Are citizens of liberal societies permitted to question liberalism? In theory, the answer is yes, given liberalism's commitment to 'free thought' and 'the marketplace of ideas'.
' To the liberal mind, to question liberalism risks opening portals to the past, a place populated by tyrannical kings, Catholic inquisitors, Spanish conquistadores, religious warriors, zealous apparatchiks, 'collectivists', fascists and sundry other ghastlies.
Over the past few years, as voters registered discontent with the global liberal consensus, an entire cottage industry of books, essays and charities has sprung up to warn against revivifying the past.
'Classical' liberals tend to mark 1789, whereas 'progressive' liberals - noting that much of reality since that watershed year has failed to conform to their own liberal ideal - are uncomfortable with anything not from the present or the future.
In the realm of ideas, we see the inability of even Christian liberals to tolerate any serious consideration of non-liberal political, economic and cultural arrangements.
For the liberal, to evoke a bedrock pre-modern concept such as the common good - much less the highest good - is to summon those various demons that good progressive liberal values were supposed to have vanquished.
At some point, the liberal has to admit that the powdered-wig version of his ideology contained in it the seeds of its woke, repressive variety: that enshrining individual autonomy and choice as the highest goods of human life would eventually create the conditions for a kind of private tyranny, precisely what the common-good tradition of classical and Christian thought had always warned about and sought to restrain.
https://spectator.us/topic/tyranny-inevitable-consequence-liberalism/
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