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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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