A liberalism that fails to answer the question of meaning opens the door to authoritarian temptation.

Liberalism is often hailed as the great success story of modernity. It freed people from feudal bonds, from religious tutelage, from authoritarian structures. It placed reason, freedom, and self-determination at the center—and promised nothing less than a universal order open to all. But this very triumph has also pushed liberalism into crisis. For once, the world is liberated from old counterweights; liberalism itself must provide orientation. If it fails, a vacuum emerges—one that is quickly filled by hedonism, authoritarianism, and populism. The question is therefore: Is liberalism in crisis because it is under attack—or because it has collapsed under the weight of its own success?

Enter Leo Strauss, the German-American philosopher who, after his emigration to the United States, became an influential thinker—and whose work was later invoked by Washington neoconservatives and even figures close to the Trump camp.

Strauss identified a dangerous paradox within liberalism: by relativizing all truths and refusing to claim ultimate validity, it undermines its own foundation. Relativism, he argued, leads to disorientation—and disorientation awakens the longing for authority. In this logic, liberalism, despite its tolerance and rejection of absolute values, ultimately risks producing the very call for a strong state it once sought to overcome.

That explains why conservative strategists in the United States repeatedly turned to Strauss. To them, he was the theorist who unmasked liberalism’s intellectual weakness—and thus legitimized a return to discipline, order, and power politics. What was formulated in the lecture hall as a warning became, in political practice, a handbook: if freedom degenerates into arbitrariness, then an authoritarian elite must set the course. This reasoning can be heard in the rhetoric of Trump-aligned ideologues. The talk of a “strong man,” of “law and order,” of borders and simple rules reflects precisely this longing for a new kind of authority—and mirrors Strauss’s old diagnosis.

Strauss’s fundamental critique of liberalism resonates with Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty means freedom from coercion—the classical ideal of liberalism. Positive liberty, by contrast, means the ability to shape one’s life meaningfully and to embed oneself in larger contexts. But liberalism, Berlin argued, focused almost exclusively on negative liberty. It guaranteed rights but offered no answers to the question of how people should use this freedom.

And so, the liberal promise remains ambivalent: it liberates, but it also overwhelms. Once freed from external constraints, individuals are suddenly tasked with shaping their own lives. Yet not everyone has the resources, the education, or the inner drive to use this freedom constructively. In a society of permanent distraction, as Neil Postman already described in the 1980s, many lack the strength to take the difficult path toward insight and maturity.

Today, liberalism encounters two internal adversaries. First, a culture of distraction, in which politics turns into spectacle and truth loses its appeal. Postman diagnosed an “amusement society,” where entertainment is not a side effect but the dominant form of public communication. Anyone watching the evening news or election debates can see how deeply politics has been absorbed into the logic of entertainment: debates as shows, candidates as performers, complexity as a nuisance. In such a public sphere, it becomes nearly impossible to realize the liberal ideal of an enlightened citizenry.

Second, liberalism collides with a capitalism that perverts its own ideals. Rights become market opportunities, autonomy becomes self-marketing. Entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), or Jeff Bezos (Amazon) embody this development. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and ideologue, openly declared that he considers democracy overrated—what matters more to him is economic freedom, understood as boundless entrepreneurship. Zuckerberg created Facebook to connect people, but at the same time, built a global infrastructure of surveillance and manipulation. Bezos turned Amazon into a business model that subjects everything—from labor rhythms to consumer habits to data use—to the logic of efficiency and profit. Few empires symbolize so starkly the surveillance of workers, tax optimization, and the total penetration of daily life by market mechanisms. All three invoke the language of freedom—yet build structures that foster dependence, control, and new forms of digital authority.

Thus, the liberal promise of “prosperity for all” flips into its opposite. Self-liberation becomes self-optimization; autonomy turns into commercialized dependency. Freedom is no longer understood as an end in itself, but as a tool for greater efficiency—in markets, in self-fulfillment, in social media, where “free” expression of opinion is monetized.

Plato’s allegory of the cave makes this dilemma visible. Plato, the Greek philosopher of the fourth century BC and one of the founders of Western thought, described how people in a cave see only shadows cast on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire. They mistake the shadows for reality—until one breaks free, steps outside, and realizes there is a higher, truer world. Liberal order rests on the hope that people will take on this arduous journey toward enlightenment: that they will educate themselves, reflect, and actively shape their freedom. But when religion, national identity, or universal ideas fade, when education and orientation decline, a vacuum emerges. And this vacuum is filled by populists and autocrats who promise simple rules and firm authority.

Modernity has deconstructed almost everything—authorities, dogmas, truths. That was its strength: liberation from myth, the disenchantment of the world. But therein lies its weakness, too. What remains is a jumble of fragments that no longer provide stability. Morality, principles, inherited orders—they seem like relics of a bygone age. In such a situation, authoritarian order no longer appears as a threat but as a temptation: it offers clarity where freedom produces confusion.

Liberalism thus finds itself in a paradoxical position today. It is attacked from the outside—by populists, autocrats, digital elites—but its deeper crisis comes from within. Having liberated, disenchanted, and deconstructed everything, it lacks a binding idea.

Strauss’s warning, therefore, sounds timelier than ever: a liberalism that fails to answer the question of meaning opens the door to authoritarian temptation. Its triumph was to release people into freedom. Its crisis is that many cannot, or will not, cope with this freedom. Unless liberalism redefines itself beyond markets, distraction, and relativism, the “next stop” will be dictatorship.