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(Corrects typo in name Xiaobo in first paragraph)

* Even hospital visitors seem unaware of Liu

* Official media in Chinese don't mention him

* China activism repressed since Xi took power

* Micro-bloggers evade censorship with Liu posts

By Christian Shepherd

SHENYANG, China, July 13 (Reuters) - As the hospital treating Liu Xiaobo says his organs and breathing have begun to fail from cancer, few in China outside a small circle of dissidents know about the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and his lifetime pursuit of liberal democratic reform.

Even other patients at the First Hospital of China Medical University in the northeastern city of Shenyang, where Liu is being treated, seem not to know they are sharing the facilities with a world famous dissident.

When Reuters visited the floor where friends say Liu is being treated, visitors for other patients on the same ward seemed confused and asked why there were new procedures when security questioned them and checked their IDs.

Nothing has appeared in Chinese-language official media since Liu was diagnosed with cancer in late May. Searches for "Liu Xiaobo" on Chinese social media show no results.

China's foreign ministry answers questions from international media at its daily briefing with the standard line: China is a country ruled by law and the case is an internal affair; other countries should not meddle. Even that line is missing from the official transcripts of the briefings on the ministry's website.

The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid published by the official paper of the ruling Communist Party, is the only publication that regularly writes articles about Liu, in English, and usually to rebuff international criticism.

The paper has cast Liu as an outsider marginalized from society whose cause has failed inside China.

It was overseas dissidents" who are the most active in "hyping the issue and are trying to boost their image by deifying Liu, the Global Times said in a Monday editorial. Western mainstream society is much less enthusiastic than before in interfering with China's sovereign affairs, it said.

Liu was the co-author of a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, which attracted more than 10,000 signatures online before the authorities deleted the document from internet pages and chatrooms. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, a year after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion.

Charter '08, issued in 2008, reflected an apparent shift in China at the time towards becoming more open to liberal ideals, said Beijing-based historian and political commentator Zhang Lifan. That changed when Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

"Since (Liu) was sentenced, peaceful transformation as a route for change has essentially been blocked off by the party. Since the new administration came into office, the party is moving in the opposite direction," he said.

Hu Jia, a well-known Beijing-based dissident and friend of Liu's, says few people in China know anything about him or his work.

"The reality is that if you are on the streets of Beijing and you stop a hundred people, to have one know who Liu Xiaobo is would be a great result," he said.

"Chinese society, due to internet censorship and being cut off from the rest of the world, essentially does not get to hear our (dissident) voices. Protesting voices on Weibo are almost not existent these days," Hu said.

But Xi has helped the dissident movement by locking up a peaceful protester and letting him die in detention. "The last state to do that was Nazi Germany," Hu says.

Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist who died in 1938 in Nazi Germany's Berlin, was the last Nobel Peace Prize winner to live out his dying days under state surveillance.

While China's censorship makes it difficult to assess Liu's support, he is a "hero" for many liberals in China, even if few will speak out for him, a Chinese editor at an online publication said, declining to be named.

"I am really not sure if it's accurate to claim he is unknown to the public, (or if) people are just too scared to show their knowledge (of Liu)," the editor said.

Despite the restrictions, internet posters have written in support of Liu and his cause, using variations on his name to avoid the censors.

"When it comes to freedom, comes to constitutional government, we have talked too much, now we need to act," read one comment on the micro-blogging platform Weibo. "Situations like Liu Xiaobo's are still a worry, but we nevertheless need people to act, bravely face the risk of death and act."

The post echoed something Liu wrote in April 1989 when he returned from studying in the United States to take part in the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square: intellectuals often "just talk", they "do not do".

"He's leaving, but we cannot see, cannot speak, cannot act" said the headline of an article shared as an image on the popular messaging platform, WeChat, a method that can slow down the censors. In the article, three people born in the 1980s were interviewed about Liu.

"I will see him as a very important symbol, (but) people like him fail to get attention from common folk, and given his plight as an unknown prisoner of conscience, there is little to say," one person identified as L said in the article.

Albert Ho, who heads the Hong Kong Alliance organising protests in Liu's support, said China's efforts to erase Liu from people's memory will fail.

"Don't underestimate the power of the internet ... And don't underestimate the people. I have seen many episodes where suddenly the hero gets degraded into the devil and the devil becomes the hero," he said, referring to previous shifts in China's political system.

"People are not living in an open society in China so you never know," he said. (Additional reporting by Venus Wu in HONG KONG and Beijing news room; Editing by Bill Tarrant)

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REFILE- China's liberals quietly fight efforts to erase Liu Xiaobo legacy - Reuters

Its anyones guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, this drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving President Donald Trump and the East, including the eruption of controversy over Trumps remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trumps liberal critics were revealing and dangerous.

The speech a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog, tweeted the Atlantics Peter Beinart. Trumps speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto, read a Vox headline. According the New Republics Jeet Heer, Trumps alt-right speech redefined the West in nativist terms.

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term alt-right that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.

There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trumps speech: For example, that he shouldnt have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaws recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served Americas interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.

How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of liberalism and the West. Liberalism is an ideology defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty, and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

So to appeal to the West in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the Wests wars, religions, and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of the West to liberalisms enemies on the alt-right that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of immigration skeptic, or social conservative, but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the Wests greatest achievements.

As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed todays conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.

As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the West. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist they fashion themselves defenders of the West, but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the Wests principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.

To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trumps speech was his remark that the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism and, presumably, the PC liberals who he believes enabling it. But there is another threat to the Wests survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.

The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the West into a slur, Trumps critics are disarming. Perhaps the presidents dire warning wasnt so exaggerated, after all.

Jason Willick is a staff writer at The American Interest.

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The alt-right is an attack on Western values. Liberals shouldn't surrender so easily. - The Denver Post

Constitutional originalism has long been an unquestioned dogma for conservative evangelicals, as the recent nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court has again confirmed. Evangelical political leaders responded to the announcement with unrestrained praise. As the Southern Baptist Conventions Russell Moore wrote, Judge Neil Gorsuchis a brilliant and articulate defender of Constitutional originalism in the mold of the man he will replace: Justice Antonin Scalia.

Focus on the Familys James Dobson struck a similar note, suggesting that Gorsuch would uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and the original intent of its framers. For many evangelical conservatives, originalism has a dogma-like status not just because it is the proper way to read and interpret a text, but because the competing doctrine of the living Constitution has brought us not only the administrative state in the New Deal, but Roe and Obergefell.

Yet if John Comptons fascinating new book The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution is right, evangelicals at the turn of the twentieth century are largely to blame for evangelicals problems here at the turn of the twenty-first century: It was evangelicals then who made the doctrine of the living Constitution plausible, even if evangelicals today lament it.

Comptons fascinating and masterfully executed argument goes something like this: Evangelical campaigns against alcohol and lotteries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century aimed at not merely regulating such vices, but prohibiting them. But to enact their political vision, they had to break existing traditions of constitutional interpretation. By exerting political pressure upon courts and subordinating constitutional interpretation to their political aims, evangelicals helped create the legal and intellectual conditions in which the doctrine of the living Constitution arose.

Comptons argument for this thesis is intricate, but it demands and deserves unwinding. He posits that the political and moral perfectionism of antebellum Protestants created standards of public morality that threatened the core ideals of the commercial republic that the Constitution was drafted to engender and protect. That is, evangelicals wanted to regulate public morality in ways that impinged upon commercial and business practices that had been legal, if not always favorably smiled upon, since the countrys founding.

While evangelical campaigns against liquor and lotteries eventually aimed at eradication, rather than tolerant regulation, such a goal was at odds with existing doctrines of constitutional interpretation. The attempt to abolish existing lottery grants, for instance, ran aground upon the Contract Clause, while prohibitions on alcohol possession and sales infringed commonly accepted notions of property rights. Not only that, but prohibition at the local level could not be accomplished without overcoming the Commerce Clause. Interstate sales were protected by the federal government, while police powers were reserved to local governmentsa dilemma that left immoral property free to be distributed and sold across state lines.

Compton traces these conflicts through their development in state courts, and then within the Supreme Court, to show that evangelical morality eventually influenced constitutional interpretation. To pick but one small aspect of Comptons many data points, he contends that until the mid-1870s, agreements between legislatures and private entities were contracts within the meaning of the Contract Clause, which would have included lottery grants. However, in the 1880 case Stone v. Mississippi, Chief Justice Morrison Waite invalidated such a contracta lottery grant from Mississippion grounds that the government, as Compton says, possessed the inherent right to suppress immoral activities.

It is, of course, theoretically possible that such a doctrinal shift had pristine intellectual and interpretative causes. However, Compton points out that the decision was made in the midst of a significant public controversy about the Louisiana Lottery, which was at the time probably the most notorious of the lottery companies.

As prohibitions on gambling at the local level had increased, the Louisiana Lottery had survived and expanded through interstate ales. They were so well known that in 1879, Anthony Comstockof the anti-contraception laws famearrested dozens of Louisiana Lottery agents in New York City. The Louisiana legislature subsequently revoked the lotterys 25-year charterbut it was protected in court by a judge who was, Compton says, widely denounced as a shill for lottery interests.

This was the political context in which theStone casewas decided, and which set the stakes for the Supreme Courts ruling. Protecting the lottery grant on the basis of the Commerce Clause would mean the most notoriously corrupt corporation in America would enjoy immunity for the length of its charter. However, revoking the grant would undermine the traditional interpretation of the Commerce Clause, which had protected lottery grants.

Waites opinion in Stone suggests he is not unaware of such political realities. Waite had written that because lotteries were prohibited in many states, the will of the people has been authoritatively expressed on the question. The court could either embrace precedent and oppose the will of the peopleor innovate. They chose the latter course, and created an exception that they tried to quarantine from having broader doctrinal effects.

Yet Stone did not crush the Louisiana Lottery, which survived by exerting its considerable political power to make their charter part of their states constitution, and thus outside the scope of Stones ambit. (Yes, seriously.) The survival of the Louisiana Lottery allowed it to go on flourishing through interstate sales. Much to the frustration of evangelical anti-lottery activists, as long as a single state allowed the lottery to exist, both the states and the federal government lacked the power to curtail interstate sales.

States had no power over interstate commerce, and the federal government was hampered by the distinction between its police and commerce powers. Compton argues that congressional legislation prohibiting transporting lottery tickets was the first clear exercise of federal police power. The Supreme Court upheld the law in Champion v. Ames, in which Justice Harlan argued that lottery tickets were commercial items, even though they had never been regarded as such by the law. But Harlan also emphasized the fact that lotteries had become offensive to the entire people of the Nation. The conflict, in other words, between morality and commerce was decided on moralitys sideand thus another exception was born.

While judges in such opinions attempted to quarantine the effect of their exceptions to their cases, Compton demonstrates that the logic that they relied upon was inexorable. In each area of conflict between the aims of morals legislation and the Supreme Courts doctrines, Compton traces a three-stage pattern of judicial resistanceaccommodation, andultimatelydoctrinal incoherence.

The Supreme Courts response to New Deal legislation has often been credited (or blamed) for undermining economic due process in the service of a hugely popular administrative state, a shift that some have blamed on the idea of the living Constitution. Yet as Compton observes, nearly every argument advanced during the New Deal period began by quoting from Justice Harlans opinion in Champion v. Ames. That is, it was the morals decisions of the late nineteenth century that made the New Deal cases possible.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, who is widely credited with being one of the progenitors of the doctrine of the living Constitution, repeatedly pointed to alcohol and gambling opinions to argue that as long as the regulation was reasonable, the judiciary should defer to the considered judgment of the people. Compton suggests that morals precedents thus brought the abstract arguments of the sociological jurists and the Legal Realists down to earth. That is, they made the notion of a living Constitution credible.

It is tempting to think that the political perfectionism of the late-nineteenth century evangelicals has nothing to do with the political manifestation of evangelicalism today. The campaigns against lotteries and alcohol were, after all, progressive efforts, while the struggles for marriage and religious liberty that have occupied the Religious Rights attention are largely conservative, defensive postures. And even if Comptons thesis is true, it is always open to contemporary evangelicals to disavow their own history, and simply deny that what happened in the past has any meaningful bearing on either the Religious Rights self-understanding or its political rhetoric.

Yet besides being a deeply unconservative posture, such a path would obscure the lessons Comptons book contains for political movements tempted by perfectionist idealsas the Religious Right indisputably is. For one, the political perfectionism at the heart of the anti-lottery and anti-gambling campaigns raises deep and important questions about which vices we should merely regulate and which we should prohibit, and to what lengths we will go to restrain them.

Few of us, on the Right and Left, are willing to countenance the question of which injustices we should permit as a society for the sake of not creating deeper injustices in our efforts to solve them. But in aiming to eradicate one vice, evangelical activists sowed the seeds for accomodating many others.

In aiming to eradicate one vice, evangelical activists sowed the seeds for accomodating many others.

Not only that, but Comptons thesis should prompt contemporary evangelicals to mitigate the denunciations that they direct toward the progressive left for their advancement of the living Constitution doctrine. The idea that the meaning of the Constitution should be determined by the will of the living has generated a great deal of damaging legal nonsense. From Sen.Dianne Feinsteins comments about Roe to Judge Posners recent invention of the judicial right to legislate, the living constitution has wrought a great deal of bad upon our country.

Yet if Comptons thesis is right, it means that such strong denunciations need to be accompanied by a greater deal of self-awareness than they often are, and to be decoupled from the antithesis between us and them that happens when the argument becomes defined by partisan stigma, as this one indisputably has. The doctrine of the living Constitution is bad, but its a badness which more traditions have deployed than we would want to recognize.

Comptons thesis demonstrates that within the many ironies of history, the social and political instruments a perfectionist movement deploys may be easily co-opted for ends and purposes never imagined in their development. That is, if late-twentieth-century evangelical activists sowed the wind, todays activists have reaped the whirlwind. Or, to switch the biblical reference, the constitutional sins of evangelicalisms forefathers have long been visited upon their more conservative heirs.

The value of such an account is that it requires a more complicated assessment about who is to blame for various features of our culture war. Describing the progressive Left as the aggressors in the culture war has the dual effect of preserving the Religious Rights purity and establishing its victim status. Yet Compton makes it clear that on at least one of our deepest culture war frontstheories of constitutional interpretationmatters are far more complicated than that simplistic narrative allows. The idea that the progressive Left invented the doctrine of the living Constitution ex nihilo in the 1920s plays well, but only at the expense of letting our own history and tradition off the hook.

But then, that kind of self-exonerating narrative is precisely what a culture war requires, if it is going to be fought with the energy that it (allegedly) needs. Acknowledging the complicity of ones own tradition in bringing about the social and political conditions one is decrying must inevitably chasten a movements rhetoricbut such reflective self-awareness rarely generates the kind of enthusiasm and fervor that keeps the institutional coffers full.

It is easierfar easierto simply disavow the past and pretend that evangelical politics began in 1980 with the Advent of St. Ronald of Reagan. There is nothing particularly conservative about such a strategy, inasmuch as it seeks to ignore both the debts and benefits that a movements forbearers bestowed. But there lies the ironical rub; in seeking to escape the past and define the evangelical political witness only by the living, todays Religious Right adopts the very mentality that demonstrates their continuity with their late-nineteenth-century forbearers.

Matthew Lee Anderson is pursuing a D.Phil. in Christian ethics from Oxford University, where he is also an associate fellow of the McDonald Centre for Christian Ethics. His academic work is focused articulating the grounds for procreative and parental rights, and countering anti-natalist arguments. He founded Mere Orthodoxy, and is the author of two lay-level books and numerous essays. He is a Perpetual Member of Biola Universitys Torrey Honors Institute, and lives in Waco, Texas, with his wife.

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How Evangelicals Invented Liberals' Favorite Legal Doctrine - The Federalist

Concerns about free-speech suppression on campus shouldnt be dismissed out of hand, and liberals should speak out against any excesses within their ranks at colleges and universities. Yet the conservative medias incessant coverage of these controversies undoubtedly inflates their significance, suggesting a systemic problem in higher education that doesnt exist. But the belief that it exists, though largely confined to the right, has consequences for us all.

The conservative narrative about colleges and universities has several common complaints: Theyre inhospitable to conservatives. Liberal professors indoctrinate their students. And left-wing students have become snowflakesbut also militant social justice warriors. In every instance, the evidence against these claims is stronger than the evidence for them.

On the question of liberal professors indoctrinating their students, the consensus is clear. Yes, professors lean left (although with some caveats), Inside Higher Eds Scott Jaschik wrote in February. But much of the research says conservative students and faculty members are not only surviving but thriving in academefree of indoctrination if not the periodic frustrations. Further, the research casts doubt on the idea that the ideological tilt of faculty members is because of discrimination. Notably, some of this research has been produced by conservative scholars.

One such example is last years Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, written by Jon Shields, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, and Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado. As two conservative professors, they wrote in The Washington Post, we agree that right-wing faculty members and ideas are not always treated fairly on college campuses. But we also know that right-wing hand-wringing about higher education is overblown.

Dunn told me he thinks conservative students do face social pressure from their liberal peers. For your average conservative student going about their daily life, he said, my guess is that politics isnt going to come up that often for them, if only because they often choose majors in the hard sciences or in business. He argued the issue is much more salient for sociology or political science majors. At the same time, he cautioned, One thing I think happens is that conservative students go into college expecting the worst. Its just not a healthy attitude in general.

Dunn hopes that schools will take this opportunity to promote intellectual diversity and civil discourse, and that campus conservatives, instead of inviting right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, will bring in more speakers like Princetown professor Robert George, who has joined with Cornel West in promoting healthy debate. I do think that conservative media could help. Of course, its not terribly newsworthy if a speaker comes to campus, gives a talk, people ask pointed but polite questions, and then everyone goes home without a YouTube-worthy video being captured, he told me. People smashing windows makes for better television than an egghead in a frumpy suit giving a talk. But they could do things that highlight how individuals that strongly disagree with one another can nevertheless work to promote civil discourse and even friendship across ideological lines.

Woessner worries about a lack of ideological diversity among faculty, and he is troubled by what he sees as attempts to suppress speakers with alternative points of view. It borders on fascism when we try to use physical threats or attempt to disrupt people from having a conservation that may be unpopular, he said. And yet, he stresses that part of succeeding in higher education is not having a victim mentality, and the right shouldnt create a self-fulfilling prophecy about being discriminated against on campus. The more conservatives overplay the narrative that theyre being persecuted and oppressed, the more they will check out of higher education, and that makes the imbalance worse, he said. I think conservatives have more to gain from higher education than liberals do. Liberals dont have their ideas challenged as often, and that makes it harder for them to grow intellectually.

Kelly-Woessner says liberals need to make changes, too. She said her research shows this generation of young people is more politically intolerant than previous cohorts. At the same time, she said, its a few instances that get blown up and then represent what colleges and universities look like. She notes that campuses dont get media coverage when host conservative speakers without controversy. We dont have the same visceral reaction to conservatives on campus, she said of Elizabethtown. In fact, weve had quite a few on campus, and nothing ever happened.... Of course were going to have slanted perspective on the magnitude of the problem, because nobody reports on the dog that doesnt bark.

The conservative media has painted a distorted portrait of academia, and their customers apparently are adjusting their opinions accordingly. But even if the decline in Republicans regard for higher education is largely attributable to right-wing hysteria and hyperbole, liberals cant afford to ignore it. The Pew poll has serious implications, for instance, for the funding and independence of public colleges and universities, which is increasingly under attack by Republicans. Consider Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and North Carolina Governor Pat McCrorys respective wars on public education in their states. Low public opinion of colleges and universities will only embolden more Republican governors to do the sameand to provide them cover when they do.

The GOPs newfound negativity about academia, Woessner told me, erodes the public support of higher education in state legislatures. If conservatives have a false impression of the state of higher education, and they believe in the open persecution of conservatives, there will be less support for the public financing of higher education. That hurts professors and students of all political stripes.

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Liberals Can't Ignore the Right's Hatred for Academia | New Republic - New Republic

French President Emmanuel Macron will host US President Donald Trump on Thursday and Friday for Bastille Day talks which coincide with the 100th anniversary of US involvement in World War Two. The meeting, between two leaders vastly different in age and political philosophies, will be intriguing for the common ground that they seek to find.

Trump has referred to his great relationship with Macron, and it is true that they share political positioning as perceived insurgent outsiders with a business background. Moreover, the two have a number of shared international objectives, including in countering international terrorism with France, for instance, the second largest contributor to the US-led coalition in Syria.

Yet, while both Macron and Trump have political reasons to court each other, the context for the meeting is the stark policy divergences. Already the two presidents have clashed...

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Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron embody the ongoing war between liberals and populists - Telegraph.co.uk