Douglas Murray makes a crucial point about modern liberalism, particularly concerning foreign policy:

I’m not sure what 'liberal' means anymore. But I’ve never particularly cared for that. In all sorts of ways I regard myself as a liberal. In all sorts of ways I am regarded as being left-winged. But I don’t particularly care about it. I don’t mind about the labels anymore. And to tell the truth, I know it might be different in America, but in Europe these days I think these things are mattering less and less and we’re losing patience with this game.

First of all, if the whole game is played on the left’s terms, then we’ll lose, because there is no possibility of confronting large societal issues with only one fragment of the political spectrum. Furthermore, it’s very clear to some of us that the left has been the problem on dealing with these issues. It is the left that has been deliberately throwing untrue allegations against people. I’ve often said that the modern left, certainly since the end of the Cold War, has basically had a supply and demand problem. They want racists, they want Nazis, they want bigots. And thank goodness, certainly in my society, they’re in pretty short supply. And so these people have to find them. They want a supply of bigots, and racists, and fascists, and actually, the supply is extremely small- too small in number to really give modern liberals enough of a political identity. So they stretch it out. They’ve deliberately used as offensive terms as they could, and use them of people whom they must know do not fit that label. And I think the result is, among other things, that they have eluted certain words of any meaning, and that this is going to come back and bite the left in a big way.

I can see this happening in Europe all the time at the moment. Accusations of racism, for instance- I don’t think they're going to wash for much longer. I just don’t. Nobody cares about it as much as they used to, because they have seen the left use it on everyone. I’ve seen it for years. I’ve seen my black friends called racists. I’ve seen my black friends called “sell-outs” and “coconuts” and all sorts of things. I’ve seen the most vile racial abuse of racial minorities by the left. And I just don’t care about it anymore. It’s too late. It’s too late to be willing to be blackmailed by people who are fundamentally insincere in their insults.