Directions (Q6-9): The passage below is accompanied by four questions.

Over the past few decades, discontent and disdain for liberalism have spread across huge swathes of the globe, led by a resurgent Right-wing populism that denounced its materialism, universalism and libertine decadence. Politicians like Victor Orban declared they were constructing new kinds of ‘illiberal democracy’ – a half truth, since the regimes would be illiberal, but not particularly democratic. Theories about what had gone wrong multiplied. Liberalism was too atomistic, too alienating, too antidemocratic, too democratic for its own good, too beholden to the ignorant masses, too elitist, even too boring and politically correct for its own good.

What was often lost in the discourse around liberalism in the 21st century was whether it could simultaneously be worth saving while also having deserved the ignominy into which it was falling.(…)

Big dreams were dangerous and contrary to liberalism, its revolutionary past aside. The best one could hope for was a competitive and highly inequitable neoliberal society defined by ordered liberty and at most a minimal welfare state. (…) If liberals couldn’t rediscover how to not just fearmonger, but inspire, they were unlikely to see their doctrine survive much longer. (…)

If liberals trade off presenting an inspiring vision of the future for mere survival, they are unlikely to get either. The existential woes of 21st-century liberalism require we do more than return to the forms of neoliberal governance that generated discontent in the first place. It requires retrieving the revolutionary emancipatory and egalitarian ethos that defined liberalism at its revolutionary best to offer a new deal to citizens of liberal states. The strand of liberal political theory that offers the richest guidance on what form this new deal should take is liberal socialism. (…)

The idea of ‘liberal socialism’ might appear odd and even oxymoronic. This is especially true for those on the Right and the Left who regard liberalism as the philosophy of market capitalism. (…) It is a political ideology that combines support for many liberal political institutions and rights with a socialist desire to establish far more equitable and democratic economic arrangements. (…)

As history shows, liberal socialists are not a monolith. They disagree on many core points. (…) Nevertheless, all liberal socialists are committed to three central principles. (…) First, liberal socialists are committed to methodological collectivism and normative individualism. They believe that the wellbeing and free development of individual persons is the highest moral priority. (…) Secondly, liberal socialists are committed to each person having as equal an opportunity to lead as good a life as possible through the provision of shared resources for the development and expression of their human powers. (…) Thirdly, liberal socialists are committed to instituting a basic social structure characterised by highly participatory liberal-democratic political institutions and protections for liberal rights concurrent with the extension of liberal democratic principles into the economy and family to establish more egalitarian economic arrangements free of domination and exploitation. (…) In a world defined by growing anger at inequality and plutocracy, liberal socialism is worthy of our loyalty.

The author of the passage attributes the fall of liberalism to all of the following EXCEPT: