Intolerance is at the Heart of Liberalism

The incoherence of liberalism is going to need a better defense than the one offered by Douglas Murray.

Liberalism, as Douglas Murray rightly points out in his Spectator piece, is in the dock and subject to a new “cultural revolution.” Murray’s piece reflects an ever-growing pessimismacross western societies that the edifice upon which liberalism was built is giving way to a “woke” progressivism concerned with curtailing free speech and toppling statues. In this new world, young people exhibit an illiberalism that would, in Murray’s mind, not be out of place in a “Talibanised” society.

For Murray, Britain and the West face an existential crisis. Saving liberalism requires the idea to be defended and reasserted. Liberalism today is facing challenges from within and without, most notably because of the rise of nationalism. This well-trodden and rather pessimistic forecast is captured in Edward Luce’s gloomily titled book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Yet Murray and his fellow crusaders recall a mythical liberalism that has never actually existed. In reality, liberalism has all too often been co-opted by eurocentrists, imperialists, racists, and white nativists (like Murray) that place European civilization above all other cultures.

The Black Lives Matter movement has revealed a gaping wound at the heart of liberal society, that of its inherent racial intolerances. George Floyd’s inhumane asphyxiation over eight long minutes was meant to be another statistic, but today stands as a metaphor for something bigger. Floyd’s horrific murder and the resulting worldwide protests underscore the intolerances at the heart of political liberalism. An intolerance that undergirds liberalism and its very foundations.

For all the talk of equality and rights, liberalism suffers from what Bikhu Parekh calls a deep narcissism; If you do not conform to the dominant consensus, you do not deserve equal recognition. This consensus is both intellectual and cultural. Those that refuse to embrace the values of liberal universalism and who do not represent the cultural attitudes of the dominant group have all too often been marginalised by liberal idealists, pushed to the fringes of societies. Both theory and practice, as well as an…