To rebuild liberalism, we’ll need to recover what the word used to mean. (Tim Bouckley for The Washington Post)
By Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff is the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the author of “On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.” This piece is adapted from an essay in the winter 2025 issue of Liberties, a journal of culture and politics.

I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin or John Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of life. We liberals commonly tell ourselves that, unlike the far right and the far left, we reach our beliefs through a rational inspection of the world as it is, but I didn’t get my ideas that way. I didn’t form my convictions through a critical evaluation of evidence about life as it actually was. I was born a liberal.

My parents were liberals, their friends were liberals, and my father worked for 30 years for liberal governments in Canada. Some of my earliest memories are political: At the age of 5, in 1952, watching the Republican National Convention with my parents on the fuzzy first black-and-white television we ever owned. My parents were Canadian diplomats in Washington, and they were for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, not Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower — and, like their American friends, they were horrified by Joseph McCarthy, the scowling Republican bully who presided over the Senate Army hearings. So before I knew anything at all, pretty much as soon as I could stand up and put on my own clothes, the label had been sewn into the shirt on my back.

We liberals of the 1960s — I became one of them — thought we had laid the granite of basic security under everyone’s feet. Sixty years later, the granite is cracking; the liberal state is frayed, contested, underfunded, straining at the seams; and we are defending our achievement, and none too successfully, against populists and authoritarians who want to take it apart. They have mobilized resentment at the price of social solidarity, but they offer no solutions, or solutions so drastic, such as the forcible deportation of millions of migrants, that they would tear society to pieces. A politics that stokes anger without proposing solutions is not a politics. It is only manipulation, and we like to think that we are in the solution business.

We are right about that, but we keep on defending achievements of long ago instead of raising our sights and finding a way to fund and reinvent social solidarity for the 21st century. For my heyday — 1945 to 1975, the glorious 30 years of robust growth and relative equality — has gone forever. Beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs were stripped out and shipped overseas. Those of us who got the credentials to enter the professional classes did well, but plenty of our fellow citizens fell behind. We didn’t notice this in time, and our failure opened up a chasm between who we were, what we believed and the people we represented. We kept offering “equality of opportunity,” a chance for the credentialed few to enter the professional elite, without tackling capitalism’s remorseless distribution of economic disadvantage itself.

By the late 1990s, the conservatives began to gain power by playing to the resentments of the ignored. The authoritarian right, especially, understood that it could build an entire politics on mocking the blindness of the liberal elite. It didn’t need solutions; stoking the rage was enough. We are now the embattled object of that rage. What will it take to earn the trust of those whose discontent we ignored? Liberalism in the next generation will need to save social solidarity from the “creative destruction” of the market by rebuilding the fiscal capacity of the liberal state and investing in the public goods that underpin a common life for all. Saying this, at a high level of generality, is easy enough: The tougher part will be finding the language and the cunning to convert a radical liberalism into a politics that wins elections and a governing strategy that pushes change through the veto-rich thicket of interests waiting to derail our best-laid plans.

In the meantime, we lament the “identity politics” of our populist and authoritarian competitors, when it would be more honest to admit that identity is where all political belief actually comes from, including our own. My identity — charter member of the White professional classes of Canada — defined my liberalism. What the liberal critique of identity politics does get right, though, we owe to our much-maligned individualism. Identity is not destiny. Every formative confrontation with reality presents each of us with political choices. We can either make up our own minds or borrow someone else’s beliefs. The convictions that stick are the ones that we decide for ourselves. The beliefs that we hold on to are the ones that first required a primal “yea” or “nay” to the allegiances we started life with. In the 1960s, I could have rebelled against my parents’ liberalism. Many of my generation did. Instead, I said yes to the world I was born into and the parents I was lucky enough to have.

The Canada I grew up in had been White and aggressively heterosexual. By 1980, I was living in a multiracial and sexually pluralistic society, teaming with new citizens from every corner of the globe. The contrast is captured in a comparison of my University of Toronto graduation class photo of 1969 (mostly male, at least professedly straight, all White) and the graduation photo of the same age group, at the same college, in 2024 (majority female and every color of the rainbow, turbans, hijabs and skullcaps all expressive of a new diversity that we liberals quickly turned into a religion of its own).

This still-unfolding multidimensional revolution turned out to be the cardinal liberal achievement of my era, but it enormously complicated the liberal task of finding the middle way between the Scylla and Charybdis of extremisms. We were naive about the nature of this problem, preferring to believe that all reasonable human beings would embrace a revolution of inclusion, when the reality was that our generation had upended the entire social order, and even our own place in it. Diversity — of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and class — was a virtue in comparison to the dire cantonment of peoples in silos of exclusion, but liberals turned diversity into an ideology. Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program of invigilation of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect.

Credentialed White people of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could invite recruits of color into our ranks without ever feeling that our own elite status was being challenged. We didn’t seem to notice that nonelite White people were threatened, even betrayed, by the new multiracial order. Faced with what we thought was White racism and sexism, when it was mostly fear, we began promulgating codes of speech and conduct to impose diversity as a new cultural norm. New bureaucracies in universities, corporate headquarters and government offices enforced diversity at the price of freedom: the freedom to defend unpopular loyalties, to freely dislike others, to be funny at other people’s expense, to be critical of the pieties of others but especially our own. A liberalism whose defining value should have been liberty invented a diversity and inclusion industry whose guiding principle may have been justice but whose means of enforcement included coercion, public disgrace and exclusion.

Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bullshit detectors and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes. We abandoned the truism that arguments are true or false, irrespective of the race or the origins of the person who makes them. We began promoting arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins or backstory (oppression, discrimination, history of family violence) of the person uttering them. The value that we placed on diversity and inclusion led us by stages to jettison a care for truth itself. We ended up compromising the very epistemological privilege that had provided us with such unending self-satisfaction.

In failing to pay heed to the fears of displacement that the liberal revolution created, we ended up creating a vital political opening for every strand of extreme opinion lining up to speak on behalf of everyone whom liberals had stopped listening to. By the 2020s, most liberals were walking back, at first nervously, and then with increasing speed, from our own self-righteous politics of virtue. First, we made everyone else sick of our virtue-signaling, and then we became sick of it ourselves.

The irony was that the liberal revolution destabilized liberals as much as it upset those who were resisting it outright. For it was the liberal revolution of inclusion that fragmented the centrist consensus that had made the liberal revolution possible in the first place. Once each group — Black, female, gay and transgender — achieved emancipation, many of them began to identify with their own group to the exclusion of wider civic-sized political aggregations of interest. The old political parties — Liberal in Canada, Democratic in the United States, Social Democratic in Europe — that had presided over the liberal revolution now saw their White working-class base heading for the exits and their multicultural support splintering into autonomous groups that each began to make a strange new epistemological claim: You can understand me only if you are like me. Only Black people can understand the Black experience of racism and police violence. Only women can understand the tyranny of patriarchy and the fear of male sexual violence. Only gay people can understand what same-sex love truly means.

The old liberal epistemology at least rested on egalitarian and universal premises. We believed that everyone was capable of entering to some degree into the mental worlds and lived experience of others, because all of us, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity or sexual orientation, were rational human creatures. This rationalist universalism disintegrated in the 1980s and 1990s, attacked by a new generation of “progressive” scholars as masculinist, colonialist, racist and fundamentally condescending. This assault was supposed to awaken us to “intersectionality”— the interaction of disadvantages — but instead of drawing hurt constituencies together, it fragmented them into highly sectarian and identity-based political groupings that foreclosed on alliances, shared understandings, and common political projects across race, class and gender. So, now, liberals denounce the prison house of identity politics, without realizing the degree to which this new self-defeating politics is a consequence of the very revolution that we helped to foment.

Needless to say, at the time I understood little or nothing of this, but these were some of the factors — the complacent politics of virtue, the blindness to the new inequality, the conceit that ours was the only rational politics — that began to erode the electoral base that had sustained the center ground of Western liberal politics. The convictions of my youth had survived intact from 1968, sheltering me from any mind-changing encounter with the world that had metamorphosed around me after the end of the Cold War. When, in 2005, I left behind a professorship at Harvard University and took the plunge into Liberal Party politics in Canada, it didn’t feel like a crazy departure from security, tenure and privilege, but instead as if my feet had been traveling homeward all along.

I had no idea of what I was letting myself in for. I had no understanding of my own inexperience, and no grasp of how weakened and debilitated the liberalism of my party had become. We were a party that kept winning elections and governing the country, but with a vote-share slowly declining in the small towns and rural districts and piling up in the downtown urban centers where the professional and commercial elites liked to live. When I led the party into an election in 2011, truth be told, the liberal platform had not much to offer a people still shocked by the financial crash three years earlier. Our message, though we never said so directly, was “Trust us. We are the adults in the room.” We even called ourselves “the natural party of government.” 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 reads to me like a judgment on not only me but also a liberalism that had allowed itself to be captured by its own self-regard.

Defeat is a great teacher. It taught me that liberalism endures because it’s a way of being and a set of values that tell us who we should try to be. This is what gives liberalism its hidden resilience, its capacity to rebuild after political reversals. If we want to rebuild, we’ll need to recover what the word used to mean. It once was a synonym for generosity. In the old days, a liberal gentleman was a generous man. We’ll want to discard these male, elitist associations by marrying generosity to the egalitarian individualism at the core of the liberal creed. The creed tells us we’re no better than anybody else but also no worse. What liberals value should be within everyone’s reach.

A liberal person wants to be generous, open, alive to new possibility, willing to learn from anyone. We want to share whatever wealth and fortune we have, to welcome strangers to our table, to stand up for people when they’re in trouble. We know we have to change our minds when someone’s idea is better than ours. We have faith that history rewards those willing to fight for what they believe. Now, none of us is ever as generous as we’d like to be, and no liberal has a monopoly on generosity, but the largeness of spirit it calls us to does define our horizon of hope. Such values are embattled today, and they need defending because our societies so desperately need largeness of spirit, together with a revived liberal ideal of solidarity. We need to be filling out this vision and bringing our citizens to believe in it. Defeat has taught me we can’t afford to jettison our values when the tides of politics turn against us. Liberalism’s incorrigible vitality comes from the fact that it tells us who we most deeply want to be, provided that we are willing to fight for it and never surrender to the passing fashions of despair.