Can liberalism and its gatekeepers survive the seismic changes in our society?

In an office in a university campus, there is a young woman – the student – and an older man, the teacher.

She’s in his office because of a poor grade. In that first meeting, he’s patronising but magnanimous. Maybe he can teach her privately? He puts an arm around her shoulder.

The next time we meet the pair, a complaint has been made to the tenure committee. The young woman has found “a group” – feminists who have put words around what she experienced in the office, and the power relations between the two.

In this meeting you see the power shift, and the professor’s magnanimity and ease liquify into fear.

Almost 30 years ago, David Mamet’s play Oleanna explored what it means when a gatekeeper – an ostensibly liberal one – has his position challenged and threatened by someone less powerful.

Oleanna was written in the shadow of the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill sexual harassment case, and Mamet’s play very much sympathises with the older man.

His student – shrill, young and wielding the borrowed intellect, talking points and nascent power of an organised group – crushed the career and upward progression of a man who was just trying to help.

The play’s lines could have been written now by someone recently cancelled: “You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?”

But the fear at the heart of Oleanna – a loss or transfer of power from establishment white men to young feminist women – never came to pass.

The old order of centrist liberals have held out in places such as universities, the media and the arts. But for how long?

The new orthodoxy

Our current moment also teems with anxiety around loss of power and, like in Oleanna, the threat comes from those lower down or outside the hierarchy.

Small “l” liberalism is being threatened like never before, as its failure to live up to its meritocratic ideals are being exposed. Foundations, supposedly built on fairness, are increasingly being damned for maintaining oppressive systems that, unwittingly or not, are racist.

Many people of colour who have gained entry to ostensibly liberal institutions have found that, once admitted, they face racism and don’t rise beyond a certain level of power.

In late June at Australia’s SBS channel, staff sent a letter pleading with the board to appoint someone other than a white Anglo man as news director to reflect the station’s multicultural charter (there has only been one exception since 1978).

Indigenous reporters posted Twitter threads about the racism they faced in the newsroom.

Things are, finally, moving fast. It’s been the summer of rage in America (and then around the world) – with the call to dismantle oppressive and racist systems, including the demands to defund the police in the US – something that would have been unthinkable in the mainstream a year ago.

Amid calls for the systems to be dismantled, representations and symbols of the systems have been toppled: statues have been torn down, shows removed from Netflix, and some anxious liberals are trawling through their Facebook from years past to expunge any problematic costume party photos.

But does this shift mean that liberalism is on the way out? In the last few, fevered weeks, we have seen fretful claims about the death of liberalism at the hands of what some say is a new orthodoxy.

On Wednesday, an open letter in Harper’s magazine was published, signed by more than 150 high-profile writers, public intellectuals, journalists and academics including JK Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, warning of an increasingly intolerant intellectual climate.

The letter stated: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

(The letter was predictably divisive, with many on social media asking the signatories to “check their privilege”.)

The issues raised in the Harper’s letter echo the views published in a much-read piece by journalist Matt Taibbi on how the left is destroying itself because people fear being called a racist.

He wrote: “The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats and intimidation.”

This new orthodoxy – or woke culture – can be defined broadly as being “alert to injustice in society, especially racism”.

Writer Wesley Yang has described it as the “successor ideology” to liberalism. Yang sees the promise and the purity of woke culture – that we can move from the “individual wish to the collective demand.”

But he believes it is a flawed ideology – the idea that we really can be equal “still seems to me an impossible wish, and, like all impossible wishes, one that is charged with authoritarian potential”.

This struggle is of a different complexion from the culture wars between left and right. Instead it pits the liberal left and centrists against the woke left.

Established cultural gatekeepers, many of whom for years have been on the left side of politics are finding, like the professor in Oleanna, that they need to defend their position – and hard.

And like the professor in Oleanna, they have anxiety that their power could be taken away – not by a committee but via cancellation, deplatforming or online shaming.

After a wrongdoing is exposed on the internet, the sheer weight of public condemnation can be highly traumatic for the person being cancelled (although for many serial offenders on the right, who are regularly cancelled for their racist views, the blowback has no material effects).

The fear of cancellation, or of not being seen performing the correct activism, or of saying the thing that doesn’t conform to the current thinking, is a form of Stalinism, according to some liberals – and privileges fear of giving offence over freedom of expression.

Robert Boyers, a literature professor at Skidmore College, is one such liberal. In his book The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies he charts what he sees as censorship on campus – where people are too afraid to express ideas contrary to the new orthodoxy, lest they be hauled before a committee.

Boyers cites political theorist Stephen Holmes in defence of liberalism; “That public disagreement is a creative force may have been the most novel and radical principle of liberal politics.”

Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis have also complained about such groupthink (devoting entire chunks of his newish book White to the issue.) He writes, “Everyone has to be the same … And if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist.”

Liberalism as he knew it in the past has “hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement”.

In Australia, novelist Richard Flanagan has defended the writers’ festivals hosting “cancelled” people – such as Germaine Greer, Lionel Shriver and Junot Díaz.

He wrote in the Guardian in 2018: “The individual examples of Shriver, Díaz, Carr and Greer all point to a larger, more disturbing trend. Writers’ festivals, like other aspects of the literary establishment such as prizes, have in recent years become less and less about books and more and more about using their considerable institutional power to enforce the new orthodoxies, to prosecute social and political agendas through reward and punishment.”

Novelist Zadie Smith has often defended the need for freedom of expression and spoken about her need to be wrong, make mistakes, and to feel free in her writing.

“I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind,” she said. “I don’t want to be bullied out of it.”

(In a 2018 short story Smith wrote for the New Yorker, everyone is eventually cancelled – and on the other side is freedom: “Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things.”)

Apart from these voices – and until the Harper’s letter – liberals have been accused of being passive when it comes to defending their right for free inquiry, their right to offend and their right to get it wrong.

“Perhaps ... the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up – they’re afraid they’ll be next,” wrote Peter Franklin in Unherd. “As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, ‘each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last’.”

The individual v the collective

Liberals are playing chess with pawns and keeping their important pieces in the back row, heavily defended. Speak out now and you may risk being put through the threshing machine of cancellation. Your colleagues might circulate a petition calling for your sacking. You can become an unperson in the moment it takes to send an ill-advised tweet.

The thrill and the danger of this present moment is in the apprehension that entrenched cultural power is shifting hands rapidly, and that once the pawns have been sacrificed, liberals could start playing a more aggressive game. One side will win and one will lose, because you can’t integrate the two orthodoxies, such are the opposing characteristics that define each movement.

One (liberalism) is about the individual and their rights, the other comes from the position of the collective, alienated from liberal power structures and networks.

The latter demands the former reconsider and reconfigure language, gender, ownership, sexuality, representation, equity and notions of equality.

But for some liberal elders – the freedom of the individual is paramount. The freedom they are talking about is their own – to write, to debate, to think, to have unpopular opinions, or, as novelist Zadie Smith has claimed, to be wrong.

“I believe in freedom of thought,” says the professor in Oleanna. (To which the student replies; “You believe not in ‘freedom of thought’ but in an elitist, in, in a protected hierarchy which rewards you.”)

Woke culture radically shifts the focus from the individual to the systems that the individual operates in. You may be able to have an unpopular opinion – but that’s because your privilege, position and your platform allow you to make mistakes and take risks, try out ideas, to be wrong. You are allowed to be free.

But while you are free, many, many more are voiceless, oppressed, unrepresented and – and the system that oppresses them remains unchanged.

It is via the collective that woke culture defines and draws its power – after all the individualism so central to the last 30 years of liberalism and so-called meritocracy has only advanced the careers and voices of the few. Problems of oppressive systems – of deaths in custody, police brutality, sexual harassment and race and gender pay gaps – still remain.

Related: Is free speech under threat from 'cancel culture'? Four writers respond

When the student threatens the power of the professor in Oleanna, she does so not as an individual but “for the group; for those who suffer what I suffer”.

Changing the systems that produce and sustain inequality can only occur via some sort of collective action. Liberalism has largely failed on this front.

For the liberal gatekeepers, we’re in an Oleanna moment.

There’s lip service to the struggle, but is there actually an exchange or relinquishing of power? Not yet. As we saw recently, two young white critics, Bec Kavanagh and Jack Callil, relinquished their platform as book reviewers for Australia’s Nine newspapers, in the hope that their positions could be filled by non-white critics.

But such actions are rare – and even rarer at the top.

In Oleanna, the professor is about to lose tenure, his house, maybe his marriage. He defends his corner. “You vicious little bitch. You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?” Here we see when the power is under real threat of being transferred, all talk of liberal ideals falls away.

The last scene of the play ends in a physical struggle. She’s on the ground, he’s about to bludgeon her with a chair he’s holding above his head.

The play’s last words are her’s: “That’s right.” In that context and the context we are now in – those final words mean something. They mean “of course” – of course you were going to defend your power by literally standing over me and threatening me with violence.

Woke culture sees this violence – which explains in part, the vehemence of the fight.

“Different but essentially the same social movements emerge every few years, it’s only the technology that changes,” one friend told me recently on a walk, as we were speculating about that day’s fresh cancellations.

The sort of shift being demanded by the new orthodoxy is nothing short of radically transformative for society. For a start, it demands a move away from the liberal position of the individual to the collective position of the woke. The shift is from “me” to “we”.