Liberalism, understood in its broadest scope as the political system of ordered liberty that has prevailed in the Western world for the past three hundred years, is under renewed and withering attack. It is a complex of mutually reinforcing ideas that includes commitment to individual equality before the law, representative government, private property rights, and wide freedoms of economic exchange, speech, religion, and association. The emergence and global influence of this tradition (nowhere more profoundly instantiated than in the founding documents of the United States of America) has produced unprecedented global prosperity and improvement to quality of life by nearly every measurable statistic.