Putin’s Wrong, But So Are Liberals
While notions of individual freedom and dignity aren’t dead, defenders should examine their reflexively fanatical faith in market mechanisms.
Trolling the West.
Photographer: Alexey Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion last week that Western liberalism was obsolete provoked some strident rebuttals. A contemptuous silence might have been preferable, saving us the embarrassment of Boris Johnson invoking “our values,” or European Council President Donald Tusk claiming, against overwhelming evidence, that it was authoritarianism that was obsolete.
Even the Financial Times, to which Putin confided his views, was reduced to childishly asserting that “while America is no longer the shining city on the hill it once seemed, the world’s poor and oppressed still head overwhelmingly for the U.S. and western Europe” rather than Russia.