Defend liberalism…by defending liberalism

A few years ago, a little after Brexit, I was having chat with the philosopher Clara Sandelind now at Manchester University. We were complaining about the defeatism we saw among liberals who spent all the time wondering what they had done wrong, and what concessions they needed to make to the anti-liberals of the right and left that were then in the ascendant. “What about,” she said, “defending liberalism by, you know, defending liberalism”?

Six or seven years on, there’s a sense that the worst of the attacks on liberal democracy have been kept at bay (however close a run thing it was on January 6th) but that we’re missing new ideas to rally behind or rhetoric to inspire people to fight for them.

Where our leaders once said they would “pay any price, bear any burden…to assure the survival and success of liberty” now they talk about “defending the rules based international order” or “providing solutions to our challenges.”

They confuse liberalism and centrism: freedom is so much more than splitting the difference between right and left.

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