"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition." —Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (quoted by F. A. Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty)

Being complacent and short-sighted moderns, we tend to take the triumph of liberty for granted. Of course the side allied with liberty won the Civil War and the World Wars and the Cold War. After all, Providence or History would have it no other way.

And of course here at home—whatever our problems and challenges—America will remain the land of the free. Freedom seems straightforward and easy. Justice we know to be more problematic. When we pledge allegiance to one nation "with liberty and justice for all," it occurs to some of us to question whether minorities enjoy full justice, and to others to ask whether the unborn do. And we're all vaguely aware of those recent books by distinguished academics quarreling about the meaning of justice.

But liberty? That, we assume, is going to be just fine. To be sure, it's something they worried a lot about in the 19th century. But who really reads the worriers—Tocqueville and Mill and Acton—today? They're not progressive enough for today's left, nor reverential enough for today's right. As for a 20th-century thinker like Hayek, he has his followers, but fewer perhaps than Ayn Rand, whose cartoon case for liberty might be said to give to opponents just grounds of opposition.

Well, one lesson of 2016 is that it's time to worry about liberty again. For to say the least, neither of this year's presidential candidates made liberty a theme. To say more, neither seemed particularly enamored of liberty.

Indeed, to the degree Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan, "Stronger Together," was anything but anodyne, it had a tone slightly hostile and menacing to individual liberty. As for her policies, they were more "progressive" than liberal—more committed to bringing about (enforcing?) "progress" than preserving an old-fashioned liberal polity. Indeed, 2016 seemed to mark the definitive eclipse of "liberalism" by "progressivism" as the banner under which the 21st-century left marches. And that was merely the culmination of the hollowing out of a rights-based and nature-based liberalism in favor of a History-based commitment to a future that has to be achieved, punctilious concerns about liberty be damned.

It's true that progressivism has, sometimes, been willing to work to achieve its goals through the institutions of a free society. But when the going gets tough, progressives get going toward illiberalism, not to say authoritarianism. Naïve about History and overconfident about Progress, progressives are easily disillusioned. Instead of learning from their disillusionment and becoming less naïve and less confident, they double down on the project of rational and central control, i.e., their control, over what had been a free society.

On the other side, Donald Trump claimed he would Make America Great Again. But very little of that agenda seemed to involve making America freer again. His effective retort to Clinton's creepily regal "I'm With Her" was the creepily populist "I'm With You."

So if the left worships at the altar of History, the right now bows before Vox Populi. If the left's project is one of rational control, the right's response now tends toward impatience with what's reasonable. If the left's progressivism culminates in the imposition of political correctness, the right's populism culminates in the removal of conservative barriers to vulgarity and demagoguery. A left populated by arrogant know-it-alls has produced a right led by a narcissistic know-nothing. The 2016 election featured a contest between authoritarian progressivism and authoritarian populism. The party of liberty had little purchase in either camp.

What is to be done? Can the party of liberty, in its various, often discordant, and even competing elements, assemble itself—more likely informally than formally—on behalf of liberty? Can it acknowledge that yes, of course, liberty is not everything; that yes, of course, there are competing goods, ranging from security to virtue; that yes, of course, the relationships among different aspects of liberty, or between liberty at home and abroad, are complex; that yes, of course, constructing or reconstructing the constitution of liberty is difficult in a thousand ways? Can it acknowledge all of this, but still fight?

To acknowledge complexity needn't mean paralysis. No one was more aware of the difficulties of sustaining and the subtleties of fostering liberty in the modern world than Tocqueville. But that most sophisticated thinker also permitted himself a simple assertion: "I would, I think, have loved liberty in all times; but I feel myself inclined to adore it in the time we are in." In the time we are in, we stand with Tocqueville.