The word “liberal” has been so thoroughly mangled by American political discourse that it now means everything and nothing. Republicans use it as an epithet for anyone who disagrees with them. Democrats embrace it as a badge of progressive virtue. Cable news hosts deploy it as a tribal marker. Political consultants focus-group it to death. And through all this semantic chaos, we’ve lost sight of something crucial: liberalism isn’t a political position—it’s the philosophical foundation that makes political positions possible.

This confusion isn’t just academic. We’re living through a moment when the basic framework of liberal democracy is under systematic assault from forces that understand exactly what they’re attacking. While we argue about whether being “liberal” means supporting higher taxes or transgender rights, oligarchs are constructing parallel systems designed to make democratic accountability obsolete. While we debate the proper scope of government, they’re building infrastructure that operates beyond government entirely.

Liberal democracy isn’t just majority rule—it’s majority rule constrained by constitutional principles that protect the conditions of democratic reasoning itself. The architecture has several essential components: