A worker standing near heavy machinery used to dump sand on the shoreline of Miami Beach, Florida. Dozens of trucks have started dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of sand on Miami Beach as part of US government measures to protect Florida's tourist destinations against the effects of climate change. - AFP
KUALA LUMPUR: It’s hard being a liberal these days. The world seems to want to go in the opposite direction. Authoritarianism is on the rise in many countries, mercantilism in the US, populism everywhere from Brazil to the Philippines and South-East Asia, and an oxymoronic "illiberal democracy” in Hungary and Poland.
Liberals seem particularly irrelevant in the two biggest debates of our time: about inequality and global warming. The first has left-wing demagogues baying once again to soak the rich in a new round of class warfare. The second has spooked the loony right into denying the problem (and indeed science) and the loony left into flight-shaming, SUV-shaming and just shaming generally, reminiscent of France’s Jacobins in 1793 or China’s Red Guards in 1966.
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