Some thoughts on the crisis of liberalism—and how to fix it

Liberalism needs nothing less than a great rebalancing if it is to regain its intellectual and political vitality

Jun 12th 2018

by BAGEHOT

BREXIT is such an all-consuming process for the British—at once a drama, a muddle and a mess—that it is easy to forget that it is part of something bigger: a crisis of liberalism in the west. A growing number of countries have had their own equivalents of Brexit: Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; the election of a populist government in Italy; the Catalan revolt in Spain; the rise of populist authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Poland and, to some extent, India; the simmering rage against what Viktor Orban calls “liberal blah blah” in the intellectual dark-web. The list will be a lot longer by the time Brexit has been completed.

It’s worth taking a break from the ins-and-outs of Brexit to look at the bigger picture, partly because the bigger picture helps us to understand Brexit better (NB: there’s more going on here than BBC bias or Russian gold) and partly because, if we are to bring the country back together once we leave the EU, we need to understand the causes of popular discontent. This post will try to address two questions—why is liberalism in such a mess? And how can it get out of it? But first a definition: what does this slippery word mean? 

There are two misleading definitions of “liberalism”. The first (and most misleading) is the American idea that liberalism means left-wing progressivism. This definition was foisted on the American left by Republicans in the 1970s: the likes of Richard Nixon and George Bush senior liked to talk about “limousine liberals” who advocated “progressive” policies on crime and social integration so long as they could protect themselves from the consequences of those policies (eg, by sending their children to private schools and living in gated communities). Since then some progressives have worn the badge with pride. But American progressivism, particularly in its current iteration, with its growing obsession with group rights and group identities, is incompatible with liberalism as I’m going to use it in this blog. The second is the classical idea that liberalism means small-government libertarianism. 

Read more at https://www.economist.com/bagehots-notebook/2018/06/12/some-thoughts-on-the-crisis-of-liberalism-and-how-to-fix-it