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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?
From time to time I'm reminded of this quote from Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius":
He wrote this in July 1940, in the midst of the Blitz. With the stunning battlefield defeats of the Allies in the west, and the division of the east between the Soviets and Germans, it certainly seemed that liberalism (and capitalism along with it) was Done For. One can not exactly blame Orwell for this sentiment, given that he was enduring bombing raids while writing it; it would seem rather axiomatic. Of course the next five years showed that liberal, capitalist countries were far superior at fighting total wars than their autocratic contemporaries, and when pushed to the brink were endlessly more evolutionarily fit.
I'm a liberal. I am unashamedly so, even if I am certainly ashamed of how liberal democracies have conducted themselves by and large these past few decades (post-1991, to put a point on it). I would not count liberalism out yet. It has survived through far worse periods. It managed after Carlsbad, after the failures of 1848, the nadir of World War II, the spread of communism during the Cold War. Each time it has eventually triumphed as the dominant political ideology. This isn't to say that it won't collapse on itself eventually, or that it has been found decidedly wanting in recent crises, but I think it is far too soon to count it out yet.
They were vastly inferior at warfighting, prevailing through sheer size and resources alone.
Germany wiped the floor with Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France singlehandedly. Germany had no oil, no rubber, no tungsten, poor reserves of iron and aluminium, only coal in large quantities. They barely had a navy and only established their air force 4 and a half years prior but put Britain on the ropes nonetheless.
If you look at a map of the powers involved in WW2, you see the sheer scale of allied ineptitude. How can you possibly struggle for so long and take serious defeats when this is the balance of the powers involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_participants_in_World_War_II.svg
It required the primary efforts of three huge countries (one of them fiercely autocratic) to beat Germany. Without the Soviet Union in the war, it's hard to see how Germany could lose in Europe. Likewise with any of the Big Three. Somehow this relatively small country was by far the strongest power in the world, stronger than the next two combined!
And this is despite Messerschmitt being a complete clownshow in procurement and project management, despite German intelligence being horrendous the whole war, despite having their codes cracked, despite not mobilizing fully until 1943, despite bizarre Fuhrer-prinzip orders...
Liberalism is just that bad. After the war, it then took 50 years to overcome the Soviet Union. The Anglo-American liberal alliance had secured all the wealthy, industrialized parts of the world: Western Europe and Japan. The Soviets suffered 27 million dead and conquered the poor parts of Eastern Europe. Their economic system was totally broken. But thanks to liberalism, it was a remotely even struggle. The Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan outlasted Soviet withdrawal, it even outlasted the Soviet Union by a small margin. A liberal puppet government in Afghanistan disintegrated before the withdrawal was even completed.
What's your explanation for WWI, then? The autocratic Russian and Austro-Hungarian states embarrassed themselves repeatedly, and on the Western Front, Germany wasn't all that different to France or Britain. A theory of liberal military weakness, and presumably autocratic strength, would seem to suggest that autocracy ought to correlate with positive military performance. But that seems more like the opposite of what we see in WWI.
Again, we look at a map. The British empire: Canada, India, half of Africa, Australia. The French Empire: the other half of Africa. America! Russia! Gigantic global empires - plus Italy, Romania and Japan.
The German Empire? 2 tiny scraps of land in Africa and Papua New Guinea. The Austro-Hungarian empire? Small, poor and disorganized. The Ottomans? Mid-sized, poor and disorganized, the sick man of Europe.
Germany had no rubber, little iron, not enough food, they had to choose between fertiliser and explosives.
Germany was massively overperforming, fighting three huge empires to a standstill and knocking Russia out of the war while France and Britain underperformed considering their size and access to world markets. But it was a totally stacked war where most of the strong powers were on one side.
(Italy had universal male suffrage since 1912, it was arguably more democratic than Britain in WW1 but their military performance was horrendous).
My theory is not that autocracy correlates to positive military performance but that liberal countries have inferior military performance considering the size and resources of the powers involved. Autocracies have a huge range from astonishing capacity to horrendous. But liberal states are regularly subpar.
I'd argue that by the standards of 1914, Germany was a relatively liberal power.
I'm actually not all that convinced that the deck was as stacked as you think - it's a mistake to just look at a map and assume that the amount of colour on the map is directly proportional to military power. Germany didn't have a huge colonial empire, but it was a large, rapidly industrialising European power with a lot of human capital, which had also militarily embarrassed France relatively recently in the 1870s. I don't look at French West Africa and therefore assume that metropolitan France should have had an insurmountable military advantage over Germany, its larger and more populous neighbour, with access to the same technological base.
But at any rate, let's grant that Germany overperformed in WWI and WWII. Is that enough to conclude that liberal states militarily underperform? That seems like a lot to generalise fron a single example, particularly considering that WWI Germany arguably was a liberal state, and that illiberal states (Austria, Russia, the Ottomans) also put in noticeably poor showings. If we grant that Britain and France underperformed, that seems less like liberal states being weaker, and more like... well, everybody underperforming relative to Germany. Maybe Germany just had really good fundamentals, or lucked into a few military geniuses and associated reforms, or something else. My point is that the pattern doesn't seem to be "liberal weak, illiberal/autocratic strong". At best the pattern is "Germany strong".
That is, however, a single example, and I am wary of drawing strong conclusions from single examples. For instance, if we go back a century (plus a half, if you're counting from WWII), we find Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which was undoubtedly the most liberal country in Europe by a massive margin, and their decades-long overperformance. If you were generalising from the period 1790-1810 or so, where France took on pretty much the entire rest of Europe and kicked them around one by one, you might be tempted to conclude that liberalism is a kind of cheat code to military supremacy.
I'm just not seeing a strong general correlation between a liberal constitution and military underperformance.
Particularly when military-industrial investments and the quality of the opposition's decision making is factored in.
If you show a map of a large part of the world and small part of the world, but the small part of the world invests more in the most relevant military technologies that can be brought to bear than the large part, you should expect to see to see the smaller part of the world out-perform and out-compete the larger parts, and to continue to do so until industrial outmatch leads to disparities that can overcome advantageous positions (like, say, being able to launch history's largest naval invasion to overcome the moat that is the English Channel).
It turns out, military-industrial economics don't work like in video games, where you pay money to buy a formation whole-cloth. You actually need to, you know, build the relevant assembly lines beforehand... emphasis on before. And a significant part of the WW2 opening military dynamic was that the western europeans were much later to invest in military expansion.
That, in turn, was driven by the rest of the world's assessments of what a good german leader would do. German headstart mobilization was tolerated / not matched up to a point in no small part because the western europeans and soviets alike thought Germany would have to be very stupid to begin a warmongering campaign against the western empires who economically outsized them on the west, and particularly with the the soviets who outsized them on the east. It would be a particularly bad leader who, even with the early military investments, would try to take one or the other, let alone both.
Which was correct! It was very stupid of the Germans to begin a warmongering campaign. That was an accurate understanding of the situation, because even with its unexpectedly high initial performance advantages the Germans did ultimately fail and fall. The unexpected success in topping- which was unexpected on both ends and hardly a reasonable expectation- did not, in fact, enable Germany to beat the Soviets in turn, even when the Soviets took several non-necessary policy errors like 'purge the Red Army right before a war' and 'ignore strategic warning intelligence.' Even with major unexpected failures on the part of the allies, and gambles that even the Nazis acknowledged were gambles, the Nazis still lost. The pre-war expectations- that the Germans would have to be stupid to try such things- was validated.
It just didn't mean that the hyper-authoritarian Germans wouldn't do stupid stuff that got their own country conquered in the process. Hitler was a romantic-nihilist, and that is not exactly commonly understood even now, let alone back then.
Which, in turn, throws another wrench in the 'liberalism is incompetent, authoritarianism is based' premise. The authoritarian lost, and lost badly, and lost for reasons broadly known beforehand. The western liberal incompetence along the way, in turn, were generally either 'this emerging aspect of technology was not recognized across the world'- in other words, not a general competence failure- or failures to believe the authoritarian would be that stupid by gambling on high risks... which, of course, is treated as a validation of the authoritarian.
The former is hindsight bias of believing what is known afterwards should have been obvious at the time, and the later is just the military variant of 'jokes on you, I was just pretending to be retarded.'
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