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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Is liberalism dying?

I see frequently brought up on this forum that Mitt Romney was a perfectly respectable Mormon conservative that was unjustly torn apart by the Left. In response to this, the Right elected a political outsider that is frequently brazenly offensive and antagonistic to the Left, as well as many (most?) establishment institutions. I am seeing the idea "this is a good thing, because if the Left are our enemies and won't budge from their positions that are explicitly against us, we need to treat them as such", probably expressed in other words.

This frightens me, as it seems to be a failure of liberalism, in this country and potentially other Western liberal democratic countries. Similar to the fate of this forum, where civil discussion was tried and then found to be mostly useless, leading to the expulsion of the forum to an offsite and the quitting of center left moderates like TracingWoodgrains and Yassine Meskhout, the political discourse has devolved into radicals that bitterly resist the other side. Moderates like Trace seem to be rare among the politically engaged, leaving types like Trump and AOC. They fight over a huge pool of people who don't really care much about politics and vote based on the vibe at the moment, who are fed rhetoric that is created by increasingly frustrated think-tanks and other political thinkers. Compromise seems to not be something talked about anymore, and instead, liberalism has been relegated to simply voting for your side and against the other side. To me, this is pretty clearly unsustainable, since the two sides seem to have a coin flip of winning each election and then upon winning, proceed to dismantle everything the previous side did.

We see this in a number of other Western liberal democratic countries. Germany and France both had a collapse of their governments recently due to an unwillingness between the parties to work together and make compromises. Similar states that seem to be on the brink of exhaustion include South Korea and Canada, though I'm told things are not nearly as divisive in Japan. China, though having its own set of problems, seems to not have issues with political division stemming from liberalism, since it's not liberal at all.

I am seeing these happenings and becoming increasingly convinced that liberalism is on its way out. Progressivism and the dissident right both seem to be totally opposed to the principles. This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things. It is predominantly America's technology companies settling the frontier, and recently they've struck gold with AI, proper chatbots, unlike the Cleverbots of old.

Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you? If it's a bad thing, what do you propose should be done to stop the bleeding?

I think parliamentary democracies were made to solve this problem.

Instead of choosing 1 person to dictate so much despite barely winning with 51% of the votes (a landslide by american standards), you can have an unlimited number of parties that can represent more than 2 ideologies, and in order to form a ruling coalition they have to make compromises with each other.

This is nice also because you don't have to vote "for the lesser evil", if you ideology isn't a perfect fit for any of the current parties it is a common practice to just create a new party, AfD for example was funded in 2013 and it is making tons of headlines after only ~10 years.

and in order to form a ruling coalition they have to make compromises with each other.

But the executive is still composed exclusively of the most popular party. Since Westminster-style democracies are a lot more unitary as opposed to the more balanced approach by the US you can run into a situation where that single party is thus permitted to do things like import voters they're hoping to be singularly loyal destroy the economy and otherwise abuse the powers of the office through its various levers.

Parliament is far from a solution.

But Germany is one of the parties that I mentioned in the post as being failures of liberalism. The parliamentary system collapsed. The other parties weren't willing to work with the AfD, finding them too detestable. Am I reading the situation correctly? The government will pick itself back up, but the problems of having fundamental disagreements within the country will continue, and get even worse.

This is kind of related to the thinking I've had on Marxism lately... I don't think the Founding Fathers properly understood that having people in the country that are opposed to the principles of the country are extremely corrosive to the country. Like the rationalists, they thought that the marketplace of ideas would win out, and that free argument would expose the wrong headed ways of thinking, just like exposure to sunlight kills germs. But they turned out to be totally wrong. People aren't rational.

I’m not sure I would call two hung parliaments the fall of liberalism. Especially not when it’s France and Germany. The French Republic has ceased to exist and been recreated five times already, and Germany has only been a republic for 80 years. And arguably, Germany has only been actually ruling itself for about 25 years.

The other parties weren't willing to work with the AfD, finding them too detestable.

This is all virtue signaling, it was very easy to say that while AfD was so small that cooperation wasn't needed. Since they are still growing, the CDU did cooperate recently with the AfD to pass some anti illegal immigration laws.

This is only after it started looking like they could outright get an absolute majority. FDP and Greens were in ruling coalitions while being absolute nobodies as far as voting percentages went.

Yeah the ruling coalition isn't based on numbers alone, parties form coalitions for being ideologically similar.

Have you ever seen the compositions of German coalitions??

They were never even remotely close to an absolute majority.

I meant if present trend continues. I think they were already the second biggest party per recent polling, and have more than cracked the threshold of a cabinet position or two, as per standard German politics, so its not just empty virtue signalling.

I think the two or so concerned German posters here would actually contend that other parties working with the AfD instead of trying to shut them out would not, in fact, be the end of Germany or possibly even the end of the German state as it is currently understood. A collapse of one set of preferences does not have to mean a total collapse of a liberal system, in my estimation, and I think this is where you're getting tripped up: a correction/realignment of the political landscape can be very painful, as we've seen, but it may be necessary and even actually prevent the downfall of a liberal system.

I mean, to be fair, the President isn't supposed to have as much power as Trump (or any other president of recent vintage) has exercised.

We're at the end of a long process where every crisis saw Congress adding emergency powers to the presidency, and that, combined with Congresses' current dysfunctions, created a situation where the only source of change is the Executive.

A system will always collapse at its weakest point. In the past that has been the Supreme Court (witness Obergefell), and at various points it has been the Imperial Presidency.

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