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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?
Yes liberalism is dying and for reasons that won’t come as a shock to anyone who has spent a good deal of time here.
There are certain principles of liberalism that are fraught with tension with realities on the ground. Specifically, liberals believe in a psychic unity of man, that all human beings are tabula rasas upon which magic dirt renders them their behaviour and social-economic functioning. This, paired with the idea that whites are inherently guilty and owe a debt to BIPOC that can never, ever be repaid, borders are therefore deemed hindrances and oppressive. Unlimited migration is the inevitable conclusion of the above, and since Caplan-esque Dubai policies are anathema to liberals, we get utility monster sub groups that are net-tax negative, coming in and bleeding the liberal welfare state dry (as an aside, it still amazes me that people think immigration is a solution to social security pension problems. It’s like throwing gasoline on the fire!). Only those deemed “far right” seem capable of the basic solution of enforcing borders and deportations, with the notable exception of Denmark, which may be the only way liberalism survives.
(What do you mottezins think? Is it possible that we all follow the danish model of strict outgrouping of foreigners? Or will that remain taboo among the centrists and liberals?)
I also see HBD as basically a time bomb waiting to explode. The advances in population genetics and cognitive neuroscience are going forward at an astounding rate. Everyone here already knows what I mean, and it’s only a matter of time before data and research seeps its way further into public consciousness, which it definitely can do faster now that right wingers are winning the war for social media platforms. We have accounts like cremiux and I/O basically churning out nonstop data supporting HBD at a rapid clip to an audience of millions, something previously completely unthinkable. All that remains is for the public to “get woke” to the IQ question, and it’s a matter of when, not if, that will happen. Maybe one way out is a Gattaca-style future only with publicly available embryo dna engineering for IQ.
I wanted to highlight this because this is not liberalism. If anything this and the wider concepts of identity-politics and collective guilt are the antithesis old-fashioned liberalism. To the degree that old-fashioned liberalism is "dying" or otherwise on the back foot, it is because the priestly claste (ie the journalists, the experts, academics, Et Al) has not only abandoned old-fashioned "tabula rasa" liberalism, but has spent the last 50 years actively trying to tear it down and discredit it in the name of "progress".
How old-fashioned is tabula rasa liberalism really?
Nothing Cremieux and co. are saying would be a shock to liberals of many centuries (well, maybe their Oriental simping). Even when civil rights and egalitarianism became an issue a lot of people may have been for legal equality but not a pretense of blank slateism, especially if it's enforced at the cost of their own rights to sovereignty and freedom of association. They definitely considered gender blank slateism to be nonsense.
While tabula rasa liberalism has some roots in thought experiments about the state of nature that go back to early liberalism, most people didn't actually live by the sort of thorough-going refusal to accept innate group differences and the existence of an underlying human nature in practice until very, very recently.
And that "wokeness" follows that ideology because it cannot live up to its promises but has shown that that ideology is a useful way to erode certain liberal principles (like freedom of association) to create a more powerful state that theoretically could.
At least two hundred years old and arguably closer to two thousand depending on how broadly you want to define it.
"wokeness" follows from Marx. A vangaurd party seizing the means of cultural production rather than material production, to establish a dictatorship of the vanguard party.
The the belief in the absolute power of the state/society is where leftism parts ways with old-fashioned liberalism.
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I think it has a very long history actually, and that is that of the "left wing" from Jacobins to the Soviets to the Woke. The idea that we are all born equal and that society should be changed to not make us unequal is longstanding, however insane it may be and however unpopular with the usually pragmatic masses.
The only times when it was fashionable to accept such differences was when racism could be used as a justification to create a State that would make us equal as new men through eugenics or other mechanisms. Rousseau's ghost haunts Liberalism, locked in an eternal battle with Hobbes. Rules of Nature.
It's Hlinka's simulation, the rest of us are just living in it.
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As far as I know, the Soviets did not insist that all people are born with equal capacities, such as equal intelligence. They of course engaged in anti-colonial activity in the third world, and for all I know maybe as part of this activity at some point they claimed that all races have equal intelligence, but even if they did I'm pretty sure it wasn't a key part of their worldview like it is for today's woke.
It depends which Soviets at which time. But they did all nominally believe throughout that if man wasn't equal he should be engineered so. That's what communism is as a state of affairs, after all. Even pragmatic concessions like NEP or Stalin's Nationalism were a means to that end.
You could only believe that this isn't a key part of the ideology if you did not read Marx or Lenin. The latter's revolutionary coalition relied very much on this, and everything down to the removal of titles, the broad feminist reforms or even the common use of "comrade" as address were motivated ideologically by Rousseauan ideas. Sometimes directly.
Need I remind you that Lysenko got to parade around his nonsense because genetics was seen as reactionary precisely because it implies innate differences that couldn't be changed? Well that and competition rather than cooperation.
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You're doing the old commie routine of "it wasn't real communism". These causes produces these effects.
You can run Liberal society for a bit and consume through the barbarism of reflection, but at some point you run out of nomos, like socialists run out of other people's money.
Liberalism doesn't produce togetherness and lasting institutions. It only can grow a total state where everyone attempts to defect until strife collapses it.
Note that this isn't an elegy of other systems, just a reality check for the utopian ambitions of fellow individual rights enjoyers. It was easy to believe in scientific government during the industrial revolution, it's a bit harder now.
No, I don't think I am. I am not saying that true liberalism has never been tried or that true liberalism does not exist. Just the opposite in fact. True liberalism has been tried. There was a dream that was Rome.
What I am saying is that the ideology currently identifying as liberalism, is not only not "liberalism" as Adam Smith or Abraham Lincoln would have understood it, it is a repudiation of that ideology.
Where old-fashioned liberalism talked about all men being created equal (note "created" not "are currently") and judging people by the content of thier character, not the color of thier skin. Modern "liberalism" says the opposite. Thou shalt not pass judgment on on a persons character, or behavior. A person's skin color is more important than who they are as individuals. Opposition to the dictat of everything within the state nothing outside the state is "Fascism".
What part of arresting state legislatures so they can't vote is liberal, exactly?
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See it's interesting that you'd pick this example, because it is precisely Reagan and his generation of neoliberals (the only ones that merit the name really) that sowed the seed of the destruction of the Liberal order.
It is they who sold nations on the altar of profit and removed class solidarity in the name of global competition. It is they who opened borders under the guise of closing them. It is they who grew the State in the name of reducing it. It is they who started imperial wars in the name of nationalism. It is they who enshrined civil rights as higher law than freedom of association.
And yet liars and frauds they were not at least insofar as that can be said of a politician.
Instead I think they honestly believed in that old dream of a global world where everyone could have their share, where the divisions of old are now but joyful flavors one can pick in the giant buffet of the entire human race. And then we'd go explore the stars or something.
Like all ideologies Liberalism bears the seeds of its own destruction, because like all ideologies, Liberalism is based on lies. The lie that all are equal. The lie that power can be separated. The lie that the individual stands alone.
Faced with internal contradictions, the extremes of liberalism and authoritarianism meet. It is their inevitable destiny.
Reagan's invasion of Grenada did not sow the seed for the destruction of the Liberal order. It is probably the single most clear-cut win for the US (and everyone else involved) in it's history.
I was thinking about Iran. Or rather a general pattern of behavior that leads us here.
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