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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?
It's been a dead doctrine for a while. To the dismay of many a Liberal including myself. You either move on and embrace post-liberal means of maintaining what you value in Liberalism (for me it's natural rights, for others it's equality under the law, etc), or you go insane (like James Lindsay).
But the foundations of the ideology are now too rotten to support any serious political movement. Even Trump's coalition (the most classical liberal looking movement we have today ironically) is made up of mostly people who don't give a rat's ass about liberalism qua liberalism. The limitations of treating everyone like Robinson Crusoe are now all to apparent.
Most things that claim themselves liberal today have gone through this commonly remaked on process where taking an ideology to its logical conclusions inverts it. Neoliberalism is a quasi-feudal oligarchy that discards constitutions at will, all in the name of "democracy" and "freedom" not the ideas, but the words.
What sort of Liberal civilization would let government arbitrarily lock up its population for years, censor the press and the public square, and attempt to force people to take medical actions against their will? If Covid didn't shatter the illusion, it's because it was shattered already. The story the West tells itself about it's legitimacy rings hollow, which is why its ruling class is going to have to change the story or face counter-elites.
Liberalism indeed is in dire straights. The continental liberalism in tradition of Rousseau was proven to be easy target for subversion by progressive/woke or even worse leftist thought. Hell, look at what happened during the latest convention selecting presidential candidate of libertarian party in USA. The classical liberal outlook was basically frozen in time with latest true champion being John Stuart Mill. It is seriously outdated and did not update its concept to many modern challenges for example what to do about the digital revolution: are your personal data your private property in the old term? What to do about monopolies providing goods and services via subscription models accompanied with uncomprehensive sets of user agreements?
Nevertheless I do have sympathy for James Lindsay, he at least acknowledges all these problems.
So do I but he does not provide solutions. His debates with Carl Benjamin demonstrate to me an impasse in his ideological position. The latter is actively trying to make up something that would uphold Liberalism's best (in his conception). But Lindsay is stuck, and his only move seems to be lashing out in a frankly completely futile manner against people who have learned not to be kowtowed by such methods. People who are close to him even.
Sectarianism is political suicide.
This is a very good point. The naive optimism of 90s libertarians prevented them from formulating a true social project because they believed that connecting people and liberating information would suffice to create utopia. Yet another poisoned fruit of Rousseau, I might add.
Yet, there is space to create something like this now. Technocapitalist interests would be willing to adopt something like this, and the tools to introduce private property in cyberspace are now real. Balaji's project may very well be called a new Liberalism. But whether that will pan out remains to be seen, and the philosophical work to justify such a vision remains lacking, or libertarian rather than liberal.
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