It’s been 10 years since Angela Merkel, as German chancellor, memorably declared “Wir schaffen das” — “We can do this” — in the face of the mass migration crisis sweeping Europe. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported, “For the first time, populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in the U.K., France and Germany.” Similar parties are already in power or in government in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, to say nothing of the United States.

To say the West’s turn to the anti-immigrant right was the predictable result of Merkel’s calamitous decision to open Germany’s borders does not mean there aren’t still lessons to be learned from it — not least by the world’s most clueless of all major political parties today, the Democratic Party.

Starting around 20 years ago, perhaps earlier, liberal democracy gained two half-siblings: postliberal democracy and preliberal democracy.

Preliberal democracy accepts the practice of regular elections but rejects most of the core values of liberalism: free speech and moral tolerance, civil liberties and the rights of the accused, the rule of law and independence of courts, the equality of women and so on. Turkey under the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan typifies this type of democracy, as did Egypt under the short reign of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.

Postliberal democracy, by contrast, embraces the values of liberalism but tries to insulate itself from the will of the people. The European Union, with its vast architecture of transnational legislation, is one example of postliberalism; international courts, issuing rulings where they have no jurisdiction, are another; global environmental accords, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (signed by the Obama administration but never ratified by Congress), are a third.

Standing between these two models is old-fashioned liberal democracy. Its task is to manage the tension, or temper the opposition, between competing imperatives: to accept majority will and protect individual right, to defend a nation’s sovereignty while maintaining a spirit of openness, to preserve its foundational principles while adapting to change. If the frustration of liberal democracy is that it tends to proceed in half-steps, its virtue is that it advances on more secure footing.