Bush has retired to Texas, and his successor in the White House is the very model of a modern liberal Christian.
Last week in Haifa, a city usually presented as a model of liberal co-existence, an anti-war rally was attacked by 700 people carrying weapons.
George Soros How much?! $8bn £5.4bnn) When not speculating controversially on currencies including the pound (in 1992 he was named "the man who broke the Bank of England) after he netted an estimated profit of $1bn on Black Wednesday), the Hungarian-born American financier has become a model of progressive liberal giving.
Google is presented as promoting a model of white, liberal and secular values, while WikiLeaks is presented as promoting various shades of gray.
Most of all, Cameron has offered his persona - a relaxed, new face, the very model of a modern major politician, a liberal conservative, as he styles himself in his most recent incarnation.
Under his leadership, the college developed into a thriving model of residential liberal arts education much admired and studied throughout Asia and the world.
Not a unipolar world, converging on a single model of liberal democratic capitalism, but a no-polar world, diverging towards many different national versions of often illiberal capitalism.
No, the worldwide crisis that frightens Nussbaum is the decline of a model of liberal education based on the arts and humanities.
I e-mailed Mead to ask what a functional, "post-blue" model of the liberal state might look like, and he wrote back: Apologies that I don't have a fully formed alternative social model ready to drop on a grateful nation, but whatever insights I come up with I will be happy to share on the blog.
