Should-Read: Henry Farrell: The Strange Death of Anglo-American Liberalism
Should-Read: Henry Farrell: The Strange Death of Anglo-American Liberalism: “The Financial Times… committed to free markets, but with a undertone that they had to have decent outcomes… http://crookedtimber.org/2017/05/31/the-strange-death-of-anglo-american-liberalism/
…Pro concerted action to solve international problems such as global warming. Very much in favor of Europe’s role in helping to cement democracy in Eastern Europe and always ready to deplore backsliding and corruption. Broadly in favor of small-l liberalism with respect to… dubious authoritarian tendencies…. Economic inequality was always a dicey set of issues for a newspaper whose financial model depended in part on the “How to Spend It” supplement…. But… a reasonably well-defined possibility-space of vaguely-left liberal to vaguely-right liberal positions, triangulating between European and UK perspectives, from which FT writers (and readers) could draw.
That has all changed…. Gideon Rachman[‘s]… anger shading into grief…. Not [his] attack on Trump… or… the terms of… Brexit deal, which FT writers have been banging on about for all the obvious reasons since the vote happened. It’s Merkel’s “unfair” suggestion that Trump’s America and May’s Britain are the same kind of problem, states that Europe simply can’t rely on any more. Dealing with the Brexit whiplash is bad enough, without the Germans rubbing salt and grit into the wounds…. Europhile British liberals don’t have much of a place to go these days, apart from the Liberal Democrats (but I repeat myself). It’s hard to see how the UK will return to liberalism in the foreseeable future…. The current standard bearers of liberalism have French names–Macron and Trudeau–and run second or third ranked powers…. Unless things change again, there won’t be much space left for… ‘decent’ market liberalism…. I suspect that the newspaper will gradual change to reflect this. If I’m right in this prediction, and if, as I suspect, it will be replaced by worse things, I’ll be sorry to see it go…