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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 think liberalism is in for another rough century, but assuming it isn't rendered obsolete by AI-backed surveillance states of some sort, I think the same lessons that Europeans learned by 1648 will be re-learned by an even larger fraction of the human race this time around (tree of liberty, blood of tyrants, you know how it goes). It may take a couple more swings of the pendulum back and forth between right-wing and left-wing illiberalism and who knows how many deaths along the way, but people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
Is that true for everyone, or just for leftists?
I see the right/left divide as basically being one of hierarchy/'equity', and since equity isn't a reality-based ideology it's gonna be prone to backfiring, yeah. But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem, at least until those elites hit upon the idea of organizing the masses against competing elites on grounds of equity, at which point we're back to leftism.
ETA: While I'm here, I'd like to point out that leftism is inherently satanic in the literal sense. On the one hand we have "God is God and you are not and He knows best" and on the other "You can be like God and decide for yourself as well or better than He can decide for you." This latter sentiment is known as pride.
Where does "The clergy are wrong about God's will" fit in this schema?
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
It's a thorny issue to be sure and relies upon what could be called ineffability to work, i.e. there's no satisfactory intellectual answer from just about any standpoint.
A Christian should be obedient to his priest and the church hierarchy in most cases. However, the hierarchy is made up of humans, who can and do go wrong. At the individual scale this can be devastating and 'should I ignore my priest about this' is a very uncomfortable question for a Christian to ever have to ask. The reality is that most people aren't really equipped to make that call. Ideally the problem is fixed by those priests being accountable to bishops and so on, but in practice the whole system can and does fail. Then again, at one point the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops all decided to reunite with the Church of Rome under the Pope, and the laity stood firm and told them 'no', and the hierarchy demurred.
What we have is a system where we all understand that human components sometimes fail, sometimes en masse, and yet we believe that Christ in His capacity as the head of the Church makes it work out anyway. It's gotten us this far.
Example?
Was Huckleberry Finn equipped to make that call, or should he have sent Hard-R Jim back into bondage?
"God will decide for me whether I survive this flood."
"I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"
(Context for today's lucky 10,000)
Ultimately he has to follow his conviction, as we all do.
Probably my fault but I'm not grasping the relevance.
And my conviction is that trans-women are women in every way that matters outside the bedroom and the doctor's office, that if the mind and body disagree on whether someone is werman or woman it is better to bring the body in line with the mind rather than vice versa, that if two people engage in coitus the morality or immorality of their act does not depend on their genders, and that parents of teenagers developing same-gender attractions or children with genital dysphoria do not have an inalienable entitlement to force or gaslight them into a heteronormative mould.
Human actions, including those that appear to go against nature, might be part of God's plan. For instance, Eliot Page being born with female parts doesn't necessarily mean that He intended Mr Page to live as a woman; His plan might very well involve hormones and surgery.
I appreciate that perspective, as the conversation under the assumption we all have the same values but disagree on facts has been extremely frustrating. That said, do you mind elaborating? If bringing the mind in line with the body is so costly (in the sense that it's better to do the opposite), why is it ok to force the majority of the population to see trans women as women "in every way that matters outside the bedroom and doctor's office"? Also, why those particular exclusions, and how do you argue against people who think even those are also a sign of bigotry?
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I will cut in here to ask how this conviction is compatible with the fact that transgender (biological) men resemble other men far more than they resemble women, and transgender (biological) women resemble other women far more than they resemble men.
The prototypical trans male is a system network administrator and Warhammer collector who grows their hair long and wants to be called Anna, and the prototypical trans female is a slight girl with anorexia who cuts her hair short and wants to be called Eliot. (I've met both in my time). Both display physical and mental traits that are strongly associated with their biological sex and strongly disassociated with the sex they proclaim themselves to be.
How do you draw a cluster that includes women-who-want-to-be-men and men but excludes women, and vice versa? What do they have in common? As far as I can see transgenderism correlates far more with autism and self-loathing than with resemblance to the opposite sex, and therefore fixing the self-loathing seems like the most kind and effective approach.
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