Michael Ignatieff's Confessions — Liberalism, populism and multiculturalism by UnHerd Confessions published on 2020-05-10T14:38:25Z Giles chats to the former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and now rector of the Central European University, Michael Ignatieff, about how his family went from Russian nobles to Canadian refugees, why the Brexit debate was good for the UK's democracy and what threat populism poses to liberalism. Genre News & Politics Comment by User 630743903 Back when he was a Canadian politician I attended a lecture he gave at an august forum (the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto). The talk was on the Future of Liberalism. He mounted the dais wearing his Reservoir Dogs suit (!) but without the indoor sunglasses he was known for while a student there. Not to put too fine a point on it, he simply had no idea what liberalism was. It was like listening to a high school dropout forced to talk on a subject he wasn't interested in, and I am not exaggerating. I left feeling liberalism had no future at all, since one of its leading proponents didn't know what it was. What a putz. 2020-11-17T07:20:01Z Comment by John As Giles said Brahman opinion (an Anywhere) 2020-05-16T00:52:24Z Comment by Andrew Baldwin The best part of the interview was where Giles told him that after asking him where the liberals went wrong he instead starting attacking the so-called right-wing populists. Yes, indeed. Canadian Liberals are very big on dogwhistles so it is unsurprising that Ignatieff would see Orban attacking the rebarbative George Soros as a dogwhistle for attacking Jews in general. However he just ignores the fact that Justin Trudeau at the advance age of 29 went to an Arabian Nights gala dressed as Aladdin in blackface, so deeply attached to his beloved blackface that he won’t use facial makeup that is in character. lgnatieff wasn’t in Canadian politics for long, but he was there long enough that now he ignores even the most obscenely offensive behaviour by his successor as leader of the Liberal Party. 2020-05-11T19:57:18Z Comment by Andrew Baldwin Ignatieff said that he believes in fighting global warming, which he calls climate change, with a carbon tax, but he didn’t fight the 2011 election on that issue as his much more principled predecessor as leader, Stéphane Dion, had fought the last one. I voted for Stephen Harper every chance I got, but whereas Dion inspired admiration for the doggedness with which he adhered to his green principles, Ignatieff was a puzzlement. He seemed to depend on his political handlers to make up for his lack of experience, and came across as fickle and inauthentic. 2020-05-11T19:56:39Z Comment by Andrew Baldwin I live in Ottawa but a Ukrainian-Canadian I curled for used to be a Liberal Party organizer in Toronto. He quit the party and decided to vote for Conservative leader Stephen Harper when Ignatieff won the leadership. He refused to support a leader whose leader was against Ukrainians. Having read Ignatieff’s otherwise charming book “The Russian Album”, I have to agree with him. Ignatieff doesn’t even seem to believe there is such a thing as a Ukrainian language; ethnic Ukrainians just speak rustic Russian dialects. Ignatieff does obeisance to the Liberal Party deity of multiculturalism, but on things that touch on his own identity, he really doesn’t seem to walk the talk, respecting Ukrainians as a related but distinct people from the Russians. 2020-05-11T19:55:13Z
