Among classical liberals, some cleave to an idealistic understanding of human nature, while others—realists—believe that social forces help shape human nature.

Samuel Gregg has penned an impressive, historically-informed defense of classical liberalism. I strongly agree that liberty in Western societies needs to be defended from contemporary threats from both left and right. Procedural liberalism, as embedded in the American constitution, is the only reasonable political-legal model for us today.

Where Gregg is a classical-liberal idealist who holds that limiting government will produce a virtuous social order, however, I am a classical-liberal realist who believes that proactive executive government is a vital check on the increasingly corrupt mediating institutions shaping individuals in society.

Gregg’s essay does a sterling job of locating the sources of illiberalism in present-day America. He deftly integrates historical sources with recent events, illuminating the need for eternal vigilance against illiberalism. He is correct that both left and right have been willing to ride roughshod over principles such as freedom of speech and free trade—even as the left today is a more powerful actor on this score than a handful of integralists or even the economic nationalists in the Trump orbit.

Gregg is correct to point out that there have been encouraging signs of citizen revolt such as the Bud Light consumer boycott or trustee pressure to end DEI at a number of elite colleges. Yet for every example of grassroots action, there are thousands of unanswered woke outrages. Compared to the effectiveness of Republican state action against DEI and critical race or gender ideology, spontaneous citizen resistance has been a weak reed.

My central contention is that classical liberalism is not a sufficient condition for counteracting the malaise of our times. Liberal versus illiberal only captures part of what is going wrong.

We need to move beyond discussions of limited government toward a conversation within classical liberalism, between idealism and realism. Liberal idealists such as Gregg hold that with the right political and constitutional framework, people will beneficially exercise their freedom, opting for family values, organized religion, civic association, and democratic participation. A virtuous constitution and political philosophy produce a spontaneous republican order, a high-trust Tocquevillean society.

Liberal realists like myself are more circumspect: people are not blank slates as Marxists would have it, but neither are they impervious to social conditioning. Tocqueville and many classical liberals adopt too sanguine a view of mediating institutions, only seeing them as a virtuous shield against the state. But they can become rotten, threatening citizen and state alike. The survey research presented in my recent book The Third Awokening shows that institutions mediating between elected government and the citizenry, such as schools, colleges, the media, and the motion picture industry, are socializing people into culturally left values. Social norms and taboos, pushed by the same elite institutions, demobilize conservatives, silencing their voices or creating a hostile environment that repels them from local political participation.

Even without progressive hostility, those who adhere to mainstream values pay less attention to politics than progressives, for whom ideology is a more important source of meaning than it is for conservatives. Our atomized consumer society draws conservative and moderate citizens into a narrow habitus of getting and spending, leaving government agencies, education, and culture firmly in the hands of the left. Left-controlled meaning-making institutions steadily bend public attitudes, especially among new generations, toward actively supporting—or at least passively acquiescing in—progressive illiberalism.

Where I part company from Gregg is that I believe that many of our problems concern malign cultural trends taking place within a liberal constitutional order. Those problems cannot be addressed by simply upholding the Constitution because they are occurring at a lower level than state versus market, federal versus local, or individual versus collective.

My concern is that a defense of classical liberalism rooted in historic texts and political philosophy is necessary but far from sufficient for addressing Western social ills.

You need an optimal set of rules to create an entertaining football game, but you also need talented and motivated players. What ails us is not so much the rules, but the mindset of the referees that apply them and the players on the field.

The questions that engaged political philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more political than cultural whereas the reverse holds true today. At that time, most Western countries were relatively homogeneous in ethnic terms, riven mainly by status differences. The social fabric of family, community, religion, and nation, especially in Protestant countries, could be largely taken for granted. These were high-trust societies in contrast to more nepotistic places such as the Arab world or Southern Italy.

The big political debates of the period between 1776 and 1900 nicely fit the categories of classical political philosophy. The main issue for liberals in earlier centuries was to extend civil and voting rights to the masses and guard against dynastic or clerical power. In the world of 1790, Canada was conservative because it retained the monarchy and some elite privileges while the United States was a liberal republic. Today, both countries accept liberal democracy and a version of the separation of powers. The United States is now considered more conservative than Canada because of its more religious culture and laissez-faire economic policies.

Canada’s trajectory in recent decades highlights the fact that the movement called “liberalism” in the twentieth century mutated into a left-infused social and political movement. On its cultural side, left-liberalism lacks any guardrails against radicalism, which is why it (diversity training, speech codes, affirmative action) meshes so easily with cultural Marxist perspectives such as critical race and gender theory. This does not mean there are no threats to political liberty, but even where these exist—as with overblown claims of “misinformation,” “hate” and “ online harms” that are used to punish speech—the illiberal energy is primarily coming from progressive ideologues rather than selfish elites trying to protect established hierarchies and privileges.

While postliberals such as Patrick Deneen correctly observe that procedural liberal toleration of difference gave way to positive forms of liberalism such as expressive individualism, atheism, and family breakdown, I do not believe that this trajectory is inevitable. Tolerating transgenderism, for instance, need not lead to valorizing it. Preventing the shift from tolerating to celebrating difference, however, requires a deliberate intervention in the culture, regardless of the scope of the state.

The question of state versus market is largely orthogonal to the sickness in our culture. Within the same system of political checks and free speech, we can choose between a culture that celebrates anti-traditional divergence or one that lauds commonality and pro-social mores. Our problem is not the negative liberal constitutional furniture so much as the positive liberal (read: anti-traditional, cultural left) guests that occupy it.

My concern, therefore, is that a defense of classical liberalism rooted in historic texts and political philosophy is necessary but far from sufficient for addressing Western social ills. A free speech ethos is not enough to paper over the cracks in a culture that is anti-natalist, anti-national, anti-mental health, anti-family, and anti-cohesion. We need to zoom in on the social order upon which our constitutional order rests to ask how these foundations can be repaired.

I am a liberal realist, not a liberal idealist. That means I believe in using the levers of majoritarian democracy subject to constitutional limits, not merely relying on lawfare, grassroots activity, or institutional checks. Gregg, in common with optimistic classical liberals such as Greg Lukianoff or Yascha Mounk, appears to believe that moral exhortation to citizens can save the day. There is still an unexamined trust in mediating institutions rather than a realistic understanding that these are hopelessly compromised, lack political diversity, and have been weaponized by woke ideologues.

Talk of “reinvigorating civil society” strikes me as abstract and idealistic, lacking granularity around concrete mechanisms and policy evidence. While the article laments the decline of religion, there is no recognition that secularization is largely about cultural change, independent of the state-market balance in politics and economics. The article knocks pronatalist government policies but offers no solution to the steady collapse of birth rates in developed countries.

It fails to understand that citizens are partly products of institutions like public schools. The woke capture of schools, for instance, means that most young Americans think their country is racist and that those who say things that some minorities find offensive should be punished for speech. A necessary way to combat this mind virus is to use elected government to fight for control of the curriculum, recruitment, teacher training, and accreditation.

School choice is not going to solve the indoctrination problem. Liberal idealists who convince themselves that the market will cure all and that government should get out of the way are living in a dream world while the indoctrination Moloch continues to mold the minds of tomorrow’s voters. To wit, a survey by Zach Goldberg and myself discovered that fully 90 percent of American 18–20-year-olds encountered at least one of six critical race theory concepts at school. The more concepts they heard, the more they supported white guilt and racial preferences.

School choice is part of the solution, but triangulating large-scale survey data shows that the attitudes of private and homeschooled children to “social justice” questions are similar to those in public schools. My worry is that people are gulled into believing that the spread of choice somehow will end indoctrination. It won’t, as the case of universities—where school choice currently obtains—glaringly demonstrates.

I do not wish to be unduly negative. There has been a modest shift in elite culture against DEI and progressive illiberalism, with even the Washington Post editorializing against mandatory diversity statements. There is a modicum of school board-level mobilization against the rampant critical race and gender indoctrination occurring in schools—though this has been orchestrated in important measure by politicians such as Ron DeSantis.

My contention, however, is that spontaneous citizen action in a highly atomized society is difficult, fragile, and insufficient. This is especially so when conservatives are operating on the left’s cultural terrain. As I observed in my book, the post-’60s cultural left has created the moral order in which we live. The only values that matter for morality are what Jonathan Haidt terms the equality and care/harm foundations, not those focused on loyalty to family or nation. Our sacred taboos revolve around racism, sexism, and homophobia rather than patriotism and religion. Add to this the fact that the left is more educated, urban, and mobilized, and it is no wonder that they are able to punch so far above their weight in devolved institutions such as school boards, foundations, or expert agencies.

Our moment calls for active liberal realism, not quietist liberal idealism

In this world, the only institution conservatives can hope to control is elected government. Yet liberal idealists would have us abjure the one tool we have to bring compromised institutions to heel. They adhere to a utopian Burkeanism of little platoons that is hopelessly out of date in a mass society in which devolved bodies, obeying O’Sullivan’s Law, tend to drift into the hands of the highly organized left.

As I note in my book, liberty is about more than the Madisonian binary of protecting citizens from government. It must also include the more realist Hobbes-Locke vision of a government that protects the liberty of citizens from private violence and private censorship. This three-tier view of society, involving individuals, institutions, and government, better describes our world. Threats to liberty increasingly come from left-dominated institutions, not our often right-leaning governments.

In order to rebalance the institutions, elected governments must intervene to enforce political neutrality and non-discrimination. DeSantis’ ban on critical race theory in schools, and the targeting of DEI in government and universities are two crucial arms of this reform program. Private universities that refuse government money are free to pursue “social justice” indoctrination to their heart’s content. But government should use its power at state and federal levels to protect free speech and restrict leftist indoctrination and discrimination.

Yes, the left may undo this when they come into office, and will use whatever state power has been accrued, but I do not believe this can be worse than what currently exists regardless of who is in power. Government acts under the glare of the media’s cameras so can be kept in check more effectively than institutions that operate behind closed doors. Trump’s victory in 2024, for instance, showed that the emphasis on “woke” issues cost Democrats dearly, a mistake they are less likely to repeat. In the future, they are more likely to focus on deflecting attention from institutional scrutiny with cries of “culture wars” so as to permit radical teachers, NGOs, and bureaucrats to operate under the radar to complete their cultural revolution. Conservatives, by contrast, have little to lose and everything to gain from using constitutional state power to resist woke transformation.

None of this means governments should replace woke indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. I oppose public religion, as Yoram Hazony would have it, and decry violations of constitutional norms such as failing to concede defeat in an election. However, only proactive government action to regulate woke institutions, as well as pipelines for grooming conservative talent for political appointments such as the Federalist Society or Project 2025, can create political balance and a less hostile public culture.

Elected government is vital for pushing back against institutional capture. In today’s world, devolving power downwards or outwards tends to hand it to the left while centralizing power into the executive offers the best chance for the right. This is the reality that liberal idealists refuse to face. While it is vital to safeguard the power of the courts (which are essential to protecting rights), I do not believe that removing power from bureaucratic agencies, foundations, or NGOs—or regulating monopolistic tech firms’ right to politically discriminate against users and employees—violates the spirit of the constitution.

The left has politicized the institutions, so the right must get in the game—all the while keeping their eye on the ball of long-run depoliticization. When societal consensus and trust return, conservatives can relax political appointments to the executive and devolve more power to expert agencies or civil society. Until then, they must remain vigilant, using the one institution they control to check and reform the others.

Our moment calls for active liberal realism, not quietist liberal idealism.