The Bland Fanatics: Unmasking the Imperial Shadow of Western Liberalism

In the grand narrative the West tells about itself, liberalism is the hero. It is the benevolent ideology of individual freedom, free markets, human rights, and a “rules-based international order.” It is the world of John F. Kennedy, the West Wing, and NGOs working for a better future. It presents itself as the universal destination of history, the final form of human political evolution. But for much of the world—the Global South in particular—this story is a fairytale. For them, liberalism has not been a liberator, but the “moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs.”

This profound disconnect is the central theme of the work of the brilliant public intellectual Pankaj Mishra. As discussed in a recent Explaining History podcast episode exploring his anthology Fanatics, Mishra’s writing forces us to confront the dark, imperial underbelly of the very ideas the West holds most dear. He reveals how the “bland fanatics”—the well-meaning technocrats and commentators who champion liberalism as a universal good—are often blind to its violent and hypocritical history.

The Original Sin: Liberalism’s Entanglement with Empire

The contradictions were there from the very beginning. As the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson acidly observed of America’s revolutionaries, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The champions of freedom were simultaneously the masters of slaves. This was not a bug in the system; for a long time, it was a feature.

This hypocrisy is starkly visible in the writings of liberalism’s founding fathers. John Stuart Mill, the great 19th-century philosopher of liberty, saw no contradiction in advocating for despotism when dealing with “barbarians,” so long as the ultimate end was their “improvement.” His supposedly enlightened view was inseparable from his role as an administrator for the British East India Company. As the literary critic John Carey argues in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, the liberal veneer of many of Britain’s greatest thinkers, from Dickens to Virginia Woolf, often concealed profoundly reactionary and racist views on empire and class.

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, celebrated for his insights into American democracy, was an unabashed supporter of France’s brutal colonial project in Algeria, viewing it as a “glorious enterprise.” The freedom and rights celebrated by liberal thinkers were never intended to be universal; they were privileges reserved for a select group, while the subjugation of others was seen as a necessary, even civilizing, mission. The intellectual historian Domenico Losurdo, in his devastating Liberalism: A Counter-History, systematically documents how liberalism historically coexisted with, and often depended upon, what he calls the “exclusion clauses” of slavery and colonialism.

The Cold War Mutation and Neoliberal Imperialism

In the 20th century, this imperial logic mutated. During the Cold War, “liberalism in its own snare,” as the podcast describes it, became viscerally anti-communist. Following Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance”—the idea that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance—Western liberals justified the support of brutal dictatorships and the overthrow of democratic governments across the Global South. Any national liberation movement that sought to control its own resources or pursue a non-capitalist path was conveniently tarred with the “communist” brush, providing a pretext for CIA-backed coups from Iran to Chile.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 did not end this dynamic; it supercharged it. This was the moment of triumph for the “bland fanatics,” who now saw their worldview as the undisputed “final form and norm of human existence.” The Cold War liberal framework seamlessly reincarnated itself as neoliberalism, offering a one-size-fits-all prescription for the world’s “stragglers.”

Figures like the influential columnist Thomas Friedman lectured the Global South on the virtues of “hard work, thrift, honesty,” while prescribing a bitter medicine: privatization of state companies, deregulation, shrinking subsidies, and “more flexible labour laws.” As the podcast powerfully argues, this was simply neo-colonialism. It was a recipe for asset-stripping. The structural adjustment programs forced upon developing nations by the IMF and World Bank led not to prosperity, but to an explosion in poverty and the collapse of public health and education systems, causing millions of preventable deaths. This economic model, as thinkers like Walter Rodney argued in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was designed to lock the Global South into a permanent state of dependency, exporting low-value raw materials (like Kenyan green beans) while importing high-value Western goods, thus replicating the economic relations of empire.

The Inevitable Collision: Democracy vs. Global Capital

Mishra’s most vital insight, echoed in the podcast, is that there is a fundamental antagonism between true representative democracy and global capitalism. Genuine democracy empowers ordinary people to demand the things they need: healthcare, education, clean water, and protection from the predatory whims of the market. Global capitalism, however, requires the opposite: the endless pursuit of profit, which means breaking down national protections, privatizing public goods, and driving down the cost of labour.

When a democratic movement in the Global South rises up to reclaim its national resources—be it oil in Iran under Mosaddegh or water in Bolivia under Morales—it immediately comes into conflict with the interests of global capital. At that point, the West’s commitment to “democracy” mysteriously vanishes, replaced by a swift and often violent intervention to restore a “market-friendly” regime. As Naomi Klein documented in The Shock Doctrine, crises are often exploited to force through these unpopular neoliberal policies that could never be passed under normal democratic conditions.

The crisis of liberalism that we see today—from the rise of the far-right in the West to the global rejection of its moral authority—is a direct consequence of these unresolved contradictions. The “moral mask” has slipped. Pankaj Mishra’s work is essential reading because it forces those of us in the West to see liberalism as it is experienced by the majority of the world: not as a universal dream, but as the parochial ideology of a historically rapacious and powerful minority, one that has consistently set money free while putting humanity in chains.

Listen & Learn: Related Podcast Collections

Explore these curated episode collections to go deeper on the history behind this article: