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In different but complementary and insightful ways, Robert D Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson have made a persuasive case for a tragic future of global and regional struggles among great powers and lesser powers alike over security, resources, and values. If they are correct, and I think they are, then the project of liberal internationalism has failed for now and perhaps forever.

Liberal internationalism entranced many elites and citizens in the West and the world three times, following three global conflicts the two world wars and the Cold War. The promise of liberal internationalism was that zero-sum struggles among countries over power, wealth, and values, in which one countrys gain means losses for others, could be replaced by non-zero-sum collaboration to promote mutual security, mutual prosperity, and common values.

One way to eliminate interstate competition, of course, would be the unification of humanity under a single state, by force or by federation. But liberal internationalists have been committed to a world of national self-determination by many sovereign states, including new ones that emerge by secession or the partition of former multinational empires. Liberal internationalists have sought to reconcile their two goals of national independence with global harmony by replacing competition among states for relative power and relative wealth with global governance rather than with global government.

In the liberal internationalist vision, security would no longer be provided on a self-help basis by individual states or alliances. Instead, a system of collective security would make all states, big and small, powerful and weak, safe from the aggression of others. Interstate aggression would be outlawed by treaties, and outlaw states would be punished by national or global military forces deployed to enforce global law by a global organisation the League of Nations or the United Nations.

Following the Cold War, many liberal internationalists in the West, including neoconservatives and humanitarian hawks, were committed to the dream of a world without interstate conflicts, but realised that the United Nations would never effectively function as global police officer. Many found a substitute in the idea of a league of democracies which would oversee the post-Cold War world. Others hoped that a single country, the United States of America, could reduce incentives for interstate competition and provide security for all countries or at least all deserving countries by policing the world as the global hegemon. If post-Soviet Russia and post-Maoist China consented willingly to membership of a liberal internationalist order or rule-based system policed by the US and regional allies, then great-power politics would vanish. Only small and recalcitrant rogue states such as Saddam Husseins Iraq and North Korea would threaten the American-led liberal international order.

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The strategy of collective security has implications for trade policy. If the League of Nations, the United Nations, or Team America kept the peace, then individual countries would no longer need to try to maximise their control of industries, markets, and natural resources vital to national defence, just as individuals under a common national government are liberated from the need to stockpile arms and supplies as a precaution against attack by their neighbours. Free of the need to provide for national militaries, except perhaps for forces that states would contribute to global collective security campaigns, countries could abandon economic nationalism and join a borderless, rule-governed global market in which individuals and firms were the only participants.

What about conflicting values? Liberal internationalists from the aftermath of the First World War to the aftermath of the Cold War hoped that conflicts of values among countries would simply disappear as the result of the inevitable conversion of all of humanity to liberal democracy, founded on ideas of individual human rights derived from the American and French revolutions during the 18th-century Enlightenment. In place of older distinctions between Christians and pagans and civilised and barbaric countries, mostly-Western liberal internationalists distinguished liberal from illiberal states and democracies from autocracies. In a secular version of post-Christian theodicy, liberal internationalists assumed that the conversion of the heathens to Western liberalism was unavoidable and could be sped up by evangelisation and the occasional coup or war of regime change.

In his war message to Congress on 2 April 1917, the US president Woodrow Wilson declared: The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. Echoing Wilson, in his second inaugural address 0 January 2005, George W Bush asserted: The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

The millennial hopes of liberal internationalists after the First World War were frustrated by the resumption of great-power rivalries that led to the Second World War. After 1945, the conflicts of the US and its allies with the Soviet Union, China and other members of the communist bloc disappointed and disillusioned those who had high hopes for the United Nations system. Now, the replacement of the USs fleeting post-Cold War global hegemony with great-power struggles pitting the US and its allies against China and Russia, along with the return of non-alignment as a strategy among many other nations, marks the defeat in our time of the liberal internationalist project.

In the emerging multipolar world, as throughout most of history, states will have to look after their own security, alone or with the help of military allies. This makes it imperative to adopt strategies of self-sufficiency in militarily essential manufacturing, raw materials, energy supplies, workforces, and consumer markets, at the level of blocs or alliances if not of individual countries.

In the realm of values, the project of liberalising the world has failed as decisively as earlier Western attempts to Christianise or civilise humanity. Saudi Arabia and Iran and many other Muslim countries, including Afghanistan under the Taliban, have non-liberal religious regimes of a kind liberals hoped would give way to secularism and individualism. In different ways Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey have consolidated postmodern autocracies that can function effectively in the age of computers and rockets.

Nor is liberal democracy healthy in its Western heartlands. In the last generation, real power in the US and European countries has drained from legislatures to increasingly powerful executives, judiciaries, transnational agencies and corporations. The result has been the replacement of the old politics of left and right by conflict between elite technocratic insiders and alienated citizens represented by colourful and often ineffectual and corrupt populist tribunes such as Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. As the multiple prosecutions of Berlusconi and Trump show, lawfare the weaponisation of the judicial system for partisan purposes as a substitute for elections is being normalised in North Atlantic democracies, having long weakened democratic institutions in the oligarchic societies of Latin America. Liberal democracy cannot flourish if political factions routinely seek to jail or censor rival politicians.

Military and economic competition, together with ineradicable conflicts of religious and secular values, cannot be eliminated as utopian liberal internationalists have hoped. But inevitable interstate conflicts can be moderated and prevented from escalating into all-out war. Age-old diplomatic expedients such as spheres of influence and neutral zones, along with newer methods such as arms control treaties, summit meetings and hotlines, can limit great-power rivalries and proxy conflicts. Instead of treating free trade as the norm and justifying sanctions and embargos only as punishments of global outlaws, we can acknowledge the legitimacy of selective protectionism and industrial policy by nations and blocs, while engaging in the trade-war equivalents of arms control negotiations. And conflicts among incommensurable values can be managed by what John Gray has called a modus vivendi , or co-existence, in a permanently pluralistic world.

What audiences want is a tragedy with a happy ending, an American movie mogul once declared. What the realist thinker John Mearsheimer calls the tragedy of great power politics is a permanent feature of a world without a world government, but that tragedy need not end in universal ruin.

Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (Atlantic Books)

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Liberal internationalism has failed, but we can live in a multipolar world - The New Statesman

On March 27, six people were killed at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, by a former student who identified as transgender. Everyone was rightfully horrified left and right, and whatever side of the sexuality and gender debate you are on.

A few days later, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decried new bills emerging in state legislatures putting some restrictions on gender transition procedures for youth. Calling these bills hateful and threatening to freedom, she said, Our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.

Predictably, that remark provoked outrage from people who found the timing inappropriate. Former White House press secretary and Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany called out the White House for the audacity of choosing that moment to speak of attacks on the trans community.

While Jean-Pierres comments were certainly misguided, they were not focused on Nashville at all. But their temporal proximity to the school shooting inflicted by a trans-identifying person was all it took. McEnany declared with emotion that it was the Christian community truly under attack, and her co-host Emily Compagno went on to insist that these state bills have nothing to do with anti or hate and instead protect Christians from this overbearing, overreaching government.

I sympathize with these concerns, and it is absolutely fair to raise them, but the entire exchange illustrates what gets lost in a cultural competition about who is being attacked.

What is lost is the full truth, and the conversation that could take us there.

Like an autoimmune condition in which nonthreats are perceived as real attacks by a confused body, we all know how haywire things can feel when our closest relationships become amped up and hyper-reactive.

When my own family gets on edge, everything and anything including minutia about kitchen cleaning or scheduling details can feel like a threat, even an attack.

Didnt you realize I had planned something else for that night? Why is it that Im the only one who ever notices the dishwasher needs to be emptied?

So many people seem on edge right now like this primed to see things that arent truly threatening as attacks.

This same kind of a pattern is showing up more and more in our over-reactive public discourse today when, for instance, honest attempts to scrutinize someones ideas or work are angrily portrayed as an attack.

Philosopher Stephen Yanchar acknowledged recently that critical thinking has a reputation of being a slash-and-burn attack mode, but it also can be loving, kind and gentle a part of relationship building.

When was the last time you saw someone receiving a thoughtful critique with such generosity or did so yourself?

Thanks for pointing out some other things I need to think more about. ... I am grateful that youd highlight some limitations to my current approach.

Its much more common to instead shift the focus to the motive, or even character, of the person raising the questions. Then the questions themselves depart stage left, and weve got a juicier conversation on our hands, one focused on reputation debates rather than truth-seeking.

You see, there is power in accusing a sincere questioner of launching an attack. At the very least, it distracts and deflects from any uncomfortable attention on you or something you care about. Such a deflection can be very helpful indeed.

Former President Donald Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct multiple times over the course of his career. When fresh allegations surfaced during his first campaign, I was struck by how often he turned the attack back on the women, accusing them of attacking his campaign and threatening to sue them for defamation.

It almost feels like we should have a word for this when people being accused of serious things accuse their accusers of being the true aggressor. Many of my own colleagues have similarly experienced attacks simply for raising sincere questions and concerns about the harms of pornography.

National Reviews Jack Butler wrote recently about this same pattern of victims being portrayed as aggressors, suggestingthis is the unenviable position many conservatives find themselves in while trying to defend various Judeo-Christian norms only to be confronted by the commentariat on the left, who having initiated its latest volley, turns around and accuses us of being the ones waging culture war.

Whether individually or organizationally, there are perhaps good reasons for this tactic, each rooted in self-preservation. Jonathan Rauch, an insightful senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has pointed out the disproportionate influence that can come from claiming to be physically endangered and psychologically traumatized by someone elses comments.

Much like the emotional power of claiming one has experienced trauma (even if its just a microaggression), there are tactical benefits from insisting on being a victim of attack. Surely, the proliferation of both usages are tied to similar trends.

Much of this is no doubt part of a tribal society convinced that the major intersections between right and wrong correspond to the divisions between men and women, white and black, rich and poor, religious and non-religious. Once youre convinced of that, it hardly takes any leap of logic to feeling attacked by any group not your own.

Its important to point out that an over-reactive sensitivity and paranoia about threat are among the classic symptoms of psychological disorders like paranoid personality disorder, delusional (paranoid) disorder and schizophrenia. And psychotherapists have whole programs designed to help people recognize when a feeling of attack is real or overstated and mistaken.

Not all of this is merely psychological, of course; there are real threats around us, too, as reflected in the worrisome increase in violence in our neighborhoods and schools.

Its worth remembering who benefits from a flame-throwing discourse in which each side accusing the other of attacking it.Its not me, and its likely not you. But there are clearly some who stand to gain from our confusion, our division and our inability to arrive at truth together.The rest of us are left more vulnerable and raw primed from one moment to the next to either feel attacked or to be seen as attacking, when in fact most people are doing the best they can, with what they know.

There are plenty of bad apples out there. And they deserve some real scrutiny. But lets agree to stop pretending that people with honest questions and critiques are somehow attacking me or you.Theyre not. And with a little thicker skin and stronger backbone, we surely can all see that.

Jacob Hess is the former editor of Public Square Magazine and writes at Publish Peace on Substack. He has worked to promote liberal-conservative understanding since the publication of Youre Not as Crazy as I Thought (But Youre Still Wrong) with Phil Neisser. With Carrie Skarda, Kyle Anderson and Ty Mansfield, he also authored The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints.

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Are conservatives or liberals really under attack? | Opinion - Deseret News

The Liberals have rejected a policy resolution that would have called on them to make a balanced budget part of their next election platform.

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The policy resolution brought forward by Quebec Liberals asks the party to develop a clear, costed proposal for a return to balanced budgets, and that it be part of their next election platform.

It was rejected in a morning vote 97-76, without formal debate, and it will not be part of the official partys policy.

Liberals also rejected a policy resolution by Saskatchewan Liberals aiming to have voting in federal elections mandatory for all Canadians over the age of 18, and that failing to do so would result in a small monetary fine.

Delegates at the Liberal Party convention, which concludes today, are set to vote on which 24 remaining policies will be their priority.

They are also set to vote on a new party president.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 6, 2023.

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Liberals reject balanced budget and mandatory voting as official policy - National Post

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Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland take part in a keynote address during the second day of the Liberal Convention in Ottawa, on May 5.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press

The late philosopher Richard Rorty argued that national pride is as necessary to countries as self-esteem is to individuals, and political parties seem to think they need huge dollops of it, too. At any rate, the Liberal Party convention that ended Saturday was one big collective self-esteem seminar.

The partisan delegates didnt just want to hear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau smack down Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre they craved it. A young Liberal said, straight-faced, that his party was too defensive and didnt do enough partisan slanging. A veteran said he wanted Mr. Trudeau to look in the camera and call Mr. Poilievre a clown. The Prime Minister came pretty close in his Thursday night speech.

On Friday, Jean Chrtien, who was prime minister when some of those young Liberals were toddlers, acted as a walking, talking, slightly apocryphal Liberal history book, running over a list of the partys accomplishments medicare, Canada Pension Plan, Charter of Rights, same-sex marriage and so on. The message through and through was that the Liberal Party built this country that its not broken, despite what Mr. Poilievre says, but rather, the envy of the world.

There was more in this vein, or variations of it.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the Ottawa convention centre to validate Liberal policies, notably $10-a-day daycare, but also to warn that the rollback of abortion rights and rise of populism south of the border could happen here.

There are forces in your own country that are trying to figure out whether they can tinker with the clock and maybe turn it back a little, she said. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, her on-stage host, nodded vigorously and implored Liberals to heed the warning.

All of it was effectively an exercise in Liberals asserting their self-worth. Pride, tradition, accomplishment and the assertion that another party Mr. Poilievres Conservatives would represent the decline of Canadian civilization. The Liberals were telling themselves they are still the natural governing party.

Thats what political parties do at conventions, but at this juncture, its worth noting the mood.

The Liberals trail in the polls now pretty consistently. They won 32.6 per cent of the vote in the last election. Mr. Trudeau has been in power for seven-and-a-half years, and at that stage, a prime ministers popularity doesnt usually rise. Many of the convention-goers could see there are forces stacking up against them.

But there was no sense of distress. Delegates seemed generally in a good mood. The political trouble Mr. Trudeaus government is coping with nearly every day filters through to party members differently. No one expressed a sense of crisis about the litany of headlines about Chinese-government interference in Canadas domestic politics. Liberals were more worried that their gun-control bill has been a political debacle.

There was no tension. Mr. Chretiens Liberal history lesson could have recounted that eight years into his premiership, every party confab was a scene of aggressive leadership campaigning by those who wanted his job. But theres no sense at this convention that the rank-and-file are looking past Mr. Trudeau, and the aspirants were just making themselves seen.

Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney was milling around; Innovation Minister Franois Philippe Champagne ran around shaking peoples hands nearly off; Foreign Affairs Minister Mlanie Joly was repeatedly surrounded by small groups of picture takers. But the real leadership politicking was being done by candidates for the Ontario provincial Liberals.

There was a tiny mini-ripple from the debate over a Quebec policy resolution calling for the government to set out a detailed path to balanced budgets, but it was defeated as an irksome proposal to do something the Liberals dont want to do. The debates over policy resolutions were sparsely attended. For any political doubts about re-election there seemed to be, for many Liberals, the comforting belief that Mr. Poilievre is too negative and too extreme for Canadian voters.

This was about waving the Liberal banner. Thats what conventions are supposed to do, of course: buck up the collective self-esteem, especially at a time when the prognosis is cloudy.

But the Liberal Party isnt known for its lack of self-confidence. Gerald Butts, Mr. Trudeaus former principal secretary, has said arrogance is the Liberal kryptonite. At this juncture, the Liberals could probably benefit from spending time looking at their weaknesses. But no one can doubt that what they really wanted was a shot of self-esteem.

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In a cloudy time, Liberals hold a self-esteem seminar - The Globe and Mail

Antonio Guillem

American adults who identify as politically liberal have long reported lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being than conservatives, a trend that mental-health experts suspect is at least partly explained by liberals tendency to spend more time worrying about stress-inducing topics like racial injustice, income inequality, gun violence, and climate change.

Now a team of Columbia epidemiologists has found evidence that the same pattern holds for American teenagers. The researchers analyzed surveys collected from more than eighty-six thousand twelfth graders over a thirteen-year period and discovered that while rates of depression have been rising among students of all political persuasions and demographics, they have been increasing most sharply among progressive students and especially among liberal girls from low-income families.

The authors, who include Columbia professors Katherine M. Keyes 10PH, Seth J. Prins 16PH, and Lisa M. Bates, along with graduate student and lead author Catherine Gimbrone, speculate that left-leaning teens may have been deeply affected by Donald Trumps election as president, the US Supreme Courts subsequent lurch to the right, rising socioeconomic inequality, and worsening political polarization. Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing, they write.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2023 print edition of Columbia Magazine with the title "The politics of depression."

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Why Depression Rates Are Higher Among Liberals - Columbia Magazine