#liberal ethics

By: Helen Pluckrosse

Published: Jul 7, 2026

There is a growing consensus that the peak of what became known as “wokeness” has passed. At its height in 2020, following the Black Lives Matter protests, support for Critical Social Justice beliefs surged across mainstream media, social media, corporations, universities, charities and public institutions. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives proliferated, ‘anti-racist’ reading lists became ubiquitous, and organisations rushed to signal their commitment. Six years later, media attention has diminished, major corporations have rolled back DEI commitments, resistance to the movement has generated its own institutions, networks and intellectual spaces and the public mood is both fatigued and resentful. Donald Trump has returned to the White House, right-wing populist movements have gained ground internationally, and many commentators now speak confidently of the death of wokeness.

For those of us who have criticised the movement from principles concerned with truth, free inquiry and individual liberty, however, the situation requires closer analysis and is contested. Three questions produce particular disagreement. First, is ‘woke’ actually dead? Second, if it is in decline, what caused that decline? Third, given the rise of increasingly illiberal tendencies on the political right, should liberals continue to criticise it at all?

Much of this disagreement arises because people are not talking about the same thing when they talk about “wokeness.” Some mean a political movement, others a set of institutional practices, a cultural moment, or a broader tendency towards ideological thinking. People can therefore observe the same phenomenon yet reach very different conclusions about its condition, causes and significance.

The term “woke” is most commonly used to describe the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement. Its beliefs are rooted in critical theories such as postcolonial theory, queer theory and critical race theory, which themselves draw upon postmodern concepts of knowledge, power and language. According to this framework, knowledge is socially constructed in the service of identity-based power rather than objectively discovered. Dominant groups, particularly white, Western, heterosexual, ‘cisgender’ and able-bodied men, determine which forms of knowledge are regarded as legitimate. These dominant discourses shape how society understands the world and thereby create and perpetuate systems of oppression such as racism, patriarchy and transphobia.

Because people are socialised into these discourses, they are held to be largely unaware of their own participation in oppressive systems. Those who have adopted CSJ theories, especially members of marginalised groups, are regarded as uniquely able to perceive and expose these invisible structures (hence, ‘woke.’) Disagreement, criticism or questions about any of this are understood as evidence of ignorance or resistance to recognising one’s own complicity and desire to preserve one’s own privilege. Allowing dissenting views to be believed or spoken is to enable the discourses to continue to construct the oppressive systems and is akin to violence against marginalised groups. Dissenting beliefs must be corrected with education in CSJ theories and unconscious bias training, all must admit their complicity in oppressive systems, dissenting speech must be silenced or punished, and dissenters must be removed from positions of authority and visibility.

It is this specific manifestation of wokeness that appears to be in decline. What is less clear is whether the epistemological and ethical assumptions that underpinned it have declined as well. The prioritisation of ideological narratives over evidence, the tendency to divide society into competing identity groups, the attraction of conspiracy-like explanations of social problems, and the desire to enforce ideological conformity have by no means disappeared. In fact, they appear to have migrated into new political contexts. Those committed to truth as correspondence with reality, together with freedom of belief, freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity, therefore have work still to do. Liberals on the left must continue to oppose illiberalism on the left, while liberal conservatives must do the same on the right.

The bigger issue is not whether one particular ideological movement has won or lost, but whether liberal societies remain capable of defending the values of truth-seeking, free inquiry and individual liberty against recurring forms of authoritarianism and resistance to reality, however they may manifest.

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Is Woke Dead?

When discussing the demise of ‘woke,’ the fundamental question is, “Is wokeness actually dying?” Sociologists and other empirical researchers have provided evidence of wokeness having been in decline since 2021. Large corporations have backed out of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, DEI roles have been cut, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen, and language associated with the movement has become markedly less common across corporate communications, mainstream media and social media. These broad trends, however, sit alongside continued reports from within institutions, particularly those concerned with knowledge production, of DEI policies and ideological enforcement remaining firmly in place. In the past month alone, I have advised people working in universities, schools, libraries, charities, social work and clinical psychology. Meanwhile, surveys of students and academics suggest that ideologically biased and censorious attitudes within institutions of knowledge production have, if anything, continued to increase.

Cultural critics have been widely diverse in their analyses of the demise of woke. Some, like Piers Morgan, have argued that wokeness is over, defeated by a resurgence of common sense resistance and demonstrated by the election of Donald Trump. For Nellie Bowles, wokeness has not died and the reason its activism is less prominent now is because it has won and been institutionalised. To Musa al-Gharbi, we have never been woke and, far from being a progressive movement, the phenomenon was yet another iteration of neoliberal elitism benefitting the knowledge production classes. James Marriot’s argument is that it was only ever a fad which few people were ever genuinely committed to and we should now worry about what the next fad will be. Daniël Eloff and Tyler Cowen are concerned that wokeness merely laid the groundwork for radical left-wing economic (rather than identitarian) activism. Eloff is also concerned about mirroring illiberal views arising on the right, as is Michelle Goldburg. The phenomenon of a rising ‘woke right’ informed and emboldened by the woke left and using much of the same postmodern/post-truth framework has been argued to negate any complacency about the death of woke by critics including Neil Shenvi, James Lindsay, Andrew Doyle, Konstantin Kisin, and Jonathan Rauch.

To understand how such disparate and conflicting views could all be held by people looking at the same phenomenon, we need to consider the variety of lenses through which ‘wokeness’ can be perceived. Morgan’s confidence that it has been defeated relies upon looking at it as a cultural/electoral phenomenon and the role this arguably played in the shift to the political right. Bowles is looking at it as an institutional phenomenon when she argues that woke ideas have been normalised. Al-Gharbi is thinking in terms of an ongoing class phenomenon in which the economically privileged continue to exploit the working class. Marriot, Eloff, Cowen and Goldburg are considering it as a cultural phenomenon rooted in ideas, discourses, tribes and factions and the potential for escalation and backlash. Those who consider ‘wokeness’ as a phenomenon manifesting on both left and right are considering it primarily as an epistemic and ethical phenomenon and, in this reading, there is little light to be seen between the postmodern left and the post-truth right.

Some of the confusion in broader public discourse also stems from treating “woke” as synonymous with “left-wing” or “progressive.” If that is what we mean, then asking whether wokeness is dying becomes almost meaningless. A healthy democracy depends upon the productive push and pull between principled left-wing and right-wing economic and social policy and between the drive to conserve (conservatism) and the drive to progress (progressivism). The important issue, I would argue, is whether these ‘sides’ are, in fact, principled and healthy.

I would argue that “woke” is best understood not as a synonym for progressivism but as an epistemological and ethical framework. It favours ideological narratives over objective truth, interprets society primarily through systems of identity-based oppression, divides people into moral categories of oppressors and oppressed, seeks to tie everybody into its own concept of a common good via censorship, shaming and cancellation and is ultimately fundamentally opposed to the Enlightenment evidence and reason and individual liberty ethos of the West.

Wokeness, in the form of the Critical Social Justice movement is, indeed, past its peak. It continues to influence many institutions, but it has lost much of its prestige and now faces sustained opposition. The epistemological and ethical assumptions that underpinned it, however, have shown no comparable decline. We have not seen a renewed confidence in objective knowledge reached through evidence and reason, a reduction in identity-based grievance or conspiratorial thinking, or a stronger commitment to pluralism, viewpoint diversity and individual liberty. Many factions across the political spectrum continue to see themselves as uniquely able to perceive hidden systems of power and to regard it as their duty to awaken everyone else to them.

Critical Social Justice is one manifestation of a much older and broader human tendency to privilege ideological narratives over evidence, and while that manifestation has weakened, the tendency itself remains vigorous. If wokeness is understood as a broader tendency to privilege conspiratorial, identity-based ideological narratives over evidence and liberal principles, its obituary has been written far too soon.

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If we accept that left-wing wokeness (CSJ) is in demise, who is responsible for that and how did it happen?

If Critical Social Justice is only one manifestation of a broader tendency, the next question becomes why and how this particular manifestation lost its dominance.

Arguments about who killed wokeness are typically highly dependent on the position of the accuser/celebrator and whether or not they believe its demise to be a good thing. For those who believe it to be a positive development, the argument is typically that the woke killed wokeness. They were so unreasonable and authoritarian that the normal, reasonable and principled people (generally their own tribe) said “enough” and reacted against it. The backlash was straightforwardly a reaction to excess.

For those who regard the decline of wokeness as regrettable or believe it has enabled the rise of an illiberal right, the woke themselves are often held to bear little responsibility for their own unpopularity. Instead, culpability is placed elsewhere. The culprits might be fascistic discourses on the right demonizing a fundamentally well-intentioned movement for social justice. It could be the conservative anti-woke (MAGA or otherwise), appealing to the uninformed masses by making evidenced-based arguments about illiberal things they were doing when they should have been more worried about Trump. They might be non-woke economic leftists and socialists objecting to the woke focus on identity politics dividing the working class rather than maintaining solidarity against the right. They might be apathetic white boomers who never fully embraced racial equality, sexual equality or acceptance of homosexuality, and for whom only a relatively small increase in activist demands was enough to provoke renewed resistance. A particularly common refrain is that it was the fault of defenders of free speech who thereby enabled ‘anti-woke’ critique to thrive and emboldened an illiberal right.

The downfall of wokeness was indeed brought about, in significant part, by the excesses of the Critical Social Justice movement itself. At the same time, opposition to wokeness emerged from across the political spectrum. These two facts are not contradictory. Rather, they are connected. The irrationalism, authoritarianism, and purity politics of the movement alienated almost everyone who did not already subscribe to it.

“Almost everyone” necessarily included a remarkably diverse coalition: the extreme right, traditional conservatives, the MAGA right, socialists and economic leftists, weary centrists, and liberals committed to individual liberty, viewpoint diversity, and freedom of speech. This fact is significant because it reminds us that the category “anti-woke” is not a coherent political movement. It is simply a term for people opposed to one thing. As with any coalition defined primarily by what it opposes, its members differ profoundly in what they endorse and want to put in its place.

The extreme right—those who openly embrace racism, sexism, homophobia, Christian nationalism and other forms of authoritarian identitarianism—naturally oppose left-wing wokeness while rejecting the foundations of secular liberal democracy as well. Their authoritarianism, conspiratorial thinking and obsession with oppressive systems of power closely mirror those of the woke left, which is why they are often described as the “woke right.” They cannot be said in any meaningful way to be an antidote to wokeness. Even among less extreme anti-woke factions on the right, alternatives can seem to offer more of the same. Some figures on the MAGA right, such as Chris Rufo, have openly advocated using critical theory to gain institutional power and narrative control. Others have simply embraced forms of post-truth populism that elevate politically useful narratives above objective truth and consistent principle. Meanwhile, the revolutionary socialist left often rejects wokeness as a neoliberal distraction from class politics, yet its preferred alternative is frequently no less hostile to liberal values. These movements differ from one another in significant ways and are often bitter enemies. What they have in common is not a shared vision of society but a common hostility to liberalism. They are competing authoritarianisms.

This is why the most important fault line is not between woke and anti-woke. It is between liberalism and authoritarianism.

The strongest and potentially most durable component of the anti-woke coalition is therefore the liberal one. It includes people on the left, right, and centre, as well as many who feel politically homeless. They may disagree profoundly about economics, culture, religion, or the role of government, but they share a commitment to freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, due process, equal treatment under the law, individual rights, and the pursuit of truth through open inquiry. Authoritarian movements cannot form stable alliances because each seeks to impose its own vision of truth and power. Liberalism, by contrast, provides a framework within which people with fundamentally different visions of the good life can coexist, compete, and cooperate without coercion.

The decline of wokeness remains incomplete and its demise is by no means assured. The movement lost legitimacy primarily because of its own excesses, yet excesses on the illiberal right could generate a counter-backlash that restores some of its appeal. More importantly, the surge of conspiratorial thinking, tribalism and post-truth politics on the right demonstrates that the decline of one manifestation of these tendencies does not resolve the larger problem.

The appropriate response is therefore neither a reflexive defence of wokeness nor an uncritical embrace of the anti-woke. It is a consistent commitment to the empirical, rational and liberal underpinnings of Western modernity wherever truth is devalued and individual liberty is denied.

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Should we stop kicking wokeness while it is down?

The final question is, if the Critical Social Justice movement is dead, dying or has at least been neutralised, shouldn’t we now focus exclusively on the illiberalism emerging on the right? This is a question I am frequently asked by liberals on the left who believe my critiques of the woke left were both valid and necessary but worry that continuing to focus on it now that it is in decline diverts attention from the populist and woke right. Some also fear that continued criticism of wokeness risks legitimising or providing ammunition for right-wing illiberalism.

This concern deserves to be taken seriously and relates to the concept of “both-sidesism.” I understand the criticism. “Both-sidesism” describes the tendency to maintain an appearance of balance by criticising both sides of a conflict even when one side presents a substantially greater threat. At best, this represents a failure to triage effectively. At worst, it creates a false equivalence that normalises genuinely dangerous illiberalism by treating it as morally comparable to less serious or less immediate concerns.

Liberals are particularly vulnerable to being accused of both-sidesism because our primary concern is consistent opposition to authoritarianism. We are liable to being condemned by illiberal factions on the right for not supporting authoritarian approaches to eradicating wokeness, while illiberal factions on the left accuse us of enabling the rise of the right by not giving the left’s authoritarianism a free pass.

I would like to defend a version of what is often dismissed as “both-sidesism” by reframing it. I agree that adopting a simple “you’re just as bad as each other” position is rarely helpful. In a political environment defined by two broad camps, however, there is a need for people within each camp to criticise both sides. It is not enough merely to criticise the illiberalism that makes the other side bad. We must also confront the illiberalism that prevents our own side from being good. I have always approached political criticism in this spirit. As someone on the left, I am therefore naturally more inclined to focus on those illiberal tendencies within the left that prevent it from fulfilling its traditional purpose and from inspiring the confidence it needs to earn public support.

The importance of internal critique in making one’s own side as principled, persuasive and worthy of support as possible is frequently underappreciated by political partisans. This has certainly been the case with recent left-wing critiques of liberal anti-woke voices. Jan-Werner Muller made the argument that the left should not trust the liberal anti-woke because their drive to find fault with both sides creates a false equivalence which enabled the rise of Trump. Similarly, Jason Stanley blamed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for fostering a moral panic about wokeness on university campuses and enabling Trump’s crackdown on academic freedom. Meanwhile, David Klion insisted that the signatories of the Harper’s Letter in defence of free speech should all “examine their role in helping to build a broad elite consensus that has functioned mainly to legitimize Trump’s actions.” [xxix]

All of these arguments depend upon the assumption that, had liberals on the left refrained from criticising illiberalism on the left, support for illiberal anti-woke movements would not have emerged. This is both implausible and psychologically naive. It effectively removes agency from the woke themselves and assumes that the public would simply not have noticed the excesses that generated the backlash. Does denial of a problem within a group ever work to convince anyone outside it? Are those on the left currently convinced by those on the right shutting down criticism of MAGA with accusations that perceiving any is Trump Derangement Syndrome and everything is just fine or does this make the problem seem more intractable? Has anybody concerned by Islamic extremism ever been convinced by being told they are mistaken and Islam is actually a religion of peace or does this just convince them that those who could address the problem are not going to and solutions will need to be external and radical? In each case, refusing to acknowledge genuine problems within one’s own political or ideological community does not reassure sceptics. It persuades them that reform from within is impossible.

Would it really have been better if criticism of left-wing illiberalism had been left entirely to the illiberal right? Would that criticism have been more accurate, more principled, or less likely to produce a reactionary backlash? Is it not more plausible that, had more liberals on the left been willing to challenge authoritarian tendencies within their own institutions and movements, they might have helped marginalise them before they became politically explosive? Far from causing the anti-woke backlash, liberal criticism may have represented the best chance of preventing it.

This, I would argue, remains the best course of action for those on the left. British liberals on the left should continue criticising illiberalism on the left and trying to marginalise it in left-wing political discourse. This is much more likely to increase public confidence in the left than simply pointing out the illiberalism within parties like Reform and Restore while denying that shutting down criticism of immigration policies and silencing gender critical feminists on the grounds of racism, Islamophobia and transphobia contributed to their rise.

Likewise, American liberals on the left would do well not to spend the period before the next election exclusively highlighting illiberalism on the right but also engage in the internal critique that can decentre it from their own political discourse and rebuild a genuinely liberal left. That is what has the potential to create a party that Americans committed to truth and liberty can support not merely as the lesser of two evils, but as a positive good.

The failure of enough liberals on the left to confront authoritarian tendencies within the woke movement—instead minimising or excusing them in the name of solidarity against the right—backfired spectacularly. That experience should serve as a warning to liberals on the right not to make the same mistake. Too many already respond to evidence of right-wing illiberalism—threats to constitutional freedoms and democratic processes, censorship, public shaming, demands for dismissals and an enthusiasm for cancellation—by deflecting to the authoritarianism of the left and its continued influence within institutions as a reason not to address problems on their own side. They would do better to confront those tendencies now than allow them to grow unchecked, further undermine truth and freedom, and ultimately provoke another powerful backlash that could restore some future variation of wokeness.

The priority for liberals on both the left and the right should not be simply to react to the illiberalism of the other side. That is certainly important, but we cannot build a more truth-centred, liberal society merely by pointing out what makes our opponents bad. We must also confront what prevents our own side from being as principled, persuasive and worthy of support as it could be. A healthy society is one in which both sides strive not only to expose the failings of their opponents but to make themselves more liberal, more trustworthy and more deserving of public confidence.

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The answers to all three questions are more complicated than much of the current discourse allows.

Critical Social Justice is clearly in decline, but the epistemological and ethical habits that sustained it are not. Nor was its decline simply a story of anti-woke victory. The coalition that opposed it contains liberals and authoritarians alike, making the most important political divide not between woke and anti-woke, but between liberalism and authoritarianism.

The lesson is therefore larger than the rise and fall of any single movement. Liberal societies cannot rely on one authoritarianism to defeat another. They depend instead upon people across the political spectrum being willing to defend truth, free inquiry and individual liberty consistently, including by confronting illiberalism within their own political tribes.

John Anderson: When we talk about the liberal global order that's prevailed since the 1940s, it's prevailed because America has been strong enough to make sure it prevails.

Konstantin Kisin: Absolutely, and believed in its values, even if you don't like them, right? They believe in freedom of speech. Europeans believe in restricting people's speech so that no one's offended. That's at a governmental level, right? At the moment, that's who you're choosing between. If you're choosing between America, the American administration believes in free speech and is prepared to accept sometimes very unpleasant costs that come with free speech, right? The Europeans want the opposite, right? That's the choice, right? And so this is a question of values.

Anderson: Well, that's right, but there's an even bigger choice that I'm alluding to, and that is that if America loses its global dominance, what will the new order, global order look like?

Kisin: Well, that's what I'm saying, right? Our values are better than the values that would be in place of those values if we were not the strongest civilization. So being strong has to be one of our values. So this sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

And so, you know, this idea that we should walk around and sort of keep ourselves small and, you know, we have this weird thing. I know it's a British thing. Maybe this is a sign that I haven't fully integrated, but we have a debate in this country every time the Prime Minister of the country goes to some global summit on a big plane, and everyone's like, oh, no, he's spending government money. I'm like, no. What, you're saying Xi Jinping arrives on a megabus? This is a game. There's a game being played here, and people will treat you depending on how powerful they perceive you to be, and human beings are very shallow. And if you've got a big plane with the name of your country on it, people tend to respect that, especially people who are not Western and don't have this moronic ideology where the stronger you are or appear to be, the worse you are as a human being. They don't have that. Xi Jinping doesn't think like that, nor does Vladimir Putin, nor do most people in the world. I think you'd back me up on this, John.

Anderson: You're right. You're absolutely right.

Kisin: Having dealt with people in different governments around the world.

Anderson: Yeah, yep, that's right. You know, we don't want braggarts, but on the other hand, we don't want our leaders to look like they're not respected or respectable.

Kisin: No. On an international stage, I think of them kind of like our champion in a battle, right? Do you want somebody who is strong and capable in that role, or do you want someone who's not, as the Americans had at the last election? I think it was as basic a choice as that, frankly,

==

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Jun 24, 2026

I am frequently told that the word ‘liberal’ has become so confused and contested, and so deeply associated with the (often illiberal) left in the United States, that attempts to defend it as a distinct philosophical tradition are no longer worthwhile. While I generally agree that it is futile to try to reclaim words to their ‘proper’ meaning, liberalism is not simply a word that can be replaced with another word. It is the term for the cluster of concepts that form the philosophical foundations of modern Western liberal democracies. To explain why I believe it remains essential to preserve the concept of liberalism, it is worth taking a historical and geographical look at how liberalism came to be associated with different political positions in different countries and what would be lost if we abandoned the concept altogether.

As a general rule, I believe it is futile to try to hold onto words when their meanings have changed in common usage. Language evolves naturally in response to a variety of pressures to serve the purposes of communicating changing ideas and concepts. I have always argued that if this is reflective of a worrying cultural shift, it is better to engage with the ideas and concepts than to try to remedy the problem by insisting on universal recognition of what the word ‘really means.’ At best, the conversation shifts to a discussion of semantics which does not address the core issue. At worst, one ends up looking like an angry, old man yelling “‘Gay’ means ‘happy’, I tell you!”

When it comes to liberalism, however, we are not talking about a word which could potentially be replaced by another word, but about the cluster of concepts underlying the foundation of modern Western liberal democracies. These include individual liberty, universalism, freedom of conscience, free speech, free trade, freedom of inquiry, meritocracy, equality before the law, support for viewpoint diversity as an engine of knowledge production and conflict resolution, a willingness to live and let live provided this does no material harm to others, firm limitations on state power, a preference for reform over revolution and a democratic system which governs by the consent of the governed.

Once we stop using the word ‘liberalism’ to describe this philosophical tradition, we find ourselves having to list all those concepts individually every time. This makes for rather laborious conversation. In practice, it also risks separating these concepts from each other and losing a sense of the cohesive philosophy which binds them together and defines the modern west.

The fact that ‘liberalism’ is used to define such different positions on the left/right political spectrum in different countries is illustrative of the history of this philosophy. When I speak about liberalism in other countries, the part where I clarify what I am not talking about varies widely. In America and parts of Europe, I have to stress that I am not referring to the left. In Australia and other parts of Europe, I must clarify that I do not mean the right. Liberalism does not belong to either the left or the right but uses of its name for such positions are revealing of what its principles were competing against historically in a particular country.

In countries where the main threats to liberty have been monarchy, feudal systems, nationalism, religious conservatism or traditional social hierarchies, liberals have been the people pushing for reform, civil liberties, secularism and democratic rights. Consequently, liberalism became associated with the left. We see this history in France, Spain and Portugal. It is also very much the case now outside the Western world in religiously conservative countries where people push for religious tolerance, women’s rights and the rights of same sex attracted people. The ‘woman, life, freedom’ protests in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Morality Police is very much a liberal protest against state authoritarianism.

In countries where strong socialist or Marxist movements emerged, liberals became the defenders of markets, private property, free trade and constitutional constraints on state power. Consequently, liberalism became associated with the right. We see this in Eastern Europe after communism, in Germany, the Low Countries and much of Latin America. Interestingly, we also see this in Australia where the Liberal Party is the conservative party. This is because Australia was established as a British colony after the major great liberal battles had been won. It never had to oppose a powerful feudal order, monarchy or church. Australia did have to deal with powerful rising Labour Movements and consequently the free trade, free enterprise and minimal government interference elements of liberalism emerged most strongly and associated liberalism with the right.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom are interesting cases within this general pattern. The US - the first country to be explicitly founded on liberal principles following its (liberal) revolution against authoritarian state power from England - has retained a strongly libertarian ethos and deep suspicion of state overreach. America has also never had a significant Marxist electoral force. Both its left-wing and its right-wing currents have supported free trade and free enterprise. It has also retained a significantly stronger cultural influence of Christianity than all the other English-speaking countries and much of the West. Consequently, its political conflict has largely been between religious conservatives and progressives within a capitalist framework. As a result, “liberal” came to be associated with the progressive side of politics, particularly after the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

The UK, as the home of John Locke who developed the philosophical foundations of liberal government, Adam Smith who articulated economic liberalism, Thomas Paine who argued for democratic liberalism and John Stuart Mill who synthesised liberty, free speech, individuality and representative government, has a history in which liberalism developed as a distinct philosophical tradition separate from left and right-wing politics. Further, it developed into a significant political force of its own creating a three-way political distinction: Labour (socialism and economic redistribution), Conservatives (tradition and social order) and Liberals (individual liberty, constitutionalism and equal rights). Because liberalism existed as its own political tradition, the meaning remained somewhat clearer than it did elsewhere. Unfortunately, because the UK is currently so deeply tuned into US political and cultural debates, we are increasingly hearing ‘liberal’ used to describe the (often illiberal) left.

What these histories demonstrate is that although the word ‘liberalism’ has come to be used to refer to different positions on the political spectrum in different countries, its underlying function has remained remarkably consistent. Whether liberals were opposing monarchies, feudal system, theocratic authoritarianism, nationalist movements, military dictatorships or socialist states, they were engaged in the same fundamental freedom-oriented project. The specific threats to liberty liberals have found themselves opposing have varied according to time and place and, consequently, came to be associated sometimes with the left and sometimes with the right. What remained consistent was its commitment to individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of inquiry, viewpoint diversity, universalism, constitutional constraints on power and democratic government. The history of liberalism is therefore not the history of a particular faction within the left-right spectrum, but of a long chain of people in different times and places committed to a philosophical tradition rooted in protecting people from authoritarian power and enabling people with different ideas and values to live together peacefully within free societies.

This is why I continue to defend the term ‘liberalism’ despite generally being skeptical of attempts to police linguistic change. If liberalism were just a word, it would not matter very much if it drifted in meaning or fell out of use. Words come and go. Concepts evolve.

The problem is that liberalism is the irreplaceable name we have for a coherent philosophical tradition that binds together an array of political, intellectual, economic and social freedoms. These are not simply a collection of attractive but unrelated values that we can pick and choose from. They form a cohesive system. Each principle supports and reinforces the others.

Once we stop thinking in terms of liberalism, it becomes easier to think of these principles as separable. We begin to imagine that we can keep democratic systems while abandoning freedom of speech, or preserve viewpoint diversity while weakening freedom of inquiry, or uphold individual liberty while expanding the powers of the state into the private lives of individuals. Keeping the concept of liberalism intact and true to its philosophical heritage reminds us that these commitments belong together because they emerged together and have historically succeeded together.

This matters because liberalism is not simply one political philosophy among many. It is the philosophical foundation of modern Western liberal democracies. When conservatives speak of defending Western civilisation, this is surely what they are seeking to defend. When progressives speak of hard-won civil rights victories, this is the philosophical tradition to which they are indebted. We cannot have a society in which conservatives lose sight of what they are conserving and progressives fail to recognise what achieves progress. The institutions, rights and freedoms that many of us take for granted did not emerge naturally or inevitably. They were won through centuries of intellectual, political and social struggle against myriad authoritarianisms. Liberalism was the tradition that united these struggles and articulated the principles on which modern democratic societies would be built.

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.

By: Lisa Bildy

Published: May 12, 2026

Does anyone understand what “classical liberalism” is anymore? The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal certainly doesn’t. Last month, it tossed out a complaint filed by a former political science professor against Simon Fraser University. He argued that he was passed over for a tenure-track position because his classical liberal beliefs did not align with the university’s demand for ideological conformity to equity, diversity & inclusion (EDI). His case didn’t even get past the gatekeeping stage. Four years after his complaint was filed, the tribunal ruled, without a hearing, that his beliefs were not grounded in a cohesive and recognized political philosophy and that there was no reasonable prospect of success.

This is the philosophy that shaped the modern West. But it’s apparently not one that the tribunal, or SFU, recognizes.

According to the decision, issued on April 15 but released publicly on May 7, Dr. Joshua Gordon’s early research focused on the sort of class-based concerns for social justice that used to preoccupy the political left: affordable housing for the working poor, the role of labour unions in building a robust welfare state, and so on. But that’s not what passes for acceptable research in today’s academic environment: ‘activist EDI’ requires the use of critical‑theory frameworks that sort people into identity groups and demand adjusted outcomes based on group hierarchy rather than individual merit or economic class. In a pluralistic society like Canada’s, this sort of thinking is corrosive.

In setting out the parties’ positions, tribunal member Devyn Cousineau noted that Dr. Gordon “describes himself as a ‘classical liberal’, who supports ‘mild EDI’, meaning ‘a liberal commitment to eliminating overt forms of discrimination and systemic barriers.’” That was the sole mention of classical liberalism in the entire decision. She could not properly characterize Gordon’s opposition to ‘activist EDI’ as classical liberalism – a coherent political tradition with centuries of scholarship – because she appeared to have no conception of it.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Universities have spent decades marinating students in identity-based theories, and those graduates now populate the institutions that shape public meaning: media, law, education, and the public service. Meanwhile, Marxist educator Paulo Freire’s revolutionary “praxis,” drawn from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has seeped into K–12 education, mobilizing students to view and transform society through the lens of oppression. Classical liberalism, seen by the critical theorists as an ‘oppressor ideology,’ is no longer on the syllabus.

Classical liberalism emerged during the Enlightenment as a political philosophy centred on individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, equality before the law, and limits on state power. Drawing on earlier traditions of rational inquiry and constitutionalism, it dismantled hereditary privilege and group‑based legal hierarchies by insisting that each person possesses inherent dignity and must be treated as a rights‑bearing individual. It is the only political philosophy that treats the right to free speech as inviolable. These principles became foundational to modern Western institutions and offered a way to restrain our tribal impulses by grounding political order in universal legal equality rather than in the claims of groups or castes.

But group rights are all the rage today, and along with them an intolerance for any expression to the contrary. Despite Dr. Gordon’s strong teaching evaluations, his “responses with respect to EDI” were deemed insufficient by the activist Faculty Group – five faculty members who opposed his appointment and held enough votes to sink it. Their concern? Gordon’s statement indicated that he treated people equally, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation. That is no longer acceptable. Under activist EDI, one must not treat people equally; one must treat them unequally, according to a shifting hierarchy of “marginalized” identities.

This hierarchy is unstable and often incoherent. Gay men who do not identify as “queer,” or non-white individuals who hold conservative or classical liberal views, can find themselves reclassified as “oppressors.” The logic is political, not principled.

Critical theory rejects the core assumptions of the classical liberal legal order: equality before the law, individual rights, and Enlightenment rationalism. Within this framework, disagreement is treated as harm, and dissenters are viewed not as interlocutors but as obstacles to justice. The result is an ideology that cannot tolerate dissent and that must correct, exclude or sanction those who reject its premises.

Gordon’s affidavit described his worldview as prioritizing equality over equity, colour-blindness, individualism over group rights, and open inquiry over ideological policing. That political worldview has a name – classical liberalism. But according to Cousineau, it lacks “the necessary cohesion and cogency” to qualify as a protected political belief under s. 13 of the Code.

Interestingly, she concluded that the activist EDI orthodoxy embraced by the Faculty Group is not a cohesive political belief either. When an ideology becomes so pervasive that it is simply “the water everyone swims in,” its political nature can become invisible to those enforcing it. When everything is political, nothing is.

By: Mike Brock

Published: Jul 8, 2025

The word “liberal” has been so thoroughly mangled by American political discourse that it now means everything and nothing. Republicans use it as an epithet for anyone who disagrees with them. Democrats embrace it as a badge of progressive virtue. Cable news hosts deploy it as a tribal marker. Political consultants focus-group it to death. And through all this semantic chaos, we’ve lost sight of something crucial: liberalism isn’t a political position—it’s the philosophical foundation that makes political positions possible.

This confusion isn’t just academic. We’re living through a moment when the basic framework of liberal democracy is under systematic assault from forces that understand exactly what they’re attacking. While we argue about whether being “liberal” means supporting higher taxes or transgender rights, oligarchs are constructing parallel systems designed to make democratic accountability obsolete. While we debate the proper scope of government, they’re building infrastructure that operates beyond government entirely.

The irony is exquisite: we’re losing liberalism because we’ve forgotten what it actually is.

So let me be precise about what we’re defending—and what we stand to lose.

The Liberal Insight

Liberalism begins with a simple but revolutionary recognition: human beings are fallible, disagreement is inevitable, and yet we must somehow organize society together. This creates what I call the fundamental liberal problem: How do conscious beings pursue truth and build institutions across disagreement, uncertainty, and difference?

Every other political philosophy tries to solve this problem by eliminating it. Authoritarians impose a single vision through force. Religious fundamentalists appeal to divine revelation. Technocrats defer to expert knowledge. Revolutionary movements promise to create new humans who won’t disagree. But liberalism does something different—it builds systems that work because people disagree, not despite their disagreement.

This is liberalism’s genius: it doesn’t require consensus on ultimate values to create functional societies. It provides a framework for collective reasoning that allows people with fundamentally different worldviews to cooperate, compete, and even change their minds through peaceful means.

Consider the miracle of what we take for granted: societies where Catholics and Protestants, capitalists and socialists, traditionalists and progressives can coexist not just peacefully, but productively. Where power changes hands through elections rather than violence. Where yesterday’s heretics can become tomorrow’s leaders through persuasion rather than revolution.

This doesn’t happen naturally. It requires a specific set of institutions, norms, and practices that must be continuously maintained against forces that would tear them apart.

The Architecture of Liberal Democracy

Liberal democracy isn’t just majority rule—it’s majority rule constrained by constitutional principles that protect the conditions of democratic reasoning itself. The architecture has several essential components:

Constitutional constraints on power. No individual, group, or even democratic majority gets unchecked authority. Power is divided, separated, and constrained by law. This isn’t inefficiency—it’s insurance against the concentration of power that makes democratic reasoning impossible.

Independent institutions. Courts, bureaucracies, universities, and media organizations that can resist capture by political or economic interests. These institutions don’t need to be perfect—they need to be independent enough to provide checks against abuse of power.

Free expression and open debate. Not because all ideas are equally valid, but because the process of testing ideas against each other is how societies learn and adapt. Mill’s “marketplace of ideas” isn’t a perfect market—it’s an ongoing experiment in collective reasoning.

Rule of law. Equal treatment under legal frameworks that apply to everyone, including those in power. This creates predictability and prevents the arbitrary exercise of authority that makes democratic planning impossible.

Democratic accountability. Regular opportunities for citizens to peacefully replace their leaders through elections. This forces power-holders to justify their decisions to those affected by them.

Notice what’s not on this list: any particular policy position. Liberalism is compatible with a range of economic arrangements—from more market-oriented systems to robust welfare states with significant government intervention. You can be a liberal who supports universal healthcare and high progressive taxation, or a liberal who prefers market solutions and lower taxes. You can be a liberal conservative who emphasizes traditional institutions or a liberal progressive who prioritizes social reform.

What you cannot be is a liberal authoritarian, because authoritarianism destroys the conditions that make liberal reasoning possible. And you cannot be a liberal socialist in the traditional sense, because socialism's commitment to collective ownership of the means of production requires a level of economic control that tends to undermine the institutional independence and distributed power that liberal democracy requires.

The key distinction: Liberalism can accommodate extensive welfare states, significant government regulation, and redistributive taxation—these are questions of degree and democratic choice. But it cannot accommodate systems that concentrate economic power to the degree that political independence becomes impossible.

The Nordic model works within liberal democracy precisely because it maintains private property, market mechanisms, and institutional independence even while providing extensive social benefits. But actual socialism—collective ownership of production—tends to require the kind of centralized control that makes the separation of powers and institutional independence very difficult to maintain.

The Epistemic Foundation

Here’s what most people miss: liberalism is epistemic before it’s political. It’s fundamentally about how we know things and how we organize knowledge in societies. The political arrangements—democracy, constitutional government, individual rights—flow from deeper commitments about truth and reasoning.

Classical liberals understood something profound: no individual or group has privileged access to truth. Not kings claiming divine right, not philosophers claiming rational insight, not scientists claiming objective knowledge, not even democratic majorities claiming popular wisdom. Everyone is fallible. Everyone has incomplete information. Everyone operates from particular perspectives that both reveal and conceal aspects of reality.

This doesn’t lead to relativism—it leads to institutionalized humility. If no one has access to final truth, then our institutions must be designed to remain open to correction. If everyone is fallible, then power must be distributed so that mistakes can be recognized and corrected rather than compounded.

This is why free speech isn’t just about individual expression—it’s about collective intelligence. Why independent media isn’t just about holding politicians accountable—it’s about creating information flows that help societies learn. Why competitive elections aren’t just about representation—they’re about institutionalized error-correction.

The liberal commitment to open inquiry, free debate, and democratic accountability isn’t based on faith that these processes will always produce correct answers. It’s based on recognition that these are the best mechanisms we’ve discovered for remaining open to better answers.

What Liberalism Isn’t

The systematic confusion about liberalism serves the interests of its enemies. So let me be clear about what liberalism is not:

Liberalism is not progressivism. Progressives believe society should move in particular directions—toward greater equality, environmental sustainability, social justice. These may be worthy goals, but they’re not inherently liberal goals. A progressive who wants to impose their vision without democratic consent or constitutional constraint is being illiberal, regardless of how noble their intentions.

Liberalism is not conservatism. Conservatives believe in preserving valuable traditions, maintaining social stability, respecting established institutions. These may be wisdom, but they’re not inherently liberal commitments. A conservative who wants to preserve arrangements without democratic accountability or constitutional limitation is being illiberal, regardless of how venerable the traditions.

Liberalism is not libertarianism. Libertarians believe in minimal government and maximum individual freedom. But the crypto-oligarchs who call themselves libertarians while building parallel systems to escape democratic accountability have abandoned liberalism entirely. When Peter Thiel declares that “freedom and democracy are incompatible,” he’s not being libertarian—he’s being anti-liberal.

Liberalism is not socialism. Socialists believe in collective ownership and democratic control of economic resources. But when socialist movements try to implement their vision through revolutionary violence or authoritarian control, they abandon liberal principles. Democratic socialism can be liberal; revolutionary socialism cannot.

The confusion arises because liberalism provides the framework within which all these other philosophies must operate if they want to remain committed to democratic reasoning. Progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and socialists can all be liberal—but only if they accept constitutional constraints on their power and remain accountable to democratic processes.

The Anti-Liberal Assault

Which brings us to why this matters now. We’re facing a coordinated assault on liberal democracy from forces that understand exactly what they’re attacking. The crypto-oligarchs, neoreactionary intellectuals, and authoritarian movements aren’t trying to win within the liberal framework—they’re trying to replace the framework entirely.

When Curtis Yarvin argues that democracy is “inefficient” and should be replaced by corporate-style governance, he’s not making a policy argument—he’s making an anti-liberal argument. When Elon Musk declares that empathy is “civilizational weakness,” he’s not critiquing particular social programs—he’s attacking the moral foundations that make liberal society possible.

When tech oligarchs build cryptocurrency systems designed to operate beyond democratic accountability, when they construct “network states” that escape constitutional constraints, when they choose fascism over progressive taxation—they’re not being libertarian. They’re being anti-liberal.

The danger isn’t that they disagree with particular liberal policies. The danger is that they reject the entire framework of democratic accountability, constitutional constraint, and moral obligation that makes peaceful disagreement possible.

The Stakes

Here’s what we stand to lose: not just particular political arrangements, but the capacity for democratic reasoning itself. The ability to organize societies where people can disagree productively rather than destructively. Where power can be constrained by law rather than exercised arbitrarily. Where tomorrow’s truth can emerge through today’s debate rather than being imposed by yesterday’s authorities.

The alternatives aren’t mysterious. We can see them emerging in real-time: algorithmic governance that replaces democratic deliberation with computational efficiency. Oligarchic networks that operate beyond constitutional constraint. Authoritarian systems that eliminate disagreement through force rather than organizing society around it.

These aren’t dystopian possibilities—they’re operational realities. The infrastructure is being built. The precedents are being set. The philosophical justifications are being developed and deployed.

The Defense

Defending liberalism requires more than voting for particular candidates or supporting particular policies. It requires understanding what liberalism actually is and why it matters. It requires recognizing that the framework is more important than any particular outcome the framework might produce.

This doesn’t mean being neutral about everything. Liberals can and should have strong convictions about justice, equality, freedom, and human flourishing. But they must hold these convictions in a way that remains open to democratic accountability and constitutional constraint.

The test isn’t whether you support the right policies—it’s whether you support the conditions that make democratic reasoning about policies possible. Whether you accept that your political opponents have legitimate standing in democratic debate. Whether you’re willing to risk losing elections rather than abandoning democratic processes. Whether you believe power should be constrained by law rather than exercised through will.

The Choice

We face a choice that will determine not just what kind of policies we have, but what kind of beings we remain. Do we preserve the framework that allows conscious creatures to reason together across difference? Or do we surrender to forces that promise more efficient solutions through the elimination of democratic accountability?

The crypto-oligarchs have made their choice. They’ve chosen sovereignty without constraint, power without accountability, efficiency without democracy. They’ve built the infrastructure to implement their vision. They’ve captured the political mechanisms to enforce it.

But they haven’t won yet. Liberal democracy remains possible—but only if we understand what we’re defending and why it’s worth defending.

Liberalism isn’t a political position. It’s the condition that makes political positions possible. It’s not a set of policies. It’s the framework that allows policies to be democratically chosen, implemented, and changed.

It’s not perfect. But it’s the best system we’ve discovered for remaining human while organizing society—for preserving the capacity for reasoning, disagreement, and growth that makes consciousness worth having.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And conscious beings reasoning together across difference is more valuable than any particular outcome that reasoning might produce.

The framework is the foundation. Without it, everything else becomes arbitrary power dressed up as necessity.

By: Greg Lukianoff

Published: Jul 19, 2024

I have a rule: Those of us who have been in a fair number of fights growing up shouldn't discuss them with people who haven't. It makes them uncomfortable. Even if you’re just trying to convey a story, and even if it’s one you’re not proud of, people with no experience being in a fight either think you’re bragging or being threatening.

I’m going to break that rule here, because today I want to talk about the dangerous conflation, on campus and beyond, of harsh or offensive speech with actual violence. I addressed this many times, in all of my books and, in some detail, with my friend and “Coddling of the American Mind” co-author Jonathan Haidt in an Atlantic article titled, “Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence.” But I’m going to take a different approach here and talk directly about my experience with violence itself.

Anyone who equates speech and violence has likely never been punched in the face. I have been punched in the face quite a bit, and I have to tell you: It hurts. Of course, how much it hurts depends on who is hitting you. I once let a smaller kid punch me twice to show he was incapable of hurting me. It did hurt, but I didn’t want him to know that. So I just picked him up and calmly said, “Stop.” He stopped. Another time I was hit so hard that I got a concussion and couldn’t join spring training for football that year.

When I was younger, I was — let’s be honest — a weird kid. I probably would’ve been diagnosed as on the spectrum if I were growing up today. And I got bullied a fair amount. I was also a pacifist, so I would just take the abuse. Eventually, though, I had enough and started fighting back.

As I got bigger and stronger, I prided myself on being an “anti-bully” — someone who would stick up for other kids even if it meant fighting bullies, which I did. I remember telling my father this quite proudly, and he simply responded, “My son, is that not just another kind of bully?”

To this day, that one sentence feels like someone splashed my face with ice water. He was absolutely right. What started as me trying to be a white knight didn't end that way. And sometimes it was just an excuse for venting my own anger. And as we know now from psychological research, anger is like a fire: The more you feed it, the bigger it gets.

The scariest moment of my life involving violence happened in my sophomore year of high school. I remember the exact date: March 14, 1991. I walked out of school that day to see one of my friends covered in blood, which was streaming from a wound in his chest. He had picked a fight with a kid and had been beating the shit out of him. Turns out, the kid had been bullied a few too many times, and he snapped, stabbing my friend close to his sternum. I was pretty sure my friend was going to die — if the knife had gone in at a slightly different angle, he would have.

At that moment, my friend was the bully. He was a profoundly troubled kid. But the kid who stabbed him was troubled too. Both of them were in the wrong. And that’s how it often works. Many situations are not clear-cut, “good versus evil” narratives.

Whether or not we have personally experienced violence ourselves, we are all uncomfortably close historically to the unparalleled bloodshed of the 20th century. Violence is real, and it is horrible. That’s why it is an insult to anyone who has ever suffered from violence to argue that words can even compare.

This isn’t to say that people can’t hurt or abuse one another with the things they say, or that trauma and emotional pain aren’t also real. I’ve been very open about my own struggles with mental health. I know that pain too. But equating a barbed tongue with a barbed spear not only betrays a lack of understanding of genuine violence, but also the way words — even harsh ones — have served as both an alternative and a solution to violence.

As an unknown thinker adored by Freud once said, “Civilization began the minute someone hurled an insult rather than a stone.” Words and violence couldn’t be more antithetical.

‘Words are violence’ is less of an argument and more of a tactic

But the line between these two sides of the argument can’t be so clear-cut, can it? Surely, at least some of the people who argue that words are violence have in fact been punched in the face. So why would they make the argument anyway?

I fear the answer is simple: It's a tactical advantage when facing any speaker you hate.

Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Under this logic, my speech — even if sharp, brutal, and filled with invective — is still simply speech. Indeed, it might be commendable, righteous rage. But their speech, even if it’s similarly sharp and brutal, is violence — and I am therefore allowed to respond with violence. It is the kind of bad idea that can only be generated in an environment of low viewpoint diversity and highly moralistic ideological rigidity, which of course we see in too many corners of campus today.

We saw the argument made full-throatedly in the wake of the violent response to conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017, when the newspaper of UC Berkeley, the school where the free speech movement was born, published article after article arguing that Milo's hate speech demanded violent retaliation. That same year, Northeastern University psychology professor and author Lisa Feldman Barrett penned an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that because words can cause a stress response and violence can cause a stress response, there's no clear delineation between words and violence.

As noted above, Jonathan Haidt and I wrote a piece for The Atlantic countering this canard back then, but unfortunately, “words are violence” continues to be argued to this day, both on campus and off. In 2021, for example, a Case Western Reserve University Observer editorial reasoned that protesting outside an abortion clinic is “inherently violent.” In 2022, Cornell students disrupting an Ann Coulter event shouted, among other things, “Your words are violence” (and as I tried to point out above, if you need to tell someone something is violence, it’s not violence). In 2023, the pride office at the University of Colorado Boulder warned that misgendering could be “considered an act of violence”: After being called out by conservative media, a reworked page describes it as an “act of oppression.”  

The notion that speech is violence fails to recognize the essential role of provocative speech and art, the revelation of harsh truth in science, and the reality of messy and distorted psychological states people can genuinely find themselves in. Most importantly, however, it is an affront to the foundation of our democracy and modern civilization. The bright line between action and speech is one of the best things humankind has ever devised, and it has been an engine for peace, progress, artistic achievement, and innovation for centuries. Without that line, representative government — not to mention the freedom to be our authentic selves without fear — is impossible.

Equating words and violence is also emotional blackmail — a rhetorical tactic Rikki Schlott and I talk about in our book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” Emotional blackmail is a way to shut down your opponent’s rational faculties, often by using an appeal to empathy for one group or person to discourage empathy for another. It’s effective at making a person think, “Well, I don’t want to hurt anyone. And if good people believe this, I probably shouldn’t think about it too hard.” 

The irony, of course, is that the “words are violence” argument is almost always used to justify hurting other people. And if you’re not a fan of hurting people, hurting people to prevent hurting people seems like a doomed mission, doesn’t it? That is, of course, unless the people you’re hurting are bad and the people for which you’re hurting them are good. This is a tactic grounded in what we describe in “Canceling” as the Great Untruth of Ad-Hominem: bad people only have bad opinions.

Don't be taken in by that.

As my colleague Angel Eduardo has said, “Fascinating that some ‘speech is violence’ advocates resort to or support physical violence in response to speech. Given their perspective, you'd think that merely hurling invective in return would be sufficient — but apparently even for them there's a relevant distinction.”

Rob Henderson defines a “luxury belief” as “an idea or opinion that confers status on members of the upper class at little cost, while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.” Like those who endorse the idea of stochastic terrorism, I think proponents of the “words are violence” argument are at least half-aware that it is bullshit. But maybe that is what luxury beliefs ultimately are: Ideas that increase your esteem in elite circles, but can also be tactically useful — they may be harmful for society but they benefit you personally. 

Henderson did a great video on the concept of luxury beliefs for The New York Times, which I encourage you all to check out:

The assassination attempt showed the gulf between words and violence, but it also proved, once again, that Cancel Culture is real and cross-partisan.

Last weekend, a would-be assassin's bullet came within a fraction of an inch of killing one of our two major presidential candidates. It tragically ended the life of a firefighter and father — and shortly after, the shooter was killed as well. All of this happened in front of the eyes of supporters and even children.

That alone should remind us that speech — even horrible, hurtful, and hateful speech — is not violence. Violence is a very different thing. But the response to it in the last few days also has me thinking about this bright line and how important it is.

After the narrowly averted assassination attempt, some people and organizations have very fairly and rightfully called for a lowering of the rhetorical temperature in our discourse. I have no issue with that. Indeed. I think the way to solve our problems is often through precise arguments rooted in real-world solutions rather than simplistic battles about which of your opponents is personally evil (spoiler: humans have a nasty tendency to see anyone who disagrees with them as stupid, evil, or both).

However, there were also calls for people to be punished for flippant comments or dark jokes that, while profoundly insensitive and even obnoxious, are and always have been a regular part of any society's political discourse.

That the rhetoric might touch on violent imagery does not make it violence in the eyes of the First Amendment. In August 1966, 18-year-old Robert Watts was having a discussion in a small group after an anti-Vietnam war rally on the Washington Monument grounds when he made a anti-war rhetorical statement: “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

Watts was convicted of threatening the president — then the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1969. The Court recognized that the “political hyperbole” of Watts’ statement did not convey a genuine threat: “The language of the political arena … is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact. We agree with petitioner that his only offense here was ‘a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.’”

In April 1981, after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, state data entry worker Ardith McPherson had a conversation with her co-worker/boyfriend where they criticized Reagan’s social policies. She ended with, “Shoot, if they go for him again, I hope they get him.” McPherson was fired. In 1987, the Supreme Court held that firing violated her rights. McPherson had a right to comment on a matter of public concern, and “the inappropriate or controversial character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.”

This is especially the case when animosity between rival factions is high, and most especially when (and we're not imagining this part) the stakes appear so high.

Take, for example, Kyle Gass of the band Tenacious D, who made a joke about the attempted assassination of former President Trump during a concert in Australia — which led to calls for he and bandmate Jack Black to be deported, Black canceling the remainder of the tour, and Gass being dropped by his talent agency. Or consider “Morning Joe” being preemptively pulled off the air, allegedly just in case they said something offensive, on the Monday after the attempted assassination.

Or consider Darcy Waldron Pinckney, the Home Depot clerk from Cayuga, New York, who wrote “To bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!” on her Facebook page in response to the attempt on the former president’s life. The social media account Libs of TikTok (who has been on an absolute tear with this kind of behavior following the assassination attempt) posted a video on X of someone confronting Pinckney at work, tagged Home Depot, and asked, “Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”

Home Depot responded on X, saying “this individual's comments don't reflect The Home Depot or our values. We can confirm she no longer works at The Home Depot.”

In summation: Pinckney posted her political opinions on Facebook, was targeted by a mob, and subsequently fired. Sound familiar? It should.

This is Cancel Culture — and as Rikki and I pointed out in “Canceling,” it is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon. The wave of doxxing and calls for people to be fired coming from some on the political right in the last few days is all the proof you need.

It’s not violence to argue that the ‘speech is violence’ argument should die

So what have we learned today? Well, for the 50,000th time: Cancel Culture is real and is not going away unless we do something about it. Also, the phenomenon comes from both sides of the political spectrum, and people tend to care about it only when it's directed at their own side (a crucial part of what Rikki and I call hypocrisy projection).

But most importantly, I want people to understand this takeaway: Speech is not violence, and saying so is an insult to anyone who's experienced actual violence. The phrase, “Your words are violence!” itself is little more than a rhetorical device, useful in politically homogeneous settings. It functions as a luxury belief, something that helps the advocate gain esteem for his or her passion in certain circles, but would lead to an inevitable spiral of violence if it were generally believed.

As Rikki and I argue in “Canceling,” there has been a more-than-50-year campaign to turn elements of the left against freedom of speech, despite the left once being the greatest champion of free speech. A major arrow in this quiver is the recharacterization of speech as violence, whether in the form of the “fighting words” doctrine (which is hanging on by a constitutional thread) to justify passing speech codes in the ‘80s and ‘90s; or the more recent conflation of both speech and silence with violence (a tell that these are rhetorical tactics rather than actual arguments, because obviously you can use one or the other any time you like without regard for consistency).

The attempt to besmirch the reputation of freedom of speech has been extremely successful throughout my career despite the efforts of so many — including FIRE and the people I admire most in the world like Jonathan Rauch, James Kirchick, Nadine Strossen, Jacob Mchangama, Alice Dreger, and so many others.

But freedom of speech has nothing to apologize for. In fact, it remains the best alternative to violence ever invented. The argument that speech is violence is a flippant justification for enacting violence against your opponents. It's a simpleton's argument disguised as a profound insight. It is also an ancient argument, one that was squarely in place back when people dueled in order to avenge insults on their honor.

It's only when the powerful become deeply in denial of their power that they can convince themselves that maybe the censors were on the right side of history. 

Jacob Mchangama’s book, “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media,” makes this point as clear as day. Chapter after chapter, we see human beings who don’t have free speech rights espouse its virtues and fight mightily to attain it. But once they do, and once they gain power, we see far too many of them suppress or desire to suppress the speech of others. “For me, but not for thee” is an all-too-human impulse. Those of us who value free expression need to remain constantly vigilant and principled, because I don’t call free speech “The Eternally Radical Idea” for nothing. Defending this critical freedom is truly a never-ending battle.

The worst thing about the argument that speech is violence is that it makes actual violence inevitable. But I can guarantee you that once that process begins, and once those who advocate for this idea experience real violence directed at them, they’ll change their tune very quickly. I wish we didn’t always have to learn things the hard way in America, but if we don’t wise up to the absurdity of the “words are violence” luxury belief, we’ll soon be hit with something much worse than a punch in the face.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Jan 20, 2026

Humans, as a species, are messy. We are quarrelsome and individualistic, yet tribal apes. Consequently, we insist on having our own minds and disagreeing with each other and factionalising over it. The kind of ape we are is big-brained and capable of complex thought so the societies we build and the issues we fight over are correspondingly complex with multiple layers and many grey areas.

Humans, as a species, dislike messiness. We crave order, consistency and comprehensible frameworks that guide how we understand things and direct us in what to do about them. This trait of forming models to understand and navigate our world has served us well and given us a level of control over it not found in any other species.

This paradox in which we are a complicated and messy big-brained species which dislikes complexity and mess combined with our evolutionary history as social mammals which band together into tribes in competition with other tribes to thrive, survive and procreate presents some challenges.

Historically, human societies have mostly been hierarchical, ruled by a dominant moral orthodoxy with a simple story about who we are and what we must do: warlords, monarchs, dynasties, theocracies. Because we are quarrelsome and factional, none of these arrangements has ever satisfied everyone. Sooner or later, the ruling regime is toppled and another takes its place, usually in bloodshed.

How Liberalism Broke the Cycle

Liberalism broke this cycle more effectively than anything before it. It worked by accepting humans as they are: big-brained, complicated, disagreeable, individualistic, and tribal. Instead of trying to suppress those traits, it channelled them. Liberal societies protected individual liberty, created space for productive disagreement that fuels knowledge and conflict resolution, and developed democratic systems of government by consent. They have never done these things perfectly, but they have done them far better than regimes that are not liberal democracies.

Liberalism’s great strength is that it accepts and accommodates human messiness. In this way, it works better with human nature than any system that has ever existed. This rests on a simple definition of success: a society that allows ordinary people to live and raise families without enduring constant tribal warfare or submission to the dictates of rulers.

Yet the expansiveness and pluralism that make liberalism strong are also what make it vulnerable. A common criticism is that it lacks a vision of the ‘common good’ or a shared moral framework that many people crave. Liberalism offers no fixed answers or direction. Instead, it allows individuals to ask their own questions, shape their own answers, and choose their own paths, requiring only that they not impose their views and values on others.

Liberalism flourishes in times of stability, when people recognise the value of its pluralistic framework that allows for and mediates disagreement. In times of insecurity, however, our craving for order, certainty, and cultural conformity is more easily triggered. When threatened, people become inclined to seek the comfort of simple frameworks and shared narratives. They turn more readily to religious, traditional, or ideological stories, retreat into tribal groups, enforce conformity more harshly, and view outsiders with deeper suspicion. In such conditions, strongman leaders and authoritarian solutions often gain appeal.

In times of instability, people often blame liberalism’s freedom-centred pluralism for the messiness of human societies rather than recognising that societies of humans are inherently messy and that liberalism is a framework that accepts this reality and works to mediate it and resolve conflicts without violence. Critics see liberalism as too open and accommodating, and accuse it of having failed, usually because an authoritarian movement has arisen despite its existence. They insist that only their own brand of authoritarianism can suppress the rival one. History suggests otherwise. Humans consistently respond badly to authoritarianism, and every authoritarian regime has had a limited shelf-life. Yet each insists that theirs will be the one to tame social tensions and end culture wars. This is, in effect, a “Real authoritarianism has never been tried” argument.

In reality, liberalism — at its root, opposition to authoritarianism — has never and can never facilitate the rise of authoritarianism. Critics often point to the authoritarian tendencies of Critical Social Justice on the left, illiberal identitarian populism on the right, or Islamism, as if liberalism failed to prevent them from gaining cultural power or provided the grounds in which they could flourish. But none of these movements arose from societies that were strongly protecting individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, or viewpoint diversity. They arose where those protections had become weak or inconsistent and where illiberal ideas were met with complacent tolerance until they gained dominance.

It is not that liberals, (or defenders of individual liberty and democratic processes who do not refer to themselves as liberals, although they are) failed to recognise these ideologies as illiberal. They did. The problem is that too few people were willing to oppose them consistently across political divides.

This brings us to the urgent question: how can liberalism survive, regroup, and remain principled in the face of rising demands for neatness, certainty, and control that so easily slide into support for authoritarianism? I hear from more and more liberals who feel anxious, even despairing, about this. Yet the role of liberals has always been clear: to oppose authoritarianism in whatever form it arises. And it rarely arises in just one.

We are now living through a particularly troubling wave of illiberalism on many fronts. On the left, we have seen the authoritarian Critical Social Justice movement. On the right, illiberal strands of the “anti-woke” reaction often overlap with populism. Both are marked by postmodern or post-truth disregard for truth, and by attempts to impose their own vision of a “common good” on everyone else.

Tensions over immigration and Islam’s cultural compatibility with liberal democracy have also spiked. At their illiberal edges, these debates fuel ethnonationalism in the UK (sometimes drawing on postcolonial theory) and Christian nationalism in the US. Internationally, conflicts over Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine are polarising Western societies, with evidence that Russia is deliberately working to destabilise liberal pluralism. Meanwhile, the UK continues to see state interference with free speech, and in the US, constitutional rights and democratic processes face threats from the Trump administration. Attempts to defend liberty consistently are hampered by deep political polarisation.

These are exactly the conditions that drive people to retreat into tribal groups, cling to simple frameworks and shared narratives, and be drawn to authoritarians who promise solutions — at the cost of both principles and liberties. For many liberals in the West, this feels like the most unstable period in living memory, with more authoritarian movements demanding opposition at once than we have ever faced before. We, too, feel the pull of clear-cut moral principles to guide us. And the sheer volume of ideologically motivated bullshit, fallacious reasoning, and reality-resistant truth claims we are bombarded with is immense.

Where Is the Line?

It is essential to recognise that a drive for principled consistency and ethical clarity is not only compatible with liberalism, but indispensable to it. The danger lies not in seeking clarity, but in looking for simple, blanket rules in fabricated ideological narratives that deny reality and human psychology. The challenge is how to pursue ethical consistency while respecting freedom, tolerating disagreement, and accepting human messiness. As one of my thoughtful commenters wrote:

I have a bit of a libertarian bend and generally subscribe to the “live and let live”. What I grapple with is that sometimes there are things which don’t harm me in the here and now, but if they get normalised they would harm society (by my reckoning) in the long run. For e.g., if someone holds beliefs I find abhorrent, I agree that unless they break a law they can think and believe what they want. But if they raise their children with those same beliefs and preach to others, they will eventually impact the society my family and offspring will one day live in. Where do we draw the line of giving people autonomy as their beliefs aren’t “harming” any one else? What if the harm is being planted in seeds that will bear fruit later? I don’t know the answer to this.

This is a common refrain. “Where do we draw the line?”

The line for the liberal is always between these two clauses:

Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit // provided they do no material harm to anybody else nor deny them the same freedoms.

This does not make things simple. There are always grey areas about what can be considered to constitute material harm and about what represents a legitimate threat to freedom. Where is the line between the expression of hostile views about a particular group and incitement of violence against that group? At what point does an illiberal religious or political worldview that we must counter with argument become an extremist movement radicalising people into committing harmful actions such that membership of it constitutes conspiracy to commit harm? Are some ideas so productive of direct harm - Islamism, Nazism, the medicalisation of children as ‘trans’ - that excluding them from public institutions is simply a matter of safety?

Where is the line between freedom of speech and targeted harassment and abuse? When does an action stop being an exercise of freedom of association, consumer choice or legitimate protest and become illiberal organised political cancellation? How can we decide when an employer has exercised their own freedom to fire someone for their speech based on a legitimate risk to their reputation and when the risk has been created by political activists to pressure them to do so? When can we understand a mass response to a controversial statement as legitimate criticism that enables bad ideas to be beaten by better ones and when is it a social media ‘pile-on’ that functions to disincentivise further dissent and chill free speech?

There simply aren’t self-evident lines that can be neatly applied to every issue but this does not mean liberals cannot have principled consistency. We cannot realistically create a master flowchart that considers every variable in every case and situation. If we attempted that, we could never get everyone to agree with it. We have to accept the reality of human messiness while being consistent in our principles and thoughtful about how we navigate it. I will suggest one form of fallacious argument that we should not allow ourselves to be sucked into and five things we can bear in mind while addressing specific issues from a liberal perspective. (There will be many more and I encourage you to share them in the comments).

One thing we should absolutely not do is accept that the existence of complexity and messiness justifies creating illiberal blanket rules that target people expressing unpopular, offensive or politically inflammatory stances, but not causing direct and material harm. We are currently seeing a surge of fallacious reasoning that goes like this: “I can think of a somewhat comparable example in which you would agree that banning or punishing someone was reasonable and not authoritarian. Therefore, you have no grounds to object to me banning or penalising things contrary to my political beliefs. And if you object, you must also reject the first example.”

Examples presented to me include:

If it’s reasonable for an employer to fire someone for saying black people are too stupid to be employable, then it’s also reasonable to fire James Damore for saying men and women differ in interests on average.

If we don’t let people walk around entirely naked, then we can also ban them from covering their hair.

If it is age-appropriate safeguarding to remove explicit violent or sexual content from school libraries, then it is age-appropriate safeguarding to remove books accurately depicting historical slavery or referencing the existence of gay people.

If it would be reasonable for fire an engineer for wearing a KKK hood at work, it is reasonable to fire him for dangling his hand from his truck window in such a way that his figures form a gesture which has been associated with white supremacy.

If it is a matter of safety to fire a hospital employee who called for another Holocaust while being responsible for preparing food for Jewish people, then it is also a matter of safety to fire a Home Depot worker who joked about wishing an assassin’s bullet had not missed Trump.

If it is reasonable to ban fetish gear that exposes genitals, then it is also reasonable to ban men from wearing dresses.

If somebody raises one of these comparisons in good faith, it can be worth pointing out the crucial differences: between claims of racial inferiority and claims of psychological sex differences; between gratuitous portrayals of violence and accurate depictions of history; between intention and accident; between established decency laws and individual expression which do not contravene them; between a credible threat to safety and a tasteless joke.

In most cases, however, people making such false equivalencies are not interested in these finer points or considering issues thoughtfully on a case-by-case basis. They are deflecting to a different issue where censorship or penalties are more defensible because they cannot easily defend either in the case in question. One can spend half an hour explaining why the cases differ, only for one’s interlocutor to switch to a new “comparison” and accuse you of being immoral or stupid for not conceding. The aim is to exhaust and overwhelm good-faith challengers and discourage further debate.

If you do choose to engage, the best move is to reverse the demand: If they are unwilling to defend their authoritarian stance on the issue in question specifically, they should make a strong case for the equivalence they are claiming, because it is not apparent. If they really believe, for example, that claims of psychological sex differences in interests are equivalent to claims of racial inferiority in capabilities, they must explain how race is equivalent to sex, how interests are equivalent to capabilities, what evidence supports either claim, or why political agendas should take precedence over evidence. It is their responsibility to do the work of making a strong case for banning anything.

Dishonest authoritarians often try to use our concern for truth and principled consistency against us. We do not need to let them. If they wish to persuade us, they must come with evidence and reasoned argument.

Five Things to Bear in Mind

Quite a lot of messy complexity can be navigated by holding core premises, principles and strategies in mind. Here I suggest five.

1. Banning things does not work.

There is a common idea that liberals are idealists. Some critics say we are radical individualists who value freedom at all costs, indifferent to social consequences. Others dismiss us as woolly elitists who think that if we sit around explaining things reasonably for long enough, we can convince people to stop being authoritarian and all the problems will go away. Either way, the charge is that we are unserious about real problems.

Individual liberty is something that should be supported for its own sake and on principle. However, there is also a strong pragmatic argument for liberalism. Banning ideas has never worked. It doesn’t make them disappear. It drives them underground, gives them the glamour of forbidden truth, and leaves their adherents free to present them unchallenged within alternative spaces. By keeping bad ideas speakable, we can expose, debate, and discredit them. That is the only way ideas have ever died: by losing support in the court of public opinion.

People who think that banning ideas can make them go away would do well to look at the UK. Under the influence of Critical Social Justice, gender-critical and anti-immigration views were heavily penalised. People were fired, arrested, threatened, and no-platformed. Five years later, the UK is now dubbed “TERF Island,” and Reform, running on an anti-immigration platform, has surged in the polls, destabilising the two-party system. Whether or not one welcomes these developments, they demonstrate that attempts to ban ideas frequently serves only to strengthen them.

It is particularly frustrating as a liberal to have it frequently assumed that we oppose the banning and penalising of ideas because we do not realise how harmful ideas can be or because we agree with the ideas and want them to thrive. Sometimes liberals can fall into this error themselves and agonise over whether they really should set aside their support for freedom of speech in the face of a particularly egregious idea. This makes intuitive sense but does not work in practice. The opposite is true. It is precisely when ideas are most harmful that we need them out in the open, where they can be confronted, resisted, and stripped of power. This is not naive idealism. We do it because it works.

2. Think in Terms of a ‘High Bar’ rather than blanket rules or simple lines.

Because humans are complicated and messy, the societies we build and the ethical dilemmas we face are also complex and multi-faceted and a variety of views on them will always exist. We are not always able to set out theoretical frameworks that cover every eventuality and potential manifestation of every issue and draw clear lines that cover every possible variable.

We can, however, think in terms of having a very high bar for banning things and stick to the ‘harm’ principle. In the liberal conception of society, individual liberty is the default position and anybody who wants to say, “No, you may not say or do that” has the responsibility to make a strong and convincing case that unambiguous, material harm has been caused or will be caused by tolerating the beliefs or actions in question. That is; people are not expected to prove that they should be allowed to say or do anything. Those who think they should not be allowed to say or do it are expected to demonstrate harm if they want to justify coercion. In the words of John Stuart Mill,

[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise.

If the case for harm cannot be made, there is no justification for coercion. This does not mean accepting that the beliefs or actions do not present a problem or succumbing to moral or epistemological relativism and accepting that everybody has their own equally valid ‘truth.’ It means that the job of dispatching those ideas and associated behaviours remains in the realm of discussion, critique, argument and persuasion, not in the realm of state or social force.

3. Hold Ourselves to a High Standard

It is common now to hear people deplore the state of society and opine that liberalism has failed because illiberalism still exists and is increasingly gaining positions of power and prestige. “Where is this liberal society?” they ask, forgetting that they are society and failing to introspect honestly about whether they have been upholding liberalism.

Too often, we are inclined to think in top-down ways of society as a thing we live in and which owes us certain rights and freedoms rather than a thing we are and which we create with the culture we develop and the principles, norms and expectations we establish. As we get increasingly anxious about a certain manifestation of illiberalism on a political side which is not our own or which threatens our own values or way of life, we become prone to tolerating or condoning illiberalism on our own side or which does not threaten our own values or way of life. Then we outsource agency to political leaders and activist groups whose illiberal stances we don’t really support while speaking and behaving in ways which embolden them to become more illiberal.

It can feel futile, idealistic or naive to try, as an individual, to push back at rising surges of illiberalism by being visibly, vocally and consistently liberal, but if we want to live in a society where our individual liberty is respected, that is what we have to do. There is no other way. Liberalism cannot be established by illiberal means. We can all hold ourselves to high standards of ethical integrity when engaging with others and be thoughtful about how we are doing so. Ask ourselves, “Am I offering strong but legitimate criticism or am I trying to help cancel someone because I hate their political views?” “Am I being consistent or am I doing something I recognised as censorious when people on the other side did it to people who share my views?”

This can be more impactful than we might think. Every person who stands up for the freedom of belief and speech of someone with whom they disagree impacts a circle of people around them, influencing those who share their political views to do so in a more consistently principled way and checking those who are asserting them in illiberal ways, while making those who take an opposing view more inclined to return that favour. At the least, they do not contribute to the escalation of illiberalism and polarisation. We know from other social movements, including, most recently, the Critical Social Justice movement, that a relatively small proportion of people can significantly impact culture if they are vocal, visible and organised. The majority of us still hold liberal principles, but hold them passively as an expectation. We can each play a part in re-activating them.

4. Really Accept Human Complexity and Messiness

We humans, despite being messy and complicated, typically strongly dislike mess and complication. We crave order and simplicity. Further, we seem to expect it and believe that we can socially engineer it. Despite no society of humans ever in the history of our species having achieved a state in which everybody held the same beliefs, values and goals, we are constantly surrounded by factions of people who believe that they can and must get everybody on-board with their vision of shared values or a ‘common good.’

Despite having just lived through the Critical Social Justice movement’s attempts at this which included a multi-billion dollar industry to retrain employees’ unconscious minds and a multi-faceted Cancel Culture, many on the illiberal right now tell us that the problem was that we do not face enough social pressure to have shared values and a sense of the common good. They argue that we need to return to a society dominated by religiously or socially conservative beliefs, racial and religious homogeneity, restrictive gender roles and intolerance of sexual minorities. Not only will this not work to reduce differences of opinion and factionalism (as someone with an academic background in Christian history in England, 1300-1700, I can assure you of this), it will not work at all, because humans do not work like that and do not tolerate that. The ‘anti-woke’ backlash against the woke movement we now see is a clear example of this and it is foolish and blinkered to think there won’t be an anti-anti-woke backlash if its illiberalism continues.

Our tendency to have strong and differing opinions and factionalise over them exists in our evolved ape brains and cannot be addressed by socially engineering our environments to reduce differences. We can only work with the disagreeable aspects of our human nature by setting up systems which allow for people with different opinions to hold them, express them and live by them while committing to not imposing them on anybody else and settling disagreements via healthy and productive verbal debate rather rather than tribal warfare and democratic processes rather than successive authoritarian regimes. This governing system is liberalism.

Despite so many of us seeming to know this on an intellectual level and hold ‘live and let live’ values, we still seem to find it counterintuitive on a deeper level and this is intensified when we feel ourselves to be under threat. At these times, we are inclined to be drawn to authoritarian rhetoric and strongman political leaders as though they offer us some kind of protection. They do not and are, in fact, most likely to lead us back to times of tribal warfare and authoritarian regimes. To resist this, we have to fully appreciate the messiness and complexity of humans and consequently human societies and fight for the liberal governing system that works with that reality.

5. Do Not Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

Liberalism becomes unpopular in times of heightened anxiety because it does not offer simple answers, blanket rules, clearly delineated ethical frameworks or a shared vision of the common good. This is a feature, not a bug. Liberalism is the governing system and ethical framework that has best advanced knowledge and enabled people with different ideas to live together and resolve conflict without bloodshed not because it is tidy and simple and perfect and provides all the answers, but because it’s the only one that works with the chaotic wiring of actual humans and enables them to find their own.

While authoritarian systems of government and societal norms provide a great number of “You musts” and “You must nots,” liberalism, at its root, has only one “You must not” which concludes with ‘harm other people or impose your own values on them.” This rule applies to the government and so protects individual liberty and enables government by consent of the governed. It applies to the law and so protects individuals from physical harm or theft of property. It applies to institutions of knowledge production and so facilitates open inquiry and the advance of knowledge. As a social norm, it enables tolerance and co-existence while also protecting people’s right to strongly disapprove of and criticise those who have different views and engage in robust and productive debate without violence.

This is not to say that we live in a society which is actually doing all this well! We are not currently doing it well and probably never will do it perfectly. There is always illiberalism and threats to or denial of individual freedoms within governments, laws, institutions of knowledge production and among different factions of humans living together. We are not a particularly liberal species. We are, however, a species capable of envisioning liberalism, setting up systems to facilitate it and getting a significant majority of people to commit to accepting their own right to believe, speak and live as they see fit, while not harming anybody else or denying them the same freedoms. The countries which have done this are known as liberal democracies and they are the most prosperous, advanced and pleasant places to live the world has ever known.

Liberals will always need to exist because illiberalism will always exist. It is our job to be alert to the rise of authoritarianisms and uncompromisingly assert that one “You must not.” We have not been doing very well at this in recent years and so we have seen the rise of unchecked authoritarian factions on the left and the right and in the form of intolerant Islam. This is not a reason to give up on liberalism and embrace whichever authoritarianism seems the least threatening. It is a reason to reinforce liberalism and be stronger in our defences of it while also recognising and being appreciative of the degree of individual liberty our societies still afford us. We may never achieve a perfect degree of liberalism in all spheres of life, but society works far better and is a much more pleasant place to live in when we hold this as an aim than when we do not.