Donald Trump and Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, July 2024


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More than his first term as president, Donald Trump’s second coming signals an epochal shift in US political culture. What is emerging still lacks clear definition, but it has become clearer what is dying: American liberalism. The demise of liberalism is consequential not just for the United States but for the international order it once purported to lead.

Liberalism has deep roots in US history, with the country’s founding ideas in the late 18th century drawing on enlightenment thinking about sovereignty of the people, the inalienable rights of the individual and the merits of a market economy. Over time it has spawned a broad ideological spectrum, encompassing different understandings of politics, freedom and economic governance.

It was not until the 20th century that modern American liberalism took on the institutional and policy trappings of a dominant ideology, such that the US could be described as a liberal democracy. By mid-century, the term “liberal consensus” articulated a broad belief that liberalism was synonymous with “American values”. It was a belief intellectually cemented by historians and writers keen to provide a national narrative fit for a new global power leading the “free world” against communism – the late American historian Arthur Schlesinger described liberalism as the “vital centre” of American politics.

American liberalism was at its most ambitious in addressing matters of social welfare and equity, evident in the major policy programmes during the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s, including the advancement of civil rights. However, partly due to such ambition, the liberal consensus began to come apart in the later 1960s and 1970s, and since the 1980s liberalism has struggled to articulate a national story compelling belief or support.

Towards the end of the 20th century, neoliberalism emerged as an influential political philosophy that drew support from both Democrats and Republicans, and became the principal economic credo of US government. It promoted market efficiency, championing deregulation of the economy and the unleashing of globalisation. It existed in an uneasy tension with liberalism, eschewing notions of justice and equality in favour of individual responsibility and the authority of the market.

The effects of neoliberal policies that have become apparent in the 21st century – growing inequality, income stagnation for working and middle classes, and loss of jobs due to outsourcing – were a major factor in the populist backlash that directed most of its rage at “liberal elites” and that Trump so successfully surfed to electoral success in 2016 and again in 2024.

Notably, Joe Biden attempted to distance himself from neoliberalism with his support of industrial policies that embraced supply-side liberalism. It was too late though; his investment in the economy was to no political benefit in terms of the electorate’s mood. Biden’s ambitious but belated intervention may be seen as the last hurrah of an outmoded model of liberal democratic politics in the US.

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