The End of Liberalism?

Ralph Schoellhammer offers this sad assessment at Brussels Signal:

It appears that Liberalism has run out of steam, and if its advocates don’t come up with something soon, then feminism, LGBTQ rights, and multiculturalism were just an intermission of modernity. Certainly, their worldview still dominates the cultural and educational institutions in most Western countries but given the recent shift to the right by Gen Z, even that dominance has an expiration date. And that is no surprise: both locally and globally, the groups that are supposed to be most protected by the ideology of liberalism, increasingly find themselves left alone. I am not just talking about the issue of biological males in women’s sports or other issues that catch the attention of Western media, but about how a growing part of the non-Western world is turning its back on liberal ideas.

I don’t think that he or many of those in the West understand what’s happening. There was never any great fondness for liberalism in the developing world. It was always seen as merely instrumental in securing economic growth. The fact that for Americans liberalism was always more honored in the breach than the observance was not lost on them.

Now that we are sacrificing our economic power on the altars of environmentalism, DEI, and consumer spending, there’s even less reason for the “non-Western world” to turn to liberalism.