For liberalism, the equivalent of John Cage’s “4'33"” composition may have been the evening in August of 2008 when the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics served as an announcement of China’s global ambitions. On the same day, Russian forces entered Georgia. In the same month, Lehman Brothers laid off 1,500 employees, a precursor to its crash and the global financial crisis. In that year, the Chinese navy deployed to the Gulf of Aden in its first modern operations outside its claimed territorial waters. These developments, though obscured by Barack Obama’s historic election victory that November, heralded an end to Western liberal primacy.
Still, liberalism has not come crashing down in the years since. Liberal aspirations—human dignity, individualism, equal rights—remain achievable, desirable, and inherently unobjectionable. What the events of the last twelve years have done is to expose liberalism’s inherent weaknesses. Human beings are not just logical but emotional creatures. Free markets attain miraculous economic growth but undermine equality of opportunity. Access to abundant information does not guarantee enlightenment. Individuals exercising free choice may choose to be tribal. Elected officials exploit these conditions.
The way to perfect these imperfections is not simply to reaffirm liberalism’s moral superiority. It is to tinker continuously with liberalism, exploring the potentially infinite variations upon its themes.