Liberalism is being replaced by Christian democracy

The argument

The claim is that liberalism is being displaced not by a single rival but by a recombination of positions it had kept apart. Two trends are identified as running at once. Economically progressive policies such as medicare for all, the green new deal, and taxing the rich at higher rates are overwhelmingly popular within the United States, and the trend follows around the world. At the same time, socially conservative outlooks are also on the rise. The significance lies in the combination rather than in either trend alone. Traditional liberal politics pairs economic positions with social ones in a fixed way, so a voter who wants the rich taxed more and also holds socially conservative views finds no settled home: each available option asks them to give up half of what they want. If both trends are real and simultaneous, then the number of people in that position is growing, and the existing arrangement of parties is organised around an alignment that no longer matches how people actually think. Christian democracy is offered as the ideology that balances both of these outlooks. It combines a willingness to use the state economically with a conservative account of social life, which is precisely the pairing the two trends together describe. A tradition built around that combination is positioned to absorb a constituency liberalism cannot hold, not by defeating liberalism in argument but by matching a distribution of views that liberalism was not built for. On this reasoning liberalism's difficulty is structural rather than a matter of losing a particular debate: the coalition it assumed has come apart underneath it. Because liberalism may take the place of traditional liberal politics in this way, Western liberalism has outlived its purpose.

Context

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in a speech in July 2018 that the generation of the post-communist '90s is replacing the generation of '68 and that its values are those of Christian democracy. He said Christian democracy is not compatible with the key tenets of liberalism and therefore should be considered 'illiberal.'

Premises

Counter-arguments

Christian democracy is still fundamentally liberal as it balances representative democracy with a capitalist economic system

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Popularity is asserted without polling or figures, and support for particular policies is not the same as support for a political programme, still less evidence of a shift in the underlying tradition. [Rejecting P2] Both trends are stated without evidence and, as described, pull against one another. The argument does not show they are held by the same people, which is what a single replacing ideology would require. [Rejecting P3] Christian democracy is a long-established European tradition rather than a new arrival, and as the counter-argument notes it operates within representative democracy and a market economy — which makes it a variant within the liberal settlement rather than its replacement.