A Liberal Manifesto in a Time of Inequality and Climate Change
Liberalism has much better answers to the burning questions of the age than the loony left and the loony right.
Locke: Liberalism then, planetism now?
Photographer: Heritage Images/Hulton ArchiveIt’s hard being a liberal these days. The world seems to want to go in the opposite direction. Authoritarianism is on the rise in China, mercantilism in the U.S., populism everywhere from Brazil to the Philippines, and an oxymoronic “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and Poland.
Liberals seem particularly irrelevant in the two biggest debates of our time: about inequality and global warming. The first has left-wing demagogues baying once again to soak the rich in a new round of class warfare. The second has spooked the loony right into denying the problem (and indeed science) and the loony left into flight-shaming, SUV-shaming and just shaming generally, reminiscent of France’s Jacobins in 1793 or China’s Red Guards in 1966.