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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"

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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

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.

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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

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The two-state solution is a political fiction liberal Zionists still cling to - The Guardian