Liberals, disorientated and disappointed over the past decade, are getting their act together, quickly uniting and strongly fighting back.

Earlier this year, liberals were heartened by the end of the 16-year rule of the poster boy of anti-liberals, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who weakened his country’s judicial and journalistic independence, advocated for an ethnically homogenous population and worked with the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to undermine Europe.

This follows the success of liberals, from both the political left and right, in recent elections in the Netherlands, Spain, France and Poland, fighting back against populists who have been insurgent over the past decade.

But, in truth, we are only at the start of trying to achieve a post-populist age, with liberals facing hard electoral and diplomatic battles ahead, as the results of the latest local elections in the UK show.

Liberals began to lose the argument from about the mid-2010s, as stubbornly stagnant living standards, mass immigration and the rise of bewildering and addictive social media undermined public faith in liberal politics. Anti-liberals outside the free world, and post-liberals within it, were emboldened. Those on the left depicted liberalism as timidly incrementalist, a defender of the unacceptable status quo, enabling deep imbalances in wealth and power, especially after the 2007-08 global financial crisis. The right demonised liberalism as excessively individualistic, undermining traditional values and communities in favour of social and geographic mobility.

The retreat of liberalism was partly self-inflicted, as liberals found shelter in shallow slogans rather than more difficult and imaginative policy-making, partly as a response to a more febrile and fast-paced political environment. Politics has become an entertainment industry: public relations, rather than domain expertise, has dominated decision-making. There was overreach, too: pushing for new injustices to slay, especially on matters relating to gender, that unnecessarily smashed careful compromises.

Ambitious thought leaders also hijacked liberalism, claiming the liberal mantle for their worldview, narrowing and twisting it. The journalist Adrian Wooldridge, in his new book Centrists of the World Unite!, describes three bastardisations: the neo-liberals, the managerial liberals and the left-liberals. The first worship free markets, neglecting the role of government and culture. The second has converted admirable institutionalism into sclerotic action, prioritising process over outcome. The third have indulged identitarianism, foregrounding social characteristics to explain behaviours and outcomes, when previously liberals fought to quieten these when judging ourselves and others. The result has been a growing and divisive communalism that submerges individuality and sometimes — more distressingly — individual rights.

Liberals need to fight their critics and contortionists. But liberalism desperately needs a reset too: in its philosophical foundations, in its policymaking and in the leaders who represent it.

We need both a more traditional and richer liberalism. The foundational principles of traditional liberalism are the bedrock of liberal democracies, the superior socioeconomic system: that all people are of equal intrinsic value; that individuals should be able to reach their potential depending on their efforts and talent, regardless of their background; and that people have autonomy and agency, and rights as well as responsibilities.

Not only does liberalism need to rediscover different values from its history, it also needs to learn to work with other philosophies to be influential in contemporary democracies. That means leaning into its pro-social and radical traditions, breaking free from its association with hyper-individualism and the establishment.

Modern communitarians — specifically, post-liberals — often depict liberalism as the enemy, promoting rootless cosmopolitanism against local belonging. Yet great liberal philosophers, such as Isaiah Berlin, recognised the importance of values to complement liberty, such as civicness, but thought freedom should rightly remain the paramount principle. In other words, people should choose whom they associate with rather than it being forced upon them. Indeed, if we are social animals as communitarians rightly claim, then surely truly free people would seek social activity? Liberals and communitarians should be better bedfellows.

As should conservatives and liberals. The goal of liberalism — individual flourishing — can only be realised by enduring cultural, democratic and civic institutions. In other words, the liberal individual is realised by the teaching and protection of conservative institutions. Conversely, the conservative emphasis on the interdependence between — not just independence of — people to cultivate responsibility towards others, as well as towards future generations, can only truly be realised if we respect the liberal insight that all individuals are equally worthy.

Liberals need and should not be libertarians. There is no such thing as a free market, as the academic Ha-Joon Chang rightly argued. We take for granted rules and regulations that have long existed in markets; they are now hidden, such as the prohibition on child labour.

Liberals should be pro-market, strongly in favour of private property and competition, but more sophisticated about the level (more or less) and type (spending, regulating, guaranteeing, innovating, owning or convening) of state intervention, which will vary depending on particular markets. Ordoliberals were behind the post-war West German economic boom, stressing strong rules enforced by the government to break up monopolies. On economics, modern liberals should look to pro-market ordoliberals rather than free-market libertarians.

Liberals also ought to have a vision of the good life rather than surrender to relativism. For a long time, liberals have debated whether to focus on negative liberty — opposed to society or the state dabbling in our affairs — or positive liberty, seeking to equip people with what the philosopher Amartya Sen described as the capabilities to live more purposeful and prosperous lives. The latter has, thankfully, been dominant in liberal thinking over the last century or so, with the former alone just libertarianism.

But liberals could and should go further. Not supporting people just to achieve whatever they want to be, but to be good people. This is a more moral liberalism, nudging people towards attitudes and actions — especially in education, employment and relationships — that are objectively good, providing both private and public benefit.

Liberals ought to align with conservatives on defending enduring institutions. But that does not mean opposing their reform. Rather than be defenders of the established settlement, liberals need to be restless radicals. That means being more imaginative in the ideation, and bolder in the implementation, of policies that will democratise access to the good life, a crusading cause of liberals at different points in history.

Liberal democracies are routinely underestimated. Dictators outside them, populists within them, come and go. As the philosopher Karl Popper argued, “Men are inclined to worship power. But there can be no doubt that the worship of power is one of the worst kinds of human idolatries, a relic of the time of the cage, of human servitude.” So, if the foundations of your society are strong and commonly held liberal principles, rather than just power, you have deeper roots. That is why liberal democracies rarely fail, in the long run. Autocracies regularly do.

But nothing is inevitable. Liberal societies have become complacent about tough trade-offs and the determination of both their internal critics and external enemies. As Popper concluded: “The great tradition of Western rationalism is to fight our battles with words rather than with swords.” And fight we must.

Politics, they say, is all about timing. The post-liberal age is running out of road. The post-populist age, based on a traditional and richer liberalism, is just beginning. Our time is coming.

This is an extract of an essay from a new book, ‘Liberalism liberated,’ published by Bright Blue