interview
The Future of Liberalism in a Post-Pandemic World
2020
Summary
In this short post-pandemic reflection, Parth J. Shah argues that the COVID-19 era and global populist resurgence have expanded state power to a degree that threatens both personal and economic liberty, creating an opening for thoughtful people across the left-right spectrum to form new alliances. He frames the central political fault line no longer as state-versus-market or state-versus-individual, but as state-versus-everyone-else, and calls on civil society to build common ground while setting aside narrower disagreements about the proper scope of government.
Shah's second argument is about temperament: he observes that moral outrage in contemporary social-justice movements, especially in the United States, flows mostly from one side, while liberals — committed to tolerance and accommodation — risk appearing complacent when their own values are trampled. He urges liberals to generate and channel their own moral outrage and to communicate to the wider public why classical-liberal values are worth defending.
Key points
- The pandemic and global populism have expanded state power against both personal and economic liberty, threatening liberals of left and right alike.
- The relevant political divide is no longer state vs. market or state vs. individual, but state vs. everybody else.
- Thinking people from left and right can build common ground on many (not all) issues by setting aside differences over the precise role of the state.
- Civil society's engagement with the state should be rethought around collaboration and coalition-building rather than ideological purity.
- Moral outrage in current social-justice movements is one-sided; liberals' tolerance can read as complacency when core values are under attack.
- Liberals must first feel and then channel their own moral outrage to defend liberty in the public sphere.
- Communicating to a larger public why liberal values are critical to society is an ongoing fight that cannot be abandoned.
Transcript
The Future of Liberalism in a Post-Pandemic World
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBQCrw6L6MY Duration: 232.3s
Speaker (00:05): One thing I do see as a result of the pandemic, not just pandemic, but the populist sort of uprising that you see around the world, right, that the sort of thinking people, that’s me sort of, I don’t know how to define them, basically, but thinking people from left and from the right, all left, all right, so put it that way, right, are coming together. Both of them realize, right, that what they cherish the most, right, would be personal liberty or economic liberties. Right? Both are under threat and by the current system, like current sort of expanse of state powers. I think I see that that’s a potential sort of ground to build off. So common ground that’s emerging. I think there’s sort of right thinking people that is no longer about, right, state versus market or state versus personal freedom. Right? I mean, state for state as individual. It is going to be about state and everybody else from the other side, and therefore, we all need to come together. Right? Keep some differences aside. Yes. We do have differences in terms of the role of the state and how the party should do and should not do. But I think by any measure, all sides agree that what the state is doing is far, far greater than what it should be doing. Right? And therefore, I think I see that as a potential sort of post-COVID scenario that can emerge with the people on the left and the right finding a common ground on many of the issue. Maybe not on all the issues, but many, many issues, a common ground would exist. Right? And that could be, I think, a a way of dealing with the situation that we are in, is building that common ground. So I see collaboration, building common ground as an important way of rethinking the engagement of civil society with the state, with with the larger social social challenges that we face. And that could be, I think, one way to think about it. I think second is becoming more and more obvious by looking at some of the social justice movements around the world, and particularly in The US, that the moral outrage is only on one side. Nothing the liberals do not show as much moral outrage. I think we, in a sense, seem to be more I mean, it’s the word complacent or is it tolerance on what we have? We believe in tolerance. We believe in accommodation, right, of different points of views. But when I think our values are being crushed, right, trampled upon, killed. Right? At that point, I think I feel that we need to show our own moral outrage as much. Right? I think unless we find a way of channeling that outrage, first of course, generating the outrage to begin with. Right? Feeling that outrage in our own hearts and minds, and then channeling that outrage to the larger society. We need a balancing of the outrage in the sense. Outrage is only on one side by and large, and that also is pushing society despite the fact I think most people don’t want to go there. Right? It’s pushing us in that direction. I think that’s important that liberals, the right mind right minded people find a way to show their own outrage, right, and find a way to communicate that with larger public, why some of these values are so critical to our society, to our way of life, and why we need to fight for them and continue to fight for them.
Notable passages
"Both of them realize, right, that what they cherish the most, right, would be personal liberty or economic liberties. Right? Both are under threat and by the current system, like current sort of expanse of state powers."
"I mean, state for state as individual. It is going to be about state and everybody else from the other side, and therefore, we all need to come together."
"the moral outrage is only on one side. Nothing the liberals do not show as much moral outrage."
"I think that's important that liberals, the right mind right minded people find a way to show their own outrage, right, and find a way to communicate that with larger public, why some of these values are so critical to our society"
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