Looking from abroad (and as a former resident) I really worry what is happening to the character of America - it really, really doesn't feel like a unified culture with a shared moral framework. What does that look like 20 years down the line? Already things seem totally insane.

The tsunami of extreme partisanship over issues that seem to never crystallise into concrete concerns about ordinary life has of course swept the whole western world, Britain has devolved into levels of absurdity only somewhat short of the US.

One of the reasons I'm a post-liberal isn't because I have a simplistic contempt for liberalism; rather I look at it having gone from a vital, morally and politically confident force capable of working tremendous improvements (whatever its drawbacks) to being utterly stagnant.

My sense is that the liberalism which many look back on with nostalgia is actually a liberalism hybridised and harmonised with a humanistic Christianity, and that the waning of this Christian aspect has left liberalism transformed and unstable.

On the one hand we see a liberalism of the left increasingly pulled towards revolutionary liberalism (with a crude and chaotic admixture of Marxism, Jacobinism and post-modernism), and on the other a right wing liberalism ever more fused with xenophobic nationalism.

We talk a lot about the 'desire' to move beyond or away from liberalism, but I would rather engage with the 'need' move beyond liberalism. For me the most urgent political project is in fact the recovery and revival of 'liberal' ideas that require a new framework to sustain them.

We are no longer able to articulate well the full moral value or practical outworking of formerly robust liberal concepts like 'tolerance', 'liberty' and 'freedom of speech, religion, association etc.' They have become fault-lines and battlegrounds in the culture wars.

What might tolerance look like if engage with questions of charity rather than merely enduring the other? What might liberty look like if it involves both collective as well as individual liberty? What might freedoms look like if considered alongside the means to exercise them?