Former Canadian Liberal leader says liberalism went astray when they lost their ‘bulls— detectors’
Former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff has written a brilliant autopsy of where the so-called “adults in the room” guiding liberalism went disastrously wrong.
As left-wing politics face a series of defeats across the Western world, starting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement impending resignationto Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat of President-elect Donald Trump, many party elites are wondering where their movements lost their plot. Ignatieff was once a major figure in Canadian liberal politics, serving as the Liberal Party of Canada and leader of the opposition in his time, but has since run a university linked to liberal mega-donor George Soros. On Tuesday, he published an article titled, “I was born a liberal. The ‘adults in the room’ still have a lot to learn” and argued, “to rebuild liberalism, we’re going to have to take back what the word used to mean.”
The author noted how drastically Canada has changed in his time in terms of diversity, and how that same diversity, “Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program to monitor speech and behavior in the name of “dignity and respect” that was used against white working-class citizens.
“Respectable whites of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could call recruits of color into our ranks without ever feeling that our elite status was in question. We didn’t seem to notice that non-elite whites were threatened, even betrayed by the new multiracial order,” he said. “In the face of what we saw as white racism and sexism, while it was mostly fear, we began to promote codes of speech and behavior to enforce diversity as the new cultural norm.”
Former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff said liberals have become shackled by their ideology. (Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images)
A former Canadian politician summarized that as a result, “a liberalism whose defining value was supposed to be freedom invented a diversity and inclusion industry whose guiding principle may have been justice, but whose means of enforcement included coercion, public shaming and exclusion.”
The consequence of this, he said, is that the liberals themselves began to be constrained by their ideology.
“Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bull— detectors and silencing the inner doubts that might have forced us to face our mistakes,” he said. “We have abandoned the claim that arguments are true or false, regardless of the race or background of the person making them. We have begun to promote arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origin, or background story (oppression, discrimination, history of domestic violence) of the person making them.”
But beyond the cultural backlash, Ignatieff argued that there were beginning to be political consequences of the abandonment of large sections of the population.
“By failing to heed the fears of displacement created by the liberal revolution, we ended up creating a vital political opening for every current of extreme thought to come together to speak for everyone the liberals stopped listening to,” he said. “By the 2020s, most liberals were turning back, at first nervously and then with increasing speed, from our own self-righteous virtue politics. First we made everyone else sick of our virtue signaling, then we got sick of it ourselves.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation in January. (AP/Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
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“The old political parties—Liberal in Canada, Democratic in the United States, Social Democratic in Europe—that had presided over the liberal revolution now saw their white working-class base on the way out, and their multicultural support disintegrating into autonomous groups each beginning to put forth a strange new epistemological claim: you can only understand me if you are like me,” he added.
He recalled that many of these questions arose when he was expelled from politics in 2011.
“On election night, our party suffered the heaviest defeat in our history, and I lost my seat in Parliament — a verdict that all these years later reads to me as a verdict not only for me but also for liberalism, which allowed itself to be captured by its own self-esteem.” , he said.
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Defeat, he wrote in long editorialhe was a useful teacher.
“Defeat taught me that we cannot afford to throw away our values when the tide of politics turns against us. Liberalism’s irreparable vitality comes from the fact that it tells us who we most deeply want to be, provided we are willing to fight for it and never surrender to passing fads despair,” he wrote.
