Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Liberalism has not lost the talent for talking about itself, only the talent for thinking. Hardly any political camp calls so often for renewal. The former intellectual self-assurance of the liberal camp has, in the first quarter of the 21st century, given way to a melancholic weariness.
The new rarely begins with a decision. It is not found in programmes, leading articles, or strong sentences in speeches; it lies in the impossibility of carrying on thinking as before. Anyone who really thinks anew thinks against himself. He risks the charge of stepping out of socially acceptable language games. The difficult part is summoning the courage for discontinuity.
Real renewal is uncomfortable and perhaps in the end also unwelcome. It is a demand, because it asks for questioning certainties, destabilising entrenched distinctions, breaking open thought styles, and questioning one’s own doxa, the deeply held assumptions. It is a practice that pushes one to become a stranger to oneself, and that is why it so rarely succeeds. Hans-Georg Gadamer once remarked that the great weakness of the computer is that it cannot forget. Perhaps this is also the weakness of liberals. We are too caught in the incantations, language games, and argumentative patterns of our own tradition.
Taylor Swift — The Eras Tour Midnights Era Set, photo by Paolo V, CC BY 2.0, edited bw
Yet texts often announce renewal at the top of their voice. They sometimes begin promisingly in the analysis and then steer back onto the safe and inherited tracks of the familiar. The route is familiar, every turn predictable. Deviations? None to be found. Surprises stay away. It is thinking with handrails, against which Hannah Arendt wrote all her life.
For this kind of text a genre of its own has long established itself, the genre of „liberal democracy rescue”, which regularly chalks up notable successes on the book market. The pattern is always similar: first, sociological diagnoses of the present are piled up, often in rich detail and saturated with empirics. Yet in the last third the unavoidable turn happens: out of the complexity of the previously unfolded web of problems, a catalogue of solutions is proclaimed with astonishing lightness. Here a small change of lifestyle, there a new democratic institution, and already the crisis looks solvable. Therein lies the real disappointment. Where the analysis has sharpness, the therapy falls flat. The tension built up in the text is not redeemed but discharged in formulas that all too often are the opposite of innovation: reassuring, defusing, easy to subscribe to.
What settles in is what I want to call slop liberalism. Long before we were flooded with AI slop images, videos, texts, and music, there already was a slop liberalism. It plays to the common sound, draws eclectically on familiar formulas and patterns. Reading it, one thinks: not bad enough to disturb, but also not good enough to discuss. One responds with a shrug. The customary reference to the great classics works only by riding on their past merit. Their names, Kant, Mill, Rawls, are pressed onto texts like seals of quality, as if their mere mention would already produce depth. It is the academic version of the Easter egg.
This slop liberalism is the sign of a kind of liberal populism that only simulates positions and wears itself out on references. Slop liberalism is soft and comfortable. Like the new Taylor Swift album, an ensemble of pop references without its own identity. It has no edges, no friction. It works because it does not hurt. It is so attuned to the present that it becomes algorithm-optimised and interchangeable.
Think of the countless works that treat democracy as a question of the right mindset: more dialogue, more empathy, more „resilience”. Slop liberalism flows here in its purest form. It cannot even understand the frame of its own crisis. The author appears as a coach of civil society who, with a mild voice and cheerful optimism, explains that things are not really so bad as long as we only „unsere Werte leben” and get talking with each other again and stand together as democrats.
The new, however, demands not only a changed self-relation, but also a new way of thinking. The deep, often latent structures of our political ontology — metaphors, narratives, distinctions we use to interpret the world — already shape our thinking before any conscious reflection. Our liberal architecture, however, has become structurally conservative: it protects itself and immunises itself against change and critical questioning. Perhaps this explains why calls for renewal so often end in stasis.
Often, a nostalgic look back stands behind many liberal appeals to renewal. The powerful idea still has a hold on us that we have arrived at the „end of history”, at that supposed end point at which human rights, liberal democracy, and market prosperity have prevailed globally. This reference, slop-like though it shows up in every second essay on the crisis of liberalism, still contains an important point. One is unanimous in the empirical rejection of Fukuyama’s thesis, but does not let go of its normative content. Holding on to it is childish, because it excludes the thought that liberalism itself bears responsibility for the present crisis. After all, one had already won. And whoever has won need not let himself be unsettled.
This intoxication of victory, however, has made us blind to the social developments that turned this liberal ensemble anachronistic. Especially where the liberal promise of equal freedom is now only a phrase that, in the face of social realities, even those who keep saying it can no longer believe. For those born later, who know the period of the brief end of history only from the tales of contemporaries or from books, the idealised portrayal of the „Welt von Gestern” (Stefan Zweig) seems almost surreal. It is not enough to defend a system that declared itself the end of the road. The question can no longer be how to return to the status quo ante, but how to formulate political answers that do justice to the radically changed state of the world.
The point is not to cut history off. There is no external zero point from which a new liberalism could be assembled, as if one had never been part of the story that now binds one. To think liberalism anew would then not mean writing a new canon, but questioning the old one with radical honesty. To put concepts and ideas in quarantine, and to take the risk of conceptual homelessness, without the warmth of the familiar vocabulary and the customary clicking-into-place of the lines of argument.
Perhaps we will discover that some roots of the tradition have become rotten. Perhaps we will see that we are not as liberal as we believe. And perhaps that is precisely the beginning: no longer to think as before. Anyone who wants to think liberalism anew may first have to forget it. So that it can become again what it once promised: a project of equal freedom. Not out of betrayal, but out of affection. Not to take leave of it, but to free it from the grip of slop liberalism.
