An interesting review of a book titled Liberalism and its Discontents by political scientist Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University appeared in the internet magazine Quillette recently. The author of the review, Seamus Flaherty, is a writer and historian. The article struck me, as a moderate liberal, as a fair analysis of historical liberalism and where it might be going. I won’t rattle on about the article except to say that the final paragraph below sums up nicely some informed thoughts about liberalism. Flaherty writes-

“According to Fukuyama, the best we can hope for is a liberalism aware of its flaws, a liberalism that “prioritizes public-spiritedness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and active engagement in public affairs,” is unembarrassed by national identity and cultural tradition, seeks to devolve power to the lowest feasible levels of government, and accepts human limits and promotes the virtue of moderation. A liberalism, in short, which seeks to compensate for its own ineradicable shortcomings. In so saying, Fukuyama sounds a lot like a reticent Red Tory or Blue Labourite—a critic of liberalism who is not anti-liberal—an impression created throughout his new book. Now, that is “progress.” What Fukuyama succeeds in showing us is that liberalism need not be commensurate with the extremes of individualism or wokeism. His version of liberalism repudiates both.”

A final comment about vocabulary. In looking up an unfamiliar word found in the article, I encountered the words that describe my world view quite well. Meliorism: the idea that progress is a real concept leading to an improvement of the world. It holds that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one. Yeah, I like it.