The former Canadian Liberal leader believes that liberalism strayed when they lost their "bulls--- detectors."

A blistering autopsy of the failure of the "adults in the room" leading liberalism was written by former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff.

As liberal politics suffer a series of losses in the West, including the resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Vice President Kamala Harris' defeat by President-elect Donald Trump, many party leaders are questioning where they went wrong. Ignatieff, a former major figure in Canadian liberal politics who served as the Liberal Party of Canada and opposition leader, has since taken a position at a university affiliated with liberal megadonor George Soros. In a recent piece titled "I was born liberal. The ‘adults in the room’ still have a lot to learn," Ignatieff argued that to rebuild liberalism, they must first recover the original meaning of the word.

In his time, Canada underwent a significant transformation in terms of diversity, which was initially an ideology but later turned into a coercive program of surveillance of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect, targeting White working-class citizens.

""We welcomed the revolution because we could invite people of color into our ranks without feeling our elite status challenged. We didn't notice that nonelite White people were threatened and betrayed by the new multiracial order. Faced with what we thought was White racism and sexism, but was mostly fear, we imposed diversity as a new cultural norm through codes of speech and conduct," he said."

The former Canadian politician stated that the liberalism that prioritized liberty resulted in the creation of a diversity and inclusion industry that emphasized justice but enforced it through coercion, public disgrace, and exclusion.

He said that liberals were shackled by their own ideology.

"We silenced our inner doubts and turned off our bulls--- detectors, willingly censoring ourselves to avoid confronting our mistakes," he said. "We abandoned the principle that arguments are true or false, regardless of the race or background of the person making them. Instead, we began promoting arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins, or backstory (oppression, discrimination, family violence history) of the person uttering them."

Ignatieff contended that the abandonment of significant portions of the population had political repercussions beyond cultural opposition.

""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," he said."

The political parties that led the liberal revolution in Canada, the United States, and Europe, which were once known as Liberal, Democratic, and Social Democratic, respectively, are now facing a decline in their White working-class base and a fragmentation of their multicultural support into independent groups that assert their unique epistemological claims: "You can comprehend me only if you are like me."

When he was removed from politics in 2011, he remembered that several of these problems returned to haunt him.

"Our party suffered the worst defeat in our history on election night, and I lost my seat in Parliament. This verdict, looking back, seems like a judgment not just on me but also on liberalism's self-regard," he stated.

In his lengthy editorial, he wrote that defeat has been a useful teacher.

"Defeat has shown me that we must not abandon our values when politics turns against us. The resilience of liberalism lies in its ability to reveal our deepest desires, as long as we are willing to fight for them and never give in to the fleeting fashions of despair," he wrote.