That liberal democracy is under attack and on the defensive is no longer news. The “third wave” of democratization that boosted it around the world peaked in 2006. Since then, many liberal democracies have declined qualitatively while others have shifted outright to illiberal and undemocratic forms of government. In the United States, the opening months of President Donald Trump’s second term have witnessed a dangerous expansion of executive power, challenges to judicial authority, and above all, threats to the rule of law—the core liberal principle on which everything else depends.

The friends of liberal democracy have awakened to the external threat posed by autocratic states, of which Russia, China, and Iran are the most dangerous, and to the internal threat from leaders who practice what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has misleadingly described as illiberal democracy—a facially majoritarian electoral system without safeguards for the civil rights of individuals and minorities or the civic rights of the press and political opposition. But liberal democracy’s supporters have not tried hard enough to understand why they have been blindsided once again by an upsurge in hostile sentiments.

The mobilization of anti-liberal passion is to some extent inevitable. After all, the defenders of liberal democracy are the true conservatives of our time, seeking to preserve what is good about the present as the best basis for future improvements. It is far easier to be passionate about abrupt and radical change, especially for those who have no experience—or historical knowledge—of the ills that such changes can produce. Many have come to believe that they have nothing to lose from the disruption of basic institutions, and antipathy offers satisfactions that more affirmative sentiments cannot match.

To resist this assault on liberal democracy effectively, the system’s defenders must embrace a rigorous realism about human nature and the course of human events. Rational self-interest does not always drive human events; the passions matter, and evil is real. Economics isn’t everything, or even the “base” of everything. Culture and religion have retained—and will not lose—their independent power to shape understanding and motivate action. Nor does history guarantee the victory of liberal democracy over its adversaries; nothing does, because it always remains possible to mobilize the dark side of our nature against efforts to create a better world. Human beings can, and often do, destroy what they have built. History has no side and no end.

The Inner Vulnerabilities of Liberal Democracy

The current assault on liberal democracy obscures the extent to which this form of government has always struggled against its inherent vulnerabilities.

First: Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. This generates public frustration with institutional restraints, and an unacknowledged envy of authoritarian systems that can act quickly and decisively. China can build huge cities in the time that it takes the United States to review the environmental impact of minor highway projects. Liberal democracy requires more patience than many possess.

While this problem can be mitigated (for example, by removing excessive obstacles to building things), it cannot be eliminated. Liberal democratic institutions are constructed with two purposes in view—to help achieve collective goals and to protect against tyranny. But efficacy and security pull in opposite directions. While checks and balances can protect us against dangerous concentrations of power, they can also hamper government’s ability to carry out the will of the people. When core problems remain unsolved for years or even decades, public frustration grows. So does support for leaders who are willing to break the rules to get things done.

Second, liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed. It is natural to feel that if we consider certain views or ways of life to be odious, we should use public power to suppress them. In many such cases, liberal democracy requires us to restrain this impulse, a psychological burden that some will find unbearable.

This leads directly to the third inherent problem of liberal democracy: the distinction it requires between civic identity and personal or group identity. Although liberals may believe that certain religious views are false and even dangerous, they must accept those who hold these views as their equals for civic purposes. Advocates may freely express these views; they may organize to promote them; they may vote, and their votes are given equal weight. The same goes for race, ethnicity, gender, and all other particularities that distinguish us from one another.

This requirement of liberal democracy often goes against the grain of natural sentiments. We want the public sphere to reflect what we find most valuable about our private commitments. Liberal democracy prevents us from fully translating our personal identities into our public lives as citizens. This is not always easy to bear. The quest for wholeness—for a political community or even a world that reflects our deepest commitments—is a deep yearning to which illiberal leaders can always appeal.

The fourth inherent difficulty of liberal democracy—the necessity of compromise—is no easier for many to accept. If what I want is good and true, why should I agree to incorporate competing views into public decisions? James Madison gives us the answer: In circumstances of liberty, diversity of views is inevitable, and unless those who agree with us form a majority so large as to be irresistible, the alternatives to compromise are either inaction, which is often more damaging, or oppression, which always is.

There are always those who prefer purity to compromise, and sometimes they are right. The Israeli political philosopher Avishai Margalit has distinguished between tolerable compromises and what he calls “rotten” compromises—agreements so deeply flawed that no morally conscientious person should accept them. But applying this distinction in practice is not easy. For example, Margalit regards the compromise with slave states that made the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787-88 possible as a rotten compromise; better for the free states to have gone their own way, as the abolitionists argued half a century later. Abraham Lincoln disagreed, however, and rightly so.

Some thinkers regard contemporary liberals’ acceptance of diversity as weak-kneed. Rather than maintaining neutrality among different ways of life, they claim, liberals should endorse certain ways of life as superior and use democratic institutions to promote them. Yale professor of history and law Samuel Moyn, for one, argues that liberals should place John Stuart Mill’s belief that “The highest life for human beings is creative experimentation and originality” at the heart of their creed. Mill insisted that lives in which individuals may choose their own “plan of life” are superior to those lived in accordance with custom and tradition, which require only what he termed the “ape-like” capacity for imitation. The refusal of today’s liberals to endorse this affirmative vision of what makes life valuable, Moyn claims, undermines liberalism’s appeal.

The evidence that liberalism is losing support due to a lack of ambition is thin at best. But the problem with Moyn’s position goes deeper. While many citizens of liberal democracies agree with Mill, many others do not. Many Americans believe that lives lived in accordance with tradition and the dictates of religion are superior to those that reject these sources of authority, and no one can prove that they are wrong. They do not believe, as Moyn does, that the “creation of the new” is the best life. And if there is a Creator, the “self-creation” that Moyn endorses is at best questionable.

If America’s liberal democracy gave official preference to Mill’s conception of how best to live and used its institutional power to promote this conception, a substantial portion of the citizenry would conclude that their equal standing in American society had been called into question. Moyn’s proposal—the secular equivalent of establishing a state religion—would yield only endless strife. The alternative—accepting diverse conceptions of the good life—is the only path that allows us to live together despite our differences.

This does not mean that liberalism is morally neutral. Liberals favor peace over war, plenty over penury, freedom over tyranny, and the rule of law over rule by decree. They embrace the moral equality of all human beings and the equal civic standing of all citizens. They believe that individuals enjoy a zone of immunity from state power. And they insist that consent, not coercion, is the basis for legitimate political authority.

Liberalism endorses a conception of social perfection—civic concord based on respect for the right of others to live as they see fit—rather than individual perfection, and democratic institutions are used to safeguard civic space for the enactment of difference. Nothing in this conception prevents citizens from living Millian lives, but nothing requires them to do so either. The alternative to accepting diverse conceptions of the good life is a culture war without end.

Liberal Illusions

I turn now from the inherent problems of liberal democracy to the unforced and avoidable errors of understanding that have weakened the ability of the system’s defenders to resist its adversaries. These illusions fall into three groups—myopia, parochialism, and naivete.

Myopia

Today’s defenders of liberal democracy often suffer from what might be termed myopic materialism: the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas. This quasi-Marxist framework (economics is the base, everything else is the superstructure) wrongly denies the autonomy and power of cultural issues. Today’s populists and autocrats know better. They advance their cause by battling their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture, invoking traditional gender roles and moving issues such as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgender identity to the front lines of the struggle. They oppose most immigration, not only on economic grounds, but also because immigrants can challenge, and over time change, long-established cultural traditions and norms.

At the heart of culture is religion, whose persistent power liberals often underestimate. For example, as the most recent Turkish presidential election campaign began, many observers believed that the country’s economic downturn and runaway inflation would end President Erdogan’s two-decade grip on power. This view became even more dominant after Erdogan’s halting response to an earthquake that destroyed a generation’s worth of infrastructure development and ended or disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of his citizens. The international community was stunned when Erdogan led by 5 percentage points after the first round of balloting and then won reelection with 52 percent of the vote, about the same share as in the previous presidential election five years earlier.

To be sure, Erdogan had done everything to tilt the playing field in his favor, leading many international observers to conclude that the election had been free but not fair. But this was nothing new. Rather, it was Erdogan’s religious rural and small-town base that kept him in power. Pious women were especially fervent in their support. Before Erdogan, they explained, they could not get government jobs if they wore headscarves. Now they could. By ending the Kemalist tradition of strict secularism in public life, Erdogan had made them full citizens for the first time, no longer forced to choose between religious observance and the economic well-being of their families. Until liberals—mostly clustered in large cities and national capitals—make the effort to understand the enduring influence of religion and traditional morality in the hinterlands, they will continue to be surprised by political events.

Parochialism

Many defenders of liberal democracy espouse some form of transnationalism, whether concrete (“citizens of Europe”) or diffuse (the “international community,” or even “citizens of the world”). From this perspective, national boundaries and loyalties are regarded as forms of irrationality. After all, we are all brothers and sisters under the skin, and the moral claims of sub-Saharan refugees ought to be as important to us as those of our fellow citizens.

These views, however sincere, are not widely shared. Transnationalism is the parochialism of elites. Most people in advanced democracies as well as “developing” nations value particular attachments—to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family and compatriots. “Liberal nationalism” is neither oxymoronic nor obsolete, and good liberal democrats are not morally debarred from giving extra weight to the interests and views of their fellow citizens. This does not mean that we can ignore the suffering of refugees, but the responses required of us may be limited—rightly—by our special attachments. Disregarding such attachments, universal utilitarianism is inapplicable to the real world of politics.

So is the view that all human beings want the same things. Yes, there is a universal aversion to the great evils of the human condition—poverty, famine, pestilence, and violence. And if the U.S. Declaration of Independence is correct, every human being is morally equal and possesses inalienable, inviolable rights. It does not follow, however, that everyone prizes these rights or wants to live in a liberal democracy. The need for security often trumps the desire for democracy. Many individuals experience freedom as a burden, not an opportunity, and a sense of superiority, individual or collective, often drives out the awareness of moral equality. Ignoring these realities leads to expensive mistakes, such as believing that liberal democracy will emerge when tyrants are removed.

Naivete

Of all the liberal illusions, naivete about the course of human events and the possibilities of human nature is the most damaging.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many liberals had come to regard their creed as the irreversible result of scientific and moral progress. Military skirmishes would continue, of course, but dense commercial ties among nations had rendered great wars irrational and therefore inconceivable.

Confidence in inevitable progress toward a liberal future died in the trenches of World War I, clearing space for philosophical challenges to liberal democracy—and for revolutionary regimes that rejected both liberalism and democracy as organizing principles and rehabilitated religious zeal in the guise of secular ideology. The horrors of World War II reinforced doubts that rational self-interest could contain the dark side of human nature, giving rise to a generation of chastened liberals for whom fear was at least as fundamental as hope.

The Holocaust convinced the post-World War II generation that destructive urges were inherent in our nature. Secularists found support for this proposition in Sigmund Freud’s theory of the “death drive”; believers, in the writings of the Protestant theologian and social critic Reinhold Niebuhr, who famously cited a description of original sin as “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”

Some scholars have criticized these “Cold War liberals” for succumbing to fear. But after the mobilization of hatred on a mass scale, after the murderous regimes of Hitler and Stalin and the genocides of millions of Jews and Ukrainians, after the degeneration of utopian dreams into tyrannical nightmares in Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and elsewhere, no other conclusion seemed empirically or morally defensible.

But as Europe rebuilt, economies and welfare states grew, international commerce flourished, colonialism shrank, liberal democracy spread, and the United States and the Soviet Union settled into an uneasy modus vivendi, the grim lessons learned between 1914 and 1945 gradually faded, and confidence became once again the dominant liberal sentiment.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the belief gained currency that history moves in only one direction: toward the permanent victory of liberal democracy over other forms of governance. American presidents of both political parties claimed that certain policies were wrong because they were on “the wrong side of history” or that certain practices could not persist because they belonged to the past.

Unfortunately for them, and for all of us, history has no side, and regression to past horrors is always possible. Despite the hopes evoked by the end of the Cold War, neither Russia nor China democratized, the global spread of democracy reversed, religious zeal resurfaced, the cost of globalization became evident, nationalist passions intensified, and the spread of cultural liberalism generated a backlash. As internal divisions deepened within established liberal democracies, long-muted passions reemerged, as did the kinds of leaders who understood how to use these passions for illiberal purposes. These developments blindsided liberals, who had come to regard the movement toward tolerance at home and internationalism abroad as irreversible. This is why so many Western leaders were shocked when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

In a crystalline distillation of the illusion that history moves in only one direction, from worse to better, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reflected on the Russian invasion in an interview: “Fighting for territory, thinking in ethnic terms, using resources to wage war. I thought we had moved beyond that.” She added, “This wasn’t supposed to happen. We thought the linearity of human progress should have left all of this behind”—as if history’s magic wand would purge resentment and the urge to dominate from the human soul.

Commitment to liberal democracy must be disentangled from faith in the inevitability of historical progress. Change is inevitable, but it can be for the worse and often is. Progress is possible, but it is neither inevitable nor irreversible.

No doubt progress is real in some domains. Humans understand more about the natural world, and to some extent the social and political world, than we did centuries ago. Mainly because of advances in human understanding, we have made technological progress on many fronts, including medical innovations that have corrected physical dysfunction, diminished pain, and increased longevity. We have made material progress as well: The share of humans living in abject poverty is much lower than it was just decades ago.

There is less evidence of moral progress, however. As China has shown, even broad-based economic gains and an expanding middle class do not guarantee movement toward civil liberties, let alone liberal democracy, and tentative gains in freedom of speech and thought can evaporate. Wars continue to rage on several continents, and innocent civilians continue to die. Despite international law, governments continue to seize hostages and use them as instruments of state policy. Some governments turn their backs on democratization and mobilize ethnic majorities against disfavored minorities, and nations once committed to equal treatment for religious minorities shift toward theocracy. “Never again” is a commitment, not a guarantee, and sadly, it can give way in practice to “once again.”

Recognizing the possibility of regress is not an argument against aspirational politics, but it is a reminder that efforts to change the world based on confidence in progress can backfire. Past ills can recur, and pure intentions do not guarantee desirable results. Grasping these facts defines political responsibility, rightly understood. Critics of the status quo have a duty to offer more than vague hopes for a better world.

The mistaken faith in historical progress goes hand in hand with psychological naivete. Most defenders of liberal democracy believe that some combination of reason and self-interest suffices to explain human behavior. This leaves out most of the sentiments that shape political life, including the dark passions—anger, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the lust for domination. Ordinary people often resent their treatment at the hands of elites, and entire countries can be driven by a sense of national humiliation—Germany after the Treaty of Versailles, China after what many Chinese call the “century of humiliation” from the 1840s to the 1940s, and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consider Viktor Orbán, who continues to inveigh against the Treaty of Trianon, the post-World War I agreement that stripped Hungary of more than half its territory and left millions of Hungarians as minorities in other countries. The desire to strike back often contradicts self-interest as conventionally understood, but this does not weaken the motivating power of revenge.

It is necessary, if almost embarrassing, to restate the obvious. The capacity for evil is part of human nature, and some members of our species succumb to it. There are those who enjoy dominating others—to subordinate them, humiliate them, gratify lust, and inflict unspeakable cruelties. The conflict between these perverse pleasures and liberal democracy’s commitment to the moral equality of all human beings is self-evident. One need not accept Augustine’s theology to believe that his depiction of human beings as prideful and bent on domination contains meaningful truths that we neglect at our peril.

While falling short of absolute evil, other defects of our nature also pull against liberal democracy. There are people who glory in war and find no satisfaction in peace. There are people whose passion for imperial conquest overrides any respect for boundaries and national sovereignty. International laws and norms by themselves will not protect liberal democracies against these passions. To maintain peace, they must prepare for war. To resist aggression, they must be prepared to defend themselves by force of arms.

Recent events highlight the costs of forgetting these basic truths. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, Europe’s leaders came to believe that core principles of the post-World War II order had become inviolable and that Kant’s dream of perpetual peace was becoming a reality, at least for Europe. When Putin invaded Ukraine, and the West (after it recovered from its shock) rallied to Kyiv’s cause, it became apparent that European nations had allowed their capacity for self-defense to erode. Their armed forces had withered and so, crucially, had their ability to produce armaments that they and the beleaguered Ukrainians could use.

The capacity for self-defense requires fighters as well as arms, and no conception of liberal democratic citizenship is complete unless it recognizes this reality. In times of war, doing what we want gives way to doing what we must, and there is no guarantee that there always will be enough volunteers to do our fighting for us. When I was young, “Make love, not war” was, understandably, a popular slogan; but it is not a viable policy in all circumstances. At roughly the same time, John Lennon asked us to “Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Whatever the merits of this dream, it is not the world in which we now live, or will live, unless human nature undergoes a fundamental transformation. World government is not in the offing, and without those who are willing to die for liberal democracy, liberal democracy itself may well die.

America’s founders were more realistic. They did not expect that the Revolution would transform Americans into a virtuous people, or cleanly divide us between the virtuous and the vicious. While they hoped that we would be virtuous enough to sustain republican self-government, they designed institutions to contain the consequences of our vices. Never has the wisdom of their course been more obvious, and its limits more tested.

The founders agreed with Augustine that the most dangerous of human sins is the libido dominandi—the lust to dominate others and to subject them to the tyranny of our unchecked will. We struggle against this urge in our personal lives. Learning to accept limits on our will—to fully embrace the existence of other wills with claims equal to our own—is a journey that begins in infancy and ends, unfinished, in death. In public life, the desire to dominate one’s adversaries can move unscrupulous leaders to override legal and institutional limits, concentrating power in ways that the founders rightly believed were precursors to tyranny. The alternative to domination is tolerance for, and acceptance of, the differences that always will become manifest in conditions of liberty.

The Foundation of Decent Politics

Acknowledging the dark side of human nature does not imply lowering our political hopes. Immanuel Kant made his famous remark that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made” in a tract outlining a path to lasting concord among the nations of the world. While the drafters of the U.S. Constitution feared the impulse toward tyranny, they believed that “reflection and choice” could create institutional protections against it. The much-maligned “Cold War liberals” backed the creation of programs to promote the prosperity and guarantee the security of the working class, and they saw securing civil rights for African Americans as essential for combatting Soviet propaganda and competing for influence in the Third World.

Indeed, the decades after World War II witnessed the greatest expansion of public programs to enhance individual security and well-being in human history. Many leaders of the center-right as well as the center-left believed that these programs were necessary to prevent the return of destructive extremism at both ends of the ideological spectrum. There is no connection between liberal realism and “neoliberalism.”

The foundation of decent politics is the establishment of institutions and norms that minimize the greatest evils of politics—cruelty, civil war, and tyranny—mixed with encouragement of policies that improve the well-being not only of the privileged, but of all citizens. Preventing the political expression of evil is the precondition for achieving the possible goods of politics. This means preventing any individual, group, or class—however well-intentioned—from attaining the power to disregard the desires and interests of other citizens.

As current events are demonstrating, the United States is no exception to these maxims. President Trump has effectively mobilized public anger and fear in the service of domination, and he appears determined to assert executive power to the hilt, whatever the consequences for the system of checks and balances the founders saw as the institutional bulwark against tyranny.

It is impossible to predict how this will end. But one thing is already clear: Impatience with long-unsolved problems has increased the public’s tolerance for disregarding legal restraints in the name of achieving fast results, whatever the collateral damage. But when the rule of law recedes, the rule of arbitrary will advances, always at the expense of liberty.

Because the United States has been the world’s leading power since World War II and has been regarded as a model of liberal democratic governance, these developments are bound to have global consequences. The end of the rules-based international order that liberals have long championed opens the door to the rule of force and the redivision of the world into great powers’ spheres of influence. Autocrats will claim vindication, and democratic activists will look in vain to the United States for assistance, material or even moral, for their struggle against oppression. Whatever verdict the American people ultimately render on the Trump Administration, it has already inflicted damage that, at best, will take a long time to repair. Some of it may be irreparable.

Events around the world during the past century taught a hard lesson that Americans are now painfully relearning: Every alternative to liberal democracy is worse than liberal democracy. Perhaps there are circumstances in which this would not be the case, but this is not the reality that exists today.

The only responsible course is to embrace the unending task of making liberal democracy the best it can be. This requires a rigorous, disciplined realism, free from the illusions that history is progressive and that human beings are perfectible. The dark side of our nature is here to stay, and liberal democracy enjoys no immunity from collapse when it is under assault from dark passions. Liberal realism means discarding hopes for revolutions of any kind in favor of what Max Weber famously called the “slow boring of hard boards.” This is how enduring reform takes hold.  It is the real work of democracy.