Over recent decades, liberalism has quietly given way to progressivism. The mechanics of this shift explain why institutions that believe they are defending liberal values now operate on illiberal ones – and why those inside often cannot tell the difference.
The BBC offered a compelling case study this week: an organisation so steeped in progressive assumptions that it mistakes moral certainty for objectivity. But the pattern extends far beyond one broadcaster. Universities that once protected controversial speech now treat it as harm. Civil services that defended individual rights now prioritise group identity. And professions built on evidence now defer to “lived experience”.
To see clearly where liberalism ends and progressivism begins – and how the latter has distorted the former – it helps to examine three basic principles.
1. Freedom of speech → speech as structural harm
Liberals – in the true sense of the word – believe truth emerges through open debate. The English philosopher John Stuart Mill advocated a “marketplace of ideas” under the assumption that truth is best discovered through the free and open competition of different viewpoints. Bad arguments lose to good ones, preventing them from becoming dogma.
The role of liberal institutions – universities, broadcasters, civil services – is to protect speech and create conditions for debate. Their role is emphatically not to decide which views should be heard. When you suppress even dangerous ideas, Mill argued, you impoverish everyone by removing the chance to test convictions against opposition.
Progressivism turns this on its head, reframing speech as an exercise of power. In this view, words don’t merely offend – they oppress minorities and maintain unjust social structures. Allowing “harmful” speech makes institutions complicit in this harm. In this way of thinking, neutrality supports an unjust status quo. Silence is framed as violence – but so, increasingly, is speech that defends existing norms.
Once speech itself is reimagined in this way, censorship becomes a moral duty. This is why Kathleen Stock was effectively driven out of Sussex University. Her gender-critical views weren’t merely wrong – they were “harmful to trans students”, in turn making the university complicit in “transphobia”.
American universities have followed the same logic on this and other issues, cancelling events with speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or withdrawing invitations to conservatives. What’s termed “progressive” is, of course, institutional cowardice – reputation management by institutions afraid to platform “dangerous ideas”.
Ironically, universities have trashed their reputations with truly liberal people, who understand, as Mill did, that institutions are not there to adjudicate what the rest of us get to hear.
2. Individual rights → group identity
In his theory of natural rights, philosopher John Locke argued that individuals have inherent rights (to life, liberty, and property) that precede the formation of society or government, making the individual the primary moral concern. Rights belong to people, not collectives. Equality before the law means the same rules and the same dignity, regardless of race, sex, or creed. When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he wasn’t being naive about group-based injustice – he spent his life confronting it. But he believed the civil rights movement was ultimately aiming at a society where rights attach to individuals, not racial categories.
Progressivism has replaced this with the view that identity categories come first. Race, sex, and sexuality are central to who you are and how you experience the world, not merely incidental characteristics. Social justice now means correcting group disparities through preferential treatment for hitherto marginalised communities. This is what progressives now mean by “equity” in place of equality. In this view, to ignore group identity is to ignore the structures that create oppression. Within a generation, not seeing colour went from a liberal aspiration to evidence of racism.
The consequences of this ideological shift are everywhere. It’s how Harvard’s admissions process ended up giving systematic preferences to achieve the “right” demographic mix, thereby penalising Asian applicants whose merit-based applications were sidelined. Many corporations and institutions maintain similar systems under euphemisms like “diversity targets”.
3. Reason and universal truth → lived experience as authority
Enlightenment liberalism rests on a stubborn belief in shared reality. Truth is something we pursue together, through evidence and argument. You could be wrong, I could be wrong, but reality is the ultimate test and how we arrive at consensus – at least until new evidence or better reasoning comes along to take its place.
Progressivism, on the other hand, elevates subjective experience to a position of epistemic authority. “Lived experience” now outranks empirical evidence. Question someone’s account of their own experience and you risk “denying their reality” and, by extension, their “humanity”. Thus, emotional personal narratives – “my truth” – supersede logical argument. The result is that truth becomes a private matter rather than something we discover together.
Perhaps the most revealing moral scandal of our time was born of this way of thinking. Clinicians at Tavistock who raised concerns about rushing children into medical transition were told they were “invalidating young people’s lived experience” of their gender identity. The Cass Review finally reintroduced evidence-based reasoning, but for years up to this point, questioning a patient’s self-diagnosis was treated as “conversion therapy”.
In 2018, researcher Lisa Littman, who coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” observed the sudden clustering of trans identification within peer groups. The journal that published her work later issued an apology and re-reviewed it under activist pressure. Littman’s methodology was sound, but it contradicted the narrative of “lived experience”. In the collision between evidence and identity, evidence lost, and feelings became fact.
The Unlightenment
What we’re seeing at the BBC and across Western institutions keeps happening because the people making these decisions never face consequences. The incentives never change. The economist Thomas Sowell put it bluntly:
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Executives, academics, doctors, and professional activists won’t lose their jobs or status – the most coveted thing of all. Instead, there will be reviews, then reviews of reviews, and then institutions will quietly archive these failures alongside every other failure of courage and moral clarity.
The principles they’ve abandoned – free speech, individual rights, shared reality – are the architecture that makes liberal societies work. Progressivism promises justice but delivers conformity. It speaks the language of liberation while enforcing new orthodoxies. That it requires top-down pressure and coercion should tell us everything we need to know.
Real liberalism, the kind worth defending, trusts people with difficult truths and messy disagreements. It assumes adults can handle being wrong and grapple with challenging ideas.
Reclaiming Enlightenment principles means recognising that reason, evidence, and open debate are the foundations of our civilisation. Without them, institutions fail, truth becomes tribal, and progressivism eclipses the very liberalism it claims to defend.
The Enlightenment’s tools still work. We’ve just forgotten how to use them.
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Thanks for reading. To see how this plays out in practice, read my article on the BBC. This piece focuses on three core principles, but the progressive distortion of liberalism shows up everywhere. What other shifts have you noticed? Where else do you see institutions claiming liberal values while operating on illiberal assumptions?
This is sensational. So clear