The below amounts to little more than a promissory note for an argument. But its outlines feel right, and I’ll be developing them in the coming weeks.

Three sets of interconnected practices decide much of our well-being:

  1. Integrative practices order our inner and outer lives toward meaning and congruence. These range from private contemplative practices to the practices that sustain our relationships, communities, and polities. They are integrative when, and only when, they align belief, affect, and action with reflectively desired ends.
  2. Protective practices preserve spheres of private and public action, including integrative and participatory practices. These practices roughly map onto the range of rights and norms associated with liberalism: practices that provide wide (though limited) scope for speech, movement, assembly, religious practice, due process, and so on.
  3. Participatory practices give us influence over common projects, including our protective practices. These roughly map onto the range of rights and norms associated with democracy: practices that provide wide (though limited) scope for having a say over how we are governed and by whom.

We often combine the latter two. "Liberal democracy" contains distinct concepts that are closely intertwined enough that the adequate realization of one always implies the other.

Yet we rarely discuss the political contexts of the first set. The thinkers most ready to discuss character or civic virtue tend to skew conservative; many move further into skepticism of both liberalism and democracy. Liberal democrats, so focused on procedures or principles, give little serious study to the political consequences of integrative practices. Which contemplative practices work best to prevent racism? What legal responsibilities must media companies bear for their social consequences? How does the physical distance of rural life shape personal ethics and political outlook? What moral and cultural orientations are responsible for the slide in East Germany toward extremism? What can reverse this?

We neglect such questions at our peril. As scholars and as citizens, we must be radical liberals, radical democrats, and radical integrationists all at once.

Two
Why? Because we can only describe the current crisis in terms of systemic disintegration. Witness the erosion of protective and participatory practices across liberal democracies. Americans, for example, are on the whole less free today to speak, or worship, or vote, or make reproductive choices than they were a generation ago. Similar losses have been felt elsewhere to varying degrees. The despots who now dominate public discourse have learned that liberal rights can be set against democracy, and vice versa.

Institutions do not collapse in isolation. Their disintegration bring personal costs. Escalating mistrust and outrage, compounded by the loss of freedoms we once took for granted, have cost us hope. We’ve lost the sense, born of the Enlightenment, that a better society can be built. A supermajority of Americans now expect their children's lives to be worse than their own. Those children will inherit a world more divided—between persons, between nations, between humanity and nature—than we once thought possible. Ours is a time of public decay.

Yet much of that decay is itself the result of individual desperation. No demagogue was ever elected by a contented people. Their power both taps and generates fear, anxiety, and anger. Many such feelings are unfounded, of course, but we cannot ignore our complicity in creating the conditions by which they thrive. We’ve allowed our hinterlands to sink into the economic distress that breeds fear and contempt. We abandoned the political will to avert a climate crisis. Our schools, little more than warehouses for a workforce in waiting, have failed entirely to provide even rudimentary lessons in understanding our minds, our emotions, and the basic practices of a happy life. It's little wonder, then, that the institutions of liberal democracy are proving incapable of preserving themselves. On their own, they never could. Their survival depends on another set of practices that cannot be reduced to legal protections, social norms, or the casting of ballots.

In short, we're now experiencing a series of feedback loops that undermine our ability to make both the personal and the public domains congruent.

Three
Think of integrative liberal democracy as a tripod, a set of mutually supporting structures that interact in ways we’ve barely begun to model.

Liberal democracy has long been criticized by communitarians for its inability to provide meaning. Against these critiques, some have argued that liberalism should itself offer a way of life. Both views rest on a category error. Liberalism (and democracy) can make space for meaning-generative practices. Public participation even constitutes some forms of meaning, such as my status as citizen. But liberal democratic politics cannot, of itself, sustain the kind of inner wholeness and systemic integration that integrative work provides.

Once we see this, the need for new political, analytical, and personal perspectives becomes clear.

Politically, begin with triage. The broader crisis will not be solved along whatever margins are immediately available to us: economic growth, political reform, better voting procedures, and so on. All are necessary; all are insufficient. Nor, of course, is the answer revolution, which would only widen the present fissures. Yet we are not powerless. We can remedy the sociological and economic grounds on which unrest rests. We can find new means to heal our epistemic ecosystems. We can even challenge the premise that republics are grounded on conflict rather than coordination. The Madisonian ideal of pitting ambition against ambition only pits us against ourselves. It promises popular rule; we get rule by popularity instead.

Alternative institutional models are far better at encouraging collaboration. We’ve yet to plumb the full resources of citizen experience in deliberative settings, experience that extends not only to the minutiae of policy but also to the experience of harm and benefit. We should distribute democratic authority away from unrepresentative bodies that sit between one set of experts (the citizens) and another (civil servants). Sortition offers great hope here. None of these moves offers a cure, of course, but together they can stanch loss and point us toward new sources and phenomenologies of politics.

Analytically, we need a new means of social theorizing that treats integration as a concern equal to traditional questions of liberal democracy. That is, we must look far deeper into the mutually implicated natures of these systems. How revealing, for example, that in the year 2026 we have no rigorous cross-national data on how cultural norms and political institutions affect empathy, or vice versa. Social science was not always so myopic; despite their many differences, both the first great theorist of liberal politics (Smith) and the first modern champion of democratic sovereignty (Rousseau) tried to ground political freedom and social agency on a sentimentalist moral psychology. Today, rigid divisions of method, vernacular, and ideology make this exceedingly difficult. Loosening such constraints would allow us to examine the inner ordering and outward reconciliation on which all social systems rest. A new field of Integrative Studies would capture this.

Finally, as individuals, we must each undertake the hard work of identifying and pursuing practices that reduce our rage, our avarice, and our apathy. This is as much an ethical obligation as a political one. Here, the millennia-long traditions of contemplative science—ignored until recently by the natural sciences of the West—offer great promise. Their greatest discoveries for day-to-day happiness and well-being can be adopted without metaphysical baggage. One needs no vows, for example, to practice the Four Immeasurables.

We can also challenge the assumption that a free society demands so little of us. Our present political model extends “doing one’s duty” to showing up on election day and little more, ignoring the work on ourselves and our communities that freedom requires. Full consideration of related problems will lead to a wholesale rethinking of our education systems, our built environments, and indeed the Western relegation of inner development to religion or therapy.

Any hope for countering our present disintegrations lies in theorizing and then building an integrative liberal democracy.

In more ways than one, the work begins with us.