Monthly Archives: July 2020

Jul 9th 2020

LIBERALISMthe Enlightenment philosophy, not the American leftstarts with the assertion that all human beings have equal moral worth. From that stem equal rights for all. Libertarians see those principles as paramount. For left-leaning liberals, equal moral worth also brings an entitlement to the resources necessary for an individual to flourish.

Yet when it comes to race many liberals have failed to live up to their own values. We hold these truths to be self-evident, wrote Thomas Jefferson in Americas Declaration of Independence in 1776, that all men are created equal. More than a decade later the Founding Fathers would write into the countrys constitution that a slave was in fact to be considered three-fifths of a person. In Europe many liberals opposed slavery but supported despotic imperial rule overseas. Perhaps liberal theory and liberal history are ships passing in the night, speculated Uday Singh Mehta of the City University of New York in 1999.

What lies behind this failure? That question is especially important today. Norms are shifting fast. The global protests that sprang up after the killing of George Floyd denounced racism throughout society. Companies, often pressed by their own employees, are in a panic about their lack of diversity, particularly at the top. Television stations and the press are rewriting the rules about how news should be covered and by whom. There is a fight over statuary and heritage, just as there is over people forced out of their jobs or publicly shamed for words or deeds deemed racist.

It is a defining moment. At Mr Floyds funeral, the Rev Al Sharpton declared: Its time to stand up in Georges name and say, Get your knee off our necks. At Mount Rushmore on July 3rd, President Donald Trump condemned a new far-left fascism. To understand all this, it is worth going back to the battle of ideas. In one corner is liberalism, with its tarnished record, and in the other the anti-liberal theories emerging from the campus to challenge it.

During the past two centuries life in the broadest terms has been transformed. Life expectancy, material wealth, poverty, literacy, civil rights and the rule of law have changed beyond recognition. Though that is not all thanks to Enlightenment liberals, obviously, liberalism has prospered as Marxism and fascism have failed.

But its poor record on race, especially with regard to African-Americans, stands out. Income, wealth, education and incarceration remain correlated with ethnicity to a staggering degree. True, great steps have been taken against overt racial animus. But the lack of progress means liberals must have either tried and failed to create a society in which people of all races can flourish, or failed to try at all.

Americas founding depended on two racist endeavours. One was slavery, which lasted for almost 250 years and was followed by nearly a century of institutionalised white supremacy. Of the seven most important Founding Fathers, only John Adams and Alexander Hamilton did not at some point own slaves. Nine early American presidents were slaveholders. And although slavery is a near-universal feature of pre-Enlightenment societies, the Atlantic slave trade is notable for having been tied to notions of racial superiority.

The other was imperialism, when British colonialists violently displaced existing people. Many 18th-century European liberals criticised the search for empire. Adam Smith viewed colonies as expensive failures of monopoly and mercantilism that benefited neither side, calling Britains East India Company plunderers. Edmund Burke (a liberal in the broadest sense) decried the outrageous injustices in British colonies, including systematick iniquity and oppression in India, which resulted from power that was unaccountable to those over whom it was exercised.

But, argues Jennifer Pitts of the University of Chicago in her book A Turn to Empire, in the 19th century the most famous European liberals gravitated towards imperial liberalism. The shift was grounded in the growing triumphalism of France and Britain, which saw themselves as qualified by virtue of their economic and technological success to disseminate universal moral and cultural values. John Stuart Mill abhorred slavery, writing during the American civil war in 1863 that I cannot look forward with satisfaction to any settlement but complete emancipation. But of empire he wrote that Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. (Mill worked for the East India Company for 35 years.) Alexis de Tocqueville championed the French empire, in particular the violent conquest and settlement of Algeria.

A belief in the basic similarity of human beings, and of their march towards progress, led these thinkers to the belief that it was possible to accelerate development at the barrel of a gun. Even at the time, this paternalism should have been tempered by scepticism about whether it can be just for one people to impose government on another. Although Mill criticised the British empires atrocities, he did not see them, as Burke had, as the inevitable consequence of an unaccountable regime.

The turn in liberal thought was reflected in the pages of The Economist. From its founding in 1843 the newspaper opposed slavery, and early in its existence it criticised imperialism. But we later backed the Second Opium War against China, the brutal suppression of the 1857 Indian mutiny and even the invasion of Mexico by France in 1861. We wrote that Indians were helpless...to restrain their own superstitions and their own passions. Walter Bagehot, editor from 1861 to 1877, wrote that the British were the most enterprising, the most successful, and in most respects the best, colonists on the face of the earth. Although the newspaper never ceased to oppose slavery, it claimed, bizarrely, that abolition would be more likely were the Confederacy to win Americas civil war. It was not until the early 20th century that The Economist regained some of its scepticism regarding empire, as liberalism at home evolved into a force for social reform.

In America the big liberal shift took place in the mid-1960s. To deal with the legacy of slavery, liberals began to concede that you need to treat the descendants of slaves as members of a group, not only as individuals. Sandra Day OConnor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, argued that affirmative action, though a breach of liberal individualism that must eventually be dispensed with, had to stay until there was reasonable equality of opportunity between groups.

Plenty of thinkers grappled with affirmative action, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a politician, sociologist and diplomat, and Ronald Dworkin, a philosopher and jurist. However, the most famous left-liberal work of the 20th century, written in 1971, was notably silent on race. The key idea of John Rawlss A Theory of Justice is the veil of ignorance, behind which people are supposed to think about the design of a fair society without knowing their own talents, class, sex or indeed race. Detached from such arbitrary factors people would discover principles of justice. But what is the point, modern critics ask, of working out what a perfectly just society looks like without considering how the actual world is ravaged by injustice?

Liberalism as it is theorised abstracts away from social oppression, writes Charles Mills, also of the City University of New York. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, a roughly 600-page book published in 2002, has no chapter, section or subsection dealing with race. The central debates in the field as presented, writes Mr Mills, exclude any reference to the modern global history of racism versus anti-racism.

As the gains of the civil-rights era failed to translate into sustained progress for African-Americans, dissatisfaction with liberalism set in. One of the first to respond was Derrick Bell, a legal scholar working at Harvard in the 1970s. Critical race theory, which fused French post-modernism with the insights of African-Americans like Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and former slave, and W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist, then emerged.

Critical race theory first focused on the material conditions of black Americans and on developing tools to help them win a fair hearing in the courtroom. One is intersectionality, set out in a defining paper in 1991 by Kimberl Crenshaw, another legal scholar and civil-rights campaigner. A black woman could lose a case of discrimination against an employer who could show that he did not discriminate against black men or white women, she explains. The liberal, supposedly universalist, legal system failed to grasp the unique intersection of being both a woman and black.

In the three decades since that paper was written, critical race theory has flourished, spreading to education, political science, gender studies, history and beyond. HR departments use its terminology. Allusions to white privilege and unconscious bias are commonplace. Over 1,000 CEOs, including those of firms such as JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer and Walmart, have joined an anti-racism coalition and promised that their staff will undertake unconscious-bias training (the evidence on its efficacy is limited). Critical race theory informs the claim that the aim of journalism is not objectivity but moral clarity.

Yet as critical race theory has grown, a focus on discourse and power has tended to supersede the practicalities. That has made it illiberal, even revolutionary.

The philosophical mechanics that bolt together critical race theory can be obscure. But the approach is elegantly engineered into bestselling books such as How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.

One thing that the popular synthesis preserves is its contempt for the liberal view of how to bring about social and moral progress. To understand why, you need to start with how ordinary words take on extraordinary meanings. Racism is not bigotry based on the colour of your skin. Races, Mr Kendi writes, are fundamentally power identities and racism is the social and institutional system that sustains whites as the most powerful group. That is why white supremacy alludes not to skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan, but, as Ms DiAngelo explains, the centrality and superiority of whites in society.

Some acts also have an unfamiliar significance. Talking to someone becomes a question of power. The identity of the speaker matters because speech is not neutral. It is either bad (ie, asserting white supremacy, and thus shoring up todays racist institutions), or it is good (ie, offering solidarity to victims of oppression or subverting white power). The techniques of subversion, called criticism, unpack speech to reveal how it is problematicthat is, the ways in which it is racist.

Speech is unfamiliar in another way, too. When you say something, what counts is not what you mean but how you are heard. A privileged person sees the world from their own viewpoint alone. Whites cannot fully understand the harm they cause. By contrast, the standpoint of someone who is oppressed gives them insight into both their own plight and the oppressors world-view, too. To say that whiteness is a standpoint, Ms DiAngelo writes, is to say that a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of racejust human.

Black people can also find themselves in the wrong. What if two black people hear a white person differently and disagree over whether he was racist? Critical race theorists might point out that there are many sorts of oppression. In 1990 Angela Harris, a legal scholar, complained that feminism treated black and white women as if their experience were the same. By being straight and male, say, the listener belongs to groups that are dominant along some axis other than race. The way out of oppression is through the recognition and empowerment of these group identities, not their neglect. Or one of them may have failed to grasp the underlying truth of how racism is perpetuated by society. If so, that person needs to be educated out of their ignorance. The heartbeat of racism is denial, Mr Kendi writes, the heartbeat of anti-racism is confession.

These ideas have revolutionary implications. One result of seeing racism embedded all around you is a tendency towards a pessimistic attitude to progress. Bell concluded that reform happens only when it suits powerful white interests. In 1991 he wrote: Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary peaks of progress, short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as practical patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.

The second implication is that well-meaning white people are often enemies. Colour-blind whites deny societys structural racism. Ms DiAngelo complains that White peoples moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging their complicity in it. IntegrationistsMr Kendis term for those who want black culture and society to integrate with whiterob black people of the identity they need to fight racism. He accuses them of lynching black cultures.

Where does this leave liberalism? Cynical Theories, a forthcoming book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, two writers, argues that the two systems of thought are incompatible. One reason is that the constellation of postmodern thinking dealing with race, gender, sexuality and disability, which they call Theory, disempowers the individual in favour of group identities, claiming that these alignments are necessary to end oppression. Another is Theorists belief that power is what forces out entrenched interests. But this carries the risk that the weak will not prevail, or that if they do, one dominant group will be replaced by another. By contrast, liberals rely on evidence, argument and the rule of law to arm the weak against the strong. A third reason is that Theory stalls liberal progress. Without the machinery of individual equality fired up by continual debate, the engine will not work.

But what will? The appeal of critical race theoryor at least its manifestation in popular writingis partly that it confidently prescribes what should be done to fight injustice. It provides a degree of absolution for those who want to help. White people may never be able to rid themselves of their racism, but they can dedicate themselves to the cause of anti-racism.

Liberals have no such simple prescription. They have always struggled with the idea of power as a lens through which to view the world, notes Michael Freeden of Oxford University. They often deny that groups (rather than individuals) can be legitimate political entities. And so liberal responses to critical race theory can seem like conservative apathy, or even denial.

Tommie Shelby of Harvard University, who sees himself as both a critical race theorist and a liberal, argues that scepticism regarding liberalisms power to redress racial inequality is rooted in the mistaken idea that liberalism isnt compatible with an egalitarian commitment to economic justice. Mr Shelby has argued that the Rawlsian principle of fair equality of opportunity can mean taking great strides towards a racially just society. That includes not just making sure that formal procedures, such as hiring practices, are non-discriminatory. It also includes ensuring that people of equal talent who make comparable efforts end up with similar life prospects, eventually eradicating the legacy of past racial injustices.

This would be a huge programme that might involve curbing housing segregation, making schooling more equal and giving tax credits (see Briefing). That is not enough for Mr Mills, another liberal and critical race theorist. He wants liberal thinkers to produce theories of rectificatory justicesay, a version of the veil of ignorance behind which people are aware of discrimination and the legacy of racial hierarchy. Liberals might then be more willing to tolerate compensation for past violations. They might also demand a reckoning with their past failures.

The problem is thorniest for libertarians who resist redistributive egalitarian schemes, regardless of the intention behind them. But even some of the most committed, such as Robert Nozick, concede that their elevation of property rights makes sense only if the initial conditions under which property was acquired were just. Countries in which the legacy of racial oppression lives on in the distribution of wealth patently fail to meet that test. Putting right that failure, Mr Mills says, should be supported in principle by liberals across the spectrum.

Plenty of people are trying to work out what that entails, but the practicalities are formidable. Having failed adequately to grapple with racial issues, liberals find themselves in a political moment that demands an agenda which is both practically and politically feasible. The risk is that they do not find one.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "In the balance"

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Enlightenment liberalism is losing ground in the debate about race - The Economist

WASHINGTON (AP) Joe Biden stood in a Pennsylvania metal works shop, just miles from his boyhood home, and pledged to define his presidency by a sweeping economic agenda beyond anything Americans have seen since the Great Depression and the industrial mobilization for World War II.

The prospective Democratic presidential nominee promised the effort would not just answer a pandemic-induced recession, but address centuries of racism and systemic inequalities with a new American economy that finally and fully (lives) up to the words and the values enshrined in the founding documents of this nation that were all created equal.

It was a striking call coming from Biden, a 77-year-old establishment figure known more as a back-slapping deal-maker than visionary reformer. But it made plain his intention to test the reach of liberal populism as he tries to create a coalition that can defeat President Donald Trump in November.

Trump and his Republican allies argue that Bidens positioning, especially his ongoing work with progressives, proves hes captive to a radical left wing. Conversely, activists who backed Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary were encouraged, yet cautious, about Bidens ability to follow through while conceding that his plans on issues including climate action and criminal justice still fall short of their ideals.

Bidens inner circle insists his approach in 2020 is the same its been since he was elected to the Senate in 1972: Meet the moment.

Hes always evolved, said Ted Kaufman, Bidens longest-serving adviser. The thing thats been consistent for his entire career, almost 50 years, is he never promises things that he doesnt think he can do.

Kaufman, who succeeded Biden in the Senate when he ascended to the vice presidency, said Bidens core identity hasnt changed: progressive Democrat, friendly to labor and business, consistent supporter of civil rights, believer in government and the private sector. Whats different in 2020, he said, are the countrys circumstances a public health crisis, near-Depression level unemployment, a national reckoning on racism and the office Biden now seeks.

If you want to get something done, encourage it, Kaufman said. What he learned over history watching campaigns is that you put forth a program, and then you come into office, and everybody involved knows thats the program youre offering.

Bidens evolution has been on display from the start of his campaign as hes tacked left both in substance and style while trying to preserve his pragmatist brand.

At the start of the Democratic primary, Biden was positioned as offering a moderate alternative to Sanders call for a political revolution and Warrens push for big structural change.

The former vice president countered their proposed universal government-funded health insurance with a government insurance plan that would compete alongside private insurance. Progressives wanted tuition-free public higher education; Biden offered tuition subsidies for two-year schools. Biden called the climate crisis an existential threat and offered a clean energy plan with a trillion-dollar price tag, but resisted the full version of progressives Green New Deal. He promised hefty tax hikes for corporations and the investor class but opposed a wealth tax on individuals net worth.

Biden noted that his health care platform put him to the left of 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, who had jettisoned a public option from his 2010 health care law, angering liberal Democrats.

And on race, even before the recent national uprising against police violence, Biden spoke often of the nations systemic failure to live up to the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson didnt, he said often in early speeches, alluding to the fact that the Declarations author and the third U.S. president owned slaves.

Still, Biden isnt immune from the kind of internal party tensions that cost Clinton progressive support in 2016, and hes spent the last three months shoring up his left flank.

Biden and Sanders created policy groups to write recommendations for Democrats 2020 platform. Those committees unveiled 110 pages of policy plans Wednesday, ahead of Bidens speech in Pennsylvania. They left Biden short of endorsing single-payer health insurance and the most aggressive timelines to achieve a carbon-neutral economy, but ratified his claims of a more progressive slate than his predecessors.

Further, Biden already had moved toward Sanders tuition position, endorsing four years of full subsidies for most middle-class households. He adopted Warrens proposed bankruptcy law overhaul and her ideas for a government procurement campaign to benefit U.S. companies.

Progressives promise continued pressure.

I think our job is really to sometimes push him, Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal said. Jayapal, who helped lead the Biden-Sanders health care task force, said that means being alongside him, of course, and then sometimes be out in front.

Likewise, Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement, a leading environmental advocacy group, said her group wont abandon the Green New Deal. But she credited Biden for embracing a level of public investment that would remake the energy economy during the pandemic recession.

Biden has managed party unity that wasnt present four years ago.

I dont consider Bidens proposals a political hat tip to progressives as much as rising to the moment were living in, said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and a Warren ally.

The former vice president also has amassed an impressive slate of endorsements and built a stable of regular campaign surrogates, including all his major primary rivals. Many of them held events in the hours and days following his speech Thursday in a show of force that Trump, even with his intense online presence and fervent base, would be hard-pressed to match.

For his part, Trump accused Biden of plagiarizing his economic populism but also tarred Biden as a leftist who cant win.

Its a plan that is very radical left, but he said the right things because hes copying what Ive done, Trump said Friday before departing the White House for Florida.

Kaufman said Biden will continue campaigning as a nominee unconcerned about such labels. Whats allowed him to survive all these years, Kaufman said, is that hes not into any of those characterizations.

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Biden forges brand of liberal populism to use against Trump - The Associated Press

In an office in a university campus, there is a young woman the student and an older man, the teacher.

Shes in his office because of a poor grade. In that first meeting, hes patronising but magnanimous. Maybe he can teach her privately? He puts an arm around her shoulder.

The next time we meet the pair, a complaint has been made to the tenure committee. The young woman has found a group feminists who have put words around what she experienced in the office, and the power relations between the two.

In this meeting you see the power shift, and the professors magnanimity and ease liquify into fear.

Almost 30 years ago, David Mamets play Oleanna explored what it means when a gatekeeper an ostensibly liberal one has his position challenged and threatened by someone less powerful.

Oleanna was written in the shadow of the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill sexual harassment case, and Mamets play very much sympathises with the older man.

His student shrill, young and wielding the borrowed intellect, talking points and nascent power of an organised group crushed the career and upward progression of a man who was just trying to help.

The plays lines could have been written now by someone recently cancelled: You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?

But the fear at the heart of Oleanna a loss or transfer of power from establishment white men to young feminist women never came to pass.

The old order of centrist liberals have held out in places such as universities, the media and the arts. But for how long?

Our current moment also teems with anxiety around loss of power and, like in Oleanna, the threat comes from those lower down or outside the hierarchy.

Small l liberalism is being threatened like never before, as its failure to live up to its meritocratic ideals are being exposed. Foundations, supposedly built on fairness, are increasingly being damned for maintaining oppressive systems that, unwittingly or not, are racist.

Many people of colour who have gained entry to ostensibly liberal institutions have found that, once admitted, they face racism and dont rise beyond a certain level of power.

In late June at Australias SBS channel, staff sent a letter pleading with the board to appoint someone other than a white Anglo man as news director to reflect the stations multicultural charter (there has only been one exception since 1978).

Indigenous reporters posted Twitter threads about the racism they faced in the newsroom.

Things are, finally, moving fast. Its been the summer of rage in America (and then around the world) with the call to dismantle oppressive and racist systems, including the demands to defund the police in the US something that would have been unthinkable in the mainstream a year ago.

Amid calls for the systems to be dismantled, representations and symbols of the systems have been toppled: statues have been torn down, shows removed from Netflix, and some anxious liberals are trawling through their Facebook from years past to expunge any problematic costume party photos.

But does this shift mean that liberalism is on the way out? In the last few, fevered weeks, we have seen fretful claims about the death of liberalism at the hands of what some say is a new orthodoxy.

On Wednesday, an open letter in Harpers magazine was published, signed by more than 150 high-profile writers, public intellectuals, journalists and academics including JK Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, warning of an increasingly intolerant intellectual climate.

The letter stated: The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

(The letter was predictably divisive, with many on social media asking the signatories to check their privilege.)

The issues raised in the Harpers letter echo the views published in a much-read piece by journalist Matt Taibbi on how the left is destroying itself because people fear being called a racist.

He wrote: The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats and intimidation.

This new orthodoxy or woke culture can be defined broadly as being alert to injustice in society, especially racism.

Writer Wesley Yang has described it as the successor ideology to liberalism. Yang sees the promise and the purity of woke culture that we can move from the individual wish to the collective demand.

But he believes it is a flawed ideology the idea that we really can be equal still seems to me an impossible wish, and, like all impossible wishes, one that is charged with authoritarian potential.

This struggle is of a different complexion from the culture wars between left and right. Instead it pits the liberal left and centrists against the woke left.

Established cultural gatekeepers, many of whom for years have been on the left side of politics are finding, like the professor in Oleanna, that they need to defend their position and hard.

And like the professor in Oleanna, they have anxiety that their power could be taken away not by a committee but via cancellation, deplatforming or online shaming.

After a wrongdoing is exposed on the internet, the sheer weight of public condemnation can be highly traumatic for the person being cancelled (although for many serial offenders on the right, who are regularly cancelled for their racist views, the blowback has no material effects).

The fear of cancellation, or of not being seen performing the correct activism, or of saying the thing that doesnt conform to the current thinking, is a form of Stalinism, according to some liberals and privileges fear of giving offence over freedom of expression.

Robert Boyers, a literature professor at Skidmore College, is one such liberal. In his book The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies he charts what he sees as censorship on campus where people are too afraid to express ideas contrary to the new orthodoxy, lest they be hauled before a committee.

Boyers cites political theorist Stephen Holmes in defence of liberalism; That public disagreement is a creative force may have been the most novel and radical principle of liberal politics.

Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis have also complained about such groupthink (devoting entire chunks of his newish book White to the issue.) He writes, Everyone has to be the same And if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist.

Liberalism as he knew it in the past has hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement.

In Australia, novelist Richard Flanagan has defended the writers festivals hosting cancelled people such as Germaine Greer, Lionel Shriver and Junot Daz.

He wrote in the Guardian in 2018: The individual examples of Shriver, Daz, Carr and Greer all point to a larger, more disturbing trend. Writers festivals, like other aspects of the literary establishment such as prizes, have in recent years become less and less about books and more and more about using their considerable institutional power to enforce the new orthodoxies, to prosecute social and political agendas through reward and punishment.

Novelist Zadie Smith has often defended the need for freedom of expression and spoken about her need to be wrong, make mistakes, and to feel free in her writing.

I want to have my feeling, even if its wrong, even if its inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind, she said. I dont want to be bullied out of it.

(In a 2018 short story Smith wrote for the New Yorker, everyone is eventually cancelled and on the other side is freedom: Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things.)

Apart from these voices and until the Harpers letter liberals have been accused of being passive when it comes to defending their right for free inquiry, their right to offend and their right to get it wrong.

Perhaps ... the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up theyre afraid theyll be next, wrote Peter Franklin in Unherd. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.

Liberals are playing chess with pawns and keeping their important pieces in the back row, heavily defended. Speak out now and you may risk being put through the threshing machine of cancellation. Your colleagues might circulate a petition calling for your sacking. You can become an unperson in the moment it takes to send an ill-advised tweet.

The thrill and the danger of this present moment is in the apprehension that entrenched cultural power is shifting hands rapidly, and that once the pawns have been sacrificed, liberals could start playing a more aggressive game. One side will win and one will lose, because you cant integrate the two orthodoxies, such are the opposing characteristics that define each movement.

One (liberalism) is about the individual and their rights, the other comes from the position of the collective, alienated from liberal power structures and networks.

The latter demands the former reconsider and reconfigure language, gender, ownership, sexuality, representation, equity and notions of equality.

But for some liberal elders the freedom of the individual is paramount. The freedom they are talking about is their own to write, to debate, to think, to have unpopular opinions, or, as novelist Zadie Smith has claimed, to be wrong.

I believe in freedom of thought, says the professor in Oleanna. (To which the student replies; You believe not in freedom of thought but in an elitist, in, in a protected hierarchy which rewards you.)

Woke culture radically shifts the focus from the individual to the systems that the individual operates in. You may be able to have an unpopular opinion but thats because your privilege, position and your platform allow you to make mistakes and take risks, try out ideas, to be wrong. You are allowed to be free.

But while you are free, many, many more are voiceless, oppressed, unrepresented and and the system that oppresses them remains unchanged.

It is via the collective that woke culture defines and draws its power after all the individualism so central to the last 30 years of liberalism and so-called meritocracy has only advanced the careers and voices of the few. Problems of oppressive systems of deaths in custody, police brutality, sexual harassment and race and gender pay gaps still remain.

When the student threatens the power of the professor in Oleanna, she does so not as an individual but for the group; for those who suffer what I suffer.

Changing the systems that produce and sustain inequality can only occur via some sort of collective action. Liberalism has largely failed on this front.

For the liberal gatekeepers, were in an Oleanna moment.

Theres lip service to the struggle, but is there actually an exchange or relinquishing of power? Not yet. As we saw recently, two young white critics, Bec Kavanagh and Jack Callil, relinquished their platform as book reviewers for Australias Nine newspapers, in the hope that their positions could be filled by non-white critics.

But such actions are rare and even rarer at the top.

In Oleanna, the professor is about to lose tenure, his house, maybe his marriage. He defends his corner. You vicious little bitch. You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life? Here we see when the power is under real threat of being transferred, all talk of liberal ideals falls away.

The last scene of the play ends in a physical struggle. Shes on the ground, hes about to bludgeon her with a chair hes holding above his head.

The plays last words are hers: Thats right. In that context and the context we are now in those final words mean something. They mean of course of course you were going to defend your power by literally standing over me and threatening me with violence.

Woke culture sees this violence which explains in part, the vehemence of the fight.

Different but essentially the same social movements emerge every few years, its only the technology that changes, one friend told me recently on a walk, as we were speculating about that days fresh cancellations.

The sort of shift being demanded by the new orthodoxy is nothing short of radically transformative for society. For a start, it demands a move away from the liberal position of the individual to the collective position of the woke. The shift is from me to we.

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Can liberalism and its gatekeepers survive the seismic changes in our society? - The Guardian

Associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

Overall, the liberal ideal is a diverse, pluralistic society of autonomous people guided by reason and tolerance. The dream is harmonious coexistence. But liberalism also happens to excel at generating dissensus, and some of the major sociopolitical controversies of the past few years should be understood as conflicts not between liberalism and something else but between parties placing emphasis on different liberal freedomschiefly freedom of speech, a popular favorite which needs no introduction, and freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values. Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

For instance, while public universities in America are generally bound by the First Amendment, controversial speakers have no broad right to speak at private institutions. Those institutions do, however, have a right to decide what ideas they are and arent interested in entertaining and what people they believe will or will not be useful to their communities of scholarsa right that limits the entry and participation not only of public figures with controversial views but the vast majority of people in our society. Senators like Tom Cotton have every right to have their views published in a newspaper. But they have no specific right to have those views published by any particular publication. Rather, publications have the rightboth constitutionally as institutions of the press, and by convention as collections of individuals engaged in lawful projectsto decide what and whom they would or would not like to publish, based on whatever standards happen to prevail within each outlet.

When a speaker is denied or when staffers at a publication argue that something should not have been published, the rights of the parties in question havent been violated in any way. But what we tend to hear in these and similar situations are criticisms that are at odds with the principle that groups in liberal society have the general right to commit themselves to values which many might disagree with and make decisions on that basis. Theres nothing unreasonable about criticizing the substance of such decisions and the values that produce them. But accusations of illiberalism in these cases carry the implication that nonstate institutions under liberalism have an obligation of some sort to be maximally permissive of opposing ideasor at least maximally permissive of the kinds of ideas critics of progressive identity politics consider important. In fact, they do not.

Associative freedom is no less vital to liberalism than the other freedoms, and is actually integral to their functioning. There isnt a right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment that isnt implicitly dependent on or augmented by similarly minded individuals having the right to come together. Most people worship with others; an assembly or petition of one isnt worth much; the institutions of the press are, again, associations; and individual speech is functionally inert unless some group chooses to offer a venue or a platform. And political speech is, in the first place, generally aimed at stirring some group or constituency to contemplation or action.

Ultimately, associative freedom is critical because groups and associations are the very building blocks of society. Political parties and unions, nonprofits and civic organizations, whole religions and whole ideologiesindividuals cannot be meaningfully free unless they have the freedom to create, make themselves part of, and define these and other kinds of affiliations. Some of our affiliations, including the major identity categories, are involuntary, and this is among the complications that makes associative freedom as messy as it is important. Just as the principle of free speech forces us into debates over hate speech, obscenity, and misinformation, association is the root of identity-based discrimination and other ills. The Supreme Courts decision in Bostock v. Clayton County banning employment discrimination on the basis of LGBTQ identity last month was a huge step forward, but in practice, workers of all stripes often lack the means and opportunity to defend themselves from unjust firingsall the more reason for those preoccupied with cancel culture and social mediadriven dismissals to support just-cause provisions and an end to at-will employment.

What about the oft-repeated charge that progressives today intend to establish group rights over and above the rights of the individualthat, specifically, minorities and certain disadvantaged groups are to be given more rights than, and held as superior to, white people? If this were the case, the critics of left illiberalism would truly be onto something: Individual rights are, again, at the center of liberal thought.

But that divergence isnt anywhere to be found in any of the major controversies that have recently captured broad attention. A minority chef who says she wants to be paid as much as her white colleagues has not said that white people are inferior; an unarmed black man under the knee of a policeman and begging for his life is not asking to be conferred a special privilege. The goal is parity, not superiority. The heart of the protests and cultural agitation weve witnessed has clearly been a desire to see minorities treated equallysharing the rights to which all people are entitled but that have been denied to many by societys extant bigots and the residual effects of injustices past.

Ultimately, its the realities of our collective past that make the notion that progressives are dragging the country toward illiberalism especially ridiculous. Over the course of two and a half centuries in this country, millions of human beings held as property toiled for the comfort and profit of already wealthy people who tortured and raped them. Just over 150 years ago, the last generation of slaves was released into systems of subjugation from which its descendants have not recovered. August will mark just 100 years since women were granted the right to vote; Black Americans, nominally awarded that right during Reconstruction, couldnt take full advantage of it until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The litany of other inequities and crimes our country has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate against Native Americans, immigrants, religious and sexual minorities, political dissidents, and the poor is endless. All told, liberal society in the U.S. is, at best, just over half a century old: If it were a person, it would be too young to qualify for Medicare.

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The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism - The New Republic