Joseph Chamberlian, British politician and businessman at his desk in the Colonial Office. Wikicommons/Harry Whates. Some rights reserved.
Today the values which liberalism holds dear are under the deepest threat. Open markets, tolerance of cultural differences, multi-national trading and security arrangements, to say nothing of Enlightenment values such as the importance of facts, truth and expertise.
All are assailed by the threat of trade wars, Brexit, resurgent nationalism and growing hostility to cultural plurality. The source of these threats to liberalism is a fragmentation of what Gramsci would have called the ‘historic bloc’ of political, cultural and class alliances that operationalise the political economy of capitalism in any given era. With this bloc fragmenting, a right-wing conservatism has broken away from the conservative-liberal consensus which has dominated politics in Europe, the UK and the US since the 1990s.
