Naming and reclaiming the liberal ideal

On New Year’s Day, 2000, Nobel laureate James Buchanan challenged his fellow classical liberals to save the “soul” of liberalism. “People need something to yearn and struggle for,” he wrote. “If the liberal ideal is not there, there will be a vacuum and other ideas will supplant it.”
Twenty years later, Buchanan’s fears seem prescient. Contempt for liberalism is growing at both ends of the ideological spectrum—from the nationalist right and p