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.@FareedZakaria lumps together as nationalist anti-democrats everyone from Brexiteers and Netanyahu to Putin and Erdogan. This continues the trend of major media and intellectual figures who’ve decided anyone who isn’t a liberal is in one camp. washingtonpost.com/opinions/democ…
@FareedZakaria This association of national conservatives with dictators has been a continuous drumbeat now for three years. Commentators like Zakaria and Robert Kagan surely know enough to distinguish conservatives from authoritarians.
@FareedZakaria What stands behind this willingness to delegitimize national conservatives in this way? Don’t they believe that a democracy like the U.K. or India or Israel needs both a political liberals and political conservatives?
@FareedZakaria But if you successfully delegitimize the national conservatives, you’ll end up with only one legitimate party—the liberals. Which means that democracy will be over. Isn’t that obvious?
@FareedZakaria It’s turning out that the great moral challenge of this generation is whether liberals can continue to publicly recognize the legitimacy of conservative political views.
@FareedZakaria A liberal who is willing publicly to defend the legitimacy of conservative views is in fact doing something that is today heroic: Standing in the breech to try to defend the diversity of viewpoints at a time when allowing an alternative is become impermissible.
@FareedZakaria In high school French class we studied a play that I’ve never understood until now: Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. In the play, one person after another turns into a rhino.
@FareedZakaria The teacher told us that Ionesco was writing about the onset of fascism—as one formerly reasonable person after another abruptly turns into dangerous animal blindly charging around.
@FareedZakaria I never thought I’d live to see something like this. But it’s exactly what we’re living through. The peer pressure, groupthink, and despair are closing liberal scholars and journalists down, one after another, to the possibility of legitimate disagreement with their views.
@FareedZakaria For conservatives, it is important to see clearly that this is not just happening among the radical left or neo-Marxists. Zakaria and Kagan represent what was until a few years ago the mainstream of thoughtful liberalism.
@FareedZakaria Today the possibility of a thoughtful liberalism—which was still so real a generation ago—seems more like it’s gone with the wind with every passing day. The very individuals who were like that are turning into people who are something quite different.
@FareedZakaria It’s important to understand this danger: For democracy to survive this rhinocification of the liberals, we’re going to somehow have to come out with two legitimate political alternatives, liberal and conservative. How is this going to happen?
