Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0006-3997-2343

Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

12-2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Government

Reader 1

George Thomas

Abstract

This paper examines the historical evolution of American political culture to evaluate whether liberalism is responsible for the social and political crises confronting the United States today. Although liberalism has been foundational to American governance and national identity since the country’s inception, a growing movement known broadly as the New Right now claims that it has failed and must be replaced. I seek to assess the legitimacy of this claim.

Using qualitative historical analysis, I trace how the form liberalism takes and the role it occupies in America’s political order has changed throughout the nation’s development. Liberalism was not always the individualistic and atomizing ideology that it is today. It was long tempered by another philosophical tradition, republicanism, which emphasized civic virtue and community welfare. For much of American history, this liberal-republican balance constrained liberalism’s excesses by ensuring that individual freedoms served the common good.

I show that in the second half of the 19th century, a host of forces weakened liberalism’s republican counterweight, and that over the course of the 20th century, liberalism itself was fundamentally reshaped. The rise of Keynesian liberalism during the New Deal era centered liberal commitments on economic security and broad-based prosperity, strengthening social cohesion and expanding opportunity. But by the late 20th century, Keynesianism gave way to neoliberalism, which reinterpreted freedom primarily in terms of market autonomy and individual choice. This shift decoupled liberal principles from the communal and civic guardrails that had once moderated them, accelerating inequalities, social atomization, and declining institutional trust.

By tracing this trajectory, I show that the social and economic dislocations that the New Right attributes to liberalism are better understood as products of this historical transformation. It was not liberalism that failed, but a particular, market-centric version of it that lacked the republican foundations that once guided individual freedom toward the common good.

Understanding this distinction is crucial at a moment when illiberalism is on the rise. Abandoning liberalism now would be a grave mistake that would likely accelerate, rather than resolve, America’s political and social decline. In many ways, to give up on liberalism would be to give up on the American political experiment itself.

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