"Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest challenge facing the
liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as
strategic, challenge. ... We in the liberal world have yet to comprehend
the magnitude and coherence of the challenge. We do not know how to manage
the new technologies that put liberalism at a disadvantage in the
struggle. ... "
We don't remember what life was like before the liberal idea. ... Average
people had little control of their destiny. They were imprisoned by the
rigid hierarchies of traditional society — maintained by brute force
when necessary — that locked them into the station to which they
were born. ...
"Only with the advent of Enlightenment liberalism did people begin
to believe that the individual conscience, as well as the individual's
body, should be inviolate and protected from the intrusions of state and
church. ... The American revolutionaries founded their new nation on what,
at the time, were regarded as radical liberal principles, set forth most
clearly by the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, that all
humans were endowed with 'natural rights' and that government existed to
protect those rights. If it did not, the people had a right to overthrow
it. ... [F]or those who fought [World War I], on both sides, it was very
much a war between liberalism and authoritarianism."
"In the brief era of liberal hegemony that followed the end of the Cold
War, we did not worry, because we did not notice, as authoritarianism
gradually regained its power and its voice as liberalism's most
enduring and formidable challenge. ... The examples of autocracies such as
Russia and China successfully resisting liberal pressures gave hope to
others that the liberal storm could be weathered. By the end of the 2000s
... [a]n authoritarian 'backlash' spread globally."
"The authoritarians now have regained their confidence and found their
voice ... Their anti-liberal critique is ... powerful [and it] is a
full-blown indictment of what many regard as the failings of liberal
society, and it has broad appeal."
"Humans do not yearn only for freedom. They also seek security — not
only physical security against attack but also the security that comes
from family, tribe, race and culture. Often, people welcome a strong,
charismatic leader who can provide that kind of protection."
"[L]iberalism's main purpose was never to provide the kind of security
that people find in tribe or family. It has been concerned with the
security of the individual and with treating all individuals equally
regardless of where they come from, what gods they worship, or who their
parents are."
"From the early 19th century onward, a consistent theme in
American history has been the fear that an Anglo-Saxon Protestant United
States was being threatened both from within and from without — from
within by the calls for the liberation and enfranchisement of African
Americans, and from without by the influx of non-Anglo-Saxon,
non-Protestant immigrants from Ireland, from Japan and China, from
southern, eastern and central Europe, and later from Latin America and the
Middle East. This remains a theme of modern conservatism."
"Nor should we be surprised that there has been a foreign-policy dimension
to this backlash. Debates about U.S. foreign policy are also debates about
American identity."
"[S]ome American conservatives find themselves in sympathy with the
world's staunchest anti-American leaders, precisely because those leaders
have raised the challenge to American liberalism. In 2013, Putin warned
that the 'Euro-Atlantic countries' were 'rejecting their roots,' which
included the 'Christian values' that were the 'basis of Western
civilization.' They were 'denying moral principles and all traditional
identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. Conservative
commentator Patrick Buchanan responded by calling Putin the voice of
'conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and
countries' who were standing up against 'the cultural and ideological
imperialism of ... a decadent West.'"
"If such views were confined to a few intellectuals on the fringe of that
broad and variegated phenomenon we call American conservatism, it would
matter less. But such thinking can be found at the highest reaches of the
Trump administration, and it is shaping U.S. foreign policy today."
"For the past seven-plus decades since the end of World War II and the
beginning of the U.S.-led liberal world order, authoritarian regimes faced
many disincentives to deprive their people of individual rights. In a
world dominated by liberal powers ... [r]egimes that went too far often
paid a price eventually. ... But the structure of incentives and
disincentives is now changing, because the structure of power in the
international system is changing."
"The revolutions in communications technologies, the Internet and social
media, data collection and artificial intelligence have reshaped the
competition between liberalism and anti-liberalism in ways that have only
recently become clear, and which do not bode well for liberalism."
"Developments in China offer the clearest glimpse of the future. Through
the domination of cyberspace, the control of social media, the collection
and use of Big Data and artificial intelligence, the government in Beijing
has created a more sophisticated, all-encompassing and efficient means of
control over its people than Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler or even George
Orwell could have imagined."
"The world is now being divided into two sectors: one in which social
media and data are controlled by governments and citizens live in
surveillance states; and one in which individuals still have some
protection against government abuse. And the trend is clear — the
surveillance-state sector is expanding and the protected space is
shrinking."
"The enormous progress of the past seven-plus decades was not some natural
evolution of humanity; it was the product of liberalismb s unprecedented
power and influence in the international system. Until the second half of
the 20th century, humanity was moving in the other direction. We err in
thinking that the horrors perpetrated against Ukrainians and Chinese
during the 1930s, and against Jews during the 1940s, were bizarre
aberrations."
"We seem to have lost sight of a simple and very practical reality: that
whatever we may think about the persistent problems of our lives, about
the appropriate balance between rights and traditions, between prosperity
and equality, between faith and reason, only liberalism ensures our right
to hold and express those thoughts and to battle over them in the public
arena. Liberalism is all that keeps us, and has ever kept us, from being
burned at the stake for what we believe."