New Year, Same Problems

It’s 2026! But when it comes to writing about liberalism we haven’t changed very much by breaking out that new “12 Hilarious Basset Hounds for 2026” calendar we got for Hanukkah last month. In fact, in so many ways, the first weeks of this new year haven’t just felt like more of 2025 for political liberals but have felt significantly worse. Whether or not we can actually measure it, it certainly feels to many people that the pace at which liberal democratic norms and institutions are eroding has sped up considerably. Maybe we’ve reached a point of no return?

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Friends at home and abroad keep asking me the same question: what are we supposed to do?

And, truthfully, I’m not entirely sure that I have a great answer. Maybe you do and, if so, I look forward to reading the comments once I send this post out into the world. What I do know is that there are at least two big problems we face, one external and one internal.

External to us is all of the illiberalism. We’re liberals so we spend our time trying to promote toleration and the expansion of rights, and we worry about the health of our democratic institutions and our communities (locally and nationally). This is obvious but I think it’s still worth noting: we don’t control what the illiberal people around us are doing and our disapproval of it doesn’t seem to have a major impact on whether or not they do more or less of it. And this leads to the problem that’s internal, namely the feeling that we have no options. Going to a protest is all well and good, but it doesn’t seem to change anything. But what are we supposed to do, start a revolution? C’mon.

Both of these problems point us in the same direction, which I think are seductive but ultimately false choices.

The first false choice is despair disguised as realism: “It’s over! Our institutions are totally hollowed out and our neighbors are moral monsters, so just protect yourself and the people you love and stop expecting anything more from politics.” Everything around us seems unmanageable, so this position doesn’t really ask us to do anything apart from taking care of ourselves. And it might make us feel like our withdrawal from the political problems we face is actually pretty mature and thoughtful. Liberal democratic life has already eroded to an unbelievable extent, so we might as well accept it in the same way you’d accept the destruction brought on by a tornado. It’s bad luck that it happened to our community, but all I can really do is make sure my family is ok.

The second option is a repetition of democratic institutional mantras: vote, donate, sign the petition, trust the process. Please don’t get me wrong—all of these things are necessary, but they feel vapid and disconnected from the speed and intensity of the political breakdown that we’re actually experiencing. Liberalism starts to resemble a synagogue where the congregants who attend on the High Holidays know the familiar melodies for the prayers and sing along but they don’t have any idea what the Hebrew words mean. It’s all very familiar to us and that feels important, but it’s not clear whether it’s really able to bear the weight of the moment.

The third option is a temptation presented by what’s happening all around us: if the other side is willing to break all the rules and use power without even a modicum of shame, then why don’t we? Clinging to liberal rule-following and institution-supporting seems like fighting with both hands and one foot tied behind our backs while the other side has all of their appendages and a wide variety of illegal weapons to boot. This one probably turns out to be the most dangerous option of all, because answering the threat to liberal democracy by destroying the habits and limits that constitute it hasn’t saved anything at all.

OK. So, again, what are we supposed to do?

When I said that the three options I’ve just outlined are false choices, what I mean is that they present themselves as the only available options but they really aren’t. The other option, I think, is what I’ll call liberal courage. The question, ultimately, isn’t about which strategy we should employ on the democratic battlefield so much as it’s a question about how to live with courage as members of a political community when the background conditions that once made decency and compromise feel desperately fragile.

Liberal courage in this moment doesn’t look like the failed heroism of the Stauffenberg plot and it doesn’t look like whatever the January 6 insurrectionists thought they were doing. It looks slower and more difficult. It begins with the refusal to surrender to either despair or rage. It means continuing to tell the truth in environments that increasingly reward lies and propaganda. It means resisting the constant pressure to reduce complex and challenging political realities to the simplistic binaries of Yes/No and Good/Bad that helps tribalism thrives. It means choosing to remain emotionally available to the hopes, the fears, and, sadly, the suffering of other people.

And, perhaps most importantly, it also means rebuilding the infrastructure of liberal democratic life where we live. Liberalism can’t and was never designed to be sustained by impressive founding documents and procedural rules and court cases; it depends on building and sustaining democratic associations, on engaged and serious local leadership, and on the accumulation of trust between neighbors over time. To put it bluntly, liberalism will be saved by ordinary people choosing over and over again to fully embed themselves in the slow, unglamorous machinery of living together in community. That’s the work we should embrace.