A Liberal Struggles

Michael Ignatieff at the Washington Post is another who can plainly see the damage that he and his have caused. He's willing to admit it and begin to struggle with it. 

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.

It is not merely an ungenerous assumption but a declared fact in the piece that all this self-reflection is brought about by the loss of power. It's good to see and healthy, but it is prompted by the loss of the power to control other people's lives, and prompted by a desire to regain that power.  

Still, it isn't only the easy bugbear of 'capitalism' that he is suddenly willing to challenge. It is diversity and identity as well.

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....

We were naive about the nature of this problem [of increasing diversity], 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.... 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. 

Tyranny, in other words, imposed with a clean conscience because they thought it was the best thing for everybody. A tyranny gladly accepted even over one's own thoughts, even when the ideas being presented were -- as the author himself says -- fairly obvious bullshit.

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.

Again, a fairly healthy process even if it is badly motivated. It doesn't approach the questions that are of increasing interest to me, which is whether or not power itself is the problem -- a thing never to be trusted to anyone, however grand their ideas and serious their self-reflection, but always to be distributed as widely as possible to avoid the evils of its concentration. It is better that power should be placed in the hands of the virtuous, if it must be placed in any hands at all; but it might be better still to prevent such concentrations. 

Few men are good enough to rule themselves, and perhaps none fit to rule others; even this man admits to serious errors and misjudgments affecting the whole of society, which he and they carried on with until the wheels came off. Only now does he pause and reflect, and only for the purpose of getting the power back.