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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?
I suppose that depends on how you define of "liberalism". For my part I do not think that "liberalism" is dying so much as it is down in the 4th quarter and making what may be its final goal-line stand. Trump and his cabinet (Rubio, Hegseth, Gabbard, Vance, Et Al) seem to be the last defenders of the older, more vigorous variety, of Liberalism championed by historical figures like Adam Smith, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King and exemplified by fictional characters like Steve Rogers and James T. Kirk remaining in the public sphere. Whether they will succeed in keeping the play-off hopes of old-fashioned liberalism alive remains to be seen.
However, if you define "liberalism" as an outward appearance of politeness accompanied by deference towards "experts", "journalists", and other representatives of the priestly caste, I think I have to agree with @Tophattingson below; "liberalism" isn't dying, it is dead. COVID, or more accurately, the priestly caste's response to COVID, killed it. The Priests broke the terms of service and are now they are faced with a war of all against all.
Personally, I'm rooting for the goal-line stand and late game comeback
To expand on this, if you defined "liberalism" as a general agreement as that, it never existed outside of DC. No one (simplistically) ever won an election running on being the avatar of the experts and the neoliberal establishment.
I wouldn't personally root for a comeback of these folks who want all sorts of foreign adventurism and welfare + chaos at home. Instead I'd advocate for a new class of actual liberals to emerge. People that actually hold to the principles of Smith and Washington. A strong hand at the rudder, none of this chaos run amok at home, overseas we kill people who are bad, and most importantly, tears and people suffering the consequences of their own actions are not persuasive arguments in any context. A murderer who is upset he is on death row is ignored, an unemployed person without food is ignored, a country whos crop failed because they are too stupid to understand crop rotation is ignore, a person who can't build a malaria net is ignored.
That is liberalism.
That's how illiberal movements gain adherents; if someone is suffering and liberals tell him, "It's your own fault; you don't deserve any help; but we have the inalienable right to have you go off and die somewhere it won't inconvenience us", while communists/fascists/wokists tell him "You deserve better; it's the bourgeoisie's/minorities'/white males' fault, join us and you'll have a better life", what do you think he will do?
If you seek to build liberalism that will last, you need Liberalism With A Human Face, even if that means less-than-absolute property rights.
I disagree.
A functional, formalized, rule-based society requires writing some people off. Every society that has ever existed or will ever exist does this. The only question is who those people will be.
Keeping your society functional requires minimizing the number of people being written off, and writing them off for good reasons. This requires less-than-absolute property rights, but less-than-absolute property rights doesn't actually obviate the need for the write-offs. Losing sight of this tends to devolve down to "property-rights-in-theory", at best, and then everyone is worse off.
They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.
The value to a society of rights to property lie not in how expansive they are, but in how consistent they are.
Imagine a village with 100 rich people, each of whom makes one-tenth what it would cost to feed the poor of their village/the neighbouring village.
There is a difference between telling all 100 "We need 10% of your wealth" versus letting ninety of them keep everything they have 'earned' while telling the other ten "We're taking everything you have because we don't like your face/you married the woman I fancied/your business competes with mine/you told everyone about the skeletons in our closet/&c., &c., &c."
Yes, exactly.
People make choices. Sometimes people make choices that are straightforwardly destructive to themselves and others. Sometimes these choices can't be un-made. When such choices are made, the people who made them sometimes need to be written off in any one of a number of ways. Sometimes this involves shaming or shunning. Sometimes it means imprisonment, exile or execution. We can wrangle over which choices require which responses, but the simple fact is that not all people are good, and not all people can be saved from themselves or their demons.
Not everyone who is suffering deserves better. Some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their own bad decisions.
This presumes that the poor are actually going to be fed, and that it actually costs 10% of their wealth to do it. What I observe is that vastly more than 10% is taken, and that a large percentage of it is either pocketed by the takers or wasted on absurdities. I also observe that the poor around me are not starving, not by a very wide margin, and that many of the ends this system is supposed to support are never achieved.
The sin I was referring to is the sin of regarding a human being as having merely instrumental, rather than terminal, value.
That doesn't change the fact that they are still human beings.
Doesn't excuse us from doing our damnedest.
The former does not follow from the latter; what is natural is not necessarily just, and it is entirely possible for a decision to have consequences which are not deserved.
For many centuries, suffering from cholera was the direct consequence of the decision to live in a city; then we built sewer systems.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of our attempts to help people; however, I was addressing the arguments against even trying.
As a society grows materially wealthier, the standard of living it is obligated to provide to the least of its members also increases.
In a society several orders of magnitude wealthier than today's OECD nations, people might very well be entitled to things which cannot be bought today at any price.
I am not clear on what it would mean for humans to have terminal value. I am very comfortable saying that other humans are not merely a means to my preferred ends, which is what I would assume you mean by "merely instrumental", but they are also pretty clearly not an end in and of themselves, which is what I would assume you mean by "terminal".
I would say that our common humanity imposes upon us both significant rights and significant obligations. I am not sure you and I are anywhere near agreement of what those rights and obligations actually are. Certainly they do not override all other concerns.
The treatment other human beings deserve from me ranges from tender affection to swift, merciless death. That is a pretty wide range, and you don't seem to recognize a fair portion of it.
And sometimes they are somewhat deserved. And sometimes they are entirely deserved.
I'm a big fan, but I notice that you picked something where the harm was entirely separated from the choice made; there was no germ theory of disease, people knew that cities were plague-ridden but they had no idea what the cause was or how to stop it, nor which actions helped or made it worse beyond "don't go to cities".
Now swap cholera for methamphetamines, and explain to me what the equivalent of the Sewer is supposed to be. My understanding is that there isn't actually a sewer equivalent; a lot of people who get addicted to narcotics cannot be "cured" of their narcotics addiction in any sort of reliable way; if you have data to the contrary I'd love to see it. And so it goes with many, many other similar choices. You are speaking as though you have a solution to these problems, as though effort expended on these problems translates into improved outcomes. At this late date, my assessment is that such claims involve willful deception, of the self and often of others.
"Trying" is not an exciting new strategy you thought up in a stroke of genius five minutes ago. We have been "trying" on some issues for half a century, others for multiple centuries, others for millennia. Any claim that we should continue trying needs to engage with the extant results of previous efforts, or it should be discarded out of hand as fundamental irresponsibility.
No, I don't believe it does. Human wants expand without limit. Human needs are unchanged over millennia. You can disagree if you like, but neither I nor others are obligated to subscribe to your bespoke morality.
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I'd go one step further and say that some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their parents' bad actions, and we still need to write those people off.
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