Across the West, extremes on the political spectrum are surging. In last June’s election in France, the far-right National Front and the leftist Popular National Front secured 322 of the 577 seats and a commanding majority of the popular vote between them. While a minority of the Popular National Front are traditional French social democrats, the coalition was dominated by the far left and ran on a program of reckless spending and immiserating taxation. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) has garnered attention, but now a new far-left party led by Sahra Wagenknecht is also on the rise. These trends are not isolated to France and Germany: in Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Austria, the fringes are gaining strength, reshaping the political landscape.

　　The two-party structure in the United States does provide some checks on extremism, but political scientists have shown that both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from the center. An indication of this shift is the choice of vice-presidential candidates in our current election; while these candidates have strengths, they were selected over other candidates that would have stronger appeal to centrist voters. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, in particular, passed over candidates who were not only more moderate but from swing states that would help her avoid the fate of winning the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.

　　Policy has also become more extreme. For instance, President Joe Biden’s suggestion of putting term limits on members of the Supreme Court by statute, which would change the composition of the Court in his party’s favor, is a throwback to the court-packing schemes of the 1930s. When Republicans were unhappy with the Warren Court in the 1960s, they proposed nothing so radical, although the Warren Court overruled even more precedents than the later Roberts Court. Tax policy too is no longer a matter of raising or lowering the income tax rates a few percentage points. Many Democrats want to tax even capital gains that have not yet been enjoyed. Some Republicans flirt with massive tariffs.

　　The trend toward extremes represents a melancholy decline for liberalism. Liberalism has historically been marked by independent courts, free trade, protection of property rights, and a limited state, even if it incorporates social welfare programs. In that sense, figures as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Emmanuel Macron, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, were all liberals in their own way.

　　It is difficult to understand why this is occurring. The last time we saw a movement by the West to extremes and rejection of liberalism followed the cataclysm of World War I and the worldwide depression that followed a decade later. But, even with fighting on peripheries such as Ukraine and Israel or the banking crisis and recession of 2008–09, the West has experienced nothing in recent years like the sharp, cataclysmic shocks that sparked the rise of totalitarianism or the mass social dislocation of the Great Depression. Even after the Covid pandemic, economic growth has resumed throughout the Western World. In some places, like Germany, it is admittedly somewhat anemic, but still far outstrips the dramatic degrowth coupled with inflation experienced in the 1920s.

　　Some, especially on the center-left, argue that extremism is a reaction to greater inequality. But inequality in the United States fell during the pandemic. Moreover, the movement to extremes is most pronounced in places such as France and Germany with comparatively less economic inequality and far more robust safety nets.

　　Others have blamed social media. X and Facebook are conducive to simple slogans and insults that pry people apart and erode possible common ground. But this explanation romanticizes the politics of the past. Campaigns throughout American history have alternated between insults and banalities; Johnson tried to make out Goldwater as a warmonger and Nixon implied that McGovern was soft on communism. On top of that, citizens across the West have never had higher levels of education—it seems odd to believe that social media can make their approach to politics even less analytical than it was decades ago when many lacked even a high school education.

　　An explanation with a greater grain of truth is the rise of identity politics and the way they undermine liberalism on both the left and the right. Unlike tax rates, it is hard to find a compromise on questions about something as deeply personal as issues related to identity. Some identity policies being debated, such as racial and ethnic preferences or affirmative action in hiring, are illiberal on their face, treating people differently under the law. Others, such as abortion or other social issues, pose difficult challenges for liberalism, forcing us to determine who counts in the polity. Immigration, which is controversial seemingly everywhere in the West, raises questions about the identity of the nation itself.

　　But the rejection of liberalism is more extreme than the problem of identity politics. For instance, the move to extremes is occurring on economic issues as well as cultural ones. High tariffs and wealth taxes buck what had been a liberal consensus for decades. Moreover, the general sense of political campaigns is increasingly that the other side is not just benighted, but evil—an existential threat sufficient to gut institutions, like courts, where opponents may be in temporary control.

　　One of liberalism’s strengths is its openness, particularly in its recognition of the vital role of associations and institutions.

　　In my view, two phenomena provide the best explanations. One paradoxically is decades of peace and prosperity. Voters feel they can indulge extreme beliefs because society and the world have been so relatively stable. Nothing bad is likely to happen by taking a punter on untested ideas. To be sure, there have been wars, like those in Ukraine and in the Middle East, but they do affect the day-to-day lives of those in the core of the West. And the West’s prosperity is responsible for elevated levels of immigration—that itself gives rise to extremism as it becomes a catalyst for debate about the essence of national identity.

　　Second, the beliefs indulged are more extreme because they offer a comprehensive view of the world that offers a picture of good and evil more compelling than centrist compromises. The most famous epigram of the German-American political theorist Eric Voegelin was “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.” Importing messianic sensibilities into politics is dangerous, because it suggests the possibility of utopian solutions here and now, eschewing the messy compromises and the prudent implementation of even novel ideas—a process that supports the stability of the political order.

　　Voegelin feared that the decline of actual religious practice could tempt citizens to immanentize the eschaton, because a spiritual void prompts the demand for more of a totalizing political program to fill it. The West is reaching a tipping point in religious decline. In Western Europe, attendance at church and other religious institutions is not only low now, but it has been so for generations. As a result, all but the elderly in Europe have almost no exposure to organized religion at all. No longer are they likely to live off even the memory of the social paradigm that Christianity or other Abrahamic religions have provided.

　　In the United States, organized religion is also in decline, albeit not as dramatically as Western Europe. But here the strength of religious cohesion is dissolving into political disagreement. Mainline Protestant churches have taken a series of novel, controversial positions on social issues leading to schism with more conservative congregations breaking away. The Catholic Church in the United States, while held together by broad allegiance to Rome, has liberal and conservative factions, angrily feuding over cultural and political issues. This development shows that religious belief in America is hollower than it once was and thus has more difficulty competing with comprehensive political paradigms.

　　This analysis has two implications. One is a possible paradox of liberalism, at least of a kind which focuses on individual as opposed to associational rights. From its beginnings, liberalism wanted to make sure that comprehensive religious beliefs would not be the touchstone of politics. Given the history of religious wars and persecutions, the liberal settlement was designed to assure social peace and the protection of individual rights, including religious freedom, by preventing religiously comprehensive views from governing politics. Liberalism also wanted to free science to improve man’s prosperity by freeing him from the constraints of nature.

　　But both projects have had so far the tendency of making religion more marginal. No one is compelled even to think about religion, and when parents leave the faith, many, if not most, children do not return. The fruits of science not only provide a lifestyle of ease and entertainment that competes with religious practice, but also offer non-religious explanations of the universe and man’s place in it. But if man by nature looks for comprehensive explanations of good and evil that have relevance to his daily life, science does not provide much help. Hence, more totalizing and extreme political beliefs become more tempting to fill the void. Over the long run, liberalism may have encouraged a return of the dominance of ideologically comprehensive beliefs—this time in secular form.

　　The second pressing question is whether liberalism can renew itself. At its broadest and most adaptable, liberalism has the resources to renew the institutional foundations and moral preconditions that sustain it. Liberalism is not only concerned with individual rights but also rights of association, including religious association. For instance, these rights could support a movement for comprehensive school choice, mandating the inclusion of religious schools, including those that discriminate on religious grounds. Given parents’ enduring interest in securing the best education for their children and the success of many religious schools, this liberal initiative would elevate the role of religion in society and foster deeper non-political connections among citizens. More broadly, government could adopt a more welcoming stance toward associations, including religious ones, providing funds to permit them to play a larger role in social welfare. This shift would link citizens—both those who ran them and those who benefit from them—through institutions beyond the state.

　　Despite its many critics, liberalism has delivered more widespread peace and prosperity than any other system of governance. But even the most successful approach to politics may require a rebalancing of priorities to ensure that the underlying social order will support its principles. One of liberalism’s strengths is its openness, particularly in its recognition of the vital role of associations and institutions. Now is time for the friends of liberty to re-embrace that openness and allow liberalism to adapt and thrive.