Former Canadian Liberal leader says liberalism went astray when they lost their ‘bull detectors’

Former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff wrote a gripping post-mortem on where liberalism’s so-called “adults in the room” leaders went disastrously wrong.

As left-wing politics faces a series of defeats across the Western world, ranging from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing his imminent resignationto Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump, many party elites are wondering where their moves lost their way. Ignatieff was once a major figure in Canadian Liberal politics, serving as Liberal Party of Canada and opposition leader in his time, but has since run a university affiliated with Liberal megadonor 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 that “to rebuild liberalism, we will need to recapture what the word used to mean.” “

The author noted how drastically Canada changed in his time in terms of diversity, and how that same diversity, “What was once an ideology quickly became a coercive program of policing speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect that was used against white working class citizens.

“Credentialed whites of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could invite recruits of color into our ranks without even feeling that our own elite status was being challenged. We didn’t seem to realize that non-elite whites were threatened, even betrayed, by the new multiracial order,” he said. “In the face of what we thought was racism and white sexism, when in reality it was mostly fear, we began to enact codes of speech and conduct to impose diversity as a new cultural norm.”

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The former Canadian politician summarized that, as a result, “a liberalism whose defining value should have been freedom invented a diversity and inclusion industry whose guiding principle may have been justice but whose means of application included coercion, public disgrace and exclusion”.

The negative reaction to this, he said, was that liberals themselves began to see themselves shackled by their ideology.

“Worst of all, we censor ourselves, voluntarily turning off our bull detectors and silencing internal doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes,” he said. “We abandon the truism that arguments are true or false, regardless of the race or origins of the person making them. “We begin to promote arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins or background (oppression, discrimination, history of family violence) of the person uttering them.”

But beyond a cultural reaction, Ignatieff argued that the abandonment of large sectors of the population began to have political consequences.

“By failing to heed the fears of displacement that the liberal revolution created, we ended up creating a vital political opening for every current of extreme opinion that lined up to speak on behalf of all those whom liberals had stopped listening to,” he said. “In the 2020s, most liberals were backing away, at first nervously and then more rapidly, from our own moralistic politics of virtue. First, we tired everyone else of our virtue signaling, and then we grew tired of it. we get tired of ourselves.”

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“The old political parties (Liberals in Canada, Democrats in the United States, Social Democrats in Europe) that had presided over the liberal revolution now saw their white working-class base headed for the exits and their multicultural support split into autonomous groups that each “one began to make a strange new epistemological claim: you can only understand me if you are like me,” he added.

He recalled that many of these problems worsened when he was expelled from politics in 2011.

“On election night, our party suffered the worst defeat in our history and I lost my seat in Parliament, a verdict that all these years later seems like a judgment not only against me but also against a liberalism that had allowed itself to be deceived. . captured by his own self-esteem,” he said.

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Defeat, he wrote in the extensive editorialHe has been a useful teacher.

“Defeat has taught me that we cannot afford to throw away our values ​​when the tides of politics turn against us. The incorrigible vitality of liberalism comes from the fact that it tells us who we most deeply want to be, as long as we are willing to fight for and never surrender to the passing fads of despair,” he wrote.