The Good Fight Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of the Political Center
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Mar 14, 2026 
Adrian Wooldridge, global business columnist and author of Centrists of the World Unite, traces how liberalism originally solved problems of identity, belief, and mobility. He discusses why 18th-century solutions still matter, how liberalism was reinvented amid crises, and debates over property, welfare, and education. Short, lively history with a forward-looking take on renewing liberal ideas.
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Liberalism As Problem-Solving Tradition
- Liberalism is best understood as a changing set of practical solutions to concrete historical problems rather than an abstract philosophy.
- Adrian Wooldridge traces its origin to solving collective identity, collective beliefs, and allocation of power during rising social mobility in the 17th–18th centuries.
Seventeenth Century Problems Are Back
- The original liberal problems have returned: intolerance, the imposition of collective beliefs, and the rise of strongmen threatening separated powers.
- Wooldridge points to campus cancel culture, religiously intolerant communities, and leaders claiming no limits beyond their conscience as modern echoes.
Postwar Homogeneity Masked Deeper Fault Lines
- The mid-20th century lull in religious and ethnic conflict was anomalous; post-1945 homogeneity hid the clash-of-beliefs problem that’s resurfaced with recent migration and revivalist religion.
- Yascha Mounk and Wooldridge note secularization, privatization, and later immigration reawakened these existential political questions.
