Originally published in Liberties Journal, 2025
Michael Ignatieff’s latest book is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.
I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of life. We liberals commonly tell ourselves that, unlike the far right and the far left, we reach our beliefs through a rational inspection of the world as it is, but I didn’t get my ideas that way. I didn’t form my convictions through a critical evaluation of evidence about life as it actually was. I was born a liberal.
My parents were liberals, their friends were liberals, and my father worked for thirty years for liberal governments in Canada. Some of my earliest memories are political: at the age of five, in 1952, watching the Republican convention with my parents on the first fuzzy black- and-white TV we ever owned. My parents were Canadian diplomats in Washington, and they were for Adlai, not Ike, and like their American friends they were horrified by McCarthy, the scowling Republican bully who presided over the Senate Army hearings. So before I knew anything at all, pretty much as soon as I could stand up and put on my own clothes, the label had been sown into the shirt on my back.
While other kids had baseball or hockey stars for heroes, mine were Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. By the age of twelve, I was copying Jack Kennedy’s mannerisms. I couldn’t do the Boston brahmin accent, but I could put my hand in my blazer pocket, with my thumb down the front seam, the way he did. By the time I was twenty-one I knew by heart Bobby Kennedy’s improvised speech in Indianapolis on the night of King’s assassination, to comfort a shocked and grieving black crowd, quoting Aeschylus about the “awful grace of God”. In those terrible months of spring and early summer in 1968, when both King and Kennedy were murdered, I campaigned for Pierre Trudeau, bringing delegates over to our side in the tumultuous five ballot struggle at the convention that elected him leader of the Liberal Party and then traveling with him on the cross-country campaign that elected him Prime Minister in June 1968. I was twenty-one years old. Bliss it was in that dawn. It was the only political campaign I have ever been part of where we knew we were going to win, the only question was by how much. It was also the only political campaign where I saw what winning meant. Two nights after his victory I was invited out to Harrington Lake, the Prime Minister’s country residence, to dine with him and one of his then current girlfriends. Instead of exhilaration, there was exhaustion in Trudeau’s eyes, and I thought I saw fear too, in his dawning realization of what it meant to hold power.
My heroes may have been Americans, but my liberalism was Canadian all the way down. Liberalism prides itself on its cosmopolitanism, but in truth all liberalisms are local, since, as the man said, all politics is local. Canadian liberalism had all the self-congratulatory earnestness particular to a small official elite, to whom my parents belonged. It was a managerial doctrine of moderation appropriate for a small country, with no imperial destiny like its neighbor next door, but instead trying to muddle through, holding together a continental nation-state the size of America but with a tenth of its population in a harsh but beautiful landscape where, as Margaret Atwood said a long time ago, the name of the game was survival.
Yet, in its muddling way, Canada did more than survive. In the surge of postwar prosperity Canadian liberalism did some great things, a new national flag, a new constitution and charter of rights, a new immigration policy, a national pension and a national health care program. The canard that liberalism never dares to take on big enemies is false. To make all this happen, liberal governments had to take on provincial governments, resurgent Quebec nationalism, and vested interests coast to coast, chief among them the pharmaceutical companies and the doctor’s lobbies. So I grew up with a liberalism that knew how to fight. It was unafraid to tame capitalism and to “socialize” medicine and pensions in order to take the fear of catastrophic illness and poverty in old age out of people’s lives. Liberalism’s victories in the 1950s and 1960s laid the foundations of a welfare state not just in Canada, but also in Europe and America. Lyndon Johnson’s administration secured Medicare for elderly Americans and Head Start for poor children.
We liberals of the 1960s thought we had laid the granite of basic security under everyone’s feet. Sixty years later, the granite is cracking, the liberal state is frayed, contested, underfunded, straining at the seams, and we are defending our achievement, and none too successfully, against populists and authoritarians who want to take it apart. They have mobilized resentment at the price of social solidarity, but they offer no solutions, or solutions so drastic, such as the forcible deportation of millions of migrants, that they would tear society to pieces. A politics that stokes anger without proposing solutions is not a politics. It is only manipulation, and we like to think that we are in the solution business.
We are right about that, but we keep on defending achievements of long ago instead of raising our sights and finding a way to fund and reinvent social solidarity for the twenty-first century. For my heyday — 1945 to 1975, what the French call les trente glorieuses, the glorious thirty years of robust growth and relative equality — has gone forever. Beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs were stripped out and shipped overseas. Those of us who got the credentials to enter the professional classes did well, but plenty of our fellow citizens fell behind. We didn’t notice this in time, and our failure opened up a chasm between who we were, what we believed, and the people we represented. We kept offering “equality of opportunity,” a chance for the credentialed few to enter the professional elite, without tackling capitalism’s remorseless distribution of economic disadvantage itself.
By the late 1990s, the conservatives began to gain power by playing to the resentments of the ignored. The authoritarian right, especially, understood that they could build an entire politics on mocking the blindness of the liberal elite. They didn’t need solutions; stoking the rage was enough. We are now the embattled object of that rage. What will it take to earn the trust of those whose discontent we ignored? Liberalism in the next generation will need to save social solidarity from the “creative destruction” of the market, by rebuilding the fiscal capacity of the liberal state and investing in the public goods that underpin a common life for all. Saying this, at a high level of generality, is easy enough: the tougher part will be finding the language and the cunning to convert a radical liberalism into a politics that wins elections and a governing strategy that pushes change through the veto-rich thicket of interests waiting to derail our best laid plans.
In the meantime we lament the “identity politics” of our populist and authoritarian competitors, when it would be more honest to admit that identity is where all political belief actually comes from, including our own. My identity — charter member of the white professional classes of Canada — defined my liberalism. What the liberal critique of identity politics does get right, though, we owe to our much-maligned individualism. Identity is not destiny. Every formative confrontation with reality presents each of us with political choices. We can either make up our own minds or borrow someone else’s beliefs. The convictions that stick are the ones that we decide for ourselves. The beliefs that we hold onto are the ones that first required a primal Yea or Nay to the allegiances we started life with. In the 1960s, I could have rebelled against my parents’ liberalism. Many of my generation did. Instead I said yes to the world I was born into and to the parents I was lucky enough to have.
Black friends of my generation also said yes to their parent’s allegiances, and they remain committed to deliver the still withheld promise of American equality. But this liberal inflection isn’t a racial obligatory. The black entertainment superstars of succeeding generations, with their bling and their Bentleys and their “attitude,” appear to have emancipated themselves from the entirety of their civil rights inheritance and its liberal conscience. So no, identity does not give us our politics. I was born a liberal, but I stayed one for life because I chose the liberal tribe as my own.
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How tribes shape you depends on the times that shape the tribe. My liberalism’s primal beginning was World War II. My parents were in their twenties when the war picked them up by the scruff of their necks and changed them forever. They found each other in London in the midst of the Blitz and the V-2s. They came to maturity during the most dramatic expansion of state power in history. In the space of five short years, Canada, like the United States, became an arsenal of democracy and fielded an army that landed in Normandy and liberated Europe. Their generation discovered the power of government, and the idea that government could be the problem and not the solution was inconceivable to them. There seemed to be nothing that a democratic government under arms couldn’t do, even defeat absolute evil.
Because they had watched their world burn down, theirs was a liberalism with internationalism at its heart. Human rights, the United Nations Charter, and the spider’s web now known as the “rules-based international order” were not the vapid bromides that they have become, but my father’s life-calling. He was part of an international generation of public servants who believed that the United Nations system, with its rules and its treaties, would tie down the predators in the international system and keep the small fry safe.
Their generation also knew what it was to hunker down in a bomb shelter with strangers, trying to keep the talk in the darkness light while the ground shook. They had lived the cross-class solidarity of those wartime shelters, and they came home from the war believing that liberal government could bind the classes together in peacetime. My left-leaning generation was just as sentimental about working people, except that we didn’t know any actual workers. As a student journalist in the 1960s, I once spent a morning on a picket line with printing workers who had been locked out of the plant that printed our university paper. It was a cold autumn morning, and we walked up and down, in front of the plant, carrying picket signs and what I remember best was not the warm glow of solidarity, but a red-faced feeling that I had nothing but good intentions to share with the big men who knew in their bones that they were marching not to victory but to the unemployment line.
Looking back now, liberals of my generation didn’t realize that the welfare state we grew up in did not unite classes. It interposed a state bureaucracy between classes, and its programs divided those who earn salaries from those who claim benefits. The rising costs of social solidarity divided citizens into warring camps. Exiting from liberal arrogance means finding a way back to a liberal politics of cross-class solidarity.
Exiting from arrogance also means, even if this sounds contradictory, recovering what that inheritance actually believed, before liberalism slipped into the suave managerial discourse it became in the Clinton and Blair years. For my parent’s wartime generation, it was a fighting creed. They knew that they were fighting against: fascism’s cult of death, its loathing of Jews, its national and racial hatred, its lust for conquest and domination. Against these forces of darkness, there was no place for compromise, moderation, splitting the difference, all the liberal virtues. This was a fight to the death that had to be won.
We can still learn from this intransigence. The Nazi marches in East Germany, the re-packaged Vichyite racism in the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, and the jeering anti-Semitism in Charlottesville, Virginia, show us that malignity never rests. Liberalism today would do well to be less self-deceiving about its opponents. I used to believe that liberalism only faces adversaries who could be allies tomorrow. I have had to learn there are some enemies in the house, dangerous to democracy, fatal to every liberal achievement, who simply have to be defeated, over and over again.
With the onset of the Cold War, my parents’ generation’s anti-fascism turned into anti-communism. By lining up against the Soviet threat, recent revisionists have argued, their generation abandoned their progressive New Deal beliefs and became apologists for American hegemony. According to Samuel Moyn, liberal thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar — who happened to have been my teachers — let their anti-communism blind them to the ugly violence of America in its imperial heyday. This progressive critique is meant to chide contemporary liberalism into learning from its mistakes, but it has the opposite effect. It severs the liberalism of today from potential sources of renewal. For if there is anything that Cold War liberalism can teach the next generation, it would be its unflinching opposition to authoritarian tyrannies and a determination to contain and deter their expansionist march.
Canadians, like Mexicans, do not need progressive Americans to tell them that America is an imperial power with blunt unilateralist instincts when it comes to defending vital interests. But we never forgot that America had fought fascism, stationed troops and weapons in Europe to deter the Soviets, and ensured that Western Europe stayed free, and we didn’t care overmuch that their motives, like any great power’s, were bound to be mixed. We also did not forget how long it took for America to enter World War II or to let in the refugees — too long, on both counts. So yes, the liberalism that became mine at adulthood was human rights universalist, militantly anti-communist, strongly internationalist, and pro-American at its core.
Besides, America also shared with the rest of the world an exuberant popular culture created by artists of genius. My parents’ heroes were Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Ella Fitzgerald. Mine were Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, and the Four Tops, names which still conjure up, across sixty years, what it felt like to be sixteen. It would be comical to call this music liberal, but it was certainly liberating, and it was profoundly American. This was a music of freedom and soulfulness, and tenderness too, and the fusion of black and white music promised something at once exciting, terrifying, and new: a truly inter-racial society. A young white teenager such as myself didn’t know a single black person well, but in our high school dances we danced to black music. We went to basement clubs and listened to grizzled old bluesmen, up from the deep South, and we knew by heart all the haunting and apocalyptic lyrics of Robert Johnson. This was still an innocent time when whites and blacks could learn what they wanted from each other’s culture, before the ban on “cultural appropriation” forced us all back into the false authenticity of our exclusive tribes.
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We embraced black music, but we had no real idea about what was at stake in the struggles to the south of us. In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy gave his first television address on racial justice. I was sixteen, at my aunt’s house, having dinner with her sister’s husband, Clark Foreman, a New York lawyer, who did pro bono work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I proclaimed how impressed I had been by Kennedy’s speech. Foreman lowered his bifocals, stared me down across the table, and shook his head. I insisted Kennedy was going as fast as he could. Fast enough? Bull Connor’s dogs were tearing the clothes off black demonstrators in Birmingham parks; Governor Wallace was standing at the door of his state university, barring entry to a qualified black man who wanted to study. Black churches were being dynamited, and young children were dying.
My inter-racial enthusiasms were too cautious by half, but the civil rights struggle gripped me. It offered a vision of inter-racial harmony as well as a politics of how to get there: through non-violent civil disobedience, mass rallies, legal challenges in the courts. In the space of a decade, black men and women perfected the whole repertoire of liberal politics for my generation, from the sit-ins and freedom marches in the American south to Rustin’s organizational effort that produced the March on Washington. It was a transformative experience to see that liberalism could be a fighting creed again, as it had been in my parent’s time — to see a young man named John Lewis, no older than I was, daring to cross Selma Bridge and being beaten bloody by the troopers, an image so resonant in memory that when, sixty years later, on Capitol Hill, I was introduced to Lewis, all I could do was clasp his hands and thank him, inarticulately, for the lesson in courage that he had taught us all. It was impossible for someone of my generation to hate an America that produced such a man.
When we entered college, we marched against the war in Vietnam, and borrowed the entire repertoire of black civil disobedience, not to denounce America, as our leftist friends wanted us to do, but to redeem it. Looking back now, I see that it was precisely then that a pro-American liberal like me made the emotional commitment that decades later led to a mistake that haunts me to this day: support for the war in Iraq. We had opposed the war in Vietnam to call America back to its better angels, and fifty years later the same instinctive belief in America, despite Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all the avatars of doom I might have noticed, led me to support an operation that has become synonymous with imperial folly.
When I entered graduate school in history at Harvard in 1969, I continued marching against the Vietnam war, often with people far to the left of me, but my chief political commitment of the time was prison visiting at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, Norfolk. My doctoral thesis was on the punitive side of Enlightenment liberalism, how intellectuals and philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Rush, and others sought to replace the arbitrary violence of ancien regime punishment with the new carceral technology of the penitentiary. By day, I read historical documents in Langdell Law Library, while by night I sat in a poorly lit room, sixty miles south of Boston, behind bars with a dozen young black men doing time for murder, rape, and a host of other crimes.
For four years, I came out every Tuesday night and sat across the table listening to them arguing, joking, and just being themselves with profane exuberance, often at my expense since I was the only white man in the room. As I got to know some of them, I helped them to get parole, or to get jobs, only to see them skip town or skip parole as soon as they tasted freedom. Some of what I learned was shocking, such as discovering that the handsome and articulate young man across the table was doing life for having thrown a skillet of boiling fat all over his girlfriend, blinding and scarring her forever. I had no conception of where such life-devastating rage could come from, or how a man could ever repent or repair such lethal harm. My years at Norfolk were the first moment in my life when I could see, plain as day, that a liberal upbringing was insufficient for me to understand the world I had entered.
In 1973, in the wake of the Attica prison riots in upstate New York that claimed forty-three lives, a similar riot devastated Walpole, the medium security prison next to Norfolk, and I volunteered to go in and mediate the stand-off between police and inmates that followed the uprising. When I did get inside and toured the cell blocks, the anger that had consumed the place seemed elemental in its force. In the weeks that followed, I played out a classic liberal role — mediating between the prisoners barricaded inside the ruined prison and the state police, waiting outside, tear gas and truncheons and shotguns at the ready, to retake the institution. I did a night shift on the segregation ward, reserved for prisoners too dangerous to be in general circulation, and I remember sitting on a chair in near darkness at one end of the cell block while black men on lockdown poked mirrors out between the bars of their cell doors to keep me under observation. I was twenty-five years old.
As a young graduate student in the dark and turbulent 1970s, the education that changed me most was not at Harvard but at Norfolk. It led me out of innocence. Here was rage beyond understanding, directed obliquely at me because of my race. I had never experienced the impersonality of racial hatred, its fixation on your skin, its indifference to who you actually are. After the prison riot of 1973, I retreated back to academic work and wrote my dissertation on the origins of the penitentiary in more privileged precincts, in the stacks and cushioned reading rooms of the Harvard library system.
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I earned my living teaching the first generation of young students to benefit from Harvard’s venture into affirmative action. Now, fifty years later, affirmative action and race-based admissions have been outlawed by the Supreme Court, to loud expressions of liberal despair, and so it is worth recalling that the first students to benefit from affirmative action were often miserable. I remember a young female student from South Carolina, the first in her family to attend college, saying between choked-back tears that liberal good intentions had gifted her a place in an elite institution, but not the belief that she had a right to be there.
Without realizing it, my generation of young white liberals was witnessing the problematic unfolding of a multi-dimensional and all-encompassing revolution. Affirmative action for black students was followed by the feminist upsurge. In the space of a generation, women went from being a minority in university classrooms to the majority. The girls we had dated in high school, with their gardenia corsages and “good girl” proprieties now became the young women discovering their sexuality and challenging our own. Outside the university, in the wider society, a little-noticed change in immigration law opened the door to Asian, Caribbean, and African immigrants who had been barred since the 1920s. In the same period, liberal democracies began decriminalizing homosexuality. As Pierre Trudeau said in 1967, “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”
The Canada I grew up in had been white and aggressively heterosexual. By 1980, I was living in a multiracial and sexually pluralistic society, teaming with new citizens from every corner of the globe. The contrast is captured in a comparison of my University of Toronto graduation class photo of 1969 — mostly male, at least professedly straight, all white — and the graduation photo of the same age group, at the same college, in 2024 — majority female and every color of the rainbow, turbans, hijabs, and skullcaps all expressive of a new diversity which we liberals quickly turned into a religion of its own.
This still-unfolding multi-dimensional revolution turned out to be the cardinal liberal achievement of my era, but it enormously complicated the liberal task of finding the middle way between the Scylla and Charybdis of extremisms. We were naïve about the nature of this problem, preferring to believe that all reasonable human beings would embrace a revolution of inclusion, when the reality was that our generation had upended the entire social order, and even our own place in it. Diversity — of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and class — was a virtue in comparison to the dire cantonment of peoples in silos of exclusion, but liberals turned diversity into an ideology. Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program of invigilation of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect.
Credentialed whites of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could invite new recruits of color into our ranks without ever feeling that our own elite status was being challenged. We didn’t seem to notice that non-elite whites were threatened, even betrayed, by the new multiracial order. Faced with what we thought was white racism and sexism, when it was mostly fear, we began promulgating codes of speech and conduct to impose diversity as a new cultural norm. New bureaucracies in universities, corporate headquarters, and government offices enforced diversity at the price of freedom, the freedom to defend unpopular loyalties, to freely dislike others, to be funny at other people’s expense, to be critical of the pieties of others but especially our own. A liberalism whose defining value should have been liberty invented a diversity and inclusion industry, whose guiding principle may have been justice, but whose means of enforcement included coercion, public disgrace, and exclusion.
Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bullshit detectors, and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes. We abandoned the truism that arguments are true or false, irrespective of the race or the origins of the person who makes them. We began promoting arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins, or backstory (oppression, discrimination, history of family violence) of the person uttering them. The value that we placed on diversity and inclusion led us by stages to jettison a care for truth itself. We ended up compromising the very epistemological privilege that had provided us with such unending self-satisfaction.
In failing to pay heed to the fears of displacement that the liberal revolution created, we ended up creating a vital political opening for every strand of extreme opinion queuing up to speak on behalf of everyone whom liberals had stopped listening to. By the 2020s most liberals were walking back, at first nervously, and then with increasing speed, from our own self-righteous politics of virtue. First we made everyone else sick of our virtue-signaling and then we became sick of it ourselves.
The irony was that the liberal revolution destabilized liberals as much as it upset those who were resisting it outright. For it was the liberal revolution of inclusion that fragmented the centrist consensus that had made the liberal revolution possible in the first place. Once each group — black, female, gay, and trans — achieved emancipation, many of them began to identify with their own group to the exclusion of wider civic-sized political aggregations of interest. The old political parties — Liberal in Canada, Democrat in the United States, social democratic in Europe — that had presided over the liberal revolution now saw their white working-class base heading for the exits, and their multicultural support splintering into autonomous groups each beginning to make a strange new epistemological claim: you can only understand me if you are like me. Only black people can understand the black experience of racism and police violence. Only women can understand the tyranny of patriarchy and the fear of male sexual violence. Only gays can understand what same sex love truly means.
The old liberal epistemology at least rested on egalitarian and universal premises. We believed that everyone was capable of entering to some degree into the mental worlds and lived experiences of others, because all of us, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, were rational human creatures. This rationalist universalism disintegrated in the 1980s and 1990s, attacked by a new generation of “progressive” scholars as masculinist, colonialist, racist, and fundamentally condescending. This assault was supposed to awaken us to “intersectionality” — the interaction of disadvantages — but instead of drawing hurt constituencies together it fragmented them into highly sectarian and identity-based political groupings that foreclosed on alliances, shared understandings, and common political projects across race, class, and gender. So now liberals denounce the prison house of identity politics, without realizing the degree to which this new self-defeating politics is a consequence of the very revolution that we helped to foment.
Needless to say, at the time I understood little or nothing of this, but these were some of the factors — the complacent politics of virtue, the blindness to the new inequality, the conceit that ours was the only rational politics — that began to erode the electoral base that had sustained the center ground of Western liberal politics. The convictions of my youth had survived intact from 1968, sheltering me from any mind-changing encounter with the world that had metamorphosed around me after the end of the Cold War. When, in 2005, I left behind a professorship at Harvard and took the plunge into Liberal party politics in Canada, it didn’t feel like a crazy departure from security, tenure, and privilege, but instead as if my feet had been traveling homeward bound all along.
I had no idea of what I was letting myself in for. I had no understanding of my own inexperience, and no grasp of how weakened and debilitated the liberalism of my party had become. We were a party that kept winning elections and governing the country, but with a vote-share slowly declining in the small towns and rural districts and piling up in the downtown urban centers where the professional and commercial elites liked to live. When I led the party into an election in 2011, truth be told, the liberal platform had not much to offer a people still shocked by the financial crash three years earlier. Our message, though we never said so directly was “trust us, we are the adults in the room.” We even called ourselves “the natural party of government.” On election night in 2011, our party suffered the worst defeat in our history, and I lost my seat in parliament — a verdict that all these years later reads to me like a judgment on me, but also on a liberalism that had allowed itself to be captured by its own self-regard.
Defeat is a great teacher. It taught me that liberalism endures because it is a way of being and a set of values that tell us who we should try to be. This is what gives liberalism its hidden resilience, its capacity to rebuild after political reversals. If we want to rebuild, we will need to recover what the word used to mean. It once was a synonym for generosity. In the old days, a liberal gentleman was a generous man. We will want to discard these male, elitist associations by marrying generosity to the egalitarian individualism at the core of the liberal creed. The creed tells us that we are no better than anybody else but also no worse. What liberals value should be within everyone’s reach. A liberal person wants to be generous, open, alive to new possibilities, willing to learn from anyone. We want to share whatever wealth and fortune we have, to welcome strangers to our table, to stand up for people when they are in trouble. We know we have to change our minds when someone’s idea is better than ours. We have faith that history rewards those willing to fight for what they believe. Now, none of us is ever as generous as we would like to be and no liberal has a monopoly on generosity, but the largeness of spirit it calls us to does define our horizon of hope.
Such values are embattled today, and they need defending because our societies so desperately need largeness of spirit, together with a revived liberal ideal of solidarity. We need to be filling out this vision and bringing our citizens to believe in it. Defeat has taught me that we cannot afford to jettison our values when the tides of politics turn against us. Liberalism’s incorrigible vitality comes from the fact that it tells us who we most deeply want to be, provided that we are willing to fight for it and never surrender to the passing fashions of despair.
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