“It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.
A new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.
Illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.
Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals.
Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen.
Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.”
Just another warning. Just another useless cry in the dark. Woke won’t stop. The illiberal left is a nightmare we can’t wake up from.
The illiberal left wil only stop when everything, including the last ray of light in western civilization, is destroyed. Only then the bodies of the slain and the oppressed (the white man and the capitalist and the infidel and the heterosexual and the democrat, the gender binary, the attractiveness of woman, the macho male, the humorist, the satirist, the scientist, the writer, the individualist and all and everything that used to be succes and freedom and joy) will moan: ‘Yes, we were warned. But we just didn’t care. Because we were too damn naieve. As usual’.
History repeats itself. Always.
