Colinxy: Why Liberalism Keeps Getting Crushed Between the Two Collectivisms

Liberalism — the philosophy of individual rights, limited government, free speech, and voluntary association — should, in theory, be the natural victor in any ideological contest. It produces prosperity, stability, and personal freedom. It avoids the utopian fantasies that lead to mass graves. It is the only system that treats people as individuals rather than as units of a collective.

And yet, historically, liberalism is the ideology that gets crushed first.

Why?

Roger Partridge: The Discovery of the Good Life

A Case for Liberalism from What We Cannot Know

Vera Rubin spent her career measuring the rotation of galaxies. When she began, the major observatories were closed to women. She pushed her way in anyway. In 1965, she became the first woman permitted to use the telescope at Palomar. By the 1970s, she had produced evidence that there is far more matter in the universe than we can see – the dark matter problem now central to physics. She lived a life no woman of her grandmother’s generation could have foreseen.

Roger Partridge: A Guide to a Muscular Liberalism

Liberals can articulate their values without trampling on rights.

Every political tradition faces the question of what constitutes a good life. But only liberalism struggles so visibly to offer a straightforward answer. Authoritarians promise order and national greatness. Socialists promise equality. Post-liberal writers promise meaning and belonging through restored religious and civilizational authority—a life ordered to faith, family, and place.

Liberalism alone points nowhere in particular. Its answer—freedom—tells you what to protect, not what to do with it. Yet that silence is not emptiness. It reflects a wise limit: no one can know in advance the forms a flourishing life will take.

Roger Partridge: Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods

In November 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali stunned many of her long-time admirers by announcing her conversion to Christianity. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she explained. As Peter Savodnik has documented, Hirsi Ali is far from alone. This conversion trend spans figures from Jordan Peterson to tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Even podcaster Joe Rogan recently declared, “We need Jesus.” In February 2025, nearly 4,000 conservatives gathered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, to hear Peterson, who now openly embraces Christianity as “the reality upon which all reality depends,” Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, and others making the case that liberal societies require deeper foundations than individual rights to survive.

John McLean: The Liberal Progressive?

In search of an alluring hybrid political animal

“Liberal” has become a pejorative term that conservatives use to label Lefties, with negative connotations of laziness, ideological incoherence and Utopian derangement.

But let’s use “Liberal” in the positive, traditional sense. Our old-fashioned archetypal Liberal believes that the central role of Government is to enhance the freedoms of the citizenry, including to protect us from being harmed by others and from the threats to liberty posed by Government itself, as well as the Courts and the Police.

Dr Wanjiru Njoya: The Rebellious Old Right

In The Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard asks “how many Americans realize that, not so long ago, the American right wing was almost the exact opposite of what we know today?” Describing the American Old Right, Tom Woods explains that: