With liberals like these, who needs conservatives?

Moral victories and electoral defeats: how liberals are killing the left.

If liberalism comes from the enlightenment, then how far it has come, indeed.

We live in a world where conservatives are buying electric cars and liberals are torching them. A society waging war, not with corruption and excess, but those seeking to dismantle it—though admittedly with a sledgehammer when a scalpel would suffice. A world holding its breath, anxious the hot war over the horizon grows hotter, as liberal leaders, in their infinite wisdom, choose escalation over negotiation, no matter the cost. This is not the liberalism of open discourse, of reasoned debate, of hard-won compromise. We live in a world where contemporary liberalism demands urgent examination.

Because, observing the erosion of classic liberal values—peace, open-mindedness, the right to disagree without fear—and the rise of their opposites replacing them, is maddening. And madness is a lot like circling a drain. Either you press ever-forward, ever-more furiously, blind to your ever-tightening radius until it’s too late, or you hear the siren call to reason and turn out early. The questions are as pressing as they are uncomfortable: when did we trade free thought for censorship and dogma? When did we trade peace for perpetual war? When did we trade individualism for institutionalism? And, why, in asking the questions am I scolded, scorned, and branded as the one who’s changed?

Let’s pull back the curtain and examine the contemporary liberalism that stands before us.

Why do today’s liberal leaders embody such ironclad resistance to negotiating peace? Is it because doing so would first require fresh and honest assessments of their positions militarily, financially, and morally? (Am I the last liberal in Europe who thinks that sounds like a good idea? Or is that now right-wing thinking?)

Avoiding these difficult reckonings and instead playing with fire isn’t just reckless—it’s compulsive, like a gambling addict throwing good money after bad. Do they genuinely believe they can win, or are they simply addicted to rolling the dice? Transpose that metaphor to Europe today, and the reality is stark: mounting battlefield losses, deepening financial ruin, and the absolute moral bankruptcy of picking up the bill for a war that young Ukrainians are paying for with their lives. More than ever—existentially so—it seems important to remind the Western liberal voters propping up the project that the West will lose a propaganda war before Russia loses a war of attrition.

With liberals like these, who needs neo-conservatives?

But this isn’t new. This is muscle memory. Western liberals have been doing it for centuries, long before Napoleon failed to take Moscow in 1812. The Brits, the French again, the Germans—they all tried, too. Same story, different century. Russophobia is very old condition.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there was a chance—an opportunity to shape a security framework that accounted for all interests, including Russia’s. Instead, NATO expanded. Liberal (and conservative) European and American leaders supported every eastward advance, installing missile positions along the way, ever closer to Moscow, rebuffing all Russian calls to reason. It was a well-kept secret (until it wasn’t): to invite Ukraine into the fold. The most neuralgic of all previously Soviet republics. Only the lobotomised or the lying tell you this as something other than provocation.

And those who revealed the secret, that the US knew full well what it was doing? You know their names—Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange. Liberals Obama and Clinton raced to destroy their lives, though Clinton, given her way, might have done it with a drone instead.

More recently, more liberals, same thing. Senior DNC officials peddling Putin-Trump collusion conspiracies. Fabrications, it turned out. The DNC paid for them. The liberal media laundered them. Anyone who was not sufficiently on board with the narrative—now debunked by the FBI and the institution who awards Pulitzers—or who just wanted to talk to Russian officials about it was accused of being a Putin stooge or someone worthy of investigating for treason or disloyalty to the West.

With liberals like these, who needs McCarthy?

Now, here we are. And suddenly, smashing things is fine. Teslas have the wrong political scent, now—light ‘em up. Never mind the owner bought it before its maker was a villain in your mind. Never mind they probably agree with you on most things. Fire is simpler than thought. And if it is ok for liberals to let off a bit of steam firebombing the premises and symbols of conservative billionaires, then there’s no doubt you did it, or cheered for it, to Rupert Murdoch every time he deployed his airwaves and column inches to oust liberal leaders across the West. And just as surely, you remained completely dispassionate in the way you characterised the January 6 capitol hill rioters as just letting off a bit of steam, too.

With liberals like you, who needs MAGA?

January 6 deserves no defense or apology. It was an abomination. A collective brainsnap. Though, in the 21^st century as American liberal leaders did nothing to prevent the shuttering of factories in America’s manufacturing towns while bailing out the Wall street bankers who profited from offshoring their jobs (and caused the GFC), can you blame the rust-belt for letting off a bit of steam and—not J6!—voting for Donald Trump?

So where does this leave us? Look around. In the United States, conservatives have embraced a Kennedy—a Kennedy!—after liberals litigated to keep him off the ballot. His crime? Leaving the Democrats to run as an independent. Up in Canada, liberals decided Mark Carney is the man to lead the charge to the next election. A former investment banker—a banker!—turned central banker. The man has spent a career socialising the losses of privatised gains. How’s that for progressive economics? Then there’s Germany, where liberal media has been shrieking about the rise of far right neo-Nazis. And rightly so. It’s a call history teaches us should never be ignored. And yet, not long ago, it was the Canadian parliament breaking into standing ovation for an actual Nazi veteran—clapping like seals, grinning like morons. And the great hope against Germany’s far right? The guy liberals are cheering for as anything but the AfD? A conservative millionaire lawyer with no experience as a minister who reportedly owns two private planes.

With candidates like these, who needs tech bros?

So, my liberal friends—those of us whose hearts still beat left—are we truly content with this? Or have we simply grown comfortable with leaders whose only real conviction is standing in opposition to Trump, as though that alone is enough? Because not too long ago, everything I’ve laid out here—every grim contradiction, every betrayal of principle—would have been unthinkable to liberals. And that’s not even getting to the things I don’t have space for, like how liberal governments in Brussels, Canada and Australia are now leading the charge against free speech (the US did it too, and Trump vowed to dismantle it). Another bad omen. A sign of becoming what we once opposed, sacrificing principle for the singular cause of opposing Trump.

Once, we championed free speech and defied censorship. We fought for institutional transparency. We fought for individual empowerment and rights and against institutional power and entitlement. Now liberals fight for institutions. Defending their bulk, their power, their secrets. Attacking anyone demanding disclosure, and branding them troublemakers, reactionaries, threats to democracy.

It is no longer conservatives who fight to preserve the ways of the old order. It is liberals who defend business as usual, as though it is sacred, and as though it is permanently under threat from crude right-wing forces. And in the most bitter turn of all, it is liberals now who look upon dissenters—antiestablishment voices, the kind we once championed—as heretics, as enemies, as antiliberal.

To be antiestablishment now is to be antiliberal. That needed repeating.

It's worth asking—is liberalism still working the way it was envisioned? Can you even ask the question? Many of us think you can’t. To suggest otherwise, even in small, trusted circles, comes with risk. The words come hesitantly, half-whispered, always with the fear of being thrown in with Trump, MAGA, woke-bashing, fascism—the hysteria du jour.

So we’re stuck. Stuck without an honest assessment of how hostile today’s liberal leaders and establishment institutions of authority have become to ordinary people’s own economic welfare and moral standing, and, unless we go back to speaking up, honestly and contentiously and messily—democratically—stuck without the ability to ever get one.

Liberals need to face themselves, and start honestly assessing all the neo-liberal policies. The wars. The economic dogmas. The obsession with centralising authority in distant institutions far removed from those who live under their rule. Institutions which once stood for the many, but now seem only to serve the class of the affluent, the educated, the untouchable. Failing this people will continue to turn elsewhere. Far right, far left, anywhere but the hollowed-out centre. Towards anyone sharing their antipathy and who depict themselves as against this. As against the establishment. As, you know, classically liberal.

Liberal democracy was never meant to reach some end-point—a closed-circuit owned by a group claiming to have perfected it. No one group will ever have the very best system of values, manifested institutionally, all of which needs to be… conserved without further debate, without further improvement or progress. It must remain open, naked, challenged—evolving. Otherwise, it ceases to be liberal as much as it ceases to be democracy.

When one group sees history as a straight line of progress, each injustice a relic, each wrong righted, or, at the very least, forgotten, things can turn awry. And turn scary when enemies are made of those who doubt society, fault it, challenge it, disrupt it, to dismantle it for the sake of rebuilding it better. As though questioning is destabilising. Challenging is betraying. As though curiosity itself is a threat to democracy.

This isn’t a system of progress. It’s maintenance of a system. Of something bigger than society, bigger than liberal democracy. What kind of thing thrives when curiosity is quiet, when scrutiny is subdued? What kind of stability demands silence?

When the gap between what ordinary people see and what they’re told they’re seeing widens, when their true feelings and how they’re told to feel go in different directions, they notice. And they speak up. Down at the pub or on social media, as is their birth right. The prevailing narrative counts for nothing if it flunks the pub test—if ordinary people pick apart the lie between pints. If that happens, it doesn’t take long for mockery to turn to anger to turn to something ungovernable.

Today’s liberal leaders cracking down on free speech see that as the real problem. Not the scandals, not the grift. The optics. The way people talk, the way they question, the way discontent spreads like a disease. A disease needs treating—cleaning up, wiping out. Label them against us. Label them anti-democratic. Extremist. You don’t even have to prove it. Just label them. Stay in line, or you’re next.

Strange, isn’t it? It was always the opposite of liberals—authoritarians— who silenced dissent, who framed the curious, the disruptive, as threats to the system. But who, exactly, is working so hard today to ensure no one questions the reality that neoliberalism is just imperialism wrapped in democratic slogans, propping itself up with the tools it once claimed to oppose? And if that’s the fight to preserve liberal democracy, then what, exactly, is being saved?