Something is wrong with America. A generation after the Great Republic vanquished the Soviet Union and established the superiority of constitutional self-government and free markets, voices in the public square lament domestic threats to “our democracy,” and it has become commonplace to list the failures of the globalized American economic system. Our institutions, once trusted, are held in disdain. Our culture, once optimistic and innovative, is now coarse, decadent, and dark.
Some argue that liberalism—broadly understood as a commitment to individual freedom as the highest political good—is the root problem. One might as well argue that the trouble with Buddhism is the Noble Eightfold Path. The United States was founded on the principle of individual liberty. Abraham Lincoln saw America as a covenantal nation, a kind of divine project patterned after ancient Israel (as Meir Soloveichik has argued in these pages). True, and the covenant has been a liberal one, the aspiration to honor the equal freedom of all citizens.
