I suspect the problem here for American readers may not be the concepts of democracy and human rights as such, or even the word liberal (which is not yet so firmly established in the US as to be obligatorily shunned by the pure of heart). Skepticism will more likely come from a natural repugnance for the triumphal narrative of America’s unique moral and political greatness. As materials out of which this self-congratulatory narrative is frequently constructed, human rights and democracy will naturally suffer a sort of guilt by association, as will the idea of progress. The rules of this game are familiar: I prove my independence of mind by seeing through the complacent Whiggery all around me. You naively tell me that something somewhere is no longer quite so awful as it used to be. I shake my head in gentle disbelief and reveal to you all the bad stuff you have somehow forgotten about.

There is never any shortage of bad stuff. And yet it doesn’t follow that the job of the left is always and everywhere to harp on it. That would not be an independent thing to do (on the contrary). Nor would it be the authentically left thing to do. The fact that progressive narrative is claimed, exaggerated, and disfigured by liberals does not mean it can be abandoned to them. You have to believe progress is possible in order to get up and try to make some. That’s why they used to call us progressive.