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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?
Well, you're certainly in the right place, since this is a subject we've discussed here at some length over the years.
Have you read Zunger's Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept, or Ozy's Conservatives as Moral Mutants? If you're looking to understand the breakdown of liberalism, those two would be my pick for the best place to start.
People act according to their values. When people share coherent values, they are able to live together and cooperate. Liberalism axiomatically assumes that at least a supermajority of humans share coherent values by nature. This is not actually the case; Liberalism evolved in a highly homogenous environment, and mistook the homogeneity of its specific host population for a universal constant of human nature. The truth is that human values drift over time, and can easily reach mutually-incoherent states. By claiming tolerance as a terminal value, Liberalism greatly accelerates this drift, and when values become broadly incoherent, it simply breaks down.
The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.
I did read Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept last time you linked it in reply to me. That's actually what set off some of this disturbed line of thinking for me. I'll read the other blog post later. Yes, your past posts are quite illustrative to me, but I was hoping someone else would swing by and change my mind. I don't think it will happen.
How do you cope?
I think I have a pretty good understanding of both the spread of likely outcomes and the prudent path forward, and have made my peace with them. Also, sincere Christianity.
Considering the track that the nation is going down, I was doing some more thinking. The approach that seemed to be the best to me is that the federal government must be weakened until it is no longer present, and let states spend their incomes how they choose and enact policies that they want, rather than viciously fighting over the same federal institutions every 4 or so years.
But upon my trying to dig up arguments against Marxism (probably the most dangerous philosophy I think has a chance of doing anything right now), I found that Karl Marx didn't really outline how socialist countries should make the transition into communism and, in fact, such a thing is probably not even possible. Institutions will try to perpetuate themselves in any way they can. Given this fact, I think DOGE is doomed to ultimately fail, especially if the next administration comes in and undoes the damage it is doing. So what is the prudent path forward?
Furthermore, this episode of history has revealed the weaknesses of liberalism: if you give people their own individual rights, including the ability to speak and convince each other of values detrimental to the state, eventually this kind of split will happen. If the federal government dissolves, and each state becomes its own nation, should they still embrace liberalism as the least bad of every option? Or should countries reserve full authority to do as they please, and there are no inherent rights?
This is my understanding of the best likely outcome as well. Picture the federal government as a fencepost set firmly in the ground. The left and right yank it right and left over and over, and each pull loosens the earth around it until eventually it is ripped loose entirely. That is the process we are currently witnessing: a breakdown in the credibility of the federal government, as each escalation converges both sides on "valid only if we control it". The optimistic view is that such a convergence rounds down to "not valid at all", as simply rejecting validity is simpler and easier to enforce than absolute tribal control. Finding a way to leave each other alone is, I hope, simply easier than exercising tyranny over half the nation.
What we're currently seeing, more or less. Blue-Tribe has dominated the institutions and used them to secure unaccountable power. Those institutions must be un-dominated and accountability restored, or they must be destroyed. There isn't really any other option available. The mistake is viewing this as fundamentally about DOGE, or Trump for that matter. If DOGE and Trump fail, the proper course is to escalate again.
In my view, they should retain as much liberalism as they can without compromising society. It seems to me that being clear-headed about liberalism's inherent flaws makes it easier to retain more of it than one can otherwise manage. In the end, though, there are no "inherent rights" in any sort of objective sense. There are values, and some of those values are compatible. Power does what it will, and constraining its abuse is a never-ending responsibility incumbent on each individual human; no system will ever do this job for us, and if we don't do it, it won't be done.
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