Is Western liberalism in retreat? From a high point after the Cold War, when it appeared liberalism would spread across the globe, today it is under siege even in its European and North American heartlands. The rise of right-wing populism seems to have shattered the West’s post-Cold War liberal consensus, with both social and economic liberal orthodoxies coming under fire.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has only catalysed these trends. With Western liberalism on the back foot, what are its chances of survival?
Liberalism's roots can be traced back to Eastern and Greek philosophy, but historians largely agree that its modern iteration emerged in the 17th century with John Locke and his successors. Britain was an early adopter, but liberal ideas spread across Europe, the Middle East and the Americas during the 19th century. Liberalism was challenged in the 20th century when fascism and communism both emerged as popular alternatives.
The defeat of Nazism prompted a revival of liberalism in western Europe, alongside its continuation in the US and Britain, as conservatives and socialists worked within broadly beral social and economic frameworks. But it was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that really marked Western liberalism’s apogee. The collapse of communism saw Eastern European governments embrace Western liberalism, joining the EU and NATO soon after. Francis Fukuyama famously boasted in 1992 that the triumph of Liberal democracy marked the ‘end of history.’
The liberal ascendency saw the spread of both economic and social liberalism. The 1990s and 2000s were the high point of the ‘Washington Consensus’ doctrine that saw Western countries encourage developing states, some would say aggressively, to adopt liberal economic policies of lowering trade barriers, privatising state industries and embracing globalisation.
Social liberalism had been growing in the West since the late 1950s, with legislation passed guaranteeing same sex rights, abortion rights and the abolition of the death penalty in most European and North American states. Similar laws were gradually adopted in non-Western countries in the 1990s and 2000s during the liberal ascendency. Meanwhile, Western countries extended rights even further, with same-sex marriage recognised first in the Netherlands in 2000 and by 38 other (mostly Western) countries in the following two decades.
A thing of the past
Fast forward to 2025 and the liberal ascendency is a thing of the past. The rise of populists like Trump, Viktor Orban and Giorgia Meloni may grab headlines, but quantitative studies show that global political liberalism is in retreat. Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index claim that global democracy levels have been falling since the early 2010s, while the Carnegie Endowment identified 27 states, including the US, that had experienced ‘democratic backsliding’, since 2005.
In some places, populists have challenged progressive social laws, such as Meloni’s restrictions on same-sex surrogacy, or the overturn of Roe vs Wade in 2022, prompting several US states to ban access to abortion.
Economic liberalism has been more robust in recent years, but Trump’s new protectionism is now placing the economic consensus under strain. From a high of around 25% in the 1930s, average global trade tariffs fell throughout the second half of the 20th century, reaching an all-time low of around 3% in the 2000s and 2010s.
The Economist reports that Trump’s new tariffs look set to return the US average duty to 1940s levels, pushing the global average much higher. If states respond, as expected, with retaliatory tariffs, it will be another blow to the flailing free trade era of the Washington Consensus.
Who is to blame?
Precisely what caused liberalism’s decline is a matter of debate. Some root it in the 2008 Financial Crash and its aftermath. Not only did the crash expose the limits of neo-liberal economics, but it also contributed to the rise of right-wing populists that blamed the poor growth and economic stagnation that followed on a mixture of migrants and elites.
Others point to the rise of China and Russia. China helped curtail the spread of liberalism globally by offering an alternative ‘authoritarian capitalist’ model of development that proved popular in much of the non-Western world. For its part, Russia—which slowly abandoned liberal democracy after Putin came to power in 2000—similarly demonstrated to some leaders that liberalism was not the only game in town.
Others have pointed to internal Western developments, like the rise of the internet and social media, which allows previously unconnected anti-liberals to join together more efficiently to challenge social and economic liberal consensuses.
Whatever the exact cause, liberalism has contracted not just across the world, but in its Western heartlands. In the US, the Democrats have now twice been defeated by MAGA Republicans that—according to the World Values Survey reported in the Financial Times—have values “much closer to that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Türkiye,” than other Western mainstream parties.
In Germany, though the economically Liberal CDU won recent elections, the populist AFD came second, while the illiberal far left came fourth. Meanwhile Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble part—once heralded as the emblem of a revived Western liberalism—suffered humiliating defeats to populists in both European and parliamentary elections last year. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, another who was seen as a poster boy for liberalism, has been forced to resign amid plunging ratings.
The populist effect is even prompting liberals to behave in a less liberal manner than they may wish. For example, Britain’s Labour party has been forced to break a manifesto pledge to maintain aid levels to fund increased defence spending in the wake of Trump no longer guaranteeing European security. Similarly, many European centre-right and centre-left parties such as the CDU and Labour have promoted anti-immigration policies as a means to counter the rise of the populist right.
