Liberalism has given humanity the most reliable foundation yet discovered for peace, freedom, and widely shared prosperity. And we are in real danger of losing that foundation.

Since January 2025, we’ve seen an executive decree attempting to end birthright citizenship, expansive use of emergency powers bypassing constitutional constraints, threats of military force against longstanding allies, the weaponization of the Department of Justice, the militarization of American cities, masked and unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raiding homes, businesses, and civic spaces, summary execution of suspected drug traffickers, the deportation of people lawfully within our borders to foreign prisons, and the self-inflicted wounds of an unprovoked trade war. I could, of course, go on.

In addition to these overt threats to the liberal order, is “The Great Forgetting”—when the principles that sustain a free society become so familiar, that they fade from view. When these principles are in good working order, we tend not to notice their presence. When they’re significantly compromised, many of our fellow citizens struggle to explain and defend—and in some cases openly reject—what once seemed self-evident.

That is the danger of the present moment. Not only that our constitutional order is under direct attack from people who swore an oath to defend it, but that our civic imagination appears to be incapable of resisting that attack.

The question is: How do we make visible the principles that sustain the liberal order, so that we are not merely slowing the drift toward a post-liberal society, but decisively reversing its course?

My concern about liberalism’s future is certainly one of constitutional political economy, the formal rules—the bones of the liberal project. Yet, it is also a soft tissue problem of values, norms, and habits that make the formal rules work. And unlike policy reform, once that soft tissue is degraded, there’s no legislative remedy to restore the default norms that hold the whole thing together.

In the remarks that follow, my aim is to provide a deeper understanding of that problem and to sketch a path toward liberal renewal. To meet this challenge, we need to understand how the soft tissue of liberalism actually works—how ideas, norms, and networks interact with one another and the formal rules of the game to produce either resilience or decay. For that, I’ll draw on a framework Virgil Storr and I developed; work that grew out of our research on community rebound and recovery in the wake of catastrophic disaster (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2015; Chamlee-Wright 2010). The idea behind this approach is to offer a cultural economy framework that complements a political economy understanding of the world.