“I've mortally offended #Putin by surviving”: why Alexei #Navalny keeps fighting

"Violence quickly grows old," Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. "After only a few years it loses confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally – since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence."

It's an idea that still resonates. Putin's regime continues to rest on the twin pillars of fear and lies. Navalny has staked his life on pulling down that edifice.

“In Russia, speaking the truth has always been a political act.”

Excellent piece from the Economist's Russia correspondent on Navalny.

Reports of the demise of #liberalism are greatly exaggerated

Los Angeles, 1952. Photo by J R Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty

Critics...all seem to agree that liberalism can no longer solve our deep social, cultural, political and economic problems, and that it has become 'unsustainable'.

Not coincidentally, all of these critics are living, writing and publishing in liberal countries. 

The many deaths of liberalism

More than a century of death notices have not diminished the achievements and the necessity of liberalism

Daniel H Cole is professor of law and public and environmental affairs at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is a founding member of both the Midwest Law and Economics Association and the Society for Environmental Law and Economics. He is the author of seven books.

Aurelian Craiutu is professor of political science and adjunct professor of American studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. His most recent book is Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (2016). He lives in Bloomington.

Modern democratic governments are founded on liberal principles meant to create the basis of a fair and just society. Liberalism emerged as a reaction against absolute power, in favour of individual autonomy protected by freedom of conscience and the rule of law. As the political theorist Judith Shklar put it in Political Thought and Political Thinkers (1998): 'Liberalism's deepest grounding is … in the conviction of the earliest defenders of toleration, born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute evil, an offence against God or humanity.' That is why liberal principles include, among others, limited government under the rule of law, with individual rights enforceable against the government. 

Liberal societies have not always lived up to these principles, which in some respects are always aspirational. But it cannot be denied that political societies based on liberal principles have been more successful, on almost any measure, than regimes that are more authoritarian, communitarian or sectarian.

So why do we read so often today that liberalism is in crisis, failing or already dead?