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Why Liberalism Failed is a critique of political, social, and economic liberalism as practiced by both American Democrats and Republicans.According to Deneen, "we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations."
[44] [45] A common simplified definition of a republic is a government where the head of state is not a monarch. [46] [47] Montesquieu included both democracies, where all the people have a share in rule, and aristocracies or oligarchies, where only some of the people rule, as republican forms of government. [48] These categories are not exclusive.
Liberals generally believed in limited government, although several liberal philosophers decried government outright, with Thomas Paine writing, "government even in its best state is a necessary evil".
Economic liberalization, or economic liberalisation, is the lessening of government regulations and restrictions in an economy in exchange for greater participation by private entities. In politics, the doctrine is associated with classical liberalism and neoliberalism.
Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under ...
Examples of democratic backsliding include: [19] [20] Free and fair elections are degraded; [ 19 ] Liberal rights of freedom of speech , press [ 21 ] and association decline, impairing the ability of the political opposition to challenge the government, hold it to account, and propose alternatives to the current regime; [ 19 ] [ 21 ]
To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either codified or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. A liberal democracy may take various and mixed constitutional forms: it may be a constitutional monarchy or a republic.
In Europe, liberalism usually means what is sometimes called classical liberalism, a commitment to limited government, laissez-faire economics. This classical liberalism sometimes more closely corresponds to the American definition of libertarianism, although some distinguish between classical liberalism and libertarianism. [41]