Illiberal movements are gaining ground in established liberal democracies, even where institutions function well and rights are formally secured. I argue that the vulnerability is theoretical, not merely institutional: procedural liberalism presupposes the capacities for agency it fails to theorise or guarantee. I call this structural deficit the dependency blind spot, and its political consequence the legitimacy gap — a disconnect between a liberal polity's capacity for justification and its capacity for recognition. The project develops orientational liberalism as a constructive response, grounding legitimacy in the state's duty to secure the conditions of agency and occupying a third position between perfectionism and proceduralism.