Kay: Liberalism’s Lonely-Hearts Club

2025/12/15 Leave a comment

Good calling out of the hypocrisy of the anti-woke when it comes to their betrayal of liberal beliefs in the age of authoritarian Trump and his policies:

…While Quillette’s liberal editorial mission has never really changed, executing it became more complicated during the COVID pandemic—especially once vaccinesbecame available. When heated and pressurised under lockdown, the same sort of free-thinking scepticism that fuels heterodox political thought, it turns out, can readily blur into conspiracism and junk science. A prominent example is Bret Weinstein, the one-time Quillette academic darling who began telling Americans that COVID vaccines had, according to one “credible estimate,” caused “something like 17 million deaths globally.” (In fact, the figure represents a passable ballpark estimate of the number of lives that such vaccines have saved.)

Even in ultra-progressive Canada, where this sort of conspiracism is less common, I’ve seen a number of prominent anti-wokesters go down similar rabbit holes. And though it’s been years since the pandemic ended, not all of them have found their way back to the surface. 

Following a recent speech I gave to a free-thinking Toronto crowd, the organiser felt moved to explain to attendees that it was important to hear “diverse views.” This was a diplomatic reference to my (poorly received) observation that many self-described heterodox intellectuals who cheer on my opposition to trans-activist pseudoscience will also insist (falsely) that COVID vaccines don’t work and (also falsely) that anthropogenic global warming is a myth. Science isn’t a buffet where you get to pick and choose what proven truths to accept, I told them. Few in the crowd looked convinced.

Another major schism within our liberal movement has centred on Donald Trump and conservative populism more generally. Trump’s second presidency, in particular, has accelerated the ongoing process by which critics of progressive illiberalism have been self-organising into two separate camps—(1) one that continues to oppose illiberalism of all flavours (that’s us), and (2) another that’s just fine with authoritarian political creeds, so long as the authoritarians come from the conservative side of the aisle.

If the goal is to get rid of DEI and throw men off women’s college sports teams, members of this latter Trump-friendly faction reason, why bother with the hard intellectual slog of staging “heterodox” academic conferences and writing long essays about Martin Luther King Jr., Areopagitica, and the nature of human sexual biology? Just elect a strongman who tells university presidents and athletic directors what to do, on pain of losing their government cash. Problem solved.

…While the University of Austin is just one institution, it serves as a bellwether of the whole anti-woke project more generally—having been conceived as a sort of model liberal project by some of the leading lights of this movement. Its board of trustees includes historian Niall Ferguson and journalist Bari Weiss, while the board of advisors boasts Eric Kaufmann, economists Glenn Loury and Tyler Cowen, and famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Harvard professor Steven Pinker was also an early advisor; as was social scientist Jonathan Haidt (a founder of the staunchly liberal-minded Heterodox Academy)—though both have since departed. Every one of these people has been featured by Quillette at one time or another, either as author or podcast guest. It says a lot about the stormy seas that liberals now face that even a once-impeccably liberal organisation such as this can begin listing to starboard just four years out of the shipyard.

I find these developments not just politically disturbing, but also personally disappointing. Not so long ago, I imagined that the coalition of plucky liberal gadflies that began countering illiberal progressivism at around the time I began working for Quillette could be sustained indefinitely—and perhaps even solidify into a durable movement that would become my long-term political home. (I’ve never had one, and it would be nice if I finally did.) But that’s now been exposed as an exercise in wishful thinking.

O’Sullivan’s Law and Quillette’s Law (I promise that’s the last time I’ll use the phrase) both describe ideologically centrifugal forces—driving people away, in opposite directions, from the liberal democratic baseline that I’d always taken for granted as the natural resting point for mainstream intellectual life. Battling against illiberalism from both sides at the same time can feel like a lonely and hopeless intellectual project. But absent the emergence of some third law that will deliver me from my labours, I see no principled alternative.

Source: Liberalism’s Lonely-Hearts Club

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Liberals have forgotten what free speech means – UnHerd

2023/11/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

Away from the horror unfolding in Israel, the past month has provided one long acid test for the West’s commitment to liberal values. What are we to make of middle-class bien pensants asserting that mass murder requires “context”, of the overt antisemitism, and of a police force that makes excusesfor theocrats calling for “jihad” on the streets of London? For some, this is proof of the failure of multiculturalism. For others, it is the final straw that broke the back of liberalism. Hate speech laws must now be strengthened, certain protests ought to be banned, and we must no longer tolerate the intolerant.

Republican senator Tom Cotton has called for those who express support for Hamas to be deported, and Donald Trump has promised to do so if re-elected. In France, Emmanuel Macron has outlawed pro-Palestine rallies on the grounds of maintaining public order, although his decree has been largely ignored. Closer to home, a pro-Palestinian protest has been scheduled in London for Armistice Day, a tactic surely intended to generate as much outrage and attention as possible.

In that respect, it has already succeeded. Rishi Sunak has stopped short of a ban, but has called on the Met Police to make “robust use” of its powers to prevent the Remembrance events being disrupted. In this, he is out of kilter with the majority of the country: only 18% believe it “should be allowed to go ahead”.

Liberalism has always been a tricky prospect, cherishing personal autonomy and freedom of speech up to the point where our behaviour encroaches on the rights of others. To ideologues, it is a poison, because it rejects their insistence that we ought to follow a preordained set of rules. Some even claim that liberalism is itself an ideology, though I see it as the precise opposite: it is the repudiation of ideological thinking — because it refuses to accept oversimplified interpretations of reality, or to outsource our decision-making capacities to an already established creed. This is why there are liberals on the Left, the Right, and everywhere in between

Yet it has been dispiriting to see our commitment to Enlightenment values being assaulted on multiple fronts. There are theocratic extremists who oppose free speech and would happily see blasphemers and apostates executed. There are Western activists intoxicated by the moonshine of intersectional identity politics calling for censorship and other restrictions. And now, we have those who once considered themselves to be “liberal” pronouncing that there should be limitations to freedom of speech and assembly.

Even those who have previously decried “cancel culture” appear to be relishing its impact on their opponents. A lecture at Liverpool Hope University by Professor Avi Shlaim, a critic of Israel, was cancelled out of concern for the “safety and wellbeing” of students; Michael Eisen, a geneticist at UC Berkeley, was fired as editor-in-chief of eLife magazine for sharing a satirical article from The Onion which took a pro-Palestine stance. Eisen, some have pointed out, had previously questioned whether cancellation really exists. But while a degree of schadenfreude is understandable, it is hardly helpful.

That there are no rulebooks to consult is liberalism’s major appeal to those of a free-thinking disposition, but it is also the source of its instability. The authoritarian has no need to engage with his detractors; he can simply have them eliminated. By contrast, the liberal must find a way to coexist with those who yearn to see his freedoms quashed, to somehow reconcile himself to the multiplicity of human outlooks and their inherent incommensurability. But how can you run a marketplace of ideas while there are hooligans trying to overturn the tables?

This essential vulnerability is always tested in moments of crisis. Governments enact “emergency powers” when at war because short-term authoritarianism seems preferable to the alternative. So when protesters at pro-Palestine marches in London are holding signs that openly celebrate the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of civilians, and an official advisor to the Met police is filmed leading a chant of “from the river to the sea”, there will always be pressure from a justifiably incensed public to resort to authoritarian remedies.

Even in peacetime, liberalism is susceptible to changing trends within the nation state. What happens, for instance, when the majority of any given population rejects the liberal values upon which their society is based? What if a government has implemented reckless migration policies that grant citizenship to those who do not recognise the value of individual freedoms? In such circumstances, the principle of democracy could be its own undoing.

Sweden is often considered to be a case in point. According to its national police chief, the rapid surge in migration over the past decade has led to an “unprecedented” rise in gang warfare between those who do not respect the rule of law. On a recent trip to Stockholm, I found myself discussing the implications with a group of residents. One woman expressed the view that Swedish people tended to take liberalism for granted, and that they had assumed newcomers would be eager to adopt the values of the nation that had welcomed them. Now many fear that this was warm-hearted naivety, and that the government had not done enough to ensure widespread integration.

Liberal countries acknowledge their moral responsibility to offer asylum for those in need, and typically take a compassionate view towards foreigners seeking a more prosperous life. At the same time, there must be a degree of societal consensus for the ethos of these nations to survive at all. For where such a consensus is jeopardised, either through mass immigration or radical domestic political movements, the temptation to dispense with liberal values is inevitable. But to call for the deportation of citizens who actively seek the demolition of our culture is to surrender our principles to the very people who oppose them. It is to resign oneself to authoritarianism in a perverse effort to defeat it.

Inevitably, one thinks of Karl Popper’s famous paradox that “in the name of tolerance” we should claim “the right not to tolerate the intolerant”. This is often invoked by activists to defend censorship of their opponents, typically in the form of a well-known cartoon meme that decontextualises and misreads Popper’s formulation:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Popper’s next sentence is often omitted, in which he emphasises that so long as public opinion and rational argument can “keep them in check”, suppression of intolerant views would be “most unwise”. Protesters who take to the streets to celebrate murder fall into this category because they are self-discrediting. They are impervious to reason, but their sentiments are so essentially rebarbative that there is no risk of public opinion shifting in their favour.

But, some might respond, if liberalism is so delicate and continually under threat, why bother with it at all? In short: because it works. For all the claims by identitarian activists that the Western world is a racist hellhole, few living in the era of Jim Crow could have conceived of the advances we have made since then. The triumph of social liberalism is evident in multiple studies that show how Western societies are the most tolerant and diverse to have ever existed. It is no coincidence that all of the major civil rights movements — for black emancipation, feminism and gay rights — have traditionally been underpinned by a commitment to free speech and liberal ideals.

Of course, it is only natural that our patience is wearing thin. Having already witnessed pro-Palestine protesters in London throwing fireworks at police, and chanting in support of “Intifada” on the Tube, there can be no guarantees that such behaviour won’t be repeated on Saturday. The timing seems not only calculated to maximise publicity, but also as a declaration of contempt for British values and history.

But even if unruly and disrespectful, it would be self-defeating to ban the protest, or to insist on deportations for the worst offenders. Taking action against direct incitement to violence is one thing, but compromising on our key values is another. If we renege on our principles at the very moment when they are most imperilled, we risk undermining the very foundations upon which our civilisation is built. The authoritarian instinct may be a human constant but, with vigilance, it can be forestalled.

Source: Liberals have forgotten what free speech means – UnHerd

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When Liberalism Grows Up

2021/02/03 Leave a comment

An interesting read, a bit similar in tone and approach to Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities in its praise of incrementalism and pragmatic approach:

The end of the history of music, at least in the Western classical tradition, can be dated to the warm, rainy evening in August of 1952 in Woodstock, New York, when a pianist first performed John Cage’s “4’33″”, a work consisting solely of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Cage’s composition was perhaps the natural conclusion of a cultural evolution that began in medieval abbeys and Renaissance courts, thrived in German churches and Italian opera houses, and flourished under Dvorak, Mahler, and Shostakovich.

Despite the uproar over “4’33″”, music did not die. Less than two years later, in July of 1954, Bill Haley and His Comets enjoyed rock and roll’s first major commercial success with “Rock Around the Clock.” Over the next seven decades, popular music exploded, evolved, and globalized: bebop, folk, bossa nova, blues rock, soul, country, glam, reggae, prog rock, disco, punk, metal, new wave, grunge, hip-hop, reggaeton, EDM, K-Pop, mumble rap. Classical music stayed popular, but further innovation in that genre was relegated to the ivory tower, subsidized performing arts centers, and the occasional film score.

Liberalism may be at a similar point today. A combination of social compacts, globalization, demographics, and technology have made evident some of liberalism’s limitations. But we could just as likely see not a reversion to a pre-liberal past, but an explosion of new diverse, experimental, chaotic, and rebellious liberal political traditions.

Liberalism may be at a similar point today. A combination of social compacts, globalization, demographics, and technology have made evident some of liberalism’s limitations. But we could just as likely see not a reversion to a pre-liberal past, but an explosion of new diverse, experimental, chaotic, and rebellious liberal political traditions.

Just as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or Bob Marley would have sounded jarring to Bach or Brahms, future liberalism may appear almost unrecognizable to today’s observer.And yet, just as the functions and forms of classical music are foundational and familiar to any contemporary performer of popular music (there would be no Beyoncé without Beethoven, no Chance the Rapper without Tchaikovsky), liberalism could well remain the basis of all future politics. Contemporary life almost anywhere in the world is so pervasively imbued with liberalism that it will be impossible to fully escape its gravitational force.

Francis Fukuyama, in his essay “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” mourns the global “wave of discontent” with liberal democracy, a system of governance that ensures checks and balances by combining accountability with the rule of law. He says that liberalism, by ensuring human dignity through tolerance, equal rights, and individual choice, “tends toward a kind of universalism.” He laments the threats now faced by liberalism from within and without—from authoritarian regimes, the economic forces of neoliberalism run amok, and the cultural hollowness created by stoic individualism.

This account of liberalism and its present-day challenges may be zeitgeist-appropriate, but it is not entirely satisfying. One problem is that liberalism, without sufficient context, is frustratingly nebulous. As historian Adam Tooze notes, liberalism “means and has meant many different things:” After all, “John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, John Rawls and Margaret Thatcher are all reasonably identified as liberals.”

In fact, depending on your vantage point, two very distinct strains of liberalism either briefly converged or split apart around the time of the French Revolution. There was the bourgeois liberalism of Hanseatic burghers, London coffeehouses, Scottish moral philosophers, and landed American colonists. Then there was proletarian liberalism, which recognized structural inequities and believed that politics was about righting social and economic wrongs in favor of the systemically disadvantaged. Both conceptions arose within the Third Estate; both required rebellion against the ancien régime of the European aristocracy. But they diverged to become the forerunners of the Western political traditions of the right (conservatism, libertarianism, Austrian economics, Christian democracy) and left (progressivism, socialism, Keynesianism, social democracy). In this sense, all modern democratic politics in advanced industrial societies has been a contest between two liberal traditions.

Additionally, liberalism, contrary to Fukuyama’s somewhat Whiggish account of its progress, stumbled from crisis to crisis for much of its history. Despite the 18th-century revolutions, the 19th century was in some ways decidedly illiberal, featuring a reactionary political elite in Europe, chattel slavery in the United States, and global wars of nationalism and colonialism. The first half of the 20th century forced the more liberal powers to contend with fascism and manifestations of competing imperialisms, including colonial competition, domestic oppression, and ideological compromises. In the second half of the century, liberals had to contend against Soviet communism, often prioritizing ends over means. The people of Algeria, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, and South Africa may be forgiven for their lack of nostalgia for the post-World War II liberal international order. Fukuyama’s contention that postwar Europeans “saw the folly of organizing politics around an exclusive and aggressive understanding of nation” does not fully acknowledge Europe’s rigidity when it came to immigration, decolonization, and multiculturalism.

None of this means that liberalism should be jettisoned on grounds of hypocrisy, as its critics frequently conclude; but the case for liberalism is far stronger if made on concrete and material rather than moral grounds. It remains the case that liberalism, not any other ideology, created the conditions for the absence of large-scale conflict and the growth of unprecedented (albeit unevenly distributed) global prosperity over the past three decades.

There are also inconsistencies in Fukuyama’s portrayal of the universality of liberalism. As he observes, liberal individualism has always been at odds with the social proclivities of human beings, especially in “non-Western societies,” where “kin, caste, or ethnic ties are still facts of life.” Yet he subsequently argues that “liberalism properly understood is perfectly compatible with communitarian impulses and has been the basis for the flourishing of deep and diverse forms of civil society.”

There are also inconsistencies in Fukuyama’s portrayal of the universality of liberalism. As he observes, liberal individualism has always been at odds with the social proclivities of human beings, especially in “non-Western societies,” where “kin, caste, or ethnic ties are still facts of life.”

So, is liberalism then universal, or isn’t it? Is it compatible with identity politics—and, if so, to what extent? Those questions remain unresolved; and, being unresolved, they lie at the heart of many of liberalism’s problems today.

For liberalism, the equivalent of John Cage’s “4’33″” composition may have been the evening in August of 2008 when the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics served as an announcement of China’s global ambitions. On the same day, Russian forces entered Georgia. In the same month, Lehman Brothers laid off 1,500 employees, a precursor to its crash and the global financial crisis. In that year, the Chinese navy deployed to the Gulf of Aden in its first modern operations outside its claimed territorial waters. These developments, though obscured by Barack Obama’s historic election victory that November, heralded an end to Western liberal primacy.

Still, liberalism has not come crashing down in the years since. Liberal aspirations—human dignity, individualism, equal rights—remain achievable, desirable, and inherently unobjectionable. What the events of the last twelve years have done is to expose liberalism’s inherent weaknesses. Human beings are not just logical but emotional creatures. Free markets attain miraculous economic growth but undermine equality of opportunity. Access to abundant information does not guarantee enlightenment. Individuals exercising free choice may choose to be tribal. Elected officials exploit these conditions.

The way to perfect these imperfections is not simply to reaffirm liberalism’s moral superiority. It is to tinker continuously with liberalism, exploring the potentially infinite variations upon its themes.

Source: https://www.orfonline.org/research/when-liberalism-grows-up/

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Why India’s Muslims Reach for Liberalism

2020/10/31 Leave a comment

Of note:

By now, the world knows that Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) have eroded the liberal principles of the Indian Constitution and are turning the country into an increasingly illiberal democracy. It is common knowledge that Mr. Modi thrives on the grievances and bigotries that pit privileged majorities against minorities living in fear.

Less familiar, but much more hopeful, is the response of the main target of this majoritarian assault: India’s Muslim minority — roughly 172 million people who account for just about 14.2 percent of India’s total population of approximately 1.32 billion people, roughly 79.8 percent of whom are Hindu.

This large religious minority of Muslims has gone through a hard time in recent years at the hands of Hindu supremacists: They have faced lynchings, lethal riots, and social and political disenfranchisement.

When minorities are pushed to such walls, they may retreat into a siege mentality that breeds radicalization. But India’s Muslims have not come up with calls for violent jihad, nor chants for Shariah law. Instead, they have embraced and emphasized the blessings of liberal democracy by placing their faith in the Constitution of India and insisting on their constitutional rights as citizens.

This hopeful tack was most visible during the mass protests for three months that started in December against the Citizenship Amendment Act, an unabashedly discriminatory law enacted by the government that fast-tracked citizenship for Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist immigrants from neighboring countries, but not for Muslims, whom Home Minister Amit Shah tried to dehumanize as “termites.”

Mr. Shah has also proposed a national register of citizens requiring documentary evidence for place of birth and residence that many Indians, especially the poor, lack. Of these the non-Muslims could escape through the loophole in the new Citizenship Amendment Act, but Muslims would find themselves stateless and liable to be put into detention camps.

In response, Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in New Delhi, held a 101-day sit-in against the citizenship law and the proposed citizenship registry, with the protest led not by conservative Muslim clerics, but by Muslim women. Thousands occupied a protest tent 24 hours each day by rotating in shifts and displaying banners saying, “We stand for peace, harmony and fraternity.” They also showed portraits of the Hindu leaders who led India’s independence movement, and festooned their dais with the preamble of the secular Constitution.

The B.J.P.’s propaganda machine depicted Muslim protesters as “traitors” and “anti-nationals,” but they were wearing headbands saying, “I love India.” waving Indian flags, and repeatedly singing the national anthem.

In other campaigns, Indian Muslim women in recent years challenged not just Hindu supremacism but also patriarchy within their own community. Through successful appeals to the Supreme Court — which upholds India’s constitutional principles — they obtained a legal ban in 2017 on “instant divorce,” a contested Shariah ruling that gives Muslim men the right to abandon their wives at will. Another Muslim women’s group gained a 2016 court decision that enforced women’s constitutionally guaranteed right of equal entry, along with men, to a Sufi shrine in Mumbai.

All such liberal moves, according to Sharik Laliwala, a Muslim Indian commentator, signify “a fundamental transformation in the political strategy of the Muslim community.” Indian Muslims, he added, are “marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions.”

Irfan Ahmad, an Indian anthropologist based at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, argues that what is happening is a new emphasis rather than a transformation, which Indian Muslims have always sought along with pluralism. The protests in Shaheen Bagh, he adds, highlighted the rift between the B.J.P.’s rule by and for the Hindu majority and a new vision of democracy that would uphold the rights and dignity of all Indians, including Muslims.

Yet there is still a danger that B.J.P. ruthlessness may backfire and drive Muslims into radicalism. In September, Umar Khalid, a secular left-wing student leader who is Muslim, was arrested on highly contested charges of orchestrating Hindu-Muslims riots last February in Delhi, where most victims were Muslim.

All of this means that India is on a very wrong track. A country that does not treat its minorities as equal human beings will be not the world’s biggest democracy, but rather a tyranny of the majority.

The results may be social strife, radicalism, decline of economic progress, and the ruination of India’s image abroad. The country is already being criticized by human rights organizations for violating human rights in Kashmir, and more recently for forcing Amnesty International’s office in India to close.

India’s story could hold lessons for Muslims elsewhere. Across the border, Pakistan long ago established what India’s B.J.P. seeks: an ethno-religious state dominated by the majority. In Pakistan’s case, this means the hegemony of Sunni Muslims at the expense of minorities such as Shiite Muslims, Ahmadis or Christians.

Farther in the East, in Malaysia, Malay-Muslim supremacy has been an official ideology since the founding of the multireligious nation in 1957. In Turkey, the Islam-infused populism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with its own insatiable wrath against “traitors” and “anti-nationals,” has strong parallels with Mr. Modi’s populism. And in the parlance of Islamist movements everywhere, “liberalism” and “secular state” are only dirty words, if not heresies.

Alas, it seems that many Muslims in countries other than India enjoy the tyranny of the majority when they themselves are in the majority and control the state, while others realize the blessings of liberalism if they are in minorities. Of course, such a double standard is neither virtuous nor defensible.

A more principled Muslim view of politics is needed, and for that, Muslim opinion leaders should observe the experience of their coreligionists in India. The latter, the largest religious minority in the world, has an important story with a lesson: Human rights and liberties must be defended in every nation, in every civilization. Without them, only power rules. And instead of betting on power, which may be won or lost, they should try to constrain it everywhere, so that no one group is oppressed and everyone is free.

Mustafa Akyol, a contributing Opinion writer, is a senior fellow on Islam and modernity at the Cato Institute, and the author of the forthcoming book “Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance.” Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, is a columnist for The Times of India, and a commentator for India’s television.

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ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism to defend their common values

2019/07/24 Leave a comment

Good column:

Why would anyone describe himself as a conservative? While we’re at it, why describe yourself as a liberal? Or socialist? Or libertarian? The point is not that there is anything wrong with any of these — only that there is something right with all of them. Each of the traditions, that is, has something to teach us. Why limit yourself to just one?

Still, people do. The desire to belong to a tribe – or perhaps, to quarrel with another – is one of the deepest urges of humanity. But tribalism, ideological or other, is not just self-blinding. On occasion it leads to madness. Consider the present state of conservatism, a tribe that has, as the past week has illuminated, lost its way, if not its mind.

If it were just a matter of Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four racial-minority congresswomen – the latest in a long series, but arguably the worst — it might be put down to his own personal depravity. If it were just the chants (“send her home’’) of the people at his rally in Greenville, N.C., it might be written off as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

But Trump, it is abundantly clear, stands atop a vast infrastructure: the Republican leaders who shrug off his abuses for the sake of party unity; the commentators who look the other way so long as he champions their pet causes; the base who are content with whatever he does so long as it annoys the liberal media; and underpinning all, a set of beliefs – superstitions, prejudices, call them what you will – that predate Trump, but which he has helped to make the credo of the conservative movement.

It was convenient that in the same week as Trump was issuing such crude appeals to hatred and bigotry, a group of academics, journalists and politicians were meeting at a hotel in Washington in an attempt to give a veneer of intellectual credibility to Trumpism. The “National Conservatism” conference underlined how completely conservatism, at least in the United States, has been turned on its head.

The conservatism of the post-war decades, a sometimes uneasy coalition of social conservatives, free marketers and hawkish internationalists, has been replaced by a populist-nationalist conservatism marked by hatred of “globalist” elites, hostility to immigration and fear of foreign trade, and by its enthusiasm for whichever strongman will protect America from these.

Where conservatives were traditionally advocates of limited government, wary of government intervention and worried about deficits, today’s conservatives embrace many of the same limitless-government approaches as the left – “collectivism rebranded for the right,” as the Republican-turned-independent Congressman Justin Amash calls it.

Where conservatives were skeptics of change, pragmatists seeking to reconcile the necessity of reform with the wisdom of tradition, the Trumpians are as reckless as they are reactionary, heedless to the social and institutional harm they have caused in the name of Making America Great Again.

And as the conference highlighted, the civic nationalism that American conservatives used to cherish – the nation to which anyone could belong so long as they subscribed to the basic ideals of the American political system, not least its reverence for the equality of every individual under the Constitution – has been replaced by a more culturally-specific, if not ethnic definition, majoritarian and monocultural rather than liberal and pluralist, that is not easily distinguished from xenophobia or indeed racism: identity politics for white people.

Canadians will be familiar with this from, for example, the Bill 21 debate. Still, few in this country would go so far as the University of Pennsylvania law professor who told the conference that, as people from certain cultures were more likely to fit into a “modern advanced society” like the United States, and as those people came mostly from Europe and the First World, and as those societies are “mostly white for now,” it followed that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” But not, you know, in a racist way.

This is, as The Economist put it in a recent issue, “not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it.” The conservatism I grew up with was basically a species of liberalism, part of the same Western liberal inheritance but more alert to liberalism’s potential for overreach. Its mission was, if you like, to save liberalism from the liberals. As such it represented a continuous tradition that, even as it changed with the times, represented certain enduring ideals. How can the very opposite set of ideas also be called conservatism without doing violence to the language?

Perhaps, as others have suggested, this is naive. Maybe there are no permanent or defining principles of conservatism, independent of its practitioners. Perhaps conservatism is whatever self-described conservatives happen to believe at the time. Trump enjoys the approval of 90 per cent of Republicans; even in Canada, according to a recent Abacus Data poll, 46 per cent of Canadian Conservatives have either a positive or neutral impression of him. Maybe it’s time to concede the point.

If so, then perhaps it is time for a more fundamental political realignment. If conservatism is now to mean its opposite, perhaps it is time for conservatives of the old school to make their peace with liberalism – for the two estranged children of the Enlightenment to reunite in defence of its values. The differences between them that once seemed so great look trivial now, compared to what they have in common, and in light of what they both oppose.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism …https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/…/andrew-coyne-its-time-for-old-school-conservati…

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