The world may be reaching a dangerous inflection point for liberalism. According to the latest reports from Freedom House, over the last 15 years the share of unfree countries in the world has risen while the share of free countries has dropped. Today, government deficits are spiking in response to the publics demand for intervention to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and some warn that authoritarian leaders are seizing the opportunity to expand their control.

Still, this may be a time when liberalism starts to gain ground, not lose it. A new study by World Bank economists, drawing on data from 190 economies spanning the last 15 years, finds that fiscal crisesof the sort created by the pandemic in countries around the worldare likely to spur liberal reforms, particularly in the economic policy areas of property, investment, and trade.

How liberal advocates act on this glimmer of hope will be crucial. Post-Cold War efforts to spread liberal democracy have disappointed to date. Instead of ushering in the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama predicted in 1989, a know-it-all approach to proselytizing liberal institutions to other countries has engendered widespread resentment toward Western influences. And yet, its more complicated. The political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes recently argued that we should think of that resentment not as a rejection of liberalism, per se, but as an indignant reaction to its perceived imposition.

Whats the lesson here? Liberals must stop thinking of liberalism as theirs alone to give. Instead, they should recognize it as a universal ideal that has roots in many different traditions and cultures. It is on such foundations that enduring liberal institutions can be built in diverse places.

Extensive research on institutional change bears that out. There is a saying: People support what they help create. For liberal institutions to stick in new places, they must not be mere knockoffs of institutions that grew elsewhere. The Wests own liberal democratic institutions, including the division of powers, property rights, freedom of exchange, free speech, and public deliberation, are idiosyncratic versions of liberal ideals, but not the ideals themselves. They are successful, but theyre works in progress. They are worthy of thoughtful study, but theyre not suited for franchise-like plug and play.

This should prompt a tectonic shift in the foreign aid approach to development. A growing number of voices within development circles have been trying to do just that. They advocate a localization agenda, which means shrinking the role and influence of foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations and narrowing their focus to a few areas where they are better suited to help, such as information-sharing and providing operating support for local NGOs to increase their capacity to lead change for themselves.

With widespread belt-tightening across the development sector due to the coronavirus pandemic, including at major institutions such as Oxfam and the U.K. Department for International Development, such a radical change has become thinkable, perhaps even imminent, in a way we would not have imagined a year ago. This may provide a short window to permanently curb the undue influence of outsiders on local development questions.

Thats not to suggest a pure agnosticism about what to support abroad. Liberal reforms and liberal institutions should remain the priority. The same logic that commends federalism and its principles of subsidiarity applies equally to development work in other countries: Decentralization works. But if foreigners continue to hold the reins, even unwittingly, their efforts will continue to breed resentment and, more importantly, fail to serve local needs.

For maximum effect, we should look to private philanthropy for most grant-making to foreign NGOs. Voluntary nongovernmental philanthropy is less liable to special-interest distortions and political manipulation. Just as importantly, private philanthropy can be less rigid about predetermined compliance requirements.

Such flexibility is important. Through the grant-making our organization has administered to think tanks and other NGOs in recent years, we have learned to hold our tongues and listen. We invite our grantees to tell us whats possible, whats important, how they will do it, and, most importantly, how they will measure meaningfully their success for the projects they are proposing.

That model fits best with what we know about the diffusion of good ideas and practices. In their study on Regulatory Reforms after Covid-19, Simeon Djankov and other World Bank economists also found that countries that share borders or that trade heavily with each other are more likely to adopt for themselves the reforms of their neighbors and commercial partners. They see with their own eyes the successes and failures in neighboring countries and can, on their own initiative, decide for themselves what changes to pursue and how best to pursue them.

Decentralized liberalism is a prudent strategy for navigating this time of great uncertainty. In 2020, we have seen the limits of centralized models at work. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Internal Revenue Service to the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and, at the global level, the United Nations World Health Organization, big institutions have failed. Its a stark reminder that there are very real limits to the types of problems that distant authorities are able to solve, no matter how well-funded or well-trained they are.

Early in this crisis, the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates invested billions of dollars in seven different vaccine candidates simultaneously knowing that, at best, one or two might work. Gates knows what a big mistake it can be to place all your bets on one unproven solution. Not only does it raise the stakes considerably if you get it wrong, but it also severely limits any opportunities for learning, since there are no alternative results for comparison.

Liberal economies, with their presumption of decentralized decision-making, allow fast-acting, widespread, uncoordinated experimentation and learning. That model takes advantage of centralized knowledge and expertise, to be sure, but it also integrates the dispersed knowledge the rest of us possess about our individual circumstances. People close to the problems can find solutions that actually work, long before a large and distant bureaucracy ever could.

Our instinct when facing fear and uncertainty is to shift the tough decisions to the experts and to insist on one uniformand presumably bestsolution to our diverse problems. Experts play important roles in collating and disseminating knowledge, but they cannot know enough to successfully conjure up one great solution for us all. Its the lesson we have learned in our failed attempt to install liberal democracies throughout the world. In this moment of crisis, we now have a second chance to get it right. Lets keep making history.

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The Pandemic Could Be the Crisis Liberalism Needed - Foreign Policy

Shyam Saran

Former Foreign Secretary and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research

The liberal spirit is suffering from terminal angst. Its political expression in liberal democracy is an endangered political species. What is the liberal spirit? It is a conception of society where the dignity of the individual is sacrosanct and rights are citizen based. A liberal society upholds the fundamental rights of each individual to life, liberty, expression and association, the only restraint being the rule of law, not the rule of state or a group or community. The liberal spirit not merely tolerates but celebrates dissent. It believes in the dictum that what is more dangerous is not when there are questions to which there are no answers but rather when there are answers which are not open to question. A liberal society creates equal opportunities for each individual to develop his innate genius and realise his potential. It is non-discriminatory among individuals irrespective of caste, creed or religion. But fraternity is equally fundamental because a sense of affinity with ones fellow citizens, the empathy for one another in recognition of a larger humanity, these are values without which a liberal society has no meaning.

To survive and to flourish, a liberal society needs a unique state structure, namely, the political dispensation of a liberal democracy. The state is as much bound by the rule of law as is the citizen and exercise of state authority is subject to challenge by even the most humble of its citizens. Another feature is the existence of independent and constitutionally empowered institutions which serve to restrain the arbitrary exercise of state power. An independent media and a robust civil society are its other essential ingredients. For a concrete and comprehensive articulation of the liberal spirit and the institution of liberal democracy, one need look no further than the Constitution of India. But while lip service is paid to the Constitution and constitutionally empowered institutions still remain in place, these are being systematically and relentlessly hollowed out. This is not just true in India but in other democracies as well. How has this happened?

I trace the origins of this slide to 1980 when Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK led the retreat of the state from the economy and elevated laissez-faire economic strategies as instruments of both economic prosperity and social welfare. The role of the state in wealth and income redistribution was progressively decimated and even made illegitimate. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave further momentum to this trend. The magic of the marketplace was now hitched together to the notion of liberal democracy. Free markets led to successful liberal democracies and liberal democracies became synonymous with free markets. Thus was born the touching faith in the inevitability of Chinas embrace of capitalism leading to its becoming like one of us. But the very moment of seeming victory of liberal democracy marked the beginning of its unravelling. It became obvious that there was nothing automatic about a free market leading to egalitarian society. The enshrinement of competition, above all else, in delivering prosperity paid no attention to those left behind.

The failure of liberalism lies precisely in its acquiescence in this new orthodoxy, its failure to question these answers. Globalisation delivered immense benefits across the board in terms of rising prosperity but states failed to ensure the egalitarian distribution of these benefits because the free market was assumed to achieve that automatically. Globalisation is not responsible for inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity. It is the failure of public policy which liberals failed to expose. When the free market went into free fall in 2007-08, so did the credibility of the liberal democratic ideal. India has not been immune to these forces. The orthodoxies of the past four decades are no longer tenable. How can one salvage the liberal ideal and liberal democracy?

The liberal idea must be preserved. It still has the power to help us deal with the challenges we confront today because it is the unbounded contention of ideas that will engender possible solutions. If globalisation is here to stay, as I am convinced it is, then we need societies that are capable of adapting to change, of being able to handle immense diversity and cultivate a new spirit of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Only liberal democracies with their respect for diversity and commitment to non-discrimination are best suited to navigate the new landscape. The pandemic raging in our midst is laying bare the bankruptcy of populist authoritarianism and crass mediocrity that pretends to represent the disempowered and deprived but is unable, unwilling and incapable of mobilising society to deal with current and looming challenges. Instead, there is a constant recourse to quick fixes, the bypassing of institutions and of constitutional norms, and worse, the overturning of the very notion of the rule of law. This is how in India, we have ended up with brazen encounter killings to applause from large sections of society which are unable to understand that once the rule of law is breached they will be its next victims.

How do we engage in a discourse that leads us back to a contemporary design of liberal democracy? What must be its key features? The renewed exploration of the Constitution is a good starting point. Even those paying lip service can hardly object.

If liberalism survives in India, its future in the rest of the world may be brighter.

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Reclaiming the liberal idea - The Tribune India

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Famous late-night show host Stephen Colbert once quipped, Reality has a well-known liberal bias. Is political comedy inherently a liberal act? It is an interesting but half-ignorant question. Primarily because most people consuming political comedy might never have actually heard a conservative comic.

Since the 1990s in the US, and over the past decade in India, stand-up comedy has had a predominantly liberal tone. But only if it ended here. Stand-ups around the world have now become the vanguard of liberalism, and consider it their moral duty to call out the excesses of the regimes in a funny, sardonic way.

But 55-year old Fox News anchor and comedian Greg Gutfeld would like to disagree. Recently, he compared cancel culture to Covid-19, calling it contagious, air-borne, with a low barrier for entry. For Libs (liberals), nothing is safe, including Hamilton the musical they all adored. The critics now point out that (Alexander) Hamilton was a White guy who owned slaves, who knew? he said.

Well, we all did, Gutfeld responds to his own rhetorical question with a straight face.

In the recent past, the comedian has made fun of liberals who, after propagating defund the police, clarified by asking not to take the words literally. He called Hilary Clinton the gift that keeps giving because you can come up with analogies, metaphors and descriptions for her, just by the virtue of her never going away. And Steve Bannon the ideological godfather of Donald Trumps 2016 election campaign as a circus peanut, left out in the sun on a minivan dashboard.

You might laugh at his joke, you might get annoyed by them sometimes, but Gutfeld is the conservative comic we need to preserve. There arent many of his kind, and we are at a time when we need someone to make fun of liberals who just keep pushing the ceiling. And there is perhaps no one better than Gutfeld, who is blowing up the Beltway liberal consensus of America.

Liberals should engage with Gutfeld not just because of his fine political insights, but also because if you can laugh with him, you might actually pass the ultimate liberal test.

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Also read: Agrima Joshua is Everywoman on social media with a view. We know why she apologised

Greg Gutfeld started off as a magazine editor, and earned initial fame as the editor-in-chief of mens health magazine, Stuff. Under him, the magazine increased its readership from 7.5 lakh to 10.2 lakh, creating a controversy month after month. But Gutfeld really gained popularity through his 3 am late night show called Red Eye, which ran from 2007 to 2015.

The New Yorkers Kelefa Sanneh described Red Eye as an odd and often funny late-night show that is not exactly satire, and not exactly anything else, either.

Its sensibility is snarky and surreal, thanks to its host, Greg Gutfeld who adopts a tone of half-sarcastic alarm, as if he cant decide which is more annoying: the politician he is talking about, or the fact that he has to talk about politicians, Sanneh wrote.

Gutfeld now runs his own late-night show, The Greg Gutfeld Show, which had an average of 2.86 million viewers in April, ahead of Colbert and Jimmy Kimmels late-night shows.

Also read: Move over political comedy, Danish Saits lockdown humour pokes fun at middle-class Indians

Gutfeld likes to identify as a libertarian, but what makes him unique is his inert need to constantly stray away from the popular norms and opinions, even when it comes to comedy. This is what gives Gutfelds comedy a refreshing sense of political realism.

Nothing highlights this better than Gutfelds take on Trumps decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

Describing Trump, Gutfeld opened his show by remarking, Well, the big orange meanie has struck again. Then, reacting to liberal media referring to Trumps decision as obscene and madness, Gutfeld said, Its a reaction we have come to expect from the children in the room, none of whom cared much about the pandemic because they were too busy smoking the crack pipe of impeachment

But are you surprised by Trumps actions? Are you like the media in which every day is the first day of Trumps presidency? No, you get it. Trumps strategy from day one is based on incentives Nothing is off limits, he said, chiding media anchors at CNN and MSNBC.

In contrast, Colbert reacted to the same news by saying, He is defunding the World Health Organization during a global pandemic. Brilliant. Its like when your house is engulfed in flames, first thing you do, burn down the fire department.

Colbert is not wrong, neither is he any less funny, and probably a lot less angry than Gutfeld. But there is something that makes the latter unique, his comedy often gives insight into how Trump thinks, unlike most Left and liberal comics.

Also read: How cancel culture has turned liberals against each other and is rocking newsrooms

Greg Gutfeld is nowhere close to a liberal, and his shows are a window to his politics. For instance, while doing a segment on Trumps infamous rally at Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, Gutfeld just gave a rundown of what the president spoke, without once commenting on the fact that no social distancing was practised at the rally.

At the end of the day, Gutfeld is a Trump supporter which is not an issue but it often makes him defend preposterous policies of President Trump.

On the recent race protests in the US following the killing of Black American George Floyd by a White policeman, Gutfeld said, When you are having 10 million arrests and something like 15 million police encounters a year, you know ten of these incidents could very easily happen, make 20, twice a month if we treat these the way we treat them now, without context, this country is not gonna survive.

We have to stop making this a Black versus White issue and make it a Black and White issue, he added.

But there is still something unique that Gutfeld brings to the table. During an interview in 2018, Gutfeld tried to shed light on Trumps thought process and his political method.

Speaking about his observations on Trump during the 2016 campaign, Gutfeld said he started to look at him less as a political figure and more as a host of a comedy roast. And what he had done was he had basically redefined every context he was in.

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Love him or hate him, but conservative Greg Gutfeld is the ultimate test for liberals - ThePrint

As a liberal Christian woman of Jewish heritage, I read Harlan Edmonds' words Sunday, July 12, with horror.

Descriptors like ignorant, divisive, treasonous, liars, arrogant and evil are words I have read before. Substitute Jews for liberals, and you have speeches from 1930 Germany. Yes, liberals believe in rights for all people; yes, they see that racism toward Black, Hispanic, Native American or any group based on color, creed or faith as wrong.

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Edmonds' descriptions of liberals in recent column were shocking - Wyoming Tribune

Sunday morning, I went driving around Cheyenne to see what churches were meeting under the new guidelines the governor put out recently. One observation was evident: The majority of evangelical churches were meeting in person.

Of the 10 liberal churches in town, only one of them was meeting in person. I drove by at the times those churches normally meet, and only one had people who came to assemble themselves together, as Hebrews 10 commands Christians to do. On a number of the reader boards outside these churches, the message said the service was online.

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Liberal churches remain closed, focused on issues of the day - Wyoming Tribune

Weiss observations hold true for most self-proclaimed liberal newsrooms across the world.

Last year on 5 August, when India mainstreamed its state of Jammu and Kashmir by taking away special status under Article 370, liberal western media erupted with war cries. An unending stream of articles started appearing, targeting India and nationalist Hindus.

None of those pieces took into account that India as a sovereign nation is entitled to grant a part of its territory equal, not inferior, status under law. Or that Article 370 was a tool to egg on separatism and Islamic terrorism in Kashmir. Or that it impinged on the rights of women, Dalits, migrant labourers, and even LGBTQIA persons.

After relentlessly attacking India in its op-eds, when The New York Timesapproached Indias nationalist governments ideological anchor organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), it was met with scorn.

On being told that it never carries the other view,NYT apparently agreed to carry a piece by RSS ideologue Manmohan Vaidya. But senior RSS leaders say that when the piece was submitted on the condition that portions would not be conveniently edited out, it never appeared.

The NYT apparently cited a lone piece by the Indian ambassador to the US to say it had done the needful, implying it would be an excess to give the Indian view any more space. It, however, continues to carry scores of articles from the Left and Islamist anti-India standpoint on Kashmir.

Most Indians, therefore, are not surprised to read Bari Weiss' scorching resignation letter to the NYT, accusing it of the most nauseating, oppressive censorship and bullying in the name of liberalism.

Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions, she writes. My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist.

She says her work and character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly inclusive one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.

Weiss observations hold true for most self-proclaimed liberal newsrooms across the world.

Mainly because the very word liberal has been hijacked by the worlds two most illiberal ideologies: Islamism and Communism.

And these two ideologies have systematically taken over campuses in the West and democracies elsewhere, and are now baring their wolf fangs from under their sheep skin of sanctimony and political correctness.

In his piece The Rock That Broke Liberalism in the Dhaka Tribune after Narendra Modis 2019 election sweep, Shafiqur Rahman does some hard analysis on the failure of the liberal order.

Stubborn defence of group identity by Muslims of the world has made upholding group identity respectable for all groups, majority or minority, powerful or weak If Muslims can be unabashedly assertive about the sanctity of their religious identity and traditions, other groups can be unapologetic about their respective identities too, Rahman writes.

In established democracies, Muslims are generally politically allied with liberal progressives, and this alliance has opened liberals up to accusation of double standards in protecting a very illiberal minority identity. Abandoning universalism and embracing identitarianism is hollowing out liberalism from within. Either the principles of liberalism apply for all groups or none at all.

It is this hypocrisy that Weiss repeatedly dwells on while talking about the NYT newsroom.

If a persons ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinised. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets, she writes.

Indian journalists, students, academicians and intellectuals with a Right-leaning, Indic or nationalistic view have suffered this secular, liberal apartheid for over seven decades. They would be taunted, hounded, denied peer review of their books, called regressive or vernac, not hired in jobs, marginalised or sacked.

On TV, there would be a token dissenting voice in a large panel and the anchor would seldom allow that person to speak uninterrupted even for a short while.

The situation has changed in the last six years, but derogatory labels like sanghi or bhakt or fascist are widely used to cut them down to size and avoid genuine debate on issues.

Such is the intolerance of the Left activists that even basic conservative or nationalist ideas of capitalism, individualism, limited government, strong defence and pride in tradition are portrayed as tyrannical. The Wests new social justice warriors justify violence against those who hold such ideas.

American journalist Sasha Polakow-Suransky argues in his book Go Back To Where You Came From that failure [of liberals] to confront the real tensions and failures of integration, by pretending violent extremism and attacks on free speech were not problems, infuriated many voters and left them feeling abandoned by mainstream parties.

Alexis Levit elaborates on this violent, head-shrinking intolerance on campus in the Stanford Review:Ben Shapiro spoke at Memorial Auditorium in November, causing intense upheaval. Following the speech, Dailyheadlines asked, When will Stanford begin to protect its students? Activists portrayed Shapiro as a cockroach to be exterminated. A large crowd amassed outside Memorial Auditorium to harass attendees, shouting loudly about the lives that had come under attack as a result of Shapiros appearance. Does something so trivial as a speech by a conservative really warrant this type of hysteria and outrage?

Francis Fukuyamas 1989 prediction of the end of history and a permanent liberal order with the collapse of Soviet Union was grossly premature.

By sleeping with the worst illiberals and condoning them, liberals have set off something quite the reverse.

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India knows what Bari Weiss is talking about: The intolerance of liberals - Firstpost