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Hyper-liberals like Angela Merkel, not the populist right, are the real extremists of our age. That’s not me saying it. It’s The Times columnist Matthew Syed, who in an important article this weekend revealed just how quickly the debate is moving towards the arguments many of us have been making for years, and our readers.
Syed, who explicitly describes himself as a liberal, makes an argument that would have been considered unthinkable in polite society only a few years ago.
Perhaps, he ponders, we have been looking for “extremists” in the wrong place. Because the real extremists, he argues, are not the ordinary men and women who want secure borders, controlled immigration, sensible energy policy, and governments that prioritise their own citizens.
No. The real extremists are ‘hyper-liberals’, who over the last twenty-five years or so not only dismantled these things but radicalised to such an extent they are now completely and utterly adrift from the vast majority of their fellow citizens.
Syed points the finger directly at Angela Merkel, who ruled Germany between 2005 and 2021. Her disastrous decision to allow more than one million asylum-seekers and illegal migrants into the country, in 2015, imposed enormous demographic and cultural pressures, while destabilising politics across much of Europe.
Here’s what he writes:
“The extremists are not the “populist” right … It is the likes of Merkel and that broader generation of western leaders who presided over the two great sins of hyperliberalism: open borders and the betrayal of Nato.
Liberalism as an ideology is muscular and realistic. It recognises that defending freedom requires powerful militaries, solid alliances and strong borders, otherwise fifth columnists will enter our nations and wreck that which we value.
As Karl Popper, the great theorist of open societies, put it: ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’ In this sense, hyperliberals have been the enemies of freedom by allowing militaries to atrophy and borders to dissolve.”
He is, of course, absolutely correct.
You can draw a straight line from Angela Merkel’s decision — like similar decisions made by Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron in France, Stefan Löfven in Sweden, and now Pedro Sánchez in Spain — to a surge of public support for populism.
The only reason parties like the Alternative for Germany, Reform UK, National Rally in France, and others like them are reshaping their respective political systems is precisely because hyper-liberals massively over-reached.
They imposed a series of extreme policies that reflected the values of an increasingly radical elite class but deeply alienated and angered millions of people who were left to live with the dire consequences of policies they often never voted for.
But it’s not just about immigration.
As Matthew Syed rightly points out, hyper-liberals such as Merkel also doubled down on a completely insane energy policy, championing Nord Stream 2 even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, consistently failing to meet NATO’s defence commitments, and then — I would add — having a meltdown when the Americans point out this glaring failure to invest in the security of their own nations.
I’m glad these arguments are entering the mainstream because I’ve been arguing the same thing for years — pointing to how the ruling political and media class in the West has become increasingly radical and detached from everybody else through what many researchers have called the ‘Great Awokening’.
As anybody who is over the age of forty years old will know, over the last twenty-five years or so the ruling class has moved sharply leftwards on everything from immigration and borders to national identity, gender, history, free speech, and more.
This isn’t merely my opinion.
It’s now supported by serious academic studies, which show how, since the 2010s, there has been a rapid and unusually sharp leftward shift in the views of university-educated, financially secure liberals who dominate politics and media. They have moved sharply leftwards, especially on issues of race and identity, while everybody else has either stayed where they were, or moved rightwards on these issues.
Hyper-liberals, as one recent study shows, also tend to only mingle with other hyper-liberals who look, sound, and think like themselves. So, as the political and media establishment in the West has been hijacked by this class, and the members of this class have themselves moved sharply to the cultural left, our institutions have been turned into ideological vessels for this class — used to impose extreme policies that are fashionable in universities but which alienate millions of ordinary people. As the columnist Andrew Sullivan once remarked: “we all live on campus now”.
Time and time again, ideas that only a few years ago would have struck most people, let alone our ancestors, as extreme have been redefined by hyper-liberals as “sensible”, “enlightened”, “moderate”, and “progressive”, while anybody who dares to challenge this new orthodoxy is branded an extremist and pushed outside ‘respectable’ debate.
Allowing small boats filled with illegal migrants and even convicted terrorists to keep flowing into the country. Teaching children they can change sex. Rewriting our history around guilt and shame. Erasing important markers of our culture. Deliberately making energy more expensive by refusing to use our own resources in pursuit of ludicrous Net Zero targets. Treating ordinary expressions of national pride, even flying the flag, with intense suspicion, an act that can even get you jailed.
All this reflects the great political sleight of hand of our age. The extremists in the corridors of power who represent no more than 10-15% of the population redefined themsleves as “moderates”, while anybody who resists their revolution is portrayed as “extremist”. And that’s how the Overton Window shifted, at least in the mind of elites.
This not only helps explain why people have increasingly rebelled against all this by rallying behind populists, but also explains why I changed my politics, too.
For me, the turning point was watching the ruling class radicalise on issues such as immigration, borders, gender identity, and our history, while attacking, demonising, abusing, and insulting anybody who stood in their way, even justifying violence against political opponents.
That experience — watching millions of Brexit voters sneered at and vilified, watching the establishment constantly try to overturn what the people had voted for, and then watching the governing Tory party betray the people all over again by imposing the Boriswave and transforming Britain without anybody ever asking for it — convinced me to leave my job as a university professor, step into the public debate, and try and help give a voice to people who rightly feel ignored, insulted, and abandoned by a far more radical ruling class that no longer cares about them.
As I explained in one of our most read pieces to date, having spent twenty years in the universities, getting to know countless politicians, commentators, journalists, think-tankers, and others, it simply became clear to me that the real extremists are not the ordinary people asking for change, nor even the ‘populists’ speaking up for them.
The real extremists, as now a growing number of people, including Matthew Syed, now realise, are the liberal ruling class who have radicalised to such an extent they are quite openly and visibly destroying Western nations.
What all this shows us is that something really important is happening. The Overton Window, the range of ideas considered acceptable in mainstream debate, is now moving again. Only this time, it’s moving in the opposite direction.
It’s now moving away from the radicalised minority in the corridors of power and back towards the people and common sense. Ideas that were dismissed only a few years ago as “extreme” — such as leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, or removing welfare benefits for foreign nationals — have entered the mainstream.
Assumptions that dominated politics for decades are now being questioned like never before, from Net Zero lunacy and the failure to invest in our own defence, to gender identity theory and the fact the economics of mass immigration no longer make sense.
Increasingly, the arguments we have been making from outside the establishment, from outside BBC-SW1 Land, are now being made within it — and that should give us some hope and optimism for the future.
Yes, Matthew Syed’s column is just one column in one newspaper. But in my mind it’s a symbol of this wider shift. When a self-described liberal columnist in The Times, the same newspaper that has spent much of this year attacking populism, openly asks whether the real extremists of our age are not populists but hyper-liberals then you know the ground is starting to move. And it’s moving very fast indeed.
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Empathy is a virtue, but without limits or reciprocity it becomes suicidal. It is a shame that George Soros, Popper’s most famous student, seems to have learned so little from his warning about unlimited tolerance. It also reminds me of Allan Bloom’s 'The Closing of the American Mind': people became so open-minded and relativistic that they closed their minds to the value of their own civilisation.
Yes I saw this and was surprised and happy it came from a mainstream newspaper. Syed though isn’t a bad bloke. I think the MSM are like sheep and follow en bloc. A herd or flock. If they do turn it’ll be like a pack of cards falling, suddenly all go at once and the argument won. But they’ve been wedded to the mainstream view for so long, I won’t hold my breath that change is coming.