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The world may be reaching a dangerous inflection point for liberalism. According to the latest reports from Freedom House, over the last 15 years the share of unfree countries in the world has risen while the share of free countries has dropped. Today, government deficits are spiking in response to the publics demand for intervention to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and some warn that authoritarian leaders are seizing the opportunity to expand their control.

Still, this may be a time when liberalism starts to gain ground, not lose it. A new study by World Bank economists, drawing on data from 190 economies spanning the last 15 years, finds that fiscal crisesof the sort created by the pandemic in countries around the worldare likely to spur liberal reforms, particularly in the economic policy areas of property, investment, and trade.

How liberal advocates act on this glimmer of hope will be crucial. Post-Cold War efforts to spread liberal democracy have disappointed to date. Instead of ushering in the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama predicted in 1989, a know-it-all approach to proselytizing liberal institutions to other countries has engendered widespread resentment toward Western influences. And yet, its more complicated. The political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes recently argued that we should think of that resentment not as a rejection of liberalism, per se, but as an indignant reaction to its perceived imposition.

Whats the lesson here? Liberals must stop thinking of liberalism as theirs alone to give. Instead, they should recognize it as a universal ideal that has roots in many different traditions and cultures. It is on such foundations that enduring liberal institutions can be built in diverse places.

Extensive research on institutional change bears that out. There is a saying: People support what they help create. For liberal institutions to stick in new places, they must not be mere knockoffs of institutions that grew elsewhere. The Wests own liberal democratic institutions, including the division of powers, property rights, freedom of exchange, free speech, and public deliberation, are idiosyncratic versions of liberal ideals, but not the ideals themselves. They are successful, but theyre works in progress. They are worthy of thoughtful study, but theyre not suited for franchise-like plug and play.

This should prompt a tectonic shift in the foreign aid approach to development. A growing number of voices within development circles have been trying to do just that. They advocate a localization agenda, which means shrinking the role and influence of foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations and narrowing their focus to a few areas where they are better suited to help, such as information-sharing and providing operating support for local NGOs to increase their capacity to lead change for themselves.

With widespread belt-tightening across the development sector due to the coronavirus pandemic, including at major institutions such as Oxfam and the U.K. Department for International Development, such a radical change has become thinkable, perhaps even imminent, in a way we would not have imagined a year ago. This may provide a short window to permanently curb the undue influence of outsiders on local development questions.

Thats not to suggest a pure agnosticism about what to support abroad. Liberal reforms and liberal institutions should remain the priority. The same logic that commends federalism and its principles of subsidiarity applies equally to development work in other countries: Decentralization works. But if foreigners continue to hold the reins, even unwittingly, their efforts will continue to breed resentment and, more importantly, fail to serve local needs.

For maximum effect, we should look to private philanthropy for most grant-making to foreign NGOs. Voluntary nongovernmental philanthropy is less liable to special-interest distortions and political manipulation. Just as importantly, private philanthropy can be less rigid about predetermined compliance requirements.

Such flexibility is important. Through the grant-making our organization has administered to think tanks and other NGOs in recent years, we have learned to hold our tongues and listen. We invite our grantees to tell us whats possible, whats important, how they will do it, and, most importantly, how they will measure meaningfully their success for the projects they are proposing.

That model fits best with what we know about the diffusion of good ideas and practices. In their study on Regulatory Reforms after Covid-19, Simeon Djankov and other World Bank economists also found that countries that share borders or that trade heavily with each other are more likely to adopt for themselves the reforms of their neighbors and commercial partners. They see with their own eyes the successes and failures in neighboring countries and can, on their own initiative, decide for themselves what changes to pursue and how best to pursue them.

Decentralized liberalism is a prudent strategy for navigating this time of great uncertainty. In 2020, we have seen the limits of centralized models at work. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Internal Revenue Service to the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and, at the global level, the United Nations World Health Organization, big institutions have failed. Its a stark reminder that there are very real limits to the types of problems that distant authorities are able to solve, no matter how well-funded or well-trained they are.

Early in this crisis, the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates invested billions of dollars in seven different vaccine candidates simultaneously knowing that, at best, one or two might work. Gates knows what a big mistake it can be to place all your bets on one unproven solution. Not only does it raise the stakes considerably if you get it wrong, but it also severely limits any opportunities for learning, since there are no alternative results for comparison.

Liberal economies, with their presumption of decentralized decision-making, allow fast-acting, widespread, uncoordinated experimentation and learning. That model takes advantage of centralized knowledge and expertise, to be sure, but it also integrates the dispersed knowledge the rest of us possess about our individual circumstances. People close to the problems can find solutions that actually work, long before a large and distant bureaucracy ever could.

Our instinct when facing fear and uncertainty is to shift the tough decisions to the experts and to insist on one uniformand presumably bestsolution to our diverse problems. Experts play important roles in collating and disseminating knowledge, but they cannot know enough to successfully conjure up one great solution for us all. Its the lesson we have learned in our failed attempt to install liberal democracies throughout the world. In this moment of crisis, we now have a second chance to get it right. Lets keep making history.

More:
The Pandemic Could Be the Crisis Liberalism Needed - Foreign Policy

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.

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

Israels impending annexation of the West Bank has put the fate of the two-state solution or, perhaps more accurately its death back in the headlines. Yet neither Benjamin Netanyahus announcement of his annexation intentions, nor the Trump peace plan, killed the chances of two states, which ceased to be realistic long ago. What the great drama of annexation playing out in the Anglo-American press is really about in no small part due to the exclusion of Palestinian voices is whether liberal Zionists will reconcile themselves to this reality or continue to deny it.

While some liberal Zionists, like the Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart, now recognize that, as he wrote last week, the traditional two-state solution no longer offers a compelling alternative to Israels path, most seem likely to choose the path of continued denial. For many liberal Zionists as well as those further to the right a two-state solution has for decades been less a practical policy proposal than an article of faith, a constitutive political fiction that has enabled them to reconcile their contradictory commitments to both ethnonationalism and liberal democracy.

The abstract idea of two states has also served a valuable strategic purpose for the Israeli government and professional Israel advocates. References to Israels putative commitment to two states in theory have become a way to shield Israel from criticism, and consequences, for actions that in practice rendered a two-state solution impossible.

The vast majority of Zionist and pro-Israel groups even, or perhaps especially, the self-defined liberal ones will be loth to confront their contradictions, or surrender their talking points, now.

Indeed, faced with annexation, liberal Jewish groups have so far responded with the same kinds of warnings they have issued for decades. In a joint statement, eight Jewish organizations including the New Israel Fund and Americans for Peace Now declared in May that annexation would show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government of Israel no longer seeks a two-state solution. Back in March, when Benny Gantz joined Netanyahus government, J Street cautioned that annexation was an absolute red line that Israel must not cross.

Yet its been obvious for years that Israels government no longer seeks a two-state solution: annexation would hardly be the first line Israel has crossed without facing any serious consequences. In fact, since before the Oslo process began in 1993, Israel has continually crossed supposedly decisive lines.

Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, warned in 1982 that, with the settler population in the West Bank approaching 100,000, Israel would cross the threshold past which territorial compromise would become impossible. When Israel blew past that, new lines were drawn: now 250,000 settlers, now 500,000; now construction in the E1 corridor, between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Maaleh Adumim; and now, finally, annexation of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.

With each new line crossed, believers in a two-state solution have found new excuses to ignore the obvious. This is especially true of liberal Zionists. Since 1967, they have clung to the myth that Israels military occupation of the West Bank is temporary, and, consequently, that Israel proper defined as the parliamentary regime within Israels pre-1967 borders can be meaningfully disentangled from the half-century-old military dictatorship on the other side of the Green Line. The occupations putative temporariness enabled liberal Zionists to see themselves as genuine liberals, to define Israel as a democracy. Annexation, which would confirm that the occupation is permanent and inextricable from Israel proper, would in theory force liberal Zionists to decide between support for democratizing the one-state reality, or support for apartheid.

The idea of two states will continue outliving the end of any realistic prospect for a two-state solution

Wholesale ideological reversals are uncommon, however. With a few notable exceptions, liberal Zionists conversion to non-state Zionism, non-Zionism, or anti-Zionism seems unlikely. And, after all, over the course of more than a decade of Netanyahu governments, liberal Zionists have become habituated to the dissonance between their values and those the Israeli government acts on.

But the idea of two states will continue outliving any realistic prospect for a two-state solution for those to the liberal Zionists right, too. Israels foreign ministry and professional Israel advocates alike recognize that the two-state solution has served as a useful means of deflecting criticism of Israeli territorial expansion. After roughly a dozen Democratic congressional representatives signed a letter, spearheaded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling to condition US military funding to Israel in the event of annexation, Aipac responded that doing so would, paradoxically, make a two-state solution less likely.

Netanyahu and his allies in the US are making the argument for annexation in similar terms. In a Washington Post op-ed, Ron Dermer, Israels ambassador to the US, argued that annexation actually will open the door to to a realistic two-state solution and get the peace process out of the cul-de-sac it has been stuck in for decades. Likewise, the authors of the Trump administrations peace plan were careful not only to construe it as an instrument for achieving a two-state solution but as the logical continuation of the Oslo process.

While theres no small degree of cynicism here, it also reflects a genuine ideological commitment. Most American Zionists, even rightwing ones, do not openly support an apartheid-style single state, unlike hardline Israeli settlers who oppose the Trump plan because it provides for areas of nominal Palestinian autonomy. In this sense, the position staked out by Dermer and the Trump administration is not that different from the liberal Zionist one: both envision a Palestinian state as an archipelago of isolated, non-contiguous Bantustans subordinated to Israeli control.

Yet as long as Zionists outside of Israel remain uncomfortable with openly defending an apartheid-style regime in terms that reflect the reality on the ground, the rhetoric of the two-state idea will serve as an invaluable means of obscuring the actual ramifications of their position not only from the public, but from themselves. Political fictions of such existential importance take a long time to die, if they ever fully do. The lack of a viable two-state solution does not mean liberal Zionists will stop believing in one.

Joshua Leifer is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents, where a longer version of this article first appeared

Read the original post:
The two-state solution is a political fiction liberal Zionists still cling to - The Guardian

The state secretary for youth and family affairs decried criticism levelled against the Europe Uncensored Conference held in Budapest last week, saying that liberals were intolerant towards ideas other than their own, intolerant regarding open debate and intolerant towards nation states.

Katalin Novk reacted on Twitter to an article written by Romanian MEP Dacian Ciolos, published on the euractiv.com news site earlier on Monday. Ciolos called the speakers of the conference, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, Serbian President Aleksandar Vui and Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jana ignorant and arrogant, and said the conference was a teambuilding event for politicians who seek to exploit their nationalism in a post-truth and populist era.

Orbn: Europe Needs Strategy Not Tactical Responses

In reaction, Novk wrote that liberals today are intolerant towards ideas other than their own, intolerant regarding open debate [and] intolerant towards nation states. Europe Uncensored is about freedom of thought and opinion.

Featured photo illustration by Gergely Botr/ kormany.hu

Link:
Novk: Liberals 'Intolerant Towards Ideas Other than Their Own' - Hungary Today

The people in Rutland and the state who claim to be leaders go from the ridiculous to the sublime. You let a few people dictate to the public what is right in their eyes only changing a school's mascot known as the Raiders to the rattlesnakes is absurd.

What's next? You going to tell veterans who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, that they can't wear their hats? People protested the Vietnam War, a war I proudly served in like so many others. Let them try and take my hat off.

This state has already said they are going to vote for Biden. You voted twice for Obama who put us deep in debt we will never get out of. You voted for Hillary who stole from you and you voted for Clinton who was an adulterer. And you continue to vote for Bernie Sanders who does nothing.

People wonder why other people aren't moving to Vermont because of high taxes, no real jobs and foolish leadership. And now Rutland is losing GE. Vermont was the 14th state to sign the declaration because of wayward thinking. I also bet the students and faculty at Rutland High School don't know what school spirit is. We have the best police force in the state but because of regulations brought on by liberals, their hands are almost tied.

Twenty-one years ago, Rutland was thriving, people were happy, places to eat and shop and a mall, but today, the mall has gone downtown, is almost empty, with no population to go to these places, they close up and move. But Vermont still thinks like a liberal, just keep raising taxes.

Go here to read the rest:
Liberal thinking | Letters - Rutland Herald