The ascent of Donald Trump has escalated the salience of these questions, which in turn raises the most important question of all: Have many elite liberals and Democrats who set the left-wing agenda become so attached to their relatively newfound power, status and income that they would battle a return to their insurgent roots tooth and nail?

Fareed Zakaria and Adrian Wooldridge, two prominent essayists — both working journalists who are, in practice, a step above the media hoi polloi — have separately raised pointed questions about liberalism and its American political arm, the Democratic Party.

Modern liberalism since the 1990s advocates “deregulating both economic life and personal life, then treating the consequences as the price of freedom,” Zakaria wrote on June 26 in an essay in The Washington Post, “To Beat Socialists and Populists, Liberalism Must Get Radical.”

In the case of markets, he continued,

this has allowed corporate consolidation and inequality to run wild. In personal life, liberals have become reluctant to say that certain behaviors are socially destructive.

The result is liberal fatalism. People camp out on city streets, addicted and mentally ill, and liberals often describe this as a housing problem. Millions suffer from obesity-related illnesses, and liberals are more comfortable blaming ‘food deserts’ than taking on the companies that hook their customers on processed food.

A liberal society should celebrate individual rights — and also demand individual responsibility. It should understand that freedom can be destroyed not only by the state but also by addiction, monopoly, crime, ignorance and dependence.

Zakaria cited Wooldridge, a Bloomberg columnist whose new book, “The Revolutionary Center,” is a devastating assault on contemporary liberalism.

“Today’s liberals,” Wooldridge said in his book,

are creatures of the establishment. Their lot in life is not the martyr’s grave or the prisoner’s cell but the tenured job and the index-linked pension. Liberal elites have created caste-like privileges that recall the caste-like privileges of the feudal and clerical elite such as exemption from paying taxes if you are a European working for the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) or the World Bank in Washington or exemption from paying fines if you are a diplomat working for the United Nations.

The political consequence?

The conversion of liberals into the establishment has driven a wedge between liberalism and ordinary people. University administrators embrace policies of affirmative action that are wildly unpopular with regular people (including most Black people). … The European Union pushes forward with its “project” of “ever closer integration” regardless of public opinion.

Liberal triumphalism, Wooldridge argued,

coincided with the fragmentation of liberal thought into several sub-creeds: the managerial liberalism of the people who ran global institutions, the left-liberalism of the universities and the neoliberalism that was promoted by Reagan and Thatcher and institutionalized by Clinton and Blair.

This fragmentation injected extremism into the heart of liberalism as each of these subgroups, concentrated in their respective professional niches, spoke only to people like themselves.

Neoliberals chased after the rainbow of efficient markets. Managerial liberals dreamed of global government and earth-spanning corporations. Left-liberals hunted ever more marginal groups. A creed that had once been defined by opposition to the extremism of both the Jacobins and the Royalists, degenerated into a collection of monomanias.

Zakaria and Wooldridge are by no means alone in their analysis.