The Closing of the Liberal Mind:
How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left
April 12,
2016
A former
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently a Distinguished Fellow at the
Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America
today and finds that it is becoming its opposite—illiberalism—abandoning the precepts of
open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of
law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant,
rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing
the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that
rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were
prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today’s liberalism has
forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian,
anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely
European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once
freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs
speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom
of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it
liberalism at all, but illiberalism—a set of ideas in politics, government, and
popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even
anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness
to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although
illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the
radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive
liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable
tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a
viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while
respecting individual liberties.
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