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Notes -
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?
Did America's heyday have anything to do with liberalism? When do you think the "heyday" of America even was, and why do you think liberalism was it's defining feature, so much so that it gets to own all that greatness?
I don't know man. I used to think we had things figured out in the 90's. If you're going to give any particular era to "liberalism", whatever that means, the 90's would probably qualify. Culture seemed to have definitively move away from a conception of The United States as a white Christian nation, and towards a multicultural melting pot. When I think back on my public school education, probably 50% of our assigned reading were polemics about racism, and the importance of not being mean or prejudging the blacks. It felt like we were getting more color blind in the 90's. Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah" moment calling out anti-white racism.
I now question whether any of that was sustainable. I question whether the 90's were just the brief period between when the radicals had pushed the overton to a fairly neutral feeling middle, and then further off a fucking cliff. Maybe liberalism was always doomed, merely a stalking horse used by radicals to destroy the "heyday" you romanticize. A lot of those 90's liberals have had a fuck of a mask off moment of late. The ones that seemed sincere have defected to MAGA. Or at the very least realize MAGA is the lesser of two evils compared to the DEI race essentialist.
Classical liberalism has become a conservative position, and MAGA is inherently less hostile to those.
Economics dictate political leanings- when costs are low and average wages are high, political power of each individual is high -> liberal (political companies more easily replaced, “just build your own X” becomes viable); when they are not, that gets cancelled in favor of the boss’s politics. That can be Christian fundamentalism, that can be wokism, doesn’t matter, they’re all just as bad.
"Classical liberalism" was an 18th century ideology that was dead by the 20th, and bears little resemblance to the positions of people who currently claim that label — as Auron Macintyre put it, John Locke would throw James Lindsay down a well. I also saw someone on Tumblr coming at this from the opposite direction, arguing that Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc. should not be called or considered "liberal" — again because their actual positions were far from what's considered "liberal" in the current century — and that at best they were a sort of early "proto-liberal" who laid the groundwork for what eventually became liberalism. In both cases, the position is that modern "liberalism" and the "liberalism" of Locke and Hobbes are such different ideologies that they shouldn't really share a label — the disagreement is one which one gets to keep the "liberalism" label.
Do note that outside the USA "liberal" still does not mean what it has come to mean in the USA.
Our centre-right laissez-faire party in Australia is called the Liberal Party (a.k.a. "the Libs"). It is mostly opposed to SJ (though it's not a full-on conservative party like its coalition partner the Nationals, nor an alt-right party like One Nation or the United Australia Party), and as such has a credible claim to being the most (classically) liberal of our notable parties.
(Our SJW party is the Greens, who want to ban One Nation and the United Australia Party and throw people in jail for hate speech. Labor is our centre-left party, who have become fairly SJW but nowhere near that extent; with that said, the Greens are Labour's usual coalition partner if it needs one - most recently 2010-13; it's currently governing alone - so weirdly enough the scenario I've been dreading for the last few years is an election landing in the middle such that the Greens can play kingmaker.)
Yeah, but they still probably have opinions on freedom of religion and atheism that Hobbes and Locke would find anathema, opinions on diversity that Mill would reject utterly (see the quote from mill that /u/Lykurg posted above); opinions on feminism, the franchise, civil society, and so many other domains that any 18th century liberal would find beyond the pale.
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