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Today is the Islamic festival of Bakra Eid where thousands of cattle, goats and buffaloes specifically are slaughtered by pious Muslims as an offering to Allah. For the entire duration of the festival and the build-up to it, you probably did not read any preachy articles from the Left media or even the righteous Liberals who during every Hindu festival, tell Hindus what they should or should not do to uphold the collective morality of the country.

From preaching to save milk during Mahashivratri to saving the water bodies during Ganesh Chaturthi, to caring about pollution on Diwali to talking about saving water on Holi Hindus have seen it all. In fact, recently Holi was equated withterrorismand fake story aboutsemen filled balloonswas propagated. Media and the celebs are pushing the bar higher every year.

The very same celebrities and media go completely silent during any Islamic festivals. Well, not completely silent. They wish the Muslims of India and of the entire world. Hope that peace prevails and that all of the rest of us learn the principles of sacrifice, brotherhood and devotion from the Islamic festival.

But have you ever wondered how would the media and these very liberals who hold sanctimonious placards at the drop of a hat react if Eid was a Hindu festival? What if everything else was constant the festival, the Qurbani et al and just the religion had changed? Would the Liberals still be talking about peace and brotherhood? Or would their reaction be completely different?

Here are 10 images that show how the Liberals would have reacted had Eid been a Hindu festival:

What would PETA and Prashant Bhushan be doing if Eid was a Hindu festival? Surely, running to the court.

And Bengal?

When there is a scope for Hindu shaming, Swara Bhaskar would surely not be left far behind.

If Eid was a Hindu festival, Barkha Dutt would surely be interviewing Asaduddin Owaisi of AIMIM.

If the Liberals had the chance to shame Hindus on a festival where Hindus went around slaughtering thousands of animals, it would be quite a surprise if the media and their favourite Hinduphobes would not have branded Hindus are terrorists.

And, of course, the portal that turned Holi in a terrorist attack with children being the terrorist would have gone hammer and tongs against the Hindus.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation would have condemned Hindu Nationalists and passed a resolution to ban the festival.

And, of course, no Hindu shaming event would be complete till the secularist would invoke Jinnah and justify the partition See? This is why Muslims did not want to live with Hindus! Ram Guha would certainly be the best person to give a whole new meaning to the Shaheen Bagh slogan Jinnah wali Azadi.

Disclaimer: I wish Happy Eid to everyone! This article is just to show how the liberal crowd is as bigoted as people they brand as bigots, and how their preaching and disdain are reserved for only one community. I wish no ill will to anyone or wish to offend any sensibilities, except theliberal kind.

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If Bakra Eid was a Hindu festival: 10 images that tell the tale of how liberal media and celebs would have reacted - OpIndia

This is a revolutionary moment in American culture.

On one side, activists and employees are demanding fundamental change to overturn structural racism deeply embedded within institutions of journalism, education, and business. On the other, critics accuse the would-be revolutionaries of engaging in acts of illiberalism, including the silencing and firing of people who resist the proposed changes or even show insufficient zeal in enacting them.

So far, the fight between the two sides has generated far more heat than light. That's what makes Osita Nwanevu's essay in The New Republic, "The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism," such a welcome intervention.

In defending the activist side of the dispute, Nwanevu's tone is high-minded, his reasoning clear and thoughtful. While critics of the activists frequently call the latter a "mob" or describe it in explicitly religious terms, Nwanevu makes a careful, deliberate, complex argument designed to show that it's actually the critics who are acting and speaking impulsively, reacting to events without deep thinking, intentionally refusing to see the reality going on around them.

As one of those critics (unnamed in Nwanevu's essay), I disagree. But it's important to clarify exactly why to ensure that both sides keep the conversation going instead of merely talking past each other, with each side doing little more than bucking up allies and seeking to discredit opponents. In my view, Nwanevu is quite wrong to describe social justice activists as "expanding" the bounds of liberalism, since the aim of their reforms is a deliberate constriction of debate. It would therefore be more honest for him and his ideological allies to admit this and accept its illiberal implications.

I've been pointing to the illiberalism of the social-justice left since at least 2013. I backed off somewhat during the first couple years of the Trump administration, since it seemed a little peevish and an offense against proportionality to write frequently about the topic with the White House occupied by a man who regularly expresses contempt for civil liberties. But there have been events worth addressing over the past year or so. Roughly since the publication of the "1619 Project" in The New York Times last August, but especially since the newsroom rebellions began early last month, I've found myself led once again to call out the illiberalism of the activist left.

Yet as far as Nwanevu is concerned, those who hold my views are the ones guilty of illiberalism.

Part of the problem may be that Nwanevu is responding to weaker arguments made by some on my own side. He's right to note, for example, that the core issue has nothing much to do with "free speech" in constitutional terms, since no one is raising a threat of government censorship. But neither does it concern, as Nwanevu asserts, "freedom of association," including the freedom of a community civil society, a newspaper, a corporate workplace to establish its own standards, since no one is denying the legitimacy of that freedom.

As I've argued on other occasions, every community makes decisions about what ideas and attitudes to rule out of bounds to treat some ideas as worthy of debate and others as unacceptable and warranting cancellation. What's distinctive about the present moment is that groups of activists are demanding to be given the power to make this all-important decision within certain institutions and they are using this newfound power to shift (and often constrict) the lines of acceptable thought and discussion, ruling certain arguments (and the people who make them) out of bounds.

Why do I oppose this effort? It has nothing to do with public policy. I'm all for vigorous debate and personally support efforts to ensure that Black Americans and other minority groups receive equal treatment under the law and that police reforms address and rectify manifest injustices in law enforcement. But that's only a small (and peripheral) part of what Nwanevu discusses in his essay and what his activist allies are aiming for. What he and they are really concerned with is defending the view that American society is comprised of "intelligible, if often hidden, systems" of racial oppression, and rejecting the views of "reactionary liberal[s]" like myself, who see the country as "a jumble of bits and pieces a muddle that defies both systemic understanding and collective action."

That really is the nub of the issue, though I think this is a tendentious way to describe the difference between the two camps. My criticism of the "1619 Project," for example, was focused less on the details of the various contributions and more on the framing of the project as an effort to tell the definitive, "true" story of America, with the history of slavery and its legacy sitting at its very core, decisively shaping everything else.

This was an activist move an act of deliberate exaggeration, a flattening out of the complexity that Nwanevu dismisses as a "muddle" and a "jumble," a decision to focus monomaniacally on one (important) facet of the multifaceted American experience and warp everything else around it. It certainly wasn't an example of seeking to achieve what Nwanevu calls "parity" among various groups. It was an effort to make Black history the defining feature of the country.

The best one can say for the effort is that it's an act of intentional overcorrection: American history has for too long been told as a story focused on white people, so now we should tell it as a story focused on Black people. But that's not a way to achieve a more accurate understanding of the past. It's an act of replacing one form of distortion with another.

And this brings us back to the second-order issue to the question of whether the activists fighting for control of decisions in the workplace believe this kind of criticism is acceptable, and hence worth publishing, at all. From his essay, it's genuinely hard to tell where Nwanevu comes down on the question. During an especially perplexing passage, he mocks New York Times columnist David Brooks for "surreal condescension" in wondering, in the midst of an essay about Ta-Nehisi Coates's much-lauded memoir Between the World and Me, whether, as a white person, he had "standing to respond" critically to Coates' "experience."

When Brooks' column appeared, five years ago, it was possible to wave away such concerns. Today, after a series of forced resignations and firings at a series of media organizations, they cannot be. Yet Nwanevu dismisses them anyway before quickly pivoting to expressions of admiration for two more recent columns from Brooks in which the columnist shows that his reading in Black history has "worked" on him, leading to a "conversion" to support for reparations for slavery and an acknowledgement that "moderates" have "failed Black America."

Brooks has learned. He won't be canceled.

But what if his reading hadn't "worked"? What if Brooks stood by or deepened his respectful criticisms of Coates? What if he continued to argue, as he did in that five-year-old column, that "this country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame" and that although "violence is embedded in America it is not close to the totality of America"? What if instead of joining Coates in calling for reparations, he argued, as I have, that it's a proposal doomed to failure? Would he be allowed to make those arguments in The New York Times today? Or would he be risking his job in doing so not because he would be severely criticized, which is assumed and expected, but because he would provoke a rebellion on staff and calls for his dismissal for refusing to adequately listen, learn, and adjust his views?

I want a public world in which Ta-Nehisi Coates is free to make his arguments with as much potency as he possibly can. But I also want a public world in which his critics can do the same without fear of crossing lines newly drawn. One argument. Then the next. And so on, down through the years. That's how we truly learn and grow as a culture not by taking control of the boundaries of debate, narrowing them to verify our tidy certainties, protecting our sacred texts, and punishing those who dare to profane them.

I don't know if Osita Nwanevu shares this vision of a free, liberal society. I do know that many of the people on his side of the debate appear not to. And that he nonetheless believes that those who think the way I do are the ones guilty of illiberalism. Maybe one day, if the argument continues, I'll be able to persuade him otherwise.

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Who are the real liberals today? - The Week

Shyam Saran

Former Foreign Secretary and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research

The liberal spirit is suffering from terminal angst. Its political expression in liberal democracy is an endangered political species. What is the liberal spirit? It is a conception of society where the dignity of the individual is sacrosanct and rights are citizen based. A liberal society upholds the fundamental rights of each individual to life, liberty, expression and association, the only restraint being the rule of law, not the rule of state or a group or community. The liberal spirit not merely tolerates but celebrates dissent. It believes in the dictum that what is more dangerous is not when there are questions to which there are no answers but rather when there are answers which are not open to question. A liberal society creates equal opportunities for each individual to develop his innate genius and realise his potential. It is non-discriminatory among individuals irrespective of caste, creed or religion. But fraternity is equally fundamental because a sense of affinity with ones fellow citizens, the empathy for one another in recognition of a larger humanity, these are values without which a liberal society has no meaning.

To survive and to flourish, a liberal society needs a unique state structure, namely, the political dispensation of a liberal democracy. The state is as much bound by the rule of law as is the citizen and exercise of state authority is subject to challenge by even the most humble of its citizens. Another feature is the existence of independent and constitutionally empowered institutions which serve to restrain the arbitrary exercise of state power. An independent media and a robust civil society are its other essential ingredients. For a concrete and comprehensive articulation of the liberal spirit and the institution of liberal democracy, one need look no further than the Constitution of India. But while lip service is paid to the Constitution and constitutionally empowered institutions still remain in place, these are being systematically and relentlessly hollowed out. This is not just true in India but in other democracies as well. How has this happened?

I trace the origins of this slide to 1980 when Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK led the retreat of the state from the economy and elevated laissez-faire economic strategies as instruments of both economic prosperity and social welfare. The role of the state in wealth and income redistribution was progressively decimated and even made illegitimate. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave further momentum to this trend. The magic of the marketplace was now hitched together to the notion of liberal democracy. Free markets led to successful liberal democracies and liberal democracies became synonymous with free markets. Thus was born the touching faith in the inevitability of Chinas embrace of capitalism leading to its becoming like one of us. But the very moment of seeming victory of liberal democracy marked the beginning of its unravelling. It became obvious that there was nothing automatic about a free market leading to egalitarian society. The enshrinement of competition, above all else, in delivering prosperity paid no attention to those left behind.

The failure of liberalism lies precisely in its acquiescence in this new orthodoxy, its failure to question these answers. Globalisation delivered immense benefits across the board in terms of rising prosperity but states failed to ensure the egalitarian distribution of these benefits because the free market was assumed to achieve that automatically. Globalisation is not responsible for inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity. It is the failure of public policy which liberals failed to expose. When the free market went into free fall in 2007-08, so did the credibility of the liberal democratic ideal. India has not been immune to these forces. The orthodoxies of the past four decades are no longer tenable. How can one salvage the liberal ideal and liberal democracy?

The liberal idea must be preserved. It still has the power to help us deal with the challenges we confront today because it is the unbounded contention of ideas that will engender possible solutions. If globalisation is here to stay, as I am convinced it is, then we need societies that are capable of adapting to change, of being able to handle immense diversity and cultivate a new spirit of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Only liberal democracies with their respect for diversity and commitment to non-discrimination are best suited to navigate the new landscape. The pandemic raging in our midst is laying bare the bankruptcy of populist authoritarianism and crass mediocrity that pretends to represent the disempowered and deprived but is unable, unwilling and incapable of mobilising society to deal with current and looming challenges. Instead, there is a constant recourse to quick fixes, the bypassing of institutions and of constitutional norms, and worse, the overturning of the very notion of the rule of law. This is how in India, we have ended up with brazen encounter killings to applause from large sections of society which are unable to understand that once the rule of law is breached they will be its next victims.

How do we engage in a discourse that leads us back to a contemporary design of liberal democracy? What must be its key features? The renewed exploration of the Constitution is a good starting point. Even those paying lip service can hardly object.

If liberalism survives in India, its future in the rest of the world may be brighter.

Originally posted here:
Reclaiming the liberal idea - The Tribune India

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"

View original post here:
Enlightenment liberalism is losing ground in the debate about race - The Economist

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.

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The Pandemic Could Be the Crisis Liberalism Needed - Foreign Policy