#classical liberalism

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/16/lucky-orifices/#invisible-hands

The theory of markets goes like this: even the best of us can fall prey to selfishness and rationalization, so let's arrange society so that people acting on their most selfish impulses end up producing benefit for all of us. That'll be easier and more reliable than convincing everyone to be more generous.

How do you arrange society so that selfishness produces public benefit? With markets. Faced with relentless competition, the most effective way to accumulate and retain wealth is by striving to make your wares cheaper and better. In a competitive labor market, we can secure fair treatment for workers without labor law or unions – bosses who treat their workers badly will lose them to better bosses. Just "align the incentives" and let markets do the rest.

This is an area where there's broad overlap between the left and the right. Chapter one of The Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels' love letter to the incredible power of markets to improve everyone's material conditions by increasing production while lowering costs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.YcmQ.KuTFFpUAnlmt&smid=url-share

Meanwhile, over in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith comes to the same conclusion:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

In other words: if you get the incentives right, then even the greediest baker will resist the temptation to fill his loaves with sawdust and gravel. The greedier he is, the more he'll strive to make his bread cheap and delicious, because that will let him sell as many loaves as possible, thus maximizing his own wealth.

It's not exactly horseshoe theory vindicated, but if you squint just right, you'll see both communists and capitalists agreeing on this one thing: if you want the bourgeoisie to bend its efforts to producing something that the rest of us can benefit from, you'll get further by appealing to their fear and greed than by trusting in their munificence.

This is how you can have both leftists and market true believers coming onto the same side on antitrust: they may not both exactly agree that the best way to run things is by appealing to capitalists' fear of being dethroned by a competitor, but they absolutely agree that the worst way to run things is to simply trust in capitalists' generosity.

They're right, of course. As Lina Khan likes to say, companies that are too big to fail become too big to jail, and thus too big to care. If you doubt it, consider this internal email sent by an Apple executive insisting that the company is wasting money by making iPhones that are too good, and counseling a corporate strategy of deliberate shittiness:

In looking at it with hindsight, I think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are 'good enough' for the consumer. I would argue we're already doing more than what would have been good enough. But we find it very hard to regress our product features YOY [year over year]." Existing features "would have been good enough today if we hadn't introduced [them] already," and "anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it's allowed into the consumer phone.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-06/423137.pdf

Policymakers can assume the profit motive, but they have to craft the conditions under which that motive is shaped by competitive anxiety to produce quality goods and services at a fair price.

Anyone who believes in markets must also tacitly believe that successful market participants don't believe in markets. They should understand that capitalists hate capitalism, that every pirate yearns to be an admiral. They should understand that capitalism's winners only defend disruption when they're the ones doing the disrupting. They should understand that profits are only good when you're a scrappy challenger, but once you've conquered the market, every capitalist seeks to become a feudal lord, converting profits to rents and insulating themselves from an exhausting life of constant competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The (smart) defenders of markets do understand this, but they face a dilemma. By definition, the benefactors with the most money and power to contribute to their think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and publications are the rentiers – the billionaires who've shored up their fortunes with Warren Buffet's beloved "moats and walls." They're the blitzscaling billionaires who thrive on predatory acquisitions and high capital costs that prevent new market entrants from challenging their incumbency and its easy profits. They're the pirates who've become admirals.

{Miscellaneous Centricide Doodles:}

This stuff is from 2025-26 in no particular order. I finally built up the courage to post rough sketches rather than full pieces. ^_^

I do lean right on a lot of issues, but you do know American-style theocratic far-right conservatism isn't how conservatism works in a lot of places, right? In some European countries, for example, gay people can lean right and the centre-right parties can be very supportive of LGBT rights and women's rights! If you're an American, your Democratic Party would be considered right-wing in a lot of contexts as well, so you might unknowingly be right-leaning too.

Iranians tend to not like anti-capitalism, collectivism, socialism, communism, anti-imperialism, as well as theocracies because those ideologies have hurt the country a great deal. Leftism has hurt the country a great deal, both from inside and outside. The best days of the country were of capitalism and monarchy and a right-wing, secular, and pro-West direction. When Iran is free, I'll make sure to ban any leftist parties and imprison all leftists alongside Islamists.

Great essay.

The majority of people who are same sex attracted do not adhere to the tenets of Queer Theory and have a variety of political and philosophical views. Some strongly object to the concept of 'queer' and oppose same-sex attraction being regarded as a transgressive, subversive political identity. They may instead want to live in a society where homosexual is recognised as something that some people are and for this to be largely unremarkable and not assumed to include any particular social status or kind of belief system.

This has been the liberal stance with regard to gay rights as well as women's rights and the rights of racial minorities. Liberalism, which foregrounds the right of all individuals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has focused on removing barriers that prevent some demographics from achieving this and then leaving them alone to decide what they want to believe and do. This was the leading approach to securing rights for women, racial minorities, religious minorities and sexual minorities from the end of the 19th century upto the 1980s. In relation to gay rights, it is best summed up by the slogan, "Some people are gay. Get over it."

This was very successful because the individual and universal elements of liberalism appealed to intuitions of fairness commonly held by people on both the left and the right. However, beginning in the 60s, a movement of radically deconstructive postmodern thought on the left arose to disrupt it. The central belief of this was that what we consider to be knowledge is, in fact, a construct of oppressive power, perpetuated in discourses (ways of talking about things). Objective truth is unobtainable and the best we can do is theorise about what political forces caused knowledge to be constructed in this way in the first place and try to deconstruct it. This remained almost entirely within the bounds of academia where it troubled the general public very little due to being largely incomprehensible until the end of the 1980s. (I have written about this here). At this time, it was mutated into an accessible and actionable form by scholars developing a cluster of 'applied postmodern' theories that were known as postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectional feminism along with the lesser known dis/ability studies and fat studies. Central to this wave of theories was identity politics.

Identity politics works very differently to liberalism in that, instead of focusing on the rights of the individual to universally granted rights and freedoms and objecting when any group is denied this, it focuses on the group specifically, rejecting both individualism and universalism. The group then becomes a collective defined by specific theorised interests which are political. People from within those groups who hold those political beliefs are presented as the authentic 'voice of colour' or 'queer voice' while those who hold different views are regarded as inauthentic and not truly a member of the group whose opinions should be considered. In relation to race, it looks like this:

A path beyond rationalism and drive-based nihilism

Michael Kumpmann examines how Peter Töpfer’s concept of Depth Truth converges with Max Stirner’s challenge to Enlightenment rationalism and the modern therapeutic state.

Peter Töpfer recently presented his philosophy of depth truth1 comprehensively in a new book. The work opens quickly with the phrase: “We need a new Enlightenment.” This is an old cliché in German politics. One of the first in the German-speaking world to raise this demand was the CDU politician Heiner Geißler in his 2012 book Sapere Aude. [CDU = Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s major center-right party. “Sapere Aude” (“Dare to know”) is the Enlightenment motto used by Immanuel Kant.] The book emerged in the context of the Stuttgart 21 protests [a large protest movement against a controversial railway and urban redevelopment project in Stuttgart] and addressed the alienation of citizens from politics, which Geißler saw as dangerous and in need of remedy.

The book was critical of capitalism and described a situation in which people could theoretically access all information through the internet, yet lacked the educational capacity to understand the complexity of the world well enough to make responsible, informed decisions. As examples, he cited the Fukushima disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, and a scandal in China involving poisoned baby formula, which later contributed to the introduction of China’s Social Credit System. Overall, he advocated greater civic participation and direct democracy in order to prevent nihilistic, desperate masses—frustrated by a system that ignored them—from blocking everything out of rage. However, he supported meaningful, constructive protest.

Much later, in 2018, Steven Pinker published Enlightenment Now, arguing against scientific skepticism and panic narratives such as those surrounding 5G technology. Although it appeared after the German debate, there are thematic overlaps.

In Germany, however, another development from the same period was more decisive. What Alexander Dugin described in “Liberalism 2.0” as an intra-liberal spiritual civil war between classical liberals and postmodern left-liberals also applied here. This conflict was particularly visible between the FDP [Free Democratic Party, Germany’s pro-market liberal party] and the Greens, who struggled over the meaning of “true” liberalism. (Many remember the jokes about the FDP on the satirical TV program Heute Show [a German political satire show similar to The Daily Show], which contributed to the party’s temporary loss of representation in the Bundestag [German federal parliament], or comedian Stefan Raab exaggerating Philipp Rösler’s self-introduction as “Bundesfurzenden” [a mocking pun meaning roughly “Federal Farter,” parodying the title “Bundesvorsitzender,” federal chairman].

During this phase, André F. Lichtschlag and Frank Schäffler introduced the term “libertarian” (libertär) into German political discourse for the first time in a sustained way. [Lichtschlag = founder of the libertarian magazine eigentümlich frei; Schäffler = FDP politician associated with anti-Euro positions.] The singer Xavier Naidoo’s ideological shift in that direction also began around that time.

The FDP politician Hasso Mansfeld from Bingen wrote his “Liberal Confession of Faith” (Liberales Glaubensbekenntnis), warning against postmodernism and an emerging therapeutic state in which “stupid, will-less, drive-controlled schizoid masses” would be manipulated by “experts” into the “healthy” direction instead of thinking for themselves. This text was widely shared, copied, and plagiarized in AfD [Alternative for Germany], CDU, and FDP circles. Many declarations of a “new Enlightenment” in German politics stem from this context. The problem: it remained superficial, losing itself in day-to-day controversies over banal statements by the Greens that generated outrage yet lacked substance. There was no fundamental engagement with political questions—only noise and agitation.

Moreover, a contradiction remained unresolved. On the one hand, Kant served as a model of Apollonian pure reason [“Apollonian” referencing Nietzsche’s contrast between rational order (Apollo) and ecstatic instinct (Dionysus)], ignoring feelings and drives and following logic alone. On the other hand, the level of debate resembled “peak Boomerism” (i.e., stereotypical baby boomer rhetoric), such as “The Greens want to take away our schnitzel,” closer to kindergarten than rational discourse.

Sexuality reflected the same pattern. A typical Boomer attitude, caricatured by internet personalities Schlomo Finkelstein / Aaron Pielka [German right-wing satirical figures] as “The tits should be out.” Everything was permitted and encouraged rather than restricted by religion or values: from the most disgusting internet pornography to topless pictures, vulgar songs like “Layla” [a 2022 German party song criticized for sexist lyrics], hook-up culture, provocative schoolgirl fashion, and Christopher Street Day parades (CSDs) [German term for LGBTQ Pride parades, named after Christopher Street in New York, site of the 1969 Stonewall riots]—the main thing was laissez-faire. Only postmodern developments such as xenogender identities, fluid gender self-definitions, or Judith Butler’s queer theory were rejected as distasteful and disruptive to private fantasy.

That Kant was among the most conservative philosophers—accepting sex only for procreation and condemning all else, stricter in this respect than Dugin (who associated with the writer Eduard Limonov) or Julius Evola (who condoned orgies and sex magic)—was ignored. Likewise absent was Aleister Crowley’s principle of sexual freedom with dignity rather than indulgence “like wild animals.” Instead of Evola’s view of sexuality as veneration of the partner as goddess and life-force, there was crude objectification. The idea that beautiful clothing ennobles—or, in Evola’s words, deifies—the human being never appeared. Instead: “The more revealing and naked the women, the freer.” (From similar milieus later came the embarrassing AfD campaign slogan “bikinis instead of burqas.” In comparison, even Jeffrey Epstein seemed more dignified.

No one asked why everything ended in postmodernism or why the first Enlightenment failed. Instead, participants congratulated themselves on their intelligence. Rather than a detailed engagement with Kant and Voltaire, it remained superficial. Critics such as Theodor W. Adorno [German philosopher of the Frankfurt School, critical theorist] were dismissed as “evil cultural Marxists” without serious discussion.

Peter Töpfer’s concept of depth truth as a path towards a new Enlightenment represents a deeper approach than these low-level debates, focusing more on psychology than on surface politics. He is influenced by Bernd Laska [German thinker influenced by Wilhelm Reich] and adopts Laska’s LSR project [La Mettrie–Stirner–Reich project, identifying these three thinkers as key Enlightenment radicals], which views Julien Offray de La Mettrie [French materialist philosopher], Max Stirner [German individualist anarchist philosopher], and Wilhelm Reich [psychoanalyst and student of Freud who emphasized sexual energy] as central figures of a new Enlightenment.

Reich’s inclusion stands out compared to other concepts. While Mansfeld, Weidel [Alice Weidel, leader of the Af], and others invoked Kant—the Prussian duty-bound moralist criticized by Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Jacques Lacan, and others as life-denying—Reich sought to allow creative and sexual energies to flow.

Töpfer first examines the counter-Enlightenment thinker Vincent Reynouard [French Holocaust revisionist], who, referencing La Mettrie, argues that the Enlightenment abandoned God and thus meaning, reducing the human being to a “higher-developed animal” or biological machine. La Mettrie, however, envisioned self-created meaning in the manner later articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre. Reynouard claims that most people reject this path—not because thoughtlessness is easier, but because nihilism permits primitive freedom while meaning-creation demands renunciation. The example of drive-dominated sexual morality among liberal “new Enlighteners” illustrates this. Such reduction of the human to unrestrained desire-machines, as in Deleuze and Guattari [French post-structuralist philosophers who described desire as productive “machines”], produces the perfect subject for the therapeutic state feared by Mansfeld. With no higher purposes and only impulses, a psychiatric society like B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two [1948 novel depicting a behaviorally engineered utopia] would fit perfectly.

Töpfer introduces an intriguing idea: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment alike deconstruct higher religions and ideologies, leaving only pure drives—which are equally hollow. Everything comes from nothing and returns to nothing. From this arises a void, a feeling of nothingness as the primal ground. This nothingness frightens people.

This recalls the Kyoto School [20th-century Japanese philosophical movement integrating Western philosophy with Zen Buddhism], especially Keiji Nishitani, who studied under Martin Heidegger. They connected Heidegger’s existential anxiety with the Zen-Buddhist concept of absolute nothingness (śūnyatā). Relative nothingness is the absence of something; absolute nothingness is undefined ground. Questions of birth, death, and meaning revolve around this absolute nothingness, which is the source of all being and action. As in Zen: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Töpfer reaches a similar conclusion.

He then turns to psychology and psychoanalysis. The “terrible insight of śūnyatā” is not merely natural but reveals something about us and our culture. Drawing on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and the Unabomber, he argues that from childhood onward humans are manipulated to fit the system: instead of hunting to meet needs, they attend school, pursue careers, and become compliant citizens. Everywhere there is manipulation; the will is ignored. Even the idea “A good job and money will bring you a girlfriend” contains a manipulative structure.

Töpfer concludes that Western religion and occultism (e.g., Freemasonry) teach ego-transcendence to discover the true self—yet systemic manipulation has destroyed that self. Nothing authentic remains to discover. Crucially, not only the superego but many drives are socially constructed; thus the 1968-era “vulgar psychoanalysis” slogan “Let your drives run free” achieves little. [“68ers” = the generation of left-wing student movements in 1968 Germany.] According to Töpfer, this anti-authoritarian imperative created a distorted superego comparable to Puritanism. Ironically, laissez-faire later produced feminist “rape culture” panic, resulting in similar rigidity to earlier prudishness.

The central thesis: the first Enlightenment understood the human being primarily as a rational being and attacked religion, superstition, and emotion to free pure reason. Many psychotherapies function similarly: Freudian analysis interprets feelings to remove them as obstacles; cognitive therapy trains self-manipulation towards “more productive” thoughts. Töpfer argues that affects and emotions must be regarded as equal to reason.

He proposes that after deconstructing the irrational, a new Enlightenment should not impose something “more rational” but teach living with the void. If values are subjective and rationalizations of drives, rational advice becomes merely an attempt to steer the “patient” towards the therapist’s drives rather than towards freedom. His key solution draws on Max Stirner’s theory of the “owner” (Eigner) and property, interpreted through psychoanalysis and Gestalt therapy (explicitly referencing Fritz Perls [founder of Gestalt therapy]).

Instead of classifying thoughts as rational or irrational, one asks: Does this thought originate from me? If not, from where? In this awareness lies salvation. In a postmodern age of “bodies without organs” [Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of deconstructed subjectivity] and Nick Land’s “hyperstitions” [self-fulfilling future myths], this approach makes sense.

The book continues with an extended discussion of psychological theories, focusing on Gestalt therapy, Reich’s students, and psychoanalysts. It also examines why Freud initially interpreted symptoms as consequences of abuse and later revised that thesis. There are excursuses on the Frankfurt School, German “culture of guilt” (Schuldkult), and the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment movement in 18th–19th century Europe], which I characterizes as ethnomasochistic. Also: Jewish intergenerational trauma transmitted through upbringing. (Note: the Old Testament story of the binding/sacrifice of Isaac [Genesis 22, where Abraham is commanded to sacrifice Isaac]; Yahweh is symbolically linked with Saturn—via the “El” syllable, and the Sabbath as Satur(n)day [the author is making an esoteric/etymological association here; “Saturday” is named after Saturn in English, while “Sabbath” derives from Hebrew Shabbat and is not etymologically from Saturn]. The god Saturn devours his children [a Greco-Roman myth: Cronus/Saturn eats his offspring], which can be interpreted as trauma/abuse. Jesus sacrifices himself, saving human siblings from the Father.)

Overall, I very much like the book despite its length. It touches central themes for me. Long before Dugin, my philosophical journey began with Xenogears and Neon Genesis Evangelion [Japanese video games/anime exploring existentialism and psychoanalysis], leading directly to existentialism and psychoanalysis: Freud, Reich, Jung, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. I never liked the Enlightenment; Kant seemed to me a tyrant who wanted to break humans into robots (Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade” reinforced this view). As a teenager, I felt neurotic panic before Yahweh. Friends showed me that Christ brings grace rather than strict law.

Thus I identify more with this new Enlightenment than with Mansfeld’s or Weidel’s neo-Kantianism. It feels closer to postmodernism than to classical rationalism. My criticism: a strong rejection of religion and tradition. Yet Töpfer’s approach may allow reevaluating tradition as tested practice. Perhaps the book itself can be seen as a practice of the left-hand path [esoteric term for spiritual self-deification through transgression], liberation from the Demiurge [Gnostic creator-god associated with illusion and bondage] through contemplation and a monastic way. As in Korean Buddhist existential philosophy: explore suffering (han [Korean concept of deep, collective sorrow]) intellectually, recognize yourself through it, and thereby liberate yourself.

(Translated from the German)

Originally published at:

Alix Breeden at Daily Kos:

We are the company we keep, and that is never more clear than when we look at who President Donald Trump surrounds himself with. Katie Miller, a former political adviser to President Donald Trump and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s wife, was quick to slam a “woke and deeply leftist” tweet Monday to prove a point. However, while Miller’s podcast might be getting some attention, her own personal reading comprehension could use some attention as well.  “I try to not talk about politics. I generally believe the best way I can serve the world is as a non-partisan expert, and my genuine beliefs are quite moderate. So the bar is very high for me to comment," Anthropic founder Chris Olah wrote via X over the weekend, referring to the killing of Alex Pretti. "My deep loyalty is to the principles of classical liberal democracy: freedom of speech, the rule of law, the dignity of the human person." Miller, in a head-scratching response, used Olah’s words to justify why artificial intelligence is too “woke” as Anthropic is a AI safety and research company. “​​If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed,” she wrote. “Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon.”

[...] Even Elon Musk’s far-right-leaning platform, fit with community-provided fact-checking notes, provided corrective context to her tweet.  “‘Classical liberal democracy’ means the basic ideas America was founded on: personal freedom, people treated equally under the law, free speech, and government that stays out of your life as much as possible,” the note read. “These ideas are closer to modern conservative views, not woke ones.”

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Dec 21, 2025

If a fundamentalist Christian or a radical Hindu massacred a group of innocent civilians, would the first instinct of politicians be to protect churches or temples? Of course not. The ideology would be named and condemned. Apologists for religiously inspired terror would be sidelined and treated as morally adjacent.

So why, when the violence is inspired by political Islam, is the reflex always to protect mosques, draft laws on “Islamophobia”, and resurrect the looming threat of the “far right”?

It’s because Western liberalism has been captured and deformed by a progressive ideology that treats plain speaking about political Islam as the cardinal sin. To judge is to imply hierarchy; to imply hierarchy is to admit that liberal values might be superior – something now utterly taboo and status-destroying among those with institutional and cultural power. This doctrine is so internalised among the progressive class that it functions like a substitute religion. Naturally, it’s ruthlessly exploited by our enemies.

In theory, liberalism is perfectly capable of moral discrimination. It emerged from the Enlightenment precisely to allow members of society to assess competing beliefs, criticise some, adopt others and, through arguments and persuasion, reject those beliefs that seek to undermine these same rights. It assumes that ideas matter, that some are better than others, and that individuals have the right – indeed the duty – to defend the conditions that make liberty possible.

Progressivism has gradually and almost imperceptibly rewritten that agreement. In its current form, it treats all cultures as morally equivalent, while moral judgement is almost exclusively reserved for the West. The result is a ruling class that no longer understands what liberal principles are for and has lost the language to say that certain belief systems are not merely inferior but incompatible with a liberal society.

Islamism isn’t morally complicated, any more than fascism is. What’s complicated is the West’s refusal to judge it.

This strange development – to see Western culture as uniquely guilty, and therefore uniquely undeserving of defence – is one of the great moral errors of our time.

It’s an intellectual failure as much as a moral one. Western liberal societies are increasingly governed by people with only the most basic understanding of the civilisation they have been entrusted to protect. Beyond the crudest moral shorthand – Hitler bad, tolerance good – their grasp of history, philosophy and our cultural inheritance is alarmingly shallow.

How many senior civil servants in the UK could explain what the Magna Carta actually constrained? Who among our governing class has heard of John Stuart Mill or could say what the Enlightenment was about? Could any articulate how Christianity shaped Western ideas of rights, duty, and human dignity? These are not pub-quiz questions. They are foundational to the order our leaders are meant to protect.

Instead we are served by a managerial class reading from a competence worksheet put together by McKinsey. They mistake box-ticking for wisdom and DEI protocols for moral precepts. Intellectually incurious and historically illiterate, our leaders imagine that what matters above all else is process, media training and fluency in the language of risk management. These are technocrats presiding over institutions whose moral and cultural logic would baffle them if they bothered to look into it.

It’s this combination of ignorance and hubris – ignorance of what liberal civilisation is, hubris about their right to redesign it – that makes the progressive ruling class so censorious, brittle and profoundly unlikeable.

For decades now, Western institutions have treated certain belief systems as exempt from serious scrutiny, provided they arrive under the banner of cultural sensitivity. Political correctness turns ideological critique into a moral transgression and disagreement into bigotry. Once that move is accepted – through decades of institutional messaging from universities, NGOs, and diversity consultancies – the public conversation becomes fraught with anxiety and policed by busybodies who derive enormous satisfaction from others’ breach of etiquette.

Language above all is where these distortions play out, and there’s no better example than with the charge of “Islamophobia”. The word functions like a magic incantation. Emotionally charged and strategically deployed, it collapses distinctions between people and ideas, specifically between Muslims as people and Islam as a system of beliefs. To be accused of “Islamophobia” is to be excommunicated from the cultural establishment and made a pariah from polite company. The substance of the argument is irrelevant.

Crucially, the term “Islamophobia” doesn’t exist to protect Muslims from violence or discrimination (a legitimate concern), but to insulate a set of ideas from scrutiny. And because progressive elites have made non-judgement a moral absolute, the tactic works, promising moral purity, high status and – as we are all now very tired of seeing – the opportunity to signal virtue.

Many of our current cultural problems stem from this same pathology. Identity narcissism, cancel culture, a far-right backlash and, above all, the persistent threat of Islamism – all of them are enabled by progressive ideology and its attendant moral confusion.

Breaking the spell doesn’t require hostility to Muslims. It means recovering moral clarity and being willing to say that liberal societies are worth defending, that some values are non-negotiable, and that not all belief systems are compatible with freedom of speech, equality before the law, or the right to leave one’s religion without fear.