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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?
Well, you're certainly in the right place, since this is a subject we've discussed here at some length over the years.
Have you read Zunger's Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept, or Ozy's Conservatives as Moral Mutants? If you're looking to understand the breakdown of liberalism, those two would be my pick for the best place to start.
People act according to their values. When people share coherent values, they are able to live together and cooperate. Liberalism axiomatically assumes that at least a supermajority of humans share coherent values by nature. This is not actually the case; Liberalism evolved in a highly homogenous environment, and mistook the homogeneity of its specific host population for a universal constant of human nature. The truth is that human values drift over time, and can easily reach mutually-incoherent states. By claiming tolerance as a terminal value, Liberalism greatly accelerates this drift, and when values become broadly incoherent, it simply breaks down.
The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.
No it did not. Liberalism is an outgrowth of religious warfare. It’s true that everyone was white in the liberal urheimat, but pre-Proto-liberalism would have seen this as less important than religious differences. ‘Better Turk than pope’ was a popular slogan during this era.
Indeed, during liberalism’s yamnaya expansion in the French Revolution the relevant distinction would have been between liberalism and Catholicism, with the liberal/conservative distinction mostly arising later, after Protestant powers defeated Napoleon for geopolitical reasons.
My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.
No true Scotsman?
I think you’d have to draw a really strange category to exclude all the deeply ethnic conflicts. There was plenty of Slav- or Jew- or Walloon- or Catalonian-hating going on.
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Non-WEIRD populations fall hard for universalist religions- Islam and Communism are historically recent examples- all the time. The kind of western European identity in which the liberal urheimat can be called homogenous did exist in the high middle ages, with the identity of 'Latins'- but that idea disappeared into sectarian violence in the sixteenth century. The English king's marriage to a French Catholic during the beginning of the enlightenment was hugely controversial and hated by the people to the point of subsequently being made illegal and France withdrew the edict of toleration in the same period. These countries were ground zero for liberalism.
'Religious tolerance among Christians' is itself a liberal idea, although perhaps rooted in the protestant tendency to see themselves as on the same team despite their gigantic theological differences. Perhaps that's why you don't see serious intellectual reactionism coming without Catholic roots; the protestant classical conservatives who aligned against Napoleon put no effort into ideology and even the moderate English version of classical conservatism tends to be aligned with high church Anglicanism when it isn't outright Catholic.
That’s seriously stretching the definition of universalist. Both of those ideologies/religions draw pretty sharp distinctions between groups of people, with fairly extreme hostility
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The most important intra-European religious conflicts in my lifetime have been in former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. In both cases religion was very obviously a proxy for tribal identity, not a religious thing. Unfortunately this doesn't answer the question, because they both happened in transHajnal Europe.
It is, of course, the whole point that religious conflict in cisHajnal Europe is unheard of, except in so far as it involves immigrants from transHajnal places.
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