The universal betrayed: how liberalism lost the world

We saw the same abdication at scale when governments allowed eviction moratoriums to expire even as billionaires' wealth soared. Empathy was individualized; outrage was commodified. Cruelty posed as conviction. The authoritarian seemed decisive only because liberalism had forgotten how to care.

The liberal will protest that pluralism and neutrality are precisely what prevent tyranny. But neutrality before injustice is not tolerance-it is complicity. When corporations fund both parties and treat democracy as an investment portfolio, neutrality becomes another name for surrender. John Rawls's veil of ignorance and Jürgen Habermas's ideal speech situation were noble efforts to restore moral seriousness to liberalism, yet they both keep justice at the level of procedure. They tell us how to decide, not what is worth deciding. A society that refuses to name the good cannot defend it.

We are told that liberal institutions, though imperfect, are self-correcting-that the ballot box, the courts, and the marketplace of ideas will eventually right themselves. But the evidence points otherwise. Decades of deregulation, privatization, and austerity have hollowed out public life across the democratic world. In Britain, the National Health Service-once the proud embodiment of collective responsibility-is being sold off in pieces. In the United States, even after the Affordable Care Act, tens of millions remain uninsured, while hospital conglomerates and insurers post record profits. The moral absurdity of a nation that can mobilize trillions for war but hesitates to guarantee basic care exposes the bankruptcy of its liberal creed.

As Slavoj Žižek observes, liberal tolerance is "a tolerance for meaninglessness"-a defense of the void itself, of a world where nothing can truly bind us. Alain Badiou goes further: universality, he insists, is never consensus but rupture-an event that breaks with the logic of self-interest and founds a new fidelity. The universal is not a compromise between individuals; it is the truth that makes individuals possible. Real equality is not managed or negotiated; it is declared and lived.

If liberalism cannot resist its enemies, it is because it has lost the idea of the universal. The task is not to choose between freedom and unity but to join them-to reclaim universality not as empire or abstraction, but as the living bond among equals. This recovery must be concrete. It requires institutions that embody universality-structures that secure autonomy for all.

Universal healthcare, education, and housing are not acts of charity but expressions of reason itself. They are the material ground of freedom. Without them, liberty is privilege and equality a slogan. The struggle for universal healthcare is not mere policy reform-it is the refusal to let human worth depend on market fortune. It is the assertion that the good society is not the one that maximizes choice, but the one that recognizes every life as equally deserving of care.

A new universality rejects both relativism and identity tribalism. Equality is not sameness but participation in shared reason. Against the liberal myth of the self as property, it sees the self as relation; against the authoritarian dream of homogeneity, it affirms unity through difference. Its language is not tolerance but solidarity-not neutrality but justice.

To re-found politics on universality is to recover the oldest insight of philosophy: that reason is common, and autonomy impossible without equality. The liberal age may be ending, but the universal has yet to begin. What we need is a politics equal to the dignity of reason-a community that knows itself not by blood or market, but by its fidelity to truth. Only such universality can meet the dangers of our time.