The stars don't vote.
On certain nights in Tirana, when the traffic quiets to a low growl and the air smells of grilled corn and exhaust, I sit on my balcony and stare at a sky that has no flag and no border. My hands rest on the cold metal of my wheelchair, fingers feeling every little scratch, while a neighbour’s TV spits out angry voices about “the system” and “the West” in the background. From Rimini to here, from the Adriatic breeze to the dust of this city, I’ve heard the same words thrown around: democracy, freedom, crisis, liberalism.
You and I are told, again and again, that “liberalism is in crisis.”
Bookshops hiss with titles predicting the collapse of the “liberal order.” Commentators turn every election result into a funeral or a resurrection. The noise feels like standing too close to a cheap speaker: distorted, tinny, grating. So let me slow the sound down and offer three uncomfortable claims that cut against the usual story.
First: liberalism isn’t failing because people want too much freedom; it’s failing because, for decades, liberals stopped believing in their own hopeful story and retreated into fear. Second: the problem isn’t that students care about identity; the problem is that we let neoliberal ideologues gut economic justice while everyone stared at campus Twitter wars. Third: the way out won’t be found in yet another European think-tank PDF, but in places that liberalism treated as pupils—especially Africa, where philosophers have quietly built alternatives rooted in community, not just the lone individual.
That’s a lot to swallow in one sip, like the harsh first gulp of Turkish coffee in a noisy Tirana café. So I want to test those three claims against one thing: a single, stubborn question that keeps buzzing in my ears like a scooter on broken pavement.
What if liberalism’s crisis isn’t a sign that people hate freedom, but a sign that they want more of it—deeper, more shared, more rooted—than our current version can handle?
I’m going to simplify some heavy political theory here, the same way I simplify black holes and exoplanets when I write for Free AstroScience. The goal isn’t to impress specialists; it’s to give you something you can hold in your hands, like the worn rubber of my wheelchair tyres brushing against a cracked curb.
1. From Freedom To Fear: When Liberalism Lost Its Nerve
If you listen carefully, political history has a sound.
The nineteenth century, at least in the books, sounds like a noisy workshop: clanking machines, crowded streets, the hum of arguments about progress and justice. Thinkers such as John Stuart Mill argued for free expression not as a defensive shield, but as the engine of human growth—freedom as “creative self-fashioning,” as Samuel Moyn likes to put it. Liberalism then was noisy, ambitious, and slightly arrogant.
Then the twentieth century happened, and the sound changed.
The world heard the boots of fascism, the crack of gunfire, the silence of camps and gulags. Out of that horror grew what Judith Shklar later called a “liberalism of fear”: a version of liberalism focused above all on avoiding cruelty, not on reaching for some brighter human future. Cold War liberals such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper stressed negative liberty—freedom from state interference—because they’d seen what an all-powerful state could do.
Fear drowned out the old, hopeful melody.
Moyn argues that in this Cold War turn, liberals betrayed their own deeper tradition. They stopped telling a story about shaping better lives and started telling a story about not sliding into totalitarian hell. History, in this mood, had no meaningful direction; grand projects were dangerous; dreams of progress smelled like fresh dictatorship. The state became something to keep at arm’s length, like a barking dog behind a thin door.
Sitting here in Albania, I understand that fear in my bones. This country still carries the stale, damp smell of bunkers and archives. People remember what it sounded like when the knock on the door came at night. Fear of the state is not an academic concept when your parents whisper stories of Enver Hoxha over the clink of coffee cups.
But turning fear into a philosophy has a cost.
Cyril Hédoin, reviewing Moyn and Alan Kahan, points out that Cold War liberals fixated on two things: blocking totalitarianism and defending markets, while letting the “moral pillar” of liberalism wither. They narrowed liberalism down to political institutions and economic efficiency, and neglected a shared sense of justice and social progress. In physics terms, they obsessed over keeping the reactor from melting down and forgot to ask what kind of energy grid people actually needed.
That defensive posture survived the Cold War. It echoes now in editorial lines that tell us, in slightly panicked tones, that we must cling to the current order because the alternatives are worse. As Hédoin notes, liberal elites warn endlessly that “the alternatives to liberalism are worse,” instead of asking what would make liberalism actually worth saving in the eyes of ordinary citizens.
A politics that only knows how to say “don’t touch, it’s dangerous” loses people who need to hear “here’s where we’re going together.” The future starts to smell not of new books and fresh paint, but of stale fear and burned coffee.
If we accept that liberalism shrank itself out of fear, the next question becomes inescapable: who moved in to fill the silence?
2. The Missing Moral Pillar And The Rise Of Resentment
Roll over the uneven pavement of any European city—Rimini, Tirana, Brussels—and you feel the bumps more sharply in a wheelchair. The world is full of little steps that someone decided were “good enough” for most people. Politics feels similar.
Alan Kahan, in his big history of liberalism, describes three “pillars” that once held the tradition up: an economic pillar (markets and property), a political pillar (constitutional democracy), and a moral pillar (ideas about justice, social progress, and the good life). Over time, he argues, liberal thinkers and politicians leaned hard on the economic and political pillars and almost forgot the moral one.
That moral hollowing-out matters. You can smell it in the cynicism that hangs over late-night tram rides, where people mutter that “they’re all the same” while the fluorescent lights flicker overhead.
Kahan traces liberal anxiety through four big historical fears: fear of despotism and religious fanaticism, fear of revolution, fear of poverty, and fear of totalitarianism. Instead of balancing these, twentieth-century liberals fixated on the last two in a skewed way. Some fixated on poverty and built welfare states; others treated poverty as a side issue and doubled down on markets. Many, especially the Cold War camp, saw totalitarianism as the overriding terror and accepted market-friendly, minimalist visions of the state as the safe option.
Meanwhile, neoliberal economists and politicians pushed a harsh gospel: shrink the state, free the market, and treat human beings primarily as individual utility-maximisers. Jane Goodall notes that Russell Blackford’s history of liberalism spends pages on identity politics and rights language, while skating quickly over this “stringently economic interpretation of individual freedom” that reshaped societies in the late twentieth century.
That imbalance had a human cost.
Kahan argues that the current populist wave grows less from material deprivation alone and more from “cultural alienation” and a “sense of loss.” The decline of traditional forms of solidarity—religion, family structures, rural community life—combined with economic stagnation and regional neglect, especially in rural areas, bred a powerful resentment. People felt not only poorer, but humiliated and looked down upon by cosmopolitan elites.
Here in Albania, when I wheel past half-finished towers and old communist blocks, I hear similar resentment in the voices of older men playing dominoes on a plastic table. The clack of tiles punctuates complaints about “Brussels,” “traitors,” and “kids who want to leave.” It isn’t just about money. It’s about status, about feeling unnecessary in your own country.
Hédoin suggests adding a new fear to Kahan’s list: the fear of resentment itself. Liberalism, he says, has failed to grasp how deeply resentment at perceived disrespect and exclusion corrodes democratic culture. When people feel that the game is rigged and that their customs, beliefs, or ways of life are mocked, sceptical lectures about “liberal values” sound like noise from a broken speaker.
Fear used to point outward, at tanks and dictators. Now it points inward—at neighbours, migrants, “the elites,” “the woke,” “the deplorables.” The room of our politics smells not of cautious hope, but of sweat and stale anger.
If we want any future for liberal democracy, we need to take that smell seriously, not spray perfume over it.
3. Populists, Professors, And The Business Of Blame
I read Patrick Deneen’s work in a cramped Tirana café, surrounded by the hiss of the espresso machine and the sticky feel of sugar granules under my fingers. His message was clear: liberalism didn’t fail; it succeeded too well.
In Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen blames liberalism’s “pernicious individualist ideology” for almost everything: collapsing communities, moral decay, environmental harm, even “deaths of despair.” For him, Democrats and Republicans are just two flavours of the same liberal poison, one more progressive, one more market-obsessed, both wedded to an “ideal of transformative progress.”
His updated prescription is striking. No longer just a retreat into small, anti-liberal enclaves, he now calls for “regime change” led by a new elite, an “aristopopulist” order that claims to rule for “the people” while guiding and tutoring them. Jan-Werner Mueller describes how Deneen imagines a world permanently divided between “the few” and “the many,” and insists the many instinctively seek stability, gratitude for the past, and continuity. Since they allegedly can’t articulate this desire, they require a better aristocracy to lead them.
Read that again, slowly, over the clink of coffee cups. The man who denounces liberal elites for condescension proposes…a better elite to manage the masses.
Mueller notes the irony, bordering on comedy: Deneen writes about “ordinary people” with “breathtaking” condescension, depicting them as too passive to pass on their own cultural traditions without elite help. His “aristopopulist regime” would entrench a union of a “muscular populism” with a morally superior aristocracy. The smell here isn’t fresh bread; it’s old incense from pre-modern hierarchies warmed up in a microwave.
Deneen is only one voice in a wider post-liberal chorus. Adrian Pabst and David Goodhart, for instance, advocate a softer “post-liberalism” that blends economic justice with social conservatism and a focus on community, family, and place. Goodhart’s famous “Anywheres vs Somewheres” distinction—cosmopolitan laptop people versus rooted locals—turned into a kind of safari map for centrists trying to understand Trump and Brexit country.
Goodall skewers this divide as “facile,” a flattening of complex realities into two caricatures. It helped some liberals stage their own guilt trips but didn’t explain why neoliberal economic policies pushed by “serious” technocrats hammered workers while enriching a tiny corporate elite.
Here’s the weird part.
Post-liberal thinkers love to blame “woke capital,” campus activists, and identity politics for the crisis, while keeping neoliberal ideologues mostly in soft focus. Blackford, in Goodall’s telling, devotes great energy to social justice movements and “concept creep” around harm, but barely tackles how neoliberal economics turned individual freedom into the “stringently economic” freedom of the market.
So we get a pantomime: on one side, professors and post-liberals shaking their fists at student activists; on the other, corporate boardrooms where executives quietly collect obscene wealth while paying people below a living wage. The shouting is about pronouns and cancel culture; the money moves in near silence, like an air-conditioned server room humming behind a locked door.
Resentment is real. Identity conflicts are real. But treating them as the root of the crisis lets those who designed the economic order walk out of the back door untouched.
If we want a future that doesn’t smell like endless culture war smoke, we need to stop buying tickets to this performance.
4. Africa’s Quiet Rejection Letter To Liberalism
While European and American writers argue about “post-liberalism” under conference lights, a different story has been unfolding under the sun of Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, and Harare. The air there is thick with dust, petrol, food, and the low murmur of queues outside polling stations.
When African countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Cameroon gained independence, they didn’t just receive new flags and shaky institutions. They inherited a ready-made political philosophy: liberalism, wrapped in talk of democracy, development, and human rights. Multiparty elections, private property, free markets, individual rights—this bundle was sold as the universal recipe for progress.
Decades later, the results feel, in Gabriel Asuquo’s phrase, “sobering.” Elections happen often, but citizens line up for hours in the heat only to see results shaped in hotel rooms or courts. Nigeria’s 2019 and 2023 elections, Kenya’s 2007 violence, Zimbabwe’s serial crises—the pattern smells of sweat and dust, not real sovereignty.
Liberal economic “reforms” tell a similar story. Structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s pushed privatisation, subsidy cuts, and rapid market opening. Nigeria’s 1986 programme brought inflation and mass layoffs; Ghana’s “recovery” deepened inequality; Zambia’s privatisation hollowed out local industries. The promised “market freedom” translated into hardship for many and windfalls for a few.
Asuquo describes this as “elections without democracy,” “rights without justice,” “markets without development,” and “freedom without sovereignty.” On paper, citizens hold rights; in reality, their governments remain financially and politically dependent on International Monetary Fund and World Bank conditions, and on donor preferences. Behind the smooth language of governance reforms, aid, and NGO partnerships, power still flows outward.
Beneath the policy details lies a deeper clash of worldviews. Liberalism arose in societies shaped by centuries of religious conflict, emerging nation-states, and the rise of industrial capitalism, with thinkers like Locke, Smith, Rousseau, and Mill centring the autonomous individual. Mill even wrote that liberalism was “unsuitable” for nations in their “nonage,” implying a hierarchy of civilisational maturity.
African traditions, by contrast, often centre a relational vision of personhood. John Mbiti’s famous line—“I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am”—captures a philosophy echoed in Ubuntu and many local cultures. Among the Igbo, Akan, and Yoruba, personhood is not a simple biological fact; it’s something earned through moral maturity and community participation. A newborn is not yet a full mmadu or onipa; status grows through rituals, responsibilities, and character.
Property reflects this difference. Liberal law treats land as a commodity to buy and sell. Many African communities see land as a communal trust linking the living, ancestors, and future generations. Imposing private property regimes has repeatedly led to dispossession and cultural dislocation.
In this context, liberalism in Africa starts to look less like a pathway to freedom and more like a continued architecture of control, dressed in new words. Kwame Nkrumah warned of “neo-colonialism,” where the old imperial powers, through the IMF, World Bank, multinationals, and cultural influence, maintained dominance. Thomas Sankara, Amílcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon made similar arguments: independence meant nothing without economic and cultural self-determination.
So African thinkers have not just complained; they’ve sketched alternatives. Ubuntu ethics stress interdependence and restorative justice, as seen in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which leaned on Ubuntu to prioritise healing over revenge. Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa villages tried, with mixed outcomes, to build an African socialism grounded in communal values and self-reliance. Kwasi Wiredu proposed consensus democracy, inspired by Akan practice, where leaders seek agreement through extended deliberation rather than winner-takes-all votes.
Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni go further, calling for the “decolonisation” of political thought itself. That means not throwing away every Western idea, but questioning which ones fit African realities and reshaping them accordingly. Ngũgĩ describes how colonialism works not only through guns and money, but through the mind—through which languages, concepts, and stories become “normal.”
Let me be blunt.
If liberalism doesn’t work on African soil without producing hollow institutions, how sure are we that the version we live with in Europe is as universal and healthy as we tell ourselves? Maybe Africa is not “behind” the West on some imaginary timeline, but ahead in noticing the gaps between liberal promises and lived life.
The future of liberalism, if it has one, will depend on listening seriously to these alternatives—not as exotic add-ons, but as sources of core insight about humans as relational beings.
5. Resentment, Ramps, And The Physics Of Belonging
When you move through a city on wheels, every step is a referendum.
A two-centimetre lip at the entrance of a bakery is a quiet message: if you can’t lift your body over this, this place isn’t for you. Nobody voted on that step. No party ran on a “two-centimetre lip” platform. Yet the stone, rough under your palm as you try to hoist yourself up, speaks loudly.
Liberalism is full of such invisible steps. On paper, we’re equal citizens. In practice, some of us hit barriers—economic, cultural, physical—that others barely notice.
Hédoin, developing Kahan’s argument, suggests that the crisis of liberalism is bound up with resentment: not only economic, but cultural and existential. As equality of legal status spread, people expected more control over their own fate. Tocqueville already heard this tension in the nineteenth century: democratic citizens have a “burning, insatiable” passion for equality and will accept poverty and even servitude as long as they don’t feel inferior to an aristocratic class.
Now imagine living in a complex modern society where your life depends on decisions taken far away, in languages you don’t speak, by people you never meet. Your job depends on opaque supply chains; your village school on distant budget lines; your town’s future on climate agreements drafted behind tinted glass. You feel small, like a single atom bouncing around a giant collider designed by someone else.
That disempowerment easily turns into resentment. Hédoin notes that people start directing anger at groups they think are favoured: “elites,” immigrants, women, queer people—anyone portrayed as receiving special treatment through public policy. Populist leaders feed this feeling, offering simple stories where “the people” take back control from corrupt insiders and dangerous outsiders.
Here’s where the liberal mainstream has often answered with two tones: technocratic patience or moralistic scolding. On TV debates, you can almost hear the hum of air conditioning and the rustle of expensive suits as pundits explain that globalisation is “complex” and that voters are “misinformed.” Resentment is treated like a bad odour to be deodorised, not a signal to be understood.
Goodall’s review of Blackford highlights another dodge: blaming social justice activism for everything while leaving extreme wealth accumulation off-screen. According to Blackford’s focus, the heat comes from “concept creep” around harm and from identity movements that, in his view, slide into new forms of intolerance. Yet Goodall asks: what about those in the corporate world who “garner obscene levels of personal wealth at the expense of people working for below poverty wages”? Why are they not the central exhibit in accounts of liberalism’s crisis?
From my chair, resentment over cultural status and resentment over economic injustice feel like intertwined currents in the same turbulent flow. When your wage stagnates, your town empties, and your traditions are mocked online, any group that seems to be gaining recognition feels like a threat, even if that recognition is long overdue.
Dismissing this as pure bigotry misses the structure of the problem. Romanticising it as “authentic” or “Somewhere” wisdom, as some post-liberals do, also misses the mark. Resentment is a real emotion with both fair and unfair targets. Some grievances—like anger at equal rights for minorities—deserve to be confronted, not indulged. Others—like anger at feeling expendable in your own economy—point to something structurally wrong.
In physics, if your model predicts that particles behave a certain way but your detector keeps hearing a different noise, you don’t lecture the detector. You rethink the model.
If liberal democracy keeps producing waves of resentment, we need to ask not just “who is manipulating people?” but “what have we built—or failed to build—that makes this resentment so plausible?”
That question leads back to the missing moral pillar and forward to another one: belonging.
6. What If Liberalism Isn’t Dying, Just Thinning Out?
There’s a cliché that liberalism is just centrist mush: a soggy compromise for winners of globalisation, a “zombie centrism,” as Elif Özmen’s critics put it. Sitting by my window with the dull thump of bass from a nearby bar coming through the glass, I don’t recognise myself in that description. I still think some core liberal ideas are worth fighting for. The question is which ones—and how thick they need to be.
Özmen argues that liberalism, despite its blind spots, has remained a coherent proposal from the nineteenth century onward. She pushes back against fashions that treat it either as historically accidental “bourgeois” culture (Richard Rorty’s style) or as permanently tainted by colonialism and capitalism. In her view, liberalism rests on a universal core: the equal freedom of individuals, protected by law, to pursue their own ideas of a good life. That doesn’t mean liberals must stay neutral about everything; it means any political order must be justifiable to each person who lives under it.
For Özmen, the “liberal trio” of individualism, freedom, and equality still matters, and liberals shouldn’t retreat from universality under pressure from either post-liberals or cultural relativists.
I find that convincing up to a point, but only if we change how we understand the individual.
African philosophy helps here. Ubuntu and related traditions don’t deny individual dignity; they embed it in relationships. “I am because we are” isn’t a rejection of personhood; it’s a claim that personhood blooms only in connection. If we combine Özmen’s insistence on equal justification for all with Ubuntu’s insight that selves are relational, we get a richer liberalism: one that protects individuals not as isolated atoms, but as nodes in webs of care.
Public reason liberalism, in its “diversity” versions, tries something similar from another angle. Gerald Gaus and others argue that in a pluralistic society, political rules should be justifiable to people who hold very different worldviews, using reasons they can reasonably accept. That doesn’t erase deep disagreement; it sets a standard for fair cooperation across it. Think of it as agreeing on traffic lights even if you’re driving different kinds of vehicles.
Hédoin notes, with some frustration, that Kahan’s history barely mentions this strand, even though it tackles liberalism’s “sectarian” problem head-on. Critics in many places increasingly see liberal societies as built by and for a specific cultural group—urban, educated, often secular—rather than as a fair home for many ways of life. Public reason liberalism tries to respond to that worry.
The danger, of course, is that in trying to stay fair to all, liberalism turns thin again—more like a legal grammar than a living culture. Kahan and Moyn both push for a “perfectionist” liberalism that again says something substantive about a good life: creative agency, social progress, the development of human capacities. Joseph Raz makes autonomy central to this vision.
Here my physics brain starts blinking warning lights. Perfectionist projects, whether religious or secular, easily harden into new orthodoxies. As Hédoin warns, perfectionism is not automatically liberal; national conservatives also promote a vision of the “good life,” centred on traditional family and religion, that conflicts with many people’s aspirations.
So we’re balancing on a narrow ledge, like my front wheels nudging the edge of an Albanian sidewalk. Too thin, and liberalism feels hollow and technocratic. Too thick, and it slips into sectarianism.
The way forward, I suspect, involves three moves.
First, rebuild the moral pillar without turning it into a monolith: emphasise dignity, reciprocity, and shared responsibility in language that different traditions can translate into their own vocabularies. Second, correct liberalism’s blind individualism by fully integrating relational insights from African and other communal philosophies. Third, stop pretending economic structures are neutral; bring questions of ownership, work, and inequality back from the margins of cultural fights to the centre of political imagination.
If that sounds abstract, let me bring it down to one cracked pavement.
7. One Conversation On A Broken Sidewalk
Late one autumn afternoon, the air in Tirana smelling of rain on dust and cheap cigarettes, I tried to cross a busy street near the Lana River. The curb on my side was cut; the one opposite wasn’t. Classic.
As I hesitated, feeling the rough concrete under my fingertips, an older man in a worn leather jacket and wool cap came up behind me. Without a word, he grabbed the back handles of my chair. His hands were dry and strong. He lifted the front wheels, we bumped down, the traffic roared a metre away, and then we perched in front of the too-high curb on the other side.
“Ku do shkosh?” he shouted over the honking. Where do you want to go?
We found a driveway with a gentler slope, rolled up, and then stopped under a balcony where laundry dripped onto the smell of wet stone.
He lit a cigarette, the tip glowing orange in the grey light, and started talking. About his son who’d gone to Germany, about the idiots in government, about the EU, about how “they don’t care about us.” His voice rose and fell with the distant siren of an ambulance.
He didn’t quote Locke or Nkrumah. He didn’t use words like neoliberalism or public reason. But in ten minutes of ranting and questions, I heard a whole theory of politics, raw and unpolished.
He wanted three things.
He wanted respect: not to be treated like trash by officials and TV pundits who spoke in a jargon he didn’t understand. He wanted security: not in a paranoid, fortress sense, but in the straightforward hope that he wouldn’t end up begging in his old age. And he wanted voice: he wanted his vote and his life to matter, not to be something powerful people stepped over like that forgotten curb.
This is where I think Deneen gets people wrong. Ordinary citizens are not passive children needing “aristopopulist” tutors. They analyse the world with the tools they have: stories, memories, comparisons, smells and sounds that tell them whether things are getting better or worse. They care about continuity and tradition, yes, but also about fairness and creativity. Tocqueville saw this mix long ago; it hasn’t disappeared.
What they don’t get from our current liberal-democratic order is a sense that anyone is listening. Instead, they are told, in different tones, either “you’re racist and backward” or “you are the real people and everything is your birthright.” Both are lies.
The sidewalk that day was a perfect model. Formally, the crossing existed. Technically, access was “provided.” In practice, someone like me could only get across because another person chose to help. The system recognised my right to move; reality threw a step in my way.
Liberalism often works like that now. Rights, formally guaranteed; real access, dependent on class, luck, and kindness.
The man finished his cigarette, stubbed it out against the damp wall with a sharp scraping sound, and asked what I did. I told him I studied physics and astronomy but wrote a lot about politics. He laughed. “So you look at stars falling while we are falling down here,” he said.
Touché.
We parted with a handshake. His palm was rough, mine slightly damp from the mist. I haven’t seen him since. But that conversation stays with me more vividly than half the books on my shelf. It’s my one data point, my single experiment, that tells me the mainstream elite story—that liberalism is in crisis because of ignorant masses seduced by populists—is only half-true at best.
People feel betrayed not because they hate freedom, but because the version of freedom on offer looks like that useless curb cut: legal on paper, blocked in practice.
If we ignore that, the future smells like more tear gas and burnt trash. If we listen, another path opens.
8. Drawing A New Star Map
When I roll back onto my balcony at night, the city lights flicker like a second, dirty constellation. Horns blare faintly; the air carries smoke and fried dough; somewhere, a dog barks at nothing. Above all that, the real stars hang in silence.
The universe doesn’t care whether we call ourselves liberal, post-liberal, socialist, conservative, or anything else. But we care, because these words shape who eats, who moves, who speaks, who breathes clean air.
From the sources I’ve been reading—and from the streets I’ve been crossing—I draw a few firm conclusions. Cold War liberals shrank their vision of freedom into a careful “liberalism of fear,” focused on avoiding the worst rather than aiming for the best, and this narrowed horizon still haunts us. Neoliberal ideologues smuggled in a harsh economic order under the friendly label of “individual freedom,” while many intellectual histories pinned blame on identity politics instead of on those who built that order. African thinkers and leaders, from Nkrumah and Nyerere to Mbiti, Wiredu, and Ngũgĩ, have already tested liberalism’s export version and found it wanting, sketching alternative models rooted in communal personhood and consensus.
None of this proves that liberalism as such is doomed. It does prove that the thin, fearful, market-obsessed version we live with now is unsustainable.
So where do we go from here?
I picture a new star map with three bright points. One point is an older liberal idea of human flourishing: the belief that politics should help people live lives of “creative and empowered free action,” not just keep them out of prison. A second point is the African insight that personhood is relational: “I am because we are,” not “I think, therefore I am.” A third point is a blunt economic truth: any order that tolerates “obscene levels of personal wealth” while millions scrape by on poverty wages will generate resentment and revolt, no matter how elegant its constitutions.
Plot those points together, and you don’t get an easy ideology. You get a demanding project: build societies where people are treated as equal centres of value, embedded in communities, supported by fair economic structures, and bound together by a civic culture of restraint and mutual justification.
I’m simplifying huge debates here, just as I simplify general relativity when I talk with school kids in Rimini or Tirana. The maths behind these ideas is messy. But the intuition is something you can feel in your skin and ears and nose. Does your society sound like a conversation or a shouting match? Do its public spaces smell of shared life—markets, children, coffee—or of fear and decay? Does its touch feel like open doors or closed gates?
We don’t need to wait for another book about “the crisis of liberalism” to start making changes. We can thicken our moral language in daily life: talk more about obligations, generosity, and shared projects, not just rights. We can push for institutions that practise something like Wiredu’s consensus-seeking, especially at local levels: city councils, school boards, workplace committees. We can challenge both the condescension of technocrats and the romanticism of post-liberal elites who promise to rule in our name.
Most of all, we can build ramps—literal and metaphorical. Ramps are tiny pieces of infrastructure that say: we expect difference, and we choose to include it. Every time we lower a barrier that stops someone participating—whether that barrier is a step, a fee, a jargon-filled meeting, or an algorithm—we push liberalism closer to the better self it once glimpsed.
The stars above Tirana still don’t vote. They just burn, patiently, while we argue and stumble below. But we’re the ones who feel cold and hunger and humiliation; we’re the ones who smell the tear gas or the bread; we’re the ones who hear the sirens.
If liberalism is cracking, we have a choice. We can patch the cracks with fear and hierarchy, or we can pour in new material drawn from all our histories—not just Europe’s—and build something more solid, more honest, and more human.
The night is long, but the sky is wide.
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