Tired of Winning
When the obituary of liberalism is finally written, it will read that liberalism perished not from prosperity but from its refusal to admit that what it called prosperity was in fact ruin. No one will remember sterile banality. They will remember only that liberalism insisted until its last breath that everything was fine, that the house was not burning, that the ruins all around us were just signs of another glorious victory. Another sign of abundance. Another helping of prosperity. But history will be less kind than the apologists, for it will see clearly what they could not: that a system which insists that losing is winning has already lost.
The Protectors of Our Industries, originally published in Puck magazine February 7, 1883. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
I've had the pleasure of knowing Josh ever since we met at the Hertog Foundation Political Studies Program back in 2023. Despite my occasional frustrations when debating him, I do respect him and his sense of intellectual wonder. I would, however, like to separate the art from the artist for a few minutes and address his essay, The New Consensus Against the Liberal Consensus: Reflections on Libcon 2025, with a degree of pugnacious bluntness. Simply put, I disagree.
Should liberalism fail, we are told, it will not be because it failed in any material sense but because it succeeded so extravagantly that it spoiled its own citizens into restlessness. This, at least, is the story repeated in Josh Cotlar’s recent defense of the liberal order. His thesis is not that liberalism betrayed its promises or hollowed out its people, but rather that it fulfilled its mission so thoroughly that abundance became stultifying, tolerance became banal, and prosperity itself turned sterile. Liberalism, in his telling, is not guilty of wrecking the social order but of giving us too much of the good life. We have grown weary not of poverty but of plenty, not of oppression but of freedom, not of failure but of success. And so, if liberalism collapses, it will be less a judgment on its defects than the ingratitude of its citizens.
This is an amazing claim because it asks us to believe that the discontent boiling over in every corner of Western society is not rooted in economic alienation, social disintegration, or spiritual emptiness but in the peculiar boredom of people too prosperous to know what to do with themselves. What looks like despair, in this account, is actually decadence; what feels like exclusion is really overindulgence; what seems like betrayal is just the price of abundance. So when the hollowing out of communities, the despair of addiction, the alienation of modern life became impossible to ignore, liberalism declared that the problem was too much winning. Well, forgive me if I fail to join in the applause.
“Where liberalism offers only tolerance and neutrality, populism offers solidarity and belonging.“
One hardly knows where to begin in responding to such a story. Perhaps with the obvious: that for vast swathes of the population, the “abundance” of liberal prosperity looks a great deal like scarcity. We are told that liberalism is collapsing under the weight of its success, yet an entire generation cannot afford homes. A generation of young men and women emerge into a labor market flooded with cheap foreign labor thanks to the wonders of temporary visas and free trade. Families once supported by a single factory income now disintegrate under the combined pressure of unemployment, opioid addiction, and social despair. If this is success, then one shudders to imagine what failure would look like.
Cotlar insists that liberalism reduces the likelihood of political violence by providing a framework of tolerance, neutrality, and prosperity. But what we are actually witnessing is not the pacification of violence but its transmutation into new forms: riots in cities, despair in small towns, quiet epidemics of suicide and overdose, not to mention the more subtle violence of debt servitude and economic immiseration. To describe this landscape as the byproduct of too much prosperity is to elevate euphemism into a form of cruelty. A man who loses his factory job, succumbs to opioids, and dies alone in a trailer is not the casualty of abundance; he is the victim of an order that tore away his livelihood and offered him nothing in return. To label his destruction a side effect of “winning too much” is an obscenity.
Yet this is the move liberalism is indirectly compelled to make. Housing is unaffordable? That is not evidence of failure but of liberalism’s success at creating desirable urban hubs. Wages stagnate while the cost of living soars? That is not betrayal but simply the price of integration into a global economy. Communities collapse, birthrates plummet, alienation spreads? That is not a problem at all but rather the inevitable adjustment to a new era of freedom and tolerance. In this strange accounting, every crisis becomes proof of triumph, every breakdown the mark of victory. The system cannot fail; it can only be failed by the ungrateful. Behold! How much more glamorous it would be if the homeless man outside the metro station could only be told that his plight is evidence of a system bursting with prosperity.
This inversion would be laughable if it were not so grotesque. Imagine telling a drowning man that his problem is not the lack of oxygen but his inability to appreciate the water. Imagine telling the foreclosed family that their homelessness is a sign of abundance. Imagine telling the opioid widow that her husband’s death is the byproduct of prosperity. Such is not the logic of a free thinker but a propagandist. It insists that such suffering is not real. And if we are to recognize that suffering is real and still choose to base our analysis of populism on everyone but those suffering under the status quo, then what on earth are we doing? Apparently, what is needed is not drastic reform of, by, and for the American people at all, but rather more gratitude and a rediscovery of liberalism’s moral center of universalism and the “welfare of humanity.”
This narrative, however, does more than insult those crushed beneath the system. It also reveals liberalism’s profound inability to grapple with its own contradictions. For what Cotlar describes as the “banality” of pluralism and prosperity is in fact the natural outcome of liberalism’s philosophical emptiness. A society that grounds itself on nothing more than individual autonomy and value pluralism will, by definition, struggle to articulate any higher vision of the good life. It cannot provide meaning, because it has disavowed meaning. It cannot inspire loyalty because it has disavowed any shared purpose beyond vague assurances of a wider community of human beings unified not by tongue, creed, or blood but by even vaguer notions of pluralistic humanism. It cannot even cultivate virtue because it has disavowed all substantive moral claims in its allergic aversion to all gods both strong and weak. These are not the deficiencies of Libcon 2025 but liberalism in of itself. The sterility Cotlar laments is not a bug of liberalism’s success but a feature of its design.
And yet, rather than admit this, the essay reframes sterility as abundance. People are restless not because they are denied meaning but because they are spoiled by prosperity. They are discontent not because liberalism hollowed out their communities but because they are bored of stability. They rebel not because the order has betrayed them but because they have grown weary of freedom. The diagnosis is as self-serving as it is false. By recasting failure as triumph, I cannot shake the impression that the panelists at Libcon 2025 allow liberalism to evade responsibility for the conditions it has produced. Those who have loved ones impacted by deaths of despair know painfully well that these tragedies are not plastic ducks in a bathtub.
This is why populism terrifies liberals. Populism, for all its flaws, dares to name what liberalism denies. It insists that communities matter, that nations matter, that shared traditions matter, that meaning cannot be reduced to consumer choice or philosophical treatises. Where liberalism offers only tolerance and neutrality, populism offers solidarity and belonging. Where liberalism insists that citizens be content with prosperity, populism insists that prosperity without dignity is no prosperity at all. And so, to the liberal apologist, populism must be dismissed as dangerous, reactionary, even violent. Not because it is inherently so, but because it exposes the emptiness of liberal promises.
When Cotlar praises liberalism for reducing political violence, he conveniently excludes the quiet forms of devastation that proliferate under its reign. When he praises tolerance, he ignores the fact that tolerance has become indistinguishable from indifference. When he praises prosperity, he ignores the reality that prosperity has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, leaving the majority to scrape by in what feels less like abundance than managed decline. This is the genius of the liberal defense: it sets the bar so low that any survival counts as victory, and then it blames the discontented for failing to be sufficiently grateful.
But gratitude cannot be commanded. And the reality is that millions of citizens look around and see not prosperity but precarity, not freedom but instability, not tolerance but nihilism. They are not bored of winning. They are suffocating under losing, day after day, year after year, told all the while that this is what triumph looks like. And so here they are on bended knees told to say “Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much!” And when they dare to say otherwise, they are mocked as a basket of deplorables who have failed to appreciate the glories of their own abundance.
The very suggestion that any serious attempt to restore America’s political community is mere reactionary utopianism exposes the intellectual poverty of the liberal imagination. Indeed, we are told that even the core message of MAGA—that the American people possess not only the right but the duty to shape their own destinies in the pursuit of happiness for themselves and their posterity—smacks of “sovereigntism,” with antisemitic historical undertones. Such rhetorical sleights of hand do not merely misunderstand the political moment; they actively discredit themselves by pathologizing what has always been the beating heart of political life: the love of one’s own. For this reason, this particular form of pearl-clutching liberalism that recoils in horror at the prospect of a people reasserting itself deserves to die, not because our present societal ills represent some unfortunate deviation of modernity gone awry, but precisely because cosmopolitan liberalism is incapable of grasping the first and most enduring truth of politics: that human beings are not inspired to sacrifice, to labor, or to die for the sake of abstractions of a book, but because they love concretely, viscerally, and unashamedly their families, their neighbors, their communities, and their nation. The reduction of such attachments to dangerous nostalgia or coded bigotry is not merely insulting; it is suicidal for any political order that hopes to endure.
One suspects that even Cotlar knows, deep down, how hollow the defense of liberalism sounds. Hence the constant reliance on abstractions of rather than concrete realities. Hence the insistence that failure is in fact success. Hence the refusal to take seriously the testimonies of those who insist that the system is not working for them by asserting that the deracination of a people is still within the streams of a force for good. It is easier to bemoan liberalism’s lack of a compelling narrative as a mere lapse in the public relations competition. As such, liberalism must be defended not as it is but as a pure metaphysical principle: always already victorious and beyond rational refutation. So when confronted, whereas the communist proclaim that this isn’t real communism, the liberal proclaim that this isn’t real suffering.
But reality intrudes. You cannot indefinitely tell people that homelessness is abundance, that despair is prosperity, that sterility is freedom, that disintegration is universalism. At some point, words lose their magic. Cotlar wants us to believe that liberalism collapses not from failure but from its own radiant success. The truth is the opposite. Liberalism collapses because it redefined failure as success, because it mocked the suffering of its citizens as ingratitude, because it hollowed out meaning and called it tolerance, because it deracinated families and called it prosperity, because it reduced people into atomized individuals and called it freedom. It collapses because its apologists cannot admit that the wreckage all around us is the direct result of the system they defend. And why should they? The defenders of liberalism do not live in the wreckage. They reside not in factories or hollowed out communities, but in the institutions of contemplation and leisure. Thus the decades-long political homelessness of the American working class doesn’t even deserve a footnote, while the years-long political homelessness of Bill Kristol merits an entire international convention.
The defense of the vital center of the American politeia cannot come from the liberal consensus because it can hardly find arguments to defend itself, let alone summon the political arguments needed to defend America. After all, what is Josh Cotlar proposing we reconsider about liberalism that John Rawls did not already attempt fifty years ago? Cotlar’s appeal to liberal renewal only repeats this impasse. And so, when the obituary of liberalism is finally written, it will not read that the order fell because its citizens grew bored of winning. It will read that the order fell because it mistook suffering for decadence, despair for abundance, sterility for triumph. It will read that liberalism perished not from prosperity but from its refusal to admit that what it called prosperity was in fact ruin. No one will remember sterile banality. They will remember only that liberalism insisted until its last breath that everything was fine, that the house was not burning, that the ruins all around us were just signs of another glorious victory. Another sign of abundance. Another helping of prosperity. But history will be less kind than the apologists, for it will see clearly what they could not: that a system which insists that losing is winning has already lost.
