Liberalism has always considered itself a noble creed, as liberals have conceived themselves its knights in shining armor. Perhaps – once upon a time – it was so. But that was in the 18th and 19th centuries, and we are now living in an era when liberals have many fears: climate change, fascism, malefactors of great wealth (as Theodore Roosevelt called them), nativists, white men, Republicans, Donald Trump. Indeed, they are frightened of so many things that I have written a book ennumerating them – a book that so far remains unpublished, perhaps because the liberal publishers fear its argument, too.
Still, having observed them for so many years, I am convinced that what liberals fear above all else is one another. Not that I can fairly blame them, since liberals are typically not nice people to get on the wrong side of; they can make rather nasty enemies, in fact. Recent events around the world, but in the West chiefly, have confirmed this impression for me; nearly everyone, it seems, save the liberals themselves, recognizes the disastrous effects eight decades of global internationalism have had upon the world through free trade, liberal immigration policies and largely unobstructed international migration. In every country affected by these phenomena, the general rule holds true: the ruled see and feel what is going on, the rulers feel and see nothing. How could they not, one wonders. The answer, of course, is that they refuse to see.
In the 1930s, the European and American left were wont to speak of “premature anti-Stalinism,” by which they meant the eagerness on the part of reactionaries to anticipate the bloody future for communism that they had predicted but that had not (apparently) come to pass. A half-century later, a similar phenomenon occurred in the US following the penetration of Ronald Reagan’s administration by the neoconservatives, who deplored what they might have called premature anti-immigrationism, or the response of traditional conservatives to the transformation of the US by waves of immigration from virtually every part of the third world that liberals considered over-hasty, absurdly pessimistic, mean-spirited, selfish and – of course – racist. Over a period of ten, maybe 20 years, the well-organized and well-financed immigration lobby identified and targeted such people and sought deliberately to ruin or blight their journalistic and political careers, with no small success. This internecene war on the soi-disant right persisted through the two Bush administrations and down to Trump’s election in 2016, by which time the scale of America’s immigration disaster was plain.
Now, ten years later, the Europeans have arrived at that same point. The European publics, that is: not, for the most part, their governments, which remain enamored of, and loyal to, the postwar liberal internationalism of the 1940s and 1950s – the European Commission on Human Rights and other “rights” agencies, the postwar laws of asylum, the treaties against human trafficking and the “modern slave trade,” the UN, the World Court, and all the rest of it: the attitudes, presumptions, and shibboleths that prevent Britain from repelling thousands of rubber dinghies from British beaches and compel the natives to house, feed, medicate and find employment for immigrants at a cost of billions of pounds annually. At almost any previous period in its history, Whitehall’s response would have been to send the army to read the invaders the riot act before firing a volley of warning shots. An enemy needn’t be armed in order to be an enemy, and dangerous: a fact that no liberal seems able to comprehend.
The reason why Europe’s boat people are not met with the resistance their aggression deserves is that European governments are staffed with generically liberal ministers and other functionaries who dare not take “illiberal” actions in the face of their liberal colleagues, whom they fear far more than they do their voters, oiks that they are. A government of aristocrats, like those in past centuries, was another thing entirely from one comprised of modern middle-class professionals today; proud men ruling broad acres at home and commanding armies in the field abroad, men not shy of exhibiting strong individual character, not intimidated by university drones marinated in all the proper progressive fixations, conceits and pretensions. Imagine the Duke of Wellington in Downing Street today! The Channel beaches would have been cleared after the first week, the boats pushed back across the water, and Froggy invited to do with them as he liked – except send them back.
The great problem with the western world is that it is run overwhelmingly by liberals, and that one liberal in office never has the moral confidence to stand up to another on a matter of liberal principle. It is for him above all a matter of social class. And so he is morally disarmed before he can open his mouth to speak.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 19, 2026 World edition.
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