I’m a liberal. You probably are as well, even if you don’t realize it. The word gets tossed around like an insult, but in truth, liberalism is what gave us democracy, free speech, civil rights, scientific progress, and the idea that government answers to its people. Without it, modern society wouldn’t exist.
At its simplest, liberalism simply means openness to new ideas and respect for others’ rights. More formally, it’s the political philosophy that promotes individual liberty, civil rights, democracy, and free enterprise. There’s nothing in that definition that should alarm anyone. In fact, these principles are so woven into our daily lives that we rarely stop to notice them. But they weren’t always taken for granted.
Liberalism was born in the wake of the Scientific Revolution in Europe in the mid-1500s. Two hundred years before America’s founding, natural philosophers began uncovering fundamental truths about the universe and the natural world. Nicolaus Copernicus challenged centuries of orthodoxy with his sun-centered model of the universe (instead of earth-centered); Johannes Kepler refined this model with the mathematics of planetary motion; Galileo confirmed these insights by using a telescope to chart the paths of moons orbiting around Jupiter; and Isaac Newton later discovered laws of motion and gravity. Francis Bacon championed a systematic method of inquiry grounded in observation and experiment, while the Royal Society in London established new rules for evidence and debate.
What emerged over these centuries was an extraordinary “aha” moment in the collective human consciousness—a realization among both scientists and mere citizens alike that truth was not decreed from authority but could be discovered through reason, observation, and verification. This realization changed everything. Societies developed a new relationship with information, fueling an explosion of publishing and literacy, breakthroughs in medicine and technology, and vigorous debates in philosophy, politics, and economics. The recognition that truth was out there waiting to be discovered marked one of the greatest turning points in human history.
It was only a matter of time before the same questions were asked of society itself. If the natural world had discoverable truths, might the human world as well? As the Scientific Revolution spawned the Enlightenment, thinkers like John Locke argued that governments derive their legitimacy only from the consent of the governed, and that individuals possess natural rights that must be protected. Rousseau described a “social contract” in which citizens agreed to live under rational, law-bound governance rather than the arbitrary proclamations of monarchs. Montesquieu added the principle of separation of powers, ensuring that no single authority could dominate unchecked. These Enlightenment era insights, building directly on the confidence science had given people in the power of reason, laid the intellectual foundations of modern democracy.
Our founding fathers drew deeply from these ideas when they drafted the US Constitution in the late 1700s. Liberalism meant freeing society from superstition and arbitrary power, empowering truth and reality, protecting the rights of citizens, and promoting the need for people to work together for the common good.
Over its 250-year history, our country has been brilliant at enshrining the principles of liberalism—or at least trying to enshrine them. Liberalism is behind voting rights, abolishing slavery, outlawing child labor, creating a social safety net for the elderly and disabled, helping our friends abroad, supporting the civil rights movement, developing medical research ethics after the Nuremberg Trials, developing laws to protect our environment, nurturing business innovation, ensuring freedom of information in the Internet Age, and more. The world of liberalism is the world we inhabit: a world where rights are guaranteed, scientific discovery is respected, and governments are held accountable by citizens. This is not utopia, but it is progress—progress we have made by choice through literally centuries of effort.
And yet, perversely, MAGA loyalists today have twisted the definition of liberalism to mean “anti-establishment.” Nothing is farther from the truth. Today’s establishment—our courts, legislatures, universities, press, and civic institutions—is profoundly liberal in the highest and best sense of the word. Anti-establishment rhetoric today really means turning our backs on caring for each other, learning about the world around us, caring for the world around us, and expecting that citizens and governments should work together for the betterment of all. Does abandoning these 250-year-old ideals make America great again?—returning to a time before America even existed, when kings ruled by whim, militaries turned on their own citizens, minorities lived in fear, and churches dictated the boundaries of truth?
It may seem alarmist to say that we’re heading back toward this kind of world, but the path we’re on is certainly pointed in that direction. Looking at the Trump Administration’s assault on truth alone over the past seven months, the signs are alarming. Official government reports are now filled with climate and medical disinformation—not truth with a sugar-coating of bias, but outright falsehoods. This comes on top of the onslaught of anti-science actions taken since January: dismantling climate monitoring satellites, freezing cancer and health research grants, and undermining the very agencies that protect public health, the environment, and national security.
What will be left of science and the scientific record after three more years of this assault? The danger may not be decades away. As we increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to parse information, and those machines are trained on “facts” drawn from distorted government reports, the degradation of truth could accelerate. Scholars have warned about this cycle of recursive degeneration: falsehoods seeded into authoritative sources become amplified, repeated, and entrenched, until it is nearly impossible to recover a shared sense of reality.
We have been here before, in a way. Liberalism leads to true authority, but it is a threat to imposed authority. Galileo was put under house arrest because his scientific truth conflicted with the church’s doctrine. In Nazi Germany, researchers were expelled, persecuted, or worse for refusing to toe the party line. In our own country, decades of lies and distortions about the dangers of smoking caused millions of premature deaths. In each case, rejecting liberal values—freedom of inquiry, openness to new ideas, respect for truth and human dignity—produced human catastrophe. Today, the Trump Administration is clamping down on liberal thinking in its own way: muffling universities, defunding or delicensing liberal-leaning media, and actively pursuing individuals and organizations seen as too unapologetically liberal. This censorship not only puts a thumb on the scale of what citizens perceive as truth, but deconstructs the institutions of knowledge we have built over centuries. It will take many years to rebuild them—and perhaps decades to deprogram Americans who have been conditioned now to distrust science, journalism, and even democracy itself.
And this unraveling comes at precisely the moment when we need science more than ever. What opportunities will be lost? What crises will overwhelm us because we decided to turn back the clock on all that liberalism has provided? Pandemics will not wait. Climate change will not pause. Technology will not stop evolving.
America and the world are in a fight for truth, and the forces of disinformation now control many levers of power. One small speck of hope in this fight is for ordinary citizens to hold fast to the rights and freedoms they have won under liberalism, and to reject the cynical claim that there is anything “great again” about a world where we disrespect others, reject opinions other than our own, and long to lose our rights and civil liberties. Some have called this drift toward illiberalism “fascism.” More broadly, it is simply the kind of world that existed before liberalism, and it is not a world we should return to.
