Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:
First, growth alone does not solve the return of great-power conflict, even perhaps civilizational conflict, as a force disrupting the frictionless ideals of globalization. The liberal model of trade and exchange works best in a world of broadly shared values, where governments and peoples are all at least somewhat Lockean in their perspectives and desires.
But if that world seems to be defunct or in retreat, then just insisting over and over again that global trade makes everyone richer can be an evasion of national responsibility. It’s a true-enough statement that doesn’t tell you what to do when some of the powers getting richer are using the wealth to prop up authoritarian and totalitarian systems, buy allies across the developing world and underwrite wars and potential wars against their neighbors.
In this environment, you can’t just answer questions like, “Is it a great idea for Europeans to buy so much oil and gas from Russia?” or “Is it a good idea for so much of the U.S. industrial base to have relocated to China?” or “Should we let our A.I. companies sell chips and technology to all comers while we’re barreling toward superintelligence?” with reference to G.D.P. statistics and consumer purchasing power.
A second example: Growth alone doesn’t tell you what to do about the social costs of liberal individualism. This is an old reactionary critique of liberalism — that what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie — but it’s garnered new force in the last two decades because of a very specific interaction between technological change and libertarian values.
In our time, political liberalism has pushed the envelope on individual liberties (around drugs and gambling and suicide, as well as sex and sexual identity) at exactly the same moment that technological progress has given us radical new means for exploiting and amplifying addictive behaviors. The results are a world that’s richer and more technologically proficient — and also seemingly unhappier, more despairing, more addicted, more deranged. And while this may be a temporary situation, and hopefully culture and politics will adapt, those adaptations will not themselves be liberal in either a philosophical or a post-Cold War political sense of the term. They might be post-liberal in the sense of political regulation of technology or in the sense of religious-moral regulation of individual choice — but they will not just emerge organically from the proper application of John Stuart Mill or Milton Friedman.
Finally, crucially, the shadow over everything: There is simply no obvious liberal answer, in economic policy or otherwise, to the confluence of wealth and technology and individualism leading to lower birthrates, which incentivizes mass migration to keep the economic system running, which leads to native resentment, ethno-religious separatism and roiling social conflict.
All the political post-liberalisms of our time, including not just right-wing populism and nationalism but also the managerial-bureaucratic style of centrist speech suppression and anti-democratic maneuvers, have emerged because post-Cold War liberalism doesn’t know how to manage the internal divisions of aging societies with large immigrant populations. The liberal prescription is a normative exhortation — natives shouldn’t be bigoted and migrants should assimilate to our values, whenever we figure out what those are — that has failed so far in all its forms, center-left and center-right and “woke.”
Douthat is putting his finger on something liberals mostly dodge because it forces trade-offs instead of moral posturing.
On geopolitics. Liberal economics assumes a Lockean world where enrichment softens conflict. That assumption is dead. Growth can bankroll repression, military buildup, and civilizational rivalry just as easily as it can bankroll middle-class comfort. Once that’s true, GDP stops being a sufficient guide. At that point, trade policy becomes national strategy, not efficiency maximization. Pretending otherwise is not principled liberalism, it’s abdication.
On social costs. This is the most damning critique. Liberalism expanded choice just as technology maximized temptation. Those two forces interact badly. You don’t just get freedom, you get industrial-scale addiction, despair, and social breakdown. Mill never imagined infinite porn, crypto casinos in your pocket, fentanyl logistics, or algorithmic slot machines optimized for compulsion. Liberal philosophy offers no tools to regulate that environment except wishful talk about “autonomy.” Any real fix will involve constraints. Meaning non-liberal moves.
On demography. This is the quiet catastrophe liberalism has no answer for. Wealth plus individualism plus technology yields fewer births. Fewer births force immigration. Immigration without shared norms produces conflict. Liberalism responds with scolding and slogans, not mechanisms. “Don’t be bigoted” is not a policy. “Assimilate” is meaningless if elites refuse to define what assimilation even means. The resulting vacuum gets filled by nationalists on the right and managerial coercion on the centrist left.
The deeper point. Post-Cold War liberalism was built for a young, growing, culturally confident world with weak external enemies and strong internal trust. We now have the opposite. Old societies. Low fertility. High migration. Fragmented moral consensus. Powerful rival states. Addictive technologies. Liberalism’s language still floats around, but its machinery doesn’t work in these conditions.
That doesn’t mean liberalism was evil. It means it was situational. We are entering a phase where trade, speech, technology, and migration will be managed rather than moralized. The real question is who does the managing and with what values. The liberal imagination has not yet caught up to that reality.
Where does buffered vs porous identity play a role in this discussion?
It sits right under everything Douthat is describing.
Post–Cold War liberalism assumes a strongly buffered self. The individual is imagined as autonomous, cognitively sovereign, and largely impermeable. Choices happen inside the self. Social structures, technologies, incentives, and moral ecologies matter less than intention and consent. That assumption props up liberal confidence in growth, trade, migration, and expanding choice. If people are buffered, they can handle it.
But the world Douthat describes keeps producing porous outcomes.
Geopolitics first. Liberal trade theory assumes nations are buffered actors too. We trade, we get richer, conflict fades. But in a porous world, wealth flows through institutions, ideologies, and power systems. Trade with China or Russia does not stay economic. It mutates regimes, alliances, weapons systems, and propaganda environments. Thinking in buffered terms leads to naive policy. Porous reality punches back.
Now the social and technological sphere. Liberalism treats drug use, sexual expression, gambling, and even suicide as matters of individual autonomy. Buffered logic. But modern technology is explicitly designed to breach the boundary of the self. Algorithms target attention, dopamine, identity formation, and habit loops. Addiction is porosity made systematic. Liberalism’s answer sounds hollow because it was never built for a world where the self is actively engineered from the outside in.
Demography is the clearest case. Liberalism assumes identity and values are chosen and portable. People migrate. They assimilate. Everyone gets along eventually. That only works if identities are thin and bufferable. In practice, identities are thick, inherited, moralized, and porous. They transmit through families, religious communities, language, and memory. When mass migration meets low native fertility, porous identities collide rather than dissolve. Liberal exhortation fails because it misunderstands how identity actually works.
Even the managerial left Douthat mentions is reacting to porosity. Speech control, moral regulation, and institutional pressure are attempts to stabilize a porous environment by force. When persuasion fails and autonomy produces chaos, management steps in. That too is post-liberal, even if it uses liberal vocabulary.
So buffered identity is the fantasy engine of late liberalism. Porous identity is the reality it increasingly governs. The gap between the two produces exactly what Douthat is pointing at. Trade that creates enemies. Freedom that creates addiction. Migration that creates fragmentation. Liberalism keeps prescribing norms for buffered selves in a world that treats humans as porous systems. That mismatch is why post-liberal answers are emerging whether elites like the label or not.
Free trade relies on a deeply buffered picture of both persons and nations.
At the individual level, classical free-trade arguments assume consumers are autonomous choosers. Cheaper goods increase welfare. Preferences are stable. Effects stop at price and income. Moral, cultural, and psychological spillovers are treated as externalities or ignored. That only works if people are buffered, meaning culture, status, habits, and identity are not significantly transformed by what they consume or by how production is organized.
In a porous frame, consumption reshapes identity. What a society makes and buys affects skills, dignity, status hierarchies, family formation, time horizons, and moral norms. Offshoring a manufacturing base does not just lower prices. It dissolves trades, weakens local authority structures, degrades male wages, alters marriage markets, and erodes civic confidence. These changes seep into identity formation over generations. Free-trade models do not count those costs because they are invisible in a buffered framework.
At the firm and national level, free trade assumes countries are buffered too. Trade is exchange, not entanglement. Wealth does not meaningfully alter values or power structures beyond making everyone richer. In reality, nations are porous systems. Capital transfers institutional capacity, military capability, surveillance tech, ideological confidence, and geopolitical leverage. Trading with an authoritarian state strengthens the regime’s internal control and its external reach. Growth flows through politics and coercion, not around them.
Free-trade advocacy also assumes values are separable from markets. The Lockean idea is that commerce civilizes. In porous reality, markets magnify whatever moral ecology they sit in. A society oriented toward discipline and hierarchy will use growth differently than one oriented toward atomized consumption. Globalization does not flatten values. It transmits them asymmetrically.
This is why GDP talk now rings evasive. Buffered reasoning says losses are transitional and individuals will retool. Porous reasoning observes that once norms, institutions, and identities break, they are not easily rebuilt. Telling displaced workers to “learn to code” misunderstands the injury. The harm is not only economic. It is social and existential.
So the free-trade debate keeps breaking down because one side is arguing with a buffered model and the other is responding to porous damage. Until trade policy takes porosity seriously, meaning identity, institutions, power, and culture as first-order effects rather than regrettable side costs, the liberal case for free trade will keep sounding abstract and disconnected from lived experience.
Buffered identity runs through economics at a foundational level, usually without being named.
Core microeconomics assumes a buffered agent. Preferences are stable, endogenous shocks are limited, and identity is exogenous or irrelevant. Individuals are utility maximizers who respond to prices, not moral ecologies. Culture, habit, and social meaning are either fixed or safely bracketed off. That abstraction works for many narrow problems. But it quietly builds a picture of the self as impermeable to context.
Rational choice depends on buffering. If preferences are shaped by advertising, institutions, technology, family structure, and social status in deep and persistent ways, then the clean separation between wants and constraints breaks down. Porous agents do not just choose within markets. Markets choose them back.
General equilibrium rests on buffered systems too. Shocks propagate through prices, not identities. Adjustment happens via retraining, migration, and capital reallocation. Social cohesion, legitimacy, and meaning are assumed to elastically adapt. In a porous reality, shocks propagate through norms, trust, fertility, health, and civic order. Adjustment is not smooth. It is cumulative and sometimes irreversible.
Welfare economics assumes measurability of value through consumption and income. Utility is inferred from revealed preference. That presumes agents know what benefits them and are not systematically misled or reshaped by the choice environment. If addiction, attention capture, and algorithmic manipulation are central features of modern markets, revealed preference becomes unreliable. You cannot infer welfare from choices made under engineered compulsion.
Externalities are the discipline’s main concession to porosity. Pollution, public goods, and information asymmetries admit that some effects leak. But identity formation, moral degradation, civic demoralization, and institutional decay are treated as either non-economic or unquantifiable. Economics does not deny porosity. It marginalizes it.
Macroeconomics carries the same bias. Growth, productivity, and GDP take center stage. Distribution, family formation, demographic replacement, and social trust are secondary. The implicit claim is that if aggregates improve, society will cope. That only works if societies are buffered enough to absorb disruption without losing coherence.
Even policy advice reflects this. Economists prefer price instruments, nudges, and marginal adjustments. These are tools suited to buffered agents. When reality demands hard boundaries, prohibitions, strategic trade-offs, or moral regulation, economics goes quiet or retreats to “that’s a political decision.”
The discipline’s power came from abstraction. Its blind spot comes from the same place. Economics works best in worlds where selves, cultures, and states are buffered. The more porous those systems become, under technology, migration, and geopolitical conflict, the less reliable economic reasoning becomes as a governing framework rather than a partial tool.