Liberalism was born as the great emancipatory idea of the modern world. It promised individuals the right to think, speak, worship, trade, and live as they saw fit — so long as they did not harm others. Its founding voices, John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, insisted that government exists to protect negative liberty: freedom from arbitrary power, not freedom to demand resources or outcomes from others. Property, contract, free expression, and equality before the law were its sacred pillars. Revolution was justified when rulers violated them.
Today, the word "liberal" is claimed by people and policies that often treat those pillars as obstacles to be dismantled. What happened? Did classical liberalism mutate into something pathological, or did it simply die and get replaced by an impostor wearing its clothes?
What Liberalism Actually Was
Locke's Second Treatise (1689) grounded rights in nature, not government grant. Individuals in the state of nature possess life, liberty, and property; they form governments by consent to secure them. If the sovereign fails, the people may dissolve it. Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) showed that voluntary exchange, guided by self-interest and competition, generates prosperity without central direction — the "invisible hand." Mill's On Liberty (1859) gave us the harm principle: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Speech, no matter how offensive, must be tolerated unless it incites direct harm.
These ideas powered the Anglo-American tradition: limited government, rule of law, free markets, open debate, and the sovereignty of the individual over the tribe or the state. Classical liberals fought monarchs, mercantilists, and censors. They were radicals for freedom.
The Mutation Begins
The shift started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with "new liberalism" or progressivism. Thinkers like T.H. Green and later John Dewey argued that true freedom required positive conditions — education, health, economic security — that only the state could reliably provide. Negative liberty (freedom from interference) was deemed insufficient; positive liberty (freedom to achieve certain ends) became the goal.
This was not automatically fatal. Some welfare measures and regulations addressed genuine market failures or monopolies without abandoning core principles. But the logic contained a seed: once government is tasked with engineering social outcomes rather than merely protecting rights, the scope of its power expands indefinitely. Equality before the law quietly morphs into equality of outcome, or "equity." Individual rights yield to group claims. Harm is redefined from concrete injury to psychological discomfort or statistical disparity.
By the mid-20th century, especially in the United States, "liberal" had come to mean support for expansive government, redistribution, and regulation, often in tension with the older creed. Classical liberals were rebranded as "libertarians" or "conservatives," while the new liberals inherited the label.
The Pathological Turn
The real mutation accelerated after the 1960s and exploded in the 2010s with identity politics, postmodern scepticism of objective truth, and the institutional capture of universities, media, corporations, and bureaucracies.
1. The selective paradox of tolerance. Karl Popper warned in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance: a tolerant society must reserve the right to be intolerant of the intolerant. Modern progressives seized this as a blank check. "Intolerance" now means any view deviating from the approved script on race, gender, climate, or identity. Classical liberalism tolerated — even celebrated — dissenting, uncomfortable, even wrong ideas because truth emerges from open contest. Today's version often treats dissent as violence and demands deplatforming, firing, or legal punishment.
2. Cancel culture as social enforcement. What began as private accountability morphed into coordinated professional destruction for legal speech. Surveys (Pew, Cato) show large majorities across the spectrum now self-censor on campuses and in workplaces. Majorities of strong liberals have endorsed firing people for offensive social-media posts or supported pronoun mandates backed by professional consequences. This is not liberalism; it is soft authoritarianism enforced by social and economic pressure rather than the state (though state actors increasingly join in).
3. Equity over equality, group over individual. Classical liberalism's radical equality was formal: everyone stands equal before the law, judged by conduct and character, not ancestry or identity. Modern practice demands "equity"—engineered proportional outcomes by group. DEI bureaucracies, diversity statements in hiring, and racial preferences in admissions or contracting institutionalise this reversal. Merit becomes suspect; "lived experience" and demographic checkboxes take precedence. The individual dissolves into the category. This is not an evolution of liberalism; it is a rejection of its universalist core.
4. Free speech becomes conditional. The same movement that once defended flag-burning, pornography, and anti-war protest, now champions "misinformation" laws, campus speech codes, and corporate censorship of "hate." During COVID, dissent on lockdowns or vaccines was often labelled dangerous and suppressed. Hunter Biden laptop stories were throttled. Today, AI "deepfake" regulations and online safety bills threaten to codify viewpoint discrimination. The marketplace of ideas is replaced by curated narratives.
These are not fringe excesses. They flow logically from redefining liberalism around positive liberty, group harm, and engineered equity. Once the state (or its cultural proxies) is the guarantor of psychological safety and statistical parity, individual rights become negotiable. Coercion in the name of compassion is still coercion.
Has Liberalism Simply Ceased to Exist?
There is a strong case that the original article is dead, and what calls itself liberalism today is a different ideology wearing the skin.
Classical liberals defended economic liberty; today's version often treats markets as presumptively suspect.
Classical liberals championed viewpoint neutrality; today's version practices viewpoint discrimination while calling it "anti-hate."
Classical liberals saw the individual as the unit of moral concern; today's version subordinates the individual to identity groups.
Classical liberals wanted government limited; today's version sees government (and allied institutions) as the solution to almost every social ill.
True heirs to Locke, Smith, and Mill are scattered across the political map — some still called liberals in Europe, others libertarians, classical liberals, or even "post-liberals" who reject the mutated form entirely. The label "liberal" in Anglo-American discourse now primarily denotes centre-Left progressivism with authoritarian streaks on culture and speech.
This is not mere semantic drift. It is ideological capture. The language of freedom ("my body, my choice," "diversity," "inclusion") is deployed to justify mechanisms that constrain freedom: compelled speech, speech codes, loyalty tests in employment, and state-backed suppression of dissent.
Reclaiming or Mourning?
Liberalism's genius was its humility about human knowledge and its suspicion of concentrated power — whether monarchical, ecclesiastical, or majoritarian. Its pathology today is arrogance: the belief that a self-appointed vanguard knows enough to redesign society, language, and thought itself, and that dissenters are not merely wrong but dangerous.
The mutation is real. The older liberalism has not entirely vanished — it survives in dissident thinkers, independent media, legal defences of speech and the stubborn common sense of ordinary people who still believe you should be able to disagree without losing your livelihood.
But the dominant strain that wears the label has become something else: illiberal progressivism, managerial therapeutic authoritarianism, or "woke liberalism" — pick your term. It is pathological precisely because it retains the moral prestige and institutional power of the old creed while subverting its substance.
Whether we call this the death of liberalism or its grotesque mutation matters less than the practical task: defending the actual principles that once made it revolutionary — individual rights, open inquiry, limited government, and genuine tolerance of disagreement. Those principles are not the property of any party or era. They are humanity's best bulwark against tyranny, old or new.
The house of liberalism is on fire. Some inside are pouring petrol while shouting "tolerance." Others are trying to save the furniture. The rest of us should grab the valuables — free speech, individual dignity, empirical reality — and rebuild on firmer ground. The original promise was too good to let the counterfeit version bury it.