Liberalism Is Breaking Under Epistemic Pressure

When Liberal Institutions Buckle Under Asymmetric Pressure

This essay brings together two core frameworks—Dan Williams’s analysis of epistemic fragmentation and Mike Brock’s theory of institutional liberalism—to explain why liberalism is under increasing strain. It also draws on Ryan Chapman’s definitional work to clarify what liberalism means at its core, and on reporting from Cathy Young and Nicole Barbaro Simovski on debates at the June 2025 Heterodox Academy conference to illustrate how these pressures are playing out inside real institutions. 

While none of these authors makes the exact argument I offer here, I build on their frameworks to propose a synthesis: liberalism now faces a dual threat—one epistemic, one institutional. The challenge is not just that truth is contested, but that the very systems built to resolve that contest are losing their authority and legitimacy.

What Liberalism Means

In A Guide to American Liberalism (2021), Ryan Chapman argues that liberalism’s foundational principle is individual freedom bounded by non-coercion. Constraints on freedom must be narrow and concrete—protecting physical safety and legal equality, not subjective harm or ideological offense. This principle underpins the systems that Williams and Brock describe. When that definition erodes, the systems themselves become vulnerable.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

How People Think About Truth

In America’s Epistemological Crisis (2024), Williams identifies the core problem: Americans now use incompatible methods for determining truth. 

The Right trusts common sense, the Left trusts expert consensus, creating what Williams calls “pseudo-environments”—mutually exclusive realities with no shared standard of resolution.

“Many liberals and conservatives seem to inhabit distinct realities… they have constructed narratives to explain why their ideological enemies are afflicted with ignorance, lies, and delusion.”

—Dan Williams

How Institutions Lose Their Grip

In What Is Liberalism? (2025), Brock defines liberalism as a method for resolving disagreement without coercion. It works because no one has to win—people can lose arguments or elections without fear of punishment.

“This is liberalism’s genius: it doesn’t require consensus on ultimate values to create functional societies. It provides a framework for collective reasoning that allows people with fundamentally different worldviews to cooperate, compete, and even change their minds through peaceful means.”

—Mike Brock

But that only works when people trust the process, and right now, they don’t.

HxA Conference

This dynamic is already playing out in real institutions. One example: the 2025 Heterodox Academy conference.

As both Cathy Young and Nicole Barbaro Simovski reported, scholars debated whether it was appropriate to publicly critique academic institutions while facing an unprecedented political assault from the federal government. Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, cautioned that too much internal critique could “do the work of authoritarianism.” Alice Dreger pushed back, warning that narrowing what’s allowed to be said, even in the name of self-preservation, replicates the very problem heterodoxy is meant to resist.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Simovski summarized the dilemma this way:

“If we want our universities to be seen once again as institutions committed to knowledge-seeking, not ideological gatekeeping…”

—Nicole Barbaro Simovski

Even at HxA, a group founded to protect institutional neutrality and viewpoint diversity, the pressure to choose between reform and defense is real.

The Dual Threat: My Synthesis

Liberalism isn’t just a set of values. It’s a method for handling conflict without coercion. But that method only works when two things are true:

1. There’s a shared process for resolving disputes

2. There’s a shared commitment to let the process work

Both pressures, epistemic and institutional, are converging on the same fragile systems:

• The epistemic threat: Unfalsifiable claims replace shared evidence, identity replaces reason, and narrative displaces verification.

• The institutional threat: Factions across the political spectrum claim to uphold truth, but shut down debate in the name of protecting institutions. Whether from progressive orthodoxy, corporate interests, or political pressure, risk aversion becomes self-censorship. Critique becomes betrayal.

Liberalism depends on institutions that can hold disagreement, without collapsing under pressure from either side.

Why It Matters

When institutions become untrusted referees, their judgments no longer settle disputes, they deepen them. In that vacuum, power rushes in. The vacuum doesn’t guarantee tyranny, but it does remove the brakes.

Conclusion: Asymmetric Restraint

The result isn’t just chaos, it’s a breakdown in the systems that are supposed to referee the chaos.

Liberalism doesn’t survive because everyone plays fair—

it survives because someone protects the rules, even when no one else will.

References

1. Dan Williams, “America’s Epistemological Crisis,” Conspicuous Cognition, September 21, 2024.

2. Mike Brock, “What is Liberalism?” Notes from the Circus, July 7, 2025.

3. Ryan Chapman, A Guide to American Liberalism (YouTube), May 11, 2021.

4. Cathy Young, “What Does ‘Heterodoxy’ Mean During Trump 2.0?” The Bulwark, June 27, 2025.

5. Nicole Barbaro Simovski, “Yes, We Can Still Criticize the Academy in the Trump Era,” Substack, July 6, 2025.