How liberals lost the fight
4/24/202659 min
In a world of increasing extremes, Liberalism itself has come to be an insult. From 'metropolitan liberal elites' to 'bleeding heart liberals' the liberal establishment seems bewildered and fresh out of devoid of new ideas in the face of populist extremes. Labour, Tories, Liberal Democrats – all now struggling to hold their own against Reform UK and The Green Party, both of which have taken populism from opposite ends of the spectrum to the heart of British politics.
This week, Lewis is joined by Adrian Wooldrdige to discuss the complexities of the liberal argument in a fractured world, and what a renewed liberalism might look like.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLewis Goodall· Host0:01
[upbeat jingle] This is a Global Player original podcast.
Adrian Wooldridge· Guest0:05
You get all the passion in, in the world going to the left or to the right.
Lewis Goodall· Host0:10
Liberalism, pluralism has become almost a dirty word.
Adrian Wooldridge· Guest0:13
And they've become a rather guilty establishment. You never have somebody like Keir Starmer really vigorously defending liberal values.
Lewis Goodall· Host0:22
You've seen electorates yearn somehow for control.
Adrian Wooldridge· Guest0:25
But what we have is a strange situation in which liberals ... In order to survive in a world where people are drawn towards populism, liberalism has to answer that quest.
Lewis Goodall· Host0:38
Think of all the ways we talk about liberal or liberalism these days. A lily-livered liberal, a bleeding-heart liberal, a metropolitan liberal elite, a woke liberal, a liberal centrist dad. It's no longer an argument, it's an insult. And yet liberalism, properly understood, is none of these things. Rather, it was a radical insurgent ideology, a way of understanding the world. Revolutionary in its day, in its insistence that no one, no king, no church, no state is above scrutiny, that each human individual was a thing of grace, of beauty, of validity, of value, that we had rights as individuals which must be respected, that the state is an instrument of the individual and not the other way around. It is the ideology