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. – Ross Douthat