As a passionate believer in modern liberal values I have been feeling ideologically homeless for a long time now. My political habitat seems to have all but vanished. As a European and a Westerner, I have come to see that the traditional Left no longer provides a language to address reality. The current refuge crisis is a drastic example of how the public political discourse is hung up on two troubling extremes: while the Right predictably casts all Muslims as rapists and terrorists, the Left clings to a naive notion of an Edenic multiculturalism in an ideology-fueled fit that looks suspiciously like a toddler’s tantrum.

What is most disturbing about this scenario is that currently it is the Left that seems to pose the greatest threat to democratic values: By suppressing any open discussion about valid cultural fears and making it impossible to talk about very real cultural frictions that do not fit the blissful multiculturalism fairytale, it is actively pushing people towards the Right.

I do not want to live in a racist, unequal society that sloppily relinquishes all the hard-earned achievements it took many centuries to build. I am horrified to find myself in a social atmosphere in which I am expected to throw core liberal principles overboard by condoning people’s behavior based on their ethnic and/or cultural background, or by suspending the principle of the equality of sexes in the name of a thoroughly misunderstood concept of “tolerance”.

Most of our Western democracies have been so spoiled and coddled as compared to the rest of the world that we have come to see our relatively easy life as a matter of course. We have become soft and helpless against more aggressive ideologies. We need to develop a robust ideological immune system very quickly if we want to protect liberal values for all.

To contribute to this goal, this blog is dedicated to discussing ideas on a form of liberalism that moves beyond the intellectual blinders of quixotic dogmas.