that liberty requires both empowerment and restraint. Government must be strong enough to secure rights, yet limited enough to prevent domination. That insight sits at the heart of the classical liberal tradition: freedom protected by constitutional structure, not granted by the good will of rulers.

American political discourse suffers from a deep conceptual confusion that distorts debates and obscures the true stakes of our moment. The terms “liberal” and “conservative,” which should help us understand philosophical commitments and political tendencies, have instead become rhetorical weapons and tribal markers. These distinctions matter profoundly for any serious effort to articulate our first principles.