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The established, institutionalized set of beliefs that define mainstream liberalism—the often-unexamined assumptions about individual rights, freedom, equality, democracy, and progress that shape liberal societies. Liberal orthodoxy includes commitments: that individuals are the primary unit of society, that freedom means absence of coercion, that rights protect individuals from the state, that democracy is the best form of government, that progress happens through reform rather than revolution, and that liberal institutions (markets, courts, elections) are fundamentally just. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a framework for political thinking, but it can also function as ideology—making liberal arrangements seem natural and inevitable, obscuring their limitations and exclusions, and delegitimizing alternatives. Liberal orthodoxy determines what counts as "reasonable" political discourse, what policies are within the "overton window," and who counts as a "serious" political thinker versus a radical or reactionary.
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