Quote of the week: Julia Buxton

"In any society that enjoys free speech, the tenor of political rhetoric and exchange is a key indicator of the health of its underlying norms. Increasingly throughout the liberal world, the language of misogyny, racism, homophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia has become unexceptional, if not mainstream. The significance of this turn in public discourse is not merely that high-profile individuals can deploy such speech from public offices, but that it can so readily be shrugged off, with outrage dismissed as outmoded “political correctness.” What we are witnessing, however, is not a push-back of the bounds of civility but norm regress: an unraveling of the slow, incremental shift in public attitudes that has over many decades made human rights a lived expectation and made bigotry and hatred in all its forms an anathema."

- Julia Buxton - Acting Dean and Professor of Comparative Politics in the School of Public Policy, at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Buxton, J. (2017), What scholars must do in a time of norm regress. Governance. doi:10.1111/gove.12270

Photo credit: Central European University.