Monthly Archives: January 2020

Calvin in Hell, Egbert van Heemskerck the Younger (c.170010). (Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

To understand Liberalism, we need to understand early modern Calvinism. This is the central claim made by Harvard professor James Simpson in his idiosyncratic but challenging new book, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism. As its dust jacket proclaims, Simpson means to rewrite the history of liberalism by uncovering its unexpected debt to evangelical religion. His aim is to show how the English Reformation, so authoritarian in its beginnings, culminated in the proto-liberal Glorious Revolution settlement of 168889 and led to the English Enlightenment.Ad Policy Books in Review

The key feature of that settlement, Simpson argues, was the Toleration Act, which gave ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion by allowing Protestant Dissenters from the Church of England freedom of worship and exemption from the penalties previously attached to nonattendance at Anglican services. This exemption was not extended to Roman Catholics, Unitarians, or Jews, and public office continued to be confined to those who worshipped in the Church of England. Many of the legislators saw toleration less as a matter of principle than as an unpleasant necessity, a pragmatic way of avoiding further strife. Nevertheless, Simpson insists that this was a foundational moment for the English liberal tradition. The Toleration Act was accompanied by a Bill of Rights declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and was followed by statutory provision for the annual meeting of Parliament, the independence of the judiciary, and qualified freedom of the press.

Whether or not this was the foundational moment of English liberalism, one might also ask in what sense this was all a consequence of Calvinism. The conventional answer is that, by making the vernacular Bible accessible to all, the Protestant reformers encouraged people to think for themselves and claim the right to do so. In addition, their doctrine of the priesthood of all believers generated a belief in human equality and encouraged respect for personal religious experience, private judgment, and individual conscience. Out of this came notions of individuality and human rights.

Many historians of political thought agree that, in this way, liberalism grew out of evangelical religion. Simpson toys with this interpretation in his discussion of the poet John Miltons radical thought, which he suggests was hammered out of, and bore powerful traces ofilliberal Protestantism. But in every other respect he categorically rejects the notion that the Reformation led inexorably to liberalism, describing the idea as unacceptable Whig triumphalism. He twice quotes Herbert Butterfields observation in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) that religious liberty was not the natural product of Protestantism but emerged painfully and grudginglyout of the tragedy of the post-Reformation world. Following Butterfields lead, Simpson argues that the liberal tradition is the younger sibling of evangelical religion but that it derives from Protestantism by repudiating it. Early Protestantism, he asserts, was so punishingly violent, fissiparous and unsustainable that it eventually led its adherents to invent a political doctrine to stabilize cultures after 150 years of psychic and social violence; the result was nascent liberalism. Unfortunately, the suggestion that it was not until 1688 that quasi-liberal sentiments were widely voiced in England flies in the face of the evidence. So does the notion that it was only in a religious context that they emerged at all.

Simpsons claim that liberal ideas were a by-product of the Reformationone unintended by its original makersis by no means new, though it has never been so relentlessly pursued. Two hundred and thirty years ago, in a little-noticed section of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon observed that the Reformation taught each Christian to acknowledge no law but the scriptures, no interpreter but his own conscience. This freedom, however, was the consequence, rather than the design, of the Reformation. The patriot reformers were ambitious of succeeding the tyrants whom they had dethroned. They imposed with equal rigour their creeds and confessions; they asserted the right of the magistrate to punish heretics with death. The same point was made by the great liberal historian G.P. Gooch in his 1898 The History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century and by the quasi-Marxist philosopher and social theorist Harold Laski in his 1936 Rise of European Liberalism, both of whom argued that liberal ideas were an unintended consequence of the Reformation and thus anathema to its makers. More recently, Berkeley historian Ethan Shagan has maintained that Protestantism was an authoritarian project, not a liberal one, and that the Enlightenment was a reaction against the habits of mind the Reformation had generated. But if that is all that Simpson means by the illiberal roots of liberalism, one might equally well speak of the Catholic roots of Protestantism or the capitalist roots of Marxism.

Simpson could have made a different and much stronger case for the Protestant origins of liberalism had he not completely passed over (Miltons writings excepted) the astonishing ferment of ideas that erupted between 1642 and 1660, the years of the English Civil War and Interregnum. In a brilliant essay, British historian Blair Worden took this ferment seriously and, as a result, offers a far more sophisticated approach to the question of liberalisms Protestant roots. John Calvin, he notes, maintained that spiritual libertyby which he meant emancipation from the bondage of sin and complete submission to Gods willis perfectly compatible with the absence of civil liberty. But as Worden points out, this view was rejected in the 1640s by many radical English Protestants, who, faced with Presbyterian intolerance, realized that their spiritual goals could not be attained if they were denied the freedom to practice their religion. Congregationalists, Levellers, and army leaders therefore claimed that liberty of conscience and worship was a civil right, even though, paradoxically, they thought of it as the right to become Gods slaves. They extended the same plea of conscience to include other civil liberties, such as the right to form separatist congregations or to withhold the payment of tithes. By stressing this new kind of Protestant political thought, Worden was able to conclude that it was from within Puritanism, not in reaction to it, that the demand for civil liberty and thus liberalism emerged.

In a valuable recent study, Stanford historian David Como further illuminates the process by which, in the 1640s, liberty of consciencesometimes even for Jews, Muslims, and atheistscame to be seen by many Protestant separatists in England as a fundamental political right, indivisibly connected to other inviolable civil liberties like freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, and freedom to vote in parliamentary elections. As the century wore on, he argues, the theological trappings tended to be clipped away, and these claims were sometimes presented as the natural Right of Mankind.Current Issue

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Simpson not only misses this emergence of liberal ideas in the 1640s; his preoccupation with Protestantism also leads him to give insufficient space to the many historians of political thought who have pointed to the nontheological origins of liberalism. He recognizes the influence of the humanistic neo-Roman theory of liberty, but he says little about the medieval vogue for natural law theories, though it was from this tradition that the idea of human rights emerged in the 17th century, starting with the universal right to self-preservation postulated by Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. He also makes only the vaguest reference to the resistance theories formulated by Protestant authors in the reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor, which gave the people both the right and the duty to remove tyrannous or idolatrous rulers. Instead, having explained liberalism as a simple reaction to what preceded it, Simpson devotes most of his book not to charting its rise but to following the illiberal progress of Protestantism over the same period, painting a vivid, indeed passionate, picture of what he sees as its devastating contribution to human unhappiness.

Echoing political theorist Michael Walzers 1965 The Revolution of the Saints, which portrayed Puritanism as a revolutionary ideology and the Puritan saint as the first active, ideologically committed political radical, Simpson identifies Protestantism as a revolutionary movement. His original contribution to this insight is to extend the boundaries of the revolution. He argues that the break with Rome was only the first stage in a state of permanent revolution, as Protestants repeatedly and compulsively repudiated previous forms and generated new ones, only to abandon them in due course for yet another nostrum, eventually clearing the path for a new liberal politics.

This is in many respects a useful way to characterize the shifts from the 1530s to the 1640s, from King Henry VIIIs break with Rome to Edward VIs Protestantism, from the Lutheran belief that Jesus Christ was substantially present in the Eucharist to the view of the rite as purely symbolic, from Episcopalianism to Presbyterianism, and from Presbyterianism to sectarianism. Simpson could have found striking corroboration for this process of permanent revolution in the spiritual odysseys of figures like the ex-tailor Laurence Clarkson (16151667). Never satisfied with his religious condition, Clarkson moved from the established church to Presbyterianism, which he rejected in turn to become an Independent, then an antinomian, then a Baptist, then a Seeker, then a Ranter, then a white witch, and finally a Muggletonian. This spiritual restlessness is what Simpson calls English Protestantisms kinetic process of endless movement, yet it was most intense in the years he puzzlingly neglects. He never even mentions the appearance in the 1650s of the Quakers, whose total rejection of a separate priesthood and formal liturgy took Protestantism to its logical and most revolutionary conclusion.

As a way of characterizing English Protestantism, the concept of permanent revolution, with its suggestion that people move to ever more extreme positions, has its limitations. Indeed, some of the makers of the early Reformation were far more radical than most of those who followed them. The Lollards of the 15th century were closer in their views to the sectaries of the 1640s than they were to the leaders of the Elizabethan church. The early reformer Robert Barnes, who was burned for heresy in 1540, declared that no day was holier than the rest, not even Christmas or Easter, while William Tyndale, the biblical translator martyred in 1536, was a mortalist who believed that the soul slept until the general Resurrection. Not until the 1640s were such views publicly ventilated.

One might also question Simpsons insistence that the progress of Protestantism was as relentless as the notion of permanent revolution might suggest. As he admits, it went into reverse in the early 17th century with the rise of Arminianism, which asserted free will against Calvinisms predestination, and with the capture of the Anglican Church by the Laudians, who embraced this new doctrine and introduced elaborate church ceremonial in place of Puritan simplicity. Yet as Simpson rightly notes, it was Arminianism that pointed most powerfully to the liberal future, since its belief in free will became a necessary precondition for liberalisms attachment to individual liberty.Related Article

It is also hard to accept Simpsons claim that Protestantism was more concerned with combating earlier versions of itself than with challenging Catholicism. For all the differences between different brands of evangelicalism, the hatred of popery far exceeded the internecine quarrels among Protestants. Catholic priests were classified as traitors by the government in 1585. The Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot were central to Protestant mythology. The fear of Catholic conspiracies played a crucial role in the origins of the English Civil War and was still present after the Restoration. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was blamed on Catholics, the rumored Popish Plot resulted in a major political crisis in 1679, and James IIs Catholicism played a large part in his downfall.

Simpson takes a dim view of early Protestantism. He is a specialist in late medieval English literature and, unsurprisingly, is partial to the writers of the 14th and 15th centuries. In an earlier work, he contrasted the rich varieties of genres and sensibilities found in the mystery cycles and the writings of William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas Malory with the centralized uniformity and dreariness of the literature of the early Tudor period. He also remarked on the profound delusions of the evangelical theology that took root in this latter era. He regrets the Protestant destruction of medieval sculpture, wall paintings, and stained glass. But his main objection to the evangelical theologians is that they left no room for human agency. Regarding Gods arbitrary grace as the sole source of redemption, they denied any possibility of achieving it through a life of good works. The fate of all individuals was predetermined, and there was no certain way of knowing if one was saved. For Simpson, this was an absolutist, cruel, despair-producing, humanity-belittling, merit-denying, determinist account of salvation, and only through its rejection could liberalism come into its own.

To make his case, Simpson devotes the great bulk of his book to describing what he sees as the five key features of the Calvinist Protestantism that stood in the way of a liberal outcome: despair, hypocrisy, iconoclasm, distrust of performative speech, and biblical literalism. He chooses to demonstrate their regrettable human consequences by drawing most of his evidence from the imaginative literature of the day. Milton, in particular, gets a disproportionate amount of space, presumably because his writings pose the problem of how the poet, born into a culture of Calvinist predestination, came to express proto-liberal sentiments. But as examples of despair and the vicious psychic torture of not knowing whether or not one was saved, Simpson also cites Thomas Wyatts Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms and John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress. He comments on the Kafkaesquequality of this theological world, in which despair is simultaneously the surest sign both of election and of damnation.

To illustrate Protestant hypocrisy, Simpson turns to Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonsons Bartholomew Fair and the Puritan Angelo in William Shakespeares Measure for Measure, two obvious examples of the duplicity generated by the Puritan tendency to prescribe humanly impossible standards of godliness. To capture Calvinist iconoclasm, which moved from the destruction of images in churches to proposals that the churches themselves be destroyed and finally to a psychic iconoclasm against incorrect imaginings, Simpson cites Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene, which portrays mental images as much worse than physical ones.

Next on Simpsons list of evangelical horrors is the Calvinist attack on performative language, by which he means the attempt to achieve physical effects by words, whether in the ritual of the Catholic Mass or in the curses of supposed witches. He accuses the reformers of inventing (or, alternatively, reinventing) the idea of black magica bizarre suggestion, since witch trials were well underway in 15th century Europe: As Simpson himself recognizes, Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious treatise providing the rationale for such prosecutions, appeared in 1487 and was the work of a papal inquisitor. He also examines the Calvinist attacks on the theater, culminating in the parliamentary ordinance of 1648 abolishing stage plays. In his desire to give that act an exclusively religious explanation, however, Simpson omits its stress on the disorders and disturbance of the peace with which the theaters were associated. Instead he cites Miltons virtuous terrorist Samson, who pulls down a theater and kills the audience, though he does not remind us that Samson Agonistes was itself a play or that the poets original idea was to make Paradise Lost one, too.

Simpsons final theme is the dominance of biblical literalism in evangelical culture. Every aspect of Church doctrine, governance and practice, he points out, was potentially vulnerable to being rejected as idolatrous if it did not find justification in a set of texts at least 1,400 years old. The literal reading of such biblical texts as There is none righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10) could, he claims, make scriptural reading an experience of existential anguish. He cites the paraphrases of Psalms by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, betrayed by his friends and despairingly awaiting execution in 1547, and Bunyans spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding (1666), which suggests that the authors persecution by the authorities paled to nothing when compared with the way that the biblical text persecuted him as a reader. Returning to his favorite analogy, Simpson remarks that we must look to Kafka to find anything remotely comparable.

Throughout his account of Calvinism and its discontents, Simpsons sympathies lie with the eras anti-literalists, notably Shakespeare, whose Shylock, insisting on the letter of his bond, resembles less the Jews than the Puritan divines in their eager readiness to inflict the arbitrary, inhuman literal sense on their fellow Christians. He admires Milton as another anti-literalist who invoked intention and context in order to produce a self-interested, nonliteral reinterpretation of Christs pronouncement on divorce and whose Paradise Lost bears only the most skeletal relationship to the words of Genesis.

Simpsons study of English Calvinism leaves the reader with a deeply depressing and somewhat overheated view of evangelical religion in the period, which he calls a state-sponsored cultural extremity of a singular, soul-crushing and violence-producing kind. If he had gone beyond his chosen literary sources, he could easily have matched his examples of despairing evangelicals with an equal or perhaps even larger list of readers who claimed to have derived real comfort from the Scriptures. Personal temperament did as much as religious allegiance to determine whether an individual emerged from reading the Bible cheered or depressed. He concedes as much when he remarks that Bunyan clearly manifests the symptoms of chronic depression. Simpson would also have found that many ordinary Protestant clergy were surprisingly tolerant of their unregenerate parishioners belief that they could earn salvation by their own efforts.

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Despite what he sees as its horrors, Simpson concludes that Calvinist theology was by far the most powerful expression of early European revolutionary modernity. It paralleled the administrative centralization carried out by Tudor monarchs by portraying God as invested with massively concentrated executive powers at the center of a purified, utterly homogeneous True Church of the Elect. In due course, the unsustainable violence of the Calvinist revolution produced the great counter narrative of modernity, namely the decentralization of theological and political power and the shift to a more liberal order.

Permanent Revolution is a rich work, abounding in challenging assertions and acute aperus, but at times it is also an infuriating one to read. Simpsons sentences can be convoluted; he employs arcane neologisms like dramicide and is capable of making statements like liberal modernity retrojected its abject onto premodernity. His text is marred by repetitions, careless proofreading, and some embarrassing factual errors. Yet he is extremely well read in modern historical writing as well as early modern literature, and his argument is punctuated by many original insights.

At the end of the book, Simpson returns to his opening theme of the liberal tradition, its origins, and its future. Here he encounters an obvious problem: No one in the 17th century gave the word liberal a political meaning, and the concept of liberalism as a political ideology did not appear until the second decade of the 19th century. So the early modern liberalism of Simpsons book is liberalism avant la lettre. When the concept did appear in the early 19th century, it was rapidly appropriated by politicians of very different hues, as historian Helena Rosenblatt brilliantly demonstrated in her 2018 The Lost History of Liberalism. Yet Simpson uses the word unselfconsciously, as if this notoriously elusive term had only one meaning. Writing as a committed liberal, he defines the tenets of modern liberalism as he sees them. They include the separation of church and state, equality before the law, toleration for minorities, freedom of association, liberty and privacy of conscience, and acceptance of the democratic judgment of the majority. (He does not say whether in the American context this means a majority of voters or a majority of states.) But this is essentially a version of what political philosophers call classical liberalism, the kind inaugurated by John Locke.

Simpson does not seem to recognize that liberalism since the 1680s has taken many different forms, according to who or what is perceived as libertys enemy, and therefore cannot be so narrowly defined. There is the economic liberalism of Adam Smith, whose attack on protectionist legislation and belief in the efficacy of the free market has been resurrected in modern times in an exaggerated form by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and there are the new liberals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who drew inspiration from John Stuart Mill, T.H. Green, and L.T. Hobhouse and whose central aim was to diminish the social and economic constraints on the personal freedom of the population at large by having the state intervene in the market. In the United States today, all the major political groupings, from Republicans to communitarians, make an appeal to liberty, though they give it very different meanings.

Although Simpson recognizes the slipperiness of the concept, he sticks to his own ahistorical definition of liberalism. His final verdict is that liberalism is an essential guardian of our freedom but that it is currently in global retreat before evangelical religionno longer Protestant this time but manifested in the rise of populist religious forces in India, Algeria, Israel, and Turkey. Liberalism, he warns, has serious weaknesses. It can be ineffective, as in the United States, the land of the free but also the nation with by far the worlds highest gross and per capita prison population. Like the Puritan elect, liberals can be intolerant, virtue-parading, exclusivist, and identitarian. They, too, are subject to the logic of permanent revolution, for there is always a new cause that directs their energies away from the classical liberalism that Simpson regards as their core commitment.

However, liberals greatest mistake, he insists, is to regard liberalism as a worldview that, like Christianity or Marxism, can offer a guide to salvation. In his opinion, liberalism is merely a second-order belief system, designed to preserve a plurality of worldviews by reminding their holders of the constitutional proprieties they should observe when pursuing their goals. Just as early Protestantism caused so much pain by extending its all-embracing tentacles into domains unconnected with spirituality, so liberalism exceeds its brief when it attempts to reshape the world on what Simpson describes as the shallow grounds of abstract, universalist human rights as a set of absolute virtues, and he sees it as particularly odious in its more recent, militantly secularist form.

Implicit in this argument seems to be the notion that, provided all the worlds different cultures and religions tolerate minorities and observe democratic constraints, they should be respected, however much their cultural practices might pose threats to liberal values. This would not have persuaded the late philosopher Richard Rorty, who held that some cultures, like some people, are no damn good: they cause too much pain and so have to be resisted. Which of these views, one wonders, is the more liberal one?

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Does Liberalism Have Its Roots in the Illiberal Upheavals of the English Reformation? - The Nation

The American political system is broken It has been for nearly three decades. Extremism seems to have usurped pragmatism. The spirit of bipartisanship and compromise are not merely waning but, in many respects, dead altogether.

Politicians constantly warn of threats posed by the opposition be they militant socialists or right-wing tyrants conspiring among the shadows. However, the more likely cause of death will not be at the hands of some radical despot. Americas political system will fail only when its populace perceives it to have stopped working and, in turn, votes to dissolve it.

Democracy dies at the ballot box.

Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused, not by generals and soldiers, but by elected governments themselves, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, co-authors of the prescient book How Democracies Die, wrote. Like Hugo Chvez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine.

In light of a devolving political life in America, one is not unreasonable to question the capacity of democracy to endure during hard times even despite the American varietys tenacity thus far. The depth of constraint and accountability imposed by constitutional order is ultimately dependent upon the willingness of its people to fight and uphold it.

For years, the guardrail sustaining American democracy was a collective, civic commitment to liberalism. As a nation, however, the United States is witnessing what seems to be the gradual death of liberalism and an attack on the ideals underpinning it.

The revolt represents a collective succumbing to those hardships inherent to human coexistence. In truth, liberalism to a degree unlike any principle or philosophy that previously governed society forces us to encounter those unlike ourselves while presupposing our capacity to overcome those differences. At its core, the liberal structure assumes that, more often than not and despite oftentimes vehement disagreement, citizens will come together bound by a human identity more alike than different in pursuit of higher ground.

But the liberal structure requires its practitioners to see more than demagoguery in their political opposition. It requires the type of coalition-building which molds seemingly contradictory truths into one mutually desired, higher truth no matter how divergent the paths were to arrive there. History suggests the reward for doing so has been, to say the least, worthwhile.

Yet, democratic governance is still failing to realize its own potential each day, whether warranted or not, taking on the manic whims of crisis and the American mediascape is partly to blame.

New technologies have radically expanded our ability to make and distribute a product, but the problem, the American novelist Salvatore Scibona writes, is that far too often the product is our judgement of one another.

Some argue these platforms social media and the 24-hour news cycle are the manifestation of a more direct democracy. But research suggests the impact of social media platforms are more complex.

A recent study by Pew Research Center found that 97% of tweets from U.S. adults that mentioned national politics came from just 10% of users. Additional analysis indicates that, on average, Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall. This means, on Twitter, an increasingly prominent way for politicians to gauge public opinion, a disproportionate amount of influence resides with a relatively small subset of young, educated and wealthy users.

On Facebook, Pew finds that more online followers engaged when elected officials took sides, especially when opposing individuals on the other side. These findings flip the incentive structure for political campaigns, who increasingly capitalize on returns to dividing Americans as opposed to uniting them, which is why ever-expanding social technology presents a problem.

To sustain a liberal society, where order and freedom are held in delicate balance, democratic structures demand and therefore must be premised upon a certain objective truth. As the political philosopher John Stuart Mill recognized, a considerable weakness of democratic governance lies in that, inevitably, citizens will not have enough information to make informed decisions about political issues. Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true but seldom or never the whole truth, he writes.

In its totality, the modern media ecosystem presents a far greater threat than Mill originally theorized, culminating in the rise of illiberal and revolutionary figures, nave to what springs from ideologies defined by zero-sum games, self-righteous indignation and leaders that lament becoming too big of a tent.

Akin to the revolutions of decades past, the revolutionary ethos, however morally valiant its cause, often lacks insight into the historical winds of change and foresight about how to recreate them. It is forsaken by the peril of its own ego, failing to accept that big ideas are usually the condensation of many breaths more than [they are] the wind that blows history forward, as the writer Adam Gopnik articulated in A Thousand Small Sanities.

Revolution, albeit at once a positive and necessary feature of history, narrows the mind so sharply toward a particular injustice, many of which are incurable within the span of a singular human life, that it renders the revolutionary unable to acknowledge the limit of their own power or to accept small steps when larger steps are out of reach.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, Carl Jung observed, but upon error also. Liberalism, and the diversity within it, necessitates a breadth of knowledge and error that inform one another so as to climb towards objective truth.

All this is not to mourn the death of liberalism but rather a contemplation on why it must persist and the potential peril if it does not. History doesnt repeat itself, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote. But it rhymes. The promise of history is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.

Hancen Sale is a senior majoring in economics. He can be reached athsale@vols.utk.edu, and you can follow him on Twitter @hancen4sale.

Columns and letters of The Daily Beacon are the views of the individual and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Beacon or the Beacon's editorial staff.

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As it Stands: In praise of liberalism - UT Daily Beacon

Local Conservative party associations are preparing to challenge the Liberal Democrats on the partys local spending during Decembers General Election, with the hope of overturning at least one result.

A case is being readied to challenge St Albans, where pro-Leave Conservative Ann Main lost to Daisy Cooper, according to sources close to the matter.

A number of Tories in parts of London and the South West have also said they are also toying with challenging the result, with meetings taking place both in Westminster and in local seats to discuss the issue.

However one MP said the plan was to focus our energies on a seat which could turn back to blue. Richmond Park, where the locally-popular MP Sarah Olney ousted Zac Goldsmith, who was sitting on a tiny majority, is not thought to be on the hit list.

Multiple Conservative MPs and their campaign agents have told City A.M. of unusually high levels of Lib Dem leaflets going out to constituents during last years campaign. There are instances where individuals have reported receiving nearly 30 pieces of literature.

I cant come up with a way that you can do that [within the rules], one party agent told City A.M. We probably put out about a fifth of the literature they did and we are close enough to limit that I would not want to go much beyond certainly not enough to to do four or five-times more.

Alec Campbell, who worked on Mains campaign, said: The challenge is always trying to understand whether every household in the constituency has got that level of literature or just isolated individuals.

Under Electoral Commission rules, updated in the wake of the Craig McKinlay expenses case in South Thanet, notional spending must be declared as an election expense in the candidates return even if the notional spending has not been authorised by the candidate, the candidates agent or someone authorised by either or both of them.

The rules stipulate that local or candidate spend is a maximum of either 6p or 9p per elector, equivalent to around 15,000 in St Albans. This includes advertising of any kind, unsolicited material sent to voters, transport costs, public meetings, staff costs, accommodation and administrative costs.

Party-level spend can include a local newspaper advert as long as it does not mention the local candidate or specifically targeted local issues.

A Liberal Democrat spokeswoman said: All local expenditure in the election was reported correctly and clearly identified in our election return which has been filed with the returning officer.

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Exclusive: Tories to challenge Liberal Democrats on overspend in St Albans - City A.M.

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.

Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.

My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planets most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Greta might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her how dare you complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon emissions.

Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbons will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.

In the late 1950s, many elites in United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would bury the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

Once Japans economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europes borderless democratic socialism and its soft power were declared preferable to the reactionary United States.

By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.

Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.

After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

The United States and Europe are often quite critical of violence against women, minorities and gays. The European Union, for example, has often singled out Israel for its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.

Yet if the purpose of Western human rights activism is to curb global bias and hate, then it would be far more cost-effective to concentrate on the greatest offenders.

China is currently detaining about a million Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps. Yet activist groups arent calling for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Beijing in the same way they target Israel.

Homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran. Scores of Iranian gays reportedly have been incarcerated and thousands executed under theocratic law since the fall of the shah in 1979. Yet rarely do Western activist groups call for global ostracism of Iran.

Dont look to the U.N. Human Rights Council for any meaningful condemnation of worldwide prejudice and hatred, although it is a frequent critic of both the United States and Israel.

Many of the 47 member nations of the Human Rights Council are habitual violators of human rights. In 2017, nine member nations persecuted citizens who were actively working to implement U.N. standards of human rights.

There are many reasons for Westerners selective outrage and pessimism toward their own culture. Cowardice explains some of the asymmetry. Blasting tiny democratic Israel will not result in any retaliation. Taking on a powerful China or a murderous Iran could earn retribution.

Guilt also explains some of the selectivity. European nations are still blamed for 19th-century colonialism and imperialism. They will always seek absolution, as the citizens of former colonial and Third World nations act like perpetual victims even well into the postmodern 21st century.

Virtual-signaling is increasingly common. Western elites often harangue about misdemeanors when they cannot address felonies a strange sort of psychological penance that excuses their impotence.

It is much easier for the city of Berkeley, California, to ban clean-burning, U.S.-produced natural gas in newly constructed buildings than it is to outlaw far dirtier crude oil from Saudi Arabia. Currently, the sexist, homophobic, autocratic Saudis are the largest source of imported oil in California, sending the state some 100 million barrels per year, without which thousands of Berkeley motorists could not get to work. Apparently, outlawing clean, domestic natural gas allows one to justify importing unclean Saudi oil.

Western elites are perpetually aggrieved. But the next time they direct their lectures at a particular target, consider the source and motivation of their outrage.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic Books, 2017).

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Liberal elites shaming of Western culture ignores the true international offenders - Washington Times