It's also been attacked from the left by people... I teach students at Stanford, and many of them think that liberalism is... the doctrine of their parents' or their grandparents' generation, but it's really not relevant to Gen Z younger people who are impatient for social justice and social change that liberalism is not providing.

There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.

Generally speaking, the goals of today's leftists are not in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals... All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.

What is becoming clear is that apartheid is not at the heart of the racial issue. At the heart of it is the fact of Western superiority, resentment of which would remain even if revolution came to South Africa. This is what the liberal-progressive ideology so dangerously overlooks... The struggle for racial equality will be seen as a power struggle and because of this intimately bound up with all those revolutionary forces, both within these shores and outside them, aimed at weakening the West. The West in short can never hope to win the hearts of the Third World except by ceasing to be the West, since in reality it is its virtues, quite as much as its vices, that cause the hostility. It is in this sense that the liberal-progressive obsession with Britain's being on the right side of the race war is so unrealistic. It inculcates a Western inclination to self-abasement that plays into Soviet hands.

There was... an attack on the individualistic premise that underlies liberalism through a new kind of identity politics. There is a liberal form of identity politics that says that liberalism does not live up to its promises of the equal treatment of individuals. So... black people, other racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people, have been marginalized and excluded from... full participation in the promise of a liberal... rule of law... [I]dentity politics was simply a means of mobilizing people and getting them to push for their inclusion. So that's a liberal and... perfectly acceptable and... desirable understanding of identity. But there is another view that's grown up very powerfully, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world... places like the United States or Britain or Australia, where identity politics is seen as an attack fundamentally on the individualistic premise of liberalism. That is to say, individuals are not really free. They're determined by the categories, the racial, gender and other categories into which they are born, and that the society needs to respect not what they do and decide as individuals, but to look first to that category, the racial, ethnic, gender category, and use that as the means of determining... the distribution of resources, hiring, promotion, the other goods that society offers, and that... is fundamentally illiberal. It divides the society which had previously been held together through a set of... common values shared by individuals, into a society of groups, and at the end of that process you can ultimately end up with a place like Lebanon or Bosnia where identity politics... defines the whole of politics...[T]here is a kind of effort to move our modern liberal democratic politics in that kind of identity based direction, coming out of the contemporary left.

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

Now the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles, but... is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that were carried to extremes that led... to bad outcomes... [T]here's a move in this direction on the right and... on the left.

You’re like liberals back when they were more reasonable before they became leftists. And now every liberal kind of has to be a leftist. If you want to be on the team, you’ve got to subscribe to the most fringe ideas that the team is promoting. You can be woke, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it’s an extension of liberalism. Because it’s most often actually an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions on these things but don’t try and piggyback on what I always believe. I have always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society.

Conservatism-under-liberalism should defend human goods that are threatened by liberal ideas taken to extremes. The family, when liberal freedom becomes a corrosive hyper-individualism. Traditional religion, when liberal toleration becomes a militant and superstitious secularism. Local community and local knowledge, against expert certainty and bureaucratic centralization. Artistic and intellectual greatness, when democratic taste turns philistine or liberal intellectuals become apparatchiks. The individual talent of the entrepreneur or businessman, against the leveling impulses of egalitarianism and the stultifying power of monopoly.

Nihilism has consumed left-liberalism from within, and now animates the corpse. Old socialist principles like the dignity of labour and the solidarity of the working class, and liberal principles like free speech, tolerance and the value of dissent, have given way to a new social justice orthodoxy which admits no dignity or solidarity and brooks no dissent. Yet because it occupies the life-like corpse of liberalism, the new orthodoxy attracts the usual bien-pensant progressives (including some calling themselves conservatives) who think they are still promoting a diverse and tolerant society.

I do want to defend liberalism... in theory and I want to talk about the ways that it is being threatened... today and... some of the consequences...

Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs.

Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.

The liberal-progressive view, so beloved of the intellectual community, is that the most crucial battle in the world today is in the field of race, and that Britain, for reasons of morality and expediency, must throw in its lot with the coloured peoples, for all their imperfections. But one can only doubt whether any Government in fact will pay more than lip-service to this view. During its last period of office Labour was able to blur the issue in a way that gave some satisfaction to both the realists and the idealists, backing the liberal-progressive view in words but only very partially in actions. It did not sell arms to South Africa, but it carried on cynically enough with trade and defence co-operation.