European politics is shifting with a velocity few predicted a decade ago. Electoral realignments in the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and the United Kingdom point to something deeper than the usual cycle of discontent. Across the continent, voters are signalling that the postwar political settlement—the consensus that delivered peace, prosperity, and predictable governance for generations—no longer commands their loyalty.
The puzzle is not merely why liberal democracy is under strain, but why it seems to be eroding from within, weakened by the very ideals it once championed. The 20th century taught Western nations to guard against external threats to freedom—totalitarianism from the left and right, foreign domination, censorship, and political violence. What nobody anticipated was the extent to which internal pressures based on liberal virtues could prove as destabilizing as any ideological opponent.
The Inherited Settlement
After 1945, Europe embraced a vision of liberal democracy that balanced two moral commitments:
- The dignity and agency of the individual human person, expressed as personal autonomy, and
- The moral equality of persons before law and institutions.
These principles were powerful because they were not free-floating abstractions. They were rooted in a centuries-long development of Christian moral anthropology: the conviction that human beings are rational, morally responsible, and oriented toward a common good that transcends the state. Theologically, they were made imago dei / in the image of God.
This framework allowed Europe to sustain high degrees of freedom without descending into moral fragmentation. As long as citizens broadly agreed on what human flourishing looked like, based on Christian revelation and theological anthropology, democratic institutions had a shared foundation. Rights were tempered by duties; liberty was moderated by norms; equality was understood not as sameness, but as the recognition of common humanity and mutual flourishing.
But in the decades after 1968, these ideals began to shift. Autonomy expanded from personal responsibility into self-creation; equality expanded from legal impartiality into cultural uniformity. The result was the transformation of liberal democracy from a tradition rooted in moral realism into a social order defined by the artifice of procedure and the idol of self-exhibition.
This evolution offers one answer to the central question: Can liberal democracy survive once it abandons the commitments that made it coherent?
When Autonomy Becomes Untethered
Liberal democracy depends on citizens capable of ordering their desires—of choosing not only what is permitted, but what is good. Autonomy presupposes a certain kind of person: self-governing, morally formed, responsible for the consequences of his choices.
But when autonomy is reinterpreted as the right to define the self, its relationship to democratic order reverses. Instead of producing responsible citizens, absolute autonomy produces fragile ones, individuals who view any constraint—cultural, familial, political—as an act of oppression. What once served as the glue of civil society now appears as an obstacle to self-realization, a crime against humanity.
‘When autonomy is reinterpreted as the right to define the self, its relationship to democratic order reverses’
The paradox is that the more autonomy of this kind expands, the more governance must grow to manage its social effects. A society of self-inventing individuals requires an ever larger administrative apparatus to regulate conflicts between them in both their public and (particularly!) their private affairs.
This is precisely the trajectory many European states now follow: expanding bureaucracies, cooped with shrinking civic trust, which inculcate a growing expectation that the state should referee every domain of life to ensure equal opportunity to autonomy. One is shocked that the state does not yet provide an ‘equity thumb’ to ensure one ‘swipes right’ often enough to ensure equal opportunity between the sheets. Give them time to catch up with the culture.
When Equality Becomes Indistinguishability
The ideal of equality has undergone a parallel transformation. Traditionally, equality meant that each person possessed a moral status before the law independent of birth, wealth, or power. Under conditions of moral consensus, equality could coexist with difference, hierarchy, inheritance, and tradition.
But in recent decades, equality has been recast as ‘indistinguishability’: the belief that any meaningful difference between persons, groups, or ways of life must be erased to protect dignity. This shift, while well-intentioned, has political consequences.
It undermines national identity (why prioritize citizens over non-citizens if all boundaries are discriminatory?). It erodes social norms (why maintain cultural expectations if they imply difference?). It dissolves institutions (why preserve marriage or family as unique when any alternative must be equalized?). The result is a social order that struggles to generate loyalty.
If a society demands nothing distinctive of its members, and only provides a referee service to ensure ‘equity’, it should not be surprised when its client-citizens offer nothing distinctive in return.
The European Symptoms
These philosophical developments might have remained academic if not for a series of political shocks demonstrating how fragile the old consensus had become.
1. The Netherlands: The Revolt of the Middle
The Dutch elections of 2023 and 2024 were less a victory for any one politician than a referendum on a political class that had lost touch with ordinary concerns. Voters were not rejecting democracy; they were rejecting a technocracy that had come to treat dissent as pathology.
The collapse of the agricultural consensus, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment, and the backlash against bureaucratic overreach all point to a society straining against an ideological version of equality that no longer reflects lived reality.
2. Poland: A Nation Torn Between Order and Progress
Poland’s alternating governments illustrate the deeper tension between two visions of liberal democracy: one rooted in cultural continuity and one driven by progressive expansion of rights as the EU defines them.
What appears as polarization is, in fact, a contest over which moral commitments should guide national life. Populism fills the vacuum when elites abandon the older vision of autonomy through responsibility, duty, and shared destiny, for a vision of autonomy based on internationally guaranteed self-development.
3. Hungary: The Case for Democratic Self-Assertion
Hungary’s critics often assume that any assertion of national identity is a retreat from liberal democracy to tyranny. But the Hungarian case shows something different: a democratic electorate consciously choosing to prioritize cultural continuity, civic unity, and social stability over the individualistic and procedural vision dominant in Brussels.
Far from being illiberal, this may represent a retrieval of an older, more sustainable understanding of democratic life—one that recognizes that liberty requires a moral community and continuity over generations, not merely a set of procedurally precise institutions of order.
4. The United Kingdom: A Post-Consensus Nation
Brexit was not a spasm of nationalism; it was a revolt against a political order that equated equality with erasing national prerogatives and autonomy with consumerism and second homes for the middle class in France. The post-Brexit landscape remains unsettled because no new moral consensus has emerged to replace the one that decayed.
Britain’s centrifugal politics—Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland—reflect a deeper cultural fragmentation accelerated by autonomy untethered from practicable, shared political identity.
The Hollow Centre
Across Europe, centrist parties that once anchored political life are losing ground not because citizens despise moderation, but because the centre no longer offers a vision of the good. When all politics becomes administration, when identity is reduced to lifestyle choosing, when public deliberation is strip-mined of traditional moral vocabulary, voters naturally gravitate toward movements that promise meaning, protection, truth, and belonging.
‘Authentic liberal democracy was always Christian democracy in disguise’
The so-called ‘populist wave’ is not the enemy of democracy; it is the symptom of liberal democracy’s philosophical exhaustion.
Can Liberal Democracy Renew Itself?
The future of liberal democracy depends on whether it can recover what it once assumed: that political order is not self-sustaining. It requires a cultural foundation—a shared vision of what human beings are, what they owe to one another, and what kind of life is worth pursuing.
In short, authentic liberal democracy was always Christian democracy in disguise.
A democracy that prizes autonomy but refuses to cultivate virtue will eventually need authoritarian tools to keep the peace. A democracy that elevates equality but suppresses legitimate differences will eventually face resistance from those whose ways of life it unjustly marginalizes.
Renewal is possible, but it requires a political imagination that transcends the narrow administrative rationality of the present and seeks the wide and permissive politics of older Christian liberalism.
The Role of Small Nations
If a renewal does occur, it may come from Europe’s smaller states—those with cultural memories strong enough to resist the abstraction of autonomy and equality into ideological absolutes. Nations such as Hungary, Finland, Serbia, and even the Baltic states understand limits in a way larger powers no longer do. Their histories have taught them the fragility of political order and the costs of moral disintegration.
They are now on guard against sweet-sounding but ultimately unsound slogans.
Small nations are often accused of retreating from liberal ideals when they defend cultural identity, regulate migration, or support the traditional family. Yet these policies may represent a more accurate reading of what democratic stability requires. A society that knows what it is can more confidently welcome newcomers, protect minorities, and sustain liberty.
The Need for Moral Foundations
Liberal democracy is not doomed. In no small part, because no one has yet come up with a better idea than liberal democracy rightly understood. But its survival cannot be taken for granted. Europe must recover the insight that animated its political tradition from the classical world through the Christian centuries: freedom requires moral formation.
‘Liberal democracy is not doomed…But its survival cannot be taken for granted’
Rights require responsibilities. Equality requires a vision of human flourishing that respects difference without dissolving them. Law requires truth as its authority.
Without such foundations, the democratic consensus will continue to fray, and the populist reactions of the past decade will look less like anomalies and more like harbingers of a weird and wild future. Liberal democracy can survive its own ideals only if those ideals return to the moral order that once gave them life.
Some have said they seek an ‘illiberal democracy’, a phrase that is mercifully hard to parse. Others want a ‘post-liberal future’, a phrase that seems only to mean ‘something unlike today’. I want the good in liberalism to be part of our post-secularist future, because that very good is also the good of Christian politics: the truth and dignity of the human person as a creature created by a loving God.
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