Sam Gregg suggests that “soft despotism” is afflicting Europe. And, he has argued, America is “becoming Europe.” In fact, however, America’s case may be more advanced, and therefore more perilous.

By soft despotism, Gregg refers to Alexis de Tocqueville, who described in Democracy in America a state wherein the regime, “does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

To be sure, much of this sounds familiar—the administrative despotism, the cost to energy and progress. Some pathologies of 2025 America, though, might have surprised even Tocqueville. For example, Tocqueville describes the citizens under “soft despotism” as industrious. Yet today, over a tenth of American men in their prime are neither working nor looking for work. Too attractive, it seems, are disability benefits, other welfare, drugs, and screens. And yet, we read of shortages in many professions, from sailors to petroleum engineers to electricians to factory workers.

Tocqueville describes a government whose administration is “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.” It “provides for [citizens’] security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry.” Its fault is being too regular and effective, and thus leaves citizens with little to do. This is not the problem we have in America today.

As New York Times columnist and Vox co-founder Ezra Klein recently lamented,

In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

The list of tasks the federal government has recently failed at is stunning: producing qualified linguists, functional Covid tests, forest management, expanding broadband, passing a budget on time, or even tracking and accounting for DOD funding to China “for the Enhancement of Pathogens of Pandemic Potential”—we could fill the rest of this piece with significant, alarming examples of state failure.

The twenty-first-century American regime is a paradox of power and impotence: powerful enough to shut down schools, churches, and businesses, surveil millions, transfer trillions of dollars, and displace both private initiative and community, but so incompetent that it often accomplishes little. In fact, government has become its own single largest barrier; a web of regulations and standard procedures that the government must follow (or believes it must follow) prior to taking action, often entirely extraneous to mission accomplishment.

This is not soft despotism; it is more like hard incompetence. When COVID-19 started spreading in 2020, the FDA blocked non-government testing, even as the CDC’s own tests did not work.

The challenge facing America is not “preserving,” then, but restoring, liberty. This endeavor will require a different approach than that employed by previous generations. Ronald Reagan’s America may have been only two generations ago, but it was a different country. That was a time when deferring to bureaucrats’ interpretations of their own authority could seem like a reasonable thing for a friend of liberty to do. Today, though, the radicals are inside the building. Sometimes they’re in charge.

Advancing liberty in 2025 will mean as often dismantling and rebuilding institutions, as preventing the erection of new ones. And imperfect political actors must do the dismantling.

It is difficult for American lovers of liberty to acknowledge this reality, proud as we are of our movement’s real accomplishments (originalism, school choice, lower taxes, etc.). Yet, on the whole, the record is clearly one of growing government and declining dynamism.

In 1960, National Review editor Frank Meyer described the freedom movement as revolting against “30 years of slow and insidious revolution.” Today, that total is closer to 85 years of slow revolution, albeit with a brief Reaganite intermission.

If Meyer was aghast at the expanse of government in 1960, how would he react to 107,262 pages of regulation in the Federal Register, $36 trillion in debt, and an additional $115 trillion projected over the next 30 years? The Great Society, endless new environmental regulations, and vastly increased spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security have now been added to the New Deal. Right-wing resistance has mainly consisted of tax cuts, and reforms that slowed but did not stop, let alone reverse the trend.

For example, civil rights law has been distorted to the point that seemingly any hiring practice is illegal, discouraging innovative approaches to education and employment that may actually help marginalized populations more than blanket four-year degree requirements. This injustice has been in place in some form for half a century, and corporations have learned to appease regulators who enforce the law “in an arbitrary and likely politically and ideologically skewed manner.” It has become very difficult to ascertain when private employers are pursuing quotas or cancel culture out of sincere belief, or in an effort to minimize compliance risks. Any private employer could plausibly be accused of disparate impact at any time.

Gregg argues against legislation banning DEI hiring practices, in the name of free expression and freedom of association. Some DEI hiring practices may already be illegal, however, under existing prohibitions against racial discrimination. The difficulty is that the government both bans and mandates discrimination on the basis of race. Private employers like Meta/Facebook, may be currently moving away from DEI, but there’s a limit on how far they can go while minimizing the risk of litigation and enforcement. Private initiative is severely curtailed in this era of hard incompetence.

We don’t have to look far for the costs. Per capita energy consumption has stagnated for over two generations. Productivity per construction worker is significantly lower now than it was in the 1970s, and manufacturing productivity has declined over the past 15 years. Both scientific productivity and overall productivity growth are lagging, too.

To be sure, there are bright spots. The US Supreme Court and judiciary more broadly have become much more skeptical of the administrative state. Courts have started to check the administrative state’s ability to set policy on major questions, manage its own courts, and interpret its own authorities. The American economy continues to outperform most of the rest of the developed world. Artificial intelligence promises to significantly increase productivity. And AI’s demand for power may prove to be a blessing in disguise, as it inspires renewed interest in dramatically scaling up power generation, including through innovative approaches like small nuclear reactors.

The law is not enough. Culture is supreme, a fact that should give us all pause.

With these advantages, even incremental policy reforms could open up enough opportunity for most Americans to regain faith in the American dream. Indeed, as Gregg recounts, America has faced and overcome many of today’s problems, in earlier forms.

Gregg identifies two anti- or post-liberal elements. First are the “hardline Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists,” who wish “to instrumentalize religion to realize political ends.” It might be closer to the truth, or at least more charitable, to say that these elements wish to instrumentalize politics to realize religious ends. Still, as Gregg notes, these are “marginal groups,” and likely always will be.

As the late Michael Novak illustrated, faith has never been separate from American government, nor intended so to be. But at the national level, public religion was broad and non-specific, as appropriate to a diverse country composed of differing Christian and non-Christian traditions. A half-century of decline in organized, orthodox Christian practice in America has only intensified the prudential case for religious liberty and toleration, even as it fuels a romantic longing for less secular eras.

More prevalent is the explicitly, or implicitly, post-Christian ethos that Gregg links to Carl Schmitt. Gregg summarizes this as an urge to “reward friends and punish enemies.” The Schmittian new right today sees classical liberals as practicing depoliticized politics, in pursuit of neutrality. But neutrality, we are told, is impossible.

Setting aside whether classical liberalism is in fact “neutral,” we should ask: does Schmitt’s criticism of liberalism match today’s situation? Indeed, every institution of American life, from schools to churches to corporations to local government, has become imbued with national politics. Would that neutrality be our greatest problem in the age of ESG and crusades against “misinformation”?

Accepting these problems with the illiberal program, it’s worth asking why illiberalism is nonetheless “on the march,” as Gregg rightly describes.

Three immediate reasons appear for illiberalism’s advance. First, most Americans think the country has gone off course. In 2023, 58 percent of Americans told pollsters they thought life was better for people like them in 1973. Any defense of the status quo will fare poorly in such an environment. And the more people think the country is in dire straits, the more open they will become to radical solutions.

Second, “liberalism” has become associated with the establishment. A chorus of journalists, foundations, and policy entrepreneurs has blamed “neoliberalism” and “market fundamentalism” for our present troubles. This gambit worked, due in part to the prevalence of free market rhetoric in politics, and of freedom-oriented voices and organizations.

These norms and institutions impress upon the superficial observer, who does not delve into policy minutiae, the hegemony of classical liberal ideas. But if these ideas dominated DC for decades, the perpetual growth of government is hard to explain.

And finally, whereas illiberal voices speak of concrete problems with simple solutions, liberals talk about abstract principles and procedures. Classical liberals ask Americans to trust that free markets, civil society, and constitutionally limited government hold the answers to our questions, even if it’s not clear how. In contrast, illiberal voices confidently proclaim they can reverse American decline, if we just grant them enough arbitrary authority to pass their specific policies.

It’s impossible to square the narrative blaming classical, or “neo-” liberalism, with the facts: decades of over-spending and over-regulation. And yet, advocates of liberalism have not produced a commensurate response explaining what has in fact gone wrong in America, and why. While the post-liberal account of America is at odds with the facts, it speaks to the dissatisfied right wing of 2025.

Gregg begins by quoting Tocqueville’s January 4, 1856, letter to Alexis Stoffels, his godson. There, Tocqueville professed to be “an old superannuated lover of liberty in an age when almost everyone desires a ruler.” The rest of the letter gives us a glimpse into Tocqueville’s private judgment.

Earlier in the letter, Tocqueville advises Stoffels, a law student, on Roman law:

Roman law has played a most important part in almost all modern nations. It has done them much good, and in my opinion, still more harm. It has improved their civil laws, and spoilt their political laws; for Roman law has two sides.

The one concerns the relations between individuals, and in this respect it is one of the most admirable products of civilization; the other part has to do with the relations between subjects and sovereign; and then it is full of the spirit of the age when the last additions were made to its compilation—the spirit of slavery. Aided by Roman law and by its interpreters, the kings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries succeeded in founding absolute monarchy on the ruins of the free institutions of the middle ages. The English alone refused to adopt it, and they alone have preserved their independence. Your professors will not tell you this. But it is the most important part.

Mercifully, English liberty did not stay confined to England. Russell Kirk’s 1993 book, America’s British Culture, explained the influence of English law on America: “American common law and positive law [are] derived chiefly from English law. This body of laws gives fuller protection to the individual person than does the legal system of any other country.”

Kirk observed that under Roman law, “the interest of the State looms first.” In English law, however, even the king himself is “under the law,” and private citizens are secured “against arbitrary actions by the possessors of power.” Even a casual observer of Britain today may wonder whether the isle retains this noble system of liberty. The last hope for English law may lie in America.

Still, the law is not enough. As Gregg warns, “Illiberals, enabled by a citizenry that has become indifferent to freedom, will have little difficulty getting around constitutional restraints.” Culture is supreme, a fact that should give us all pause.

It is seldom remarked that famed psychologist Abraham Maslow revisited his notion of self-actualization late in life. He met “youngsters” in the 1960s who “fulfilled the criteria of self-actualization” and yet were “disrupted and disturbed.” Why? They “mistrusted all values,” and thought “truth, justice, goodness and virtue” were “fake.” Individuals so skeptical of these values, Maslow observed, failed to achieve self-actualization, even if they met the other conditions. Could such individuals, then, also become lovers of liberty? The restoration of liberty in our illiberal times may also require a cultural revolution.