The extradition bill is the next evolution in this repressive trend. It probably won’t be the last.

Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland is supposed to be governed by the principle of “one country, two systems.” But as with any form of pluralism, it’s a principle that poses inherent dangers to Beijing. It was little West Berlin that, merely by being free, helped bring down the mighty (as it seemed at the time) Honecker regime in East Germany in 1989. The Chinese supreme leader, Xi Jinping, isn’t about to let that happen to him via Hong Kong.

Then again, maybe he shouldn’t be so worried. Throughout the 1980s the free world was politically united and morally confident: It believed in its liberal-democratic values, in their universality, and in the immorality of those who sought to abridge or deny them.

It also wasn’t afraid to speak out. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world,” one prominent liberal writer denounced him as “primitive.” But it was such rhetoric that gave courage to dissidents and dreamers on the other side of the wall. What’s really primitive is to look upon the oppression of others and, whether out of deficient sympathy or excessive sophistication, remain silent.

Compare the free world then with what it is today. “I’m sure they’ll be able to work it out,” was just about all Donald Trump could bring himself to say about the Hong Kong protests during a press conference on Wednesday with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda. As clarion moments in U.S. moral leadership go, “Ich bin ein Berliner” it was not.

Trump and Duda are two of the more prominent champions of the new populist nationalism, which believes in butting out of the affairs of others so they may butt out of yours. Trump has applied the principle widely, from Saudi Arabia’s treatment of gadfly journalists to North Korea’s treatment of everybody. It’s the right-wing version of the left’s cultural relativism, always asking: “Who are we to judge?”