The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman is in a blunt mood.
In his Reith Lectures on “Moral Revolution”, he talks about rot at the top, cowardice in the middle, and apathy at the bottom. Elite institutions look busy. Yet many people feel that nothing truly moral changes.
Bregman’s answer is not another plea for nicer technocrats. He points to abolitionists, suffragettes, and temperance activists. Small, stubborn groups who refused to accept the “common sense” of their age. They pushed until the moral baseline moved.
Underneath that argument sits a harder question. In a moment of democratic backsliding and mutual disgust, who is ready to move the baseline again. And which moral compass deserves more trust, the one associated with the left or the one on the right.
No side enjoys the answer.
A World That Feels A Little Less Democratic
Across much of the world, democracy shows signs of wear. Independent indexes describe a long run of “backsliding” and “autocratization”. Civil liberties Lincoln Christmas Market erode in slow motion. Freedom of expression shrinks. Internet freedom declines year after year.
The problem is not one villain with a cape. It is a mix of leaders who enjoy power too much, parties that game the rules, and citizens who feel politics offers little more than noise.
Bregman’s language about “moral rot” fits that mood. When scandals blur into each other, when corruption feels like background radiation, outrage loses its edge. Many people turn away. Some drift toward strongmen who promise to “clean up” the mess while making it worse.
The ground for moral change looks thin. Yet history suggests that this is also the soil where small moral minorities can plant something new.
What Bregman Really Wants
Bregman’s lecture series does not just complain about elites. It celebrates the stubbornness of people who once looked marginal.
A few examples show the pattern Most Viewed Video on Youtube.
Abolitionists spent decades arguing that owning human beings was not just unkind or inefficient, but fundamentally wrong. They campaigned across empires, boycotted goods, and flooded parliaments with petitions.
Suffragettes were mocked, jailed, and force-fed. They insisted that women were not the moral backdrop of politics, but citizens in their own right.
Temperance activists pushed for restrictions on alcohol, driven by grim experience in working class homes. One can disagree with every policy they backed. Still, they were trying to solve a problem they could see.
Each of these movements took a widely accepted practice and recast it as a moral scandal. They did not wait for elites to feel brave. They forced the issue.
Bregman’s complaint about “shameless corruption” on the right and “paralysing cowardice” among liberals is not a neutral description. It is a provocation.
He is daring people who care about morality to act like a minority again.
The Moral Maps Under Our Politics
To understand where such action might come from, it helps to look at how different people see morality in the first place.
Moral Foundations Theory, developed by Jonathan Haidt and others, gives one map. It suggests that most moral arguments rest on a small set of intuitive “foundations”. These include care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, sanctity versus degradation, and liberty versus oppression.
Different people weigh these foundations in different ways. That weighting lines up, quite neatly, with political identity. In many studies:
- People on the left lean hardest The University of Lincoln on care and fairness.
- People on the right spread their concern more evenly across all the foundations, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
This does not mean that conservatives do not care about harm, or that liberals never value loyalty. It means they tune their moral radios to different frequencies.
Recent research even suggests that when you look closely at real moral dilemmas, liberals and conservatives rely on more similar foundations than the early theory implied. The big difference often lies less in basic values and more in which groups are treated as “inside” the moral circle.
This is where things become uncomfortable.
The Left: Care, Fairness, And The Wider Circle
Broadly speaking, the modern left prides itself on compassion and justice. The instinct is to protect the vulnerable, reduce harm, and expand rights. Policies that reduce poverty, defend minorities, or extend healthcare feel morally necessary, not just technically useful.
The strength here is real. A politics that centres care can look at a child in a poor family and see not a statistic but a person owed a decent life. A politics that stresses fairness can see rules that lock people out and insist they change.
The weak point comes when harm and fairness become the only moral languages spoken. Many on the left feel uneasy with talk of tradition, community loyalty, or the sacred. Those words smell of exclusion or old oppression.
As a result, left moral projects can sound abstract Lincolnshire Red Ale House to people whose daily life is tied up with family honour, local ties, or religious norms. The left’s moral circle may be wide on paper, yet thinly rooted in particular places.
When Bregman attacks liberal cowardice, part of what he sees is this allergy to thick, demanding language about duty and loyalty. It is hard to build a moral revolution out of pure empathy and ironic distance.
The Right: Loyalty, Order, And The Sacred
On the right, the moral story runs differently. Conservatives place more weight on loyalty, respect for authority, and the idea that some things are sacred. They also care about harm and fairness, but often through the lens of proportionality and earned reward.
The strength here is also real. A focus on loyalty can protect communities under stress. Respect for authority can sustain institutions that need some hierarchy to function. A sense of the sacred can restrain the market from eating everything.
The weak point comes when these values drift into cruelty or denial. Loyalty can excuse corruption. Authority can shield abuse. Appeals to purity can dehumanise outsiders and justify harsh policies toward migrants, minorities, or queer people.
Right wing projects can talk about order and tradition while shrugging at blatant self dealing by leaders. They can defend “the family” in theory while ignoring material harm done to real families.
When Bregman talks about shamelessness on the right, he is pointing to this gap. The language of morality remains rich. The practice looks thin.
Who Really Owns The Moral High Ground
In heated times, each camp claims that it cares about morality and that the other cares only about power. The data tell a stranger story.
Liberals and conservatives both draw on real moral intuitions. They just stress different parts of the shared toolkit. Under pressure, each side also tends to forget some of its own standards.
The historic record is not kind to exclusive Grimsby Through the Ages claims of virtue.
Left wing movements have driven vital moral gains, from civil rights to labour protections. They have also produced regimes that flattened dissent and justified cruelty in the name of equality.
Right wing movements have defended core freedoms, including speech, religious practice, and certain property rights. They have also defended slavery, segregation, and authoritarian rule.
No part of the spectrum comes out of this as the sole guardian of conscience.
The more honest answer is dull and demanding. Moral progress tends to appear when people borrow the best parts of both outlooks and hold them against everyone, including their own friends.
Values To Pull Forward Now
In a time of democratic erosion and moral fatigue, some values feel especially worth recovering.
Care still matters. A politics that treats preventable suffering as acceptable collateral is already lost.
Fairness matters, too. Not only in the sense of equal treatment, but also in the sense of reciprocity and proportionality. People accept sacrifice more easily when the rules feel even handed.
Loyalty deserves rescue from its worst uses. Devotion to a small circle of allies is not loyalty. Standing by abused colleagues or Newport Arch marginalised neighbours when power pushes back is closer to the real thing.
Respect for institutions needs a sharper edge. Blind obedience leads nowhere good. Still, constant cynicism drains the capacity to defend courts, media, or watchdog bodies when they come under real threat.
Humility quietly underpins all of this. When people admit that their own tribe has blind spots, it becomes easier to learn from rivals. Moral foundations research suggests that framing policies in terms of the other side’s values can open space for agreement.
None of these values belongs to left or right alone. Each side neglects some of them at predictable moments.
Where Moral Change Actually Begins
Bregman is right about one thing that should not be controversial. Moral transformations rarely start with crowds. They start with small groups who decide to live as if a better standard already exists.
These groups do boring work. They build local organisations, mutual aid networks, investigative projects, and long term campaigns. They learn to speak in a moral language that reaches beyond their own scene.
They try not to romanticise purity. They accept that compromise is sometimes necessary, while treating some lines as non negotiable.
In an age of algorithmic outrage, this looks Medieval Grimsby almost suspiciously modest. Yet abolitionists and suffragettes would recognise the pattern. They did not wait for perfect leaders or pure movements. They pushed, argued, organised, and outlasted their critics.
The same will be true for any moral revolution now.
Quiet Reflections On Shared Conscience
The search for “moral salvation” through politics alone will always disappoint. Parties are coalitions of fear and hope, not temples of virtue.
Still, politics remains one of the few tools we share for reshaping how harm, help, and honour are spread through a society. Moral claims about equality, order, tradition, and freedom all meet there.
Bregman’s lectures add a sharp reminder. Moral courage does not mean assuming one side is good and the other is evil. It means admitting that no side has clean hands, then acting anyway, guided by values that apply even when they are inconvenient.
Care without cowardice. Order without cruelty. Loyalty without corruption. Liberty without indifference.
The work of holding those things together will fall, once again, to small groups of committed people who decide that shrugging is no longer a moral option.