History's Fools: David Martin Jones on the failures of progressive liberalism

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David Martin Jones takes the unfashionable risk of reclaiming classical liberalism from progressive-liberalism. His latest book ("History's Fools") achieves the monumental feat of tracing progressive-liberal failures at both domestic and international levels.

David Martin Jones, a political scientist from Wales who has taught mostly in Australasia, talks with me about his book, classical liberalism, progressive liberalism, the flaws in liberal democratic triumphalism, and the failed promise to achieve peace and prosperity at every level from the local to the international.

History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics, by David Martin Jones (Hurst, 2020) £25.00

In the first two pages, the book defines the “progressive liberal worldview” that emerged in the 1990s as “shared norms, open markets, open borders, and an abstract commitment to social justice.” This worldview mixed progressivism with “cultural Marxists and post-structuralists” (post-modernists and deconstructionists). The actors in the consensus included academia, mainstream media, business, finance, and government, with their own selfish interests (such as immigrant cheap labor and progressive voters). Achieving these “universal values” involved “multiculturalism at home and military intervention abroad.”