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Notes -
I’d like to bring up a comment by @ResoluteRaven from last week’s thread:
It's not the first time I see this line of reasoning getting brought up, usually in the narrower context of the terrible destruction of the 30 Years’ War which @Capital_Room brought up in the same comment chain.
I’m not much of a historian but still this doesn’t appear to hold water in my view. As far as I can tell, the era of European sectarian wars (mainly) between Catholics and Protestants wasn’t ended by classical liberalism but by monarchist absolutism i.e. a new order where sovereign authority is centralized and unrestrained, feudalism is gradually dismantled and the state supersedes the church in terms of power and influence. Local lords and religious leaders no longer had the means to start sectarian wars in the first place. There were no more peasant rebellions fueled by sectarian grievances (among other things). This doesn’t mean that the Catholic church wasn’t in a hegemonic position in various states or that Protestants weren’t in effect treated as second-class subjects, but that’s another issue.
Now I suppose one can argue that this all actually represented the birth of classical liberalism because reasons, but I find that rather far-fetched.
It appears to me that the death of "classical liberalism" has been greatly exaggerated.
It was legal to own slaves in the US up until the 1860s. Has the US been a classically liberal society since its inception? If no, then we have to establish the start and end dates we have in mind for "classical liberalism". If yes, then classical liberalism is compatible with slavery -- and if it's compatible with slavery, then it's surely compatible with SJWs and Trump and whatever else people are worried about now.
Let's also not forget that up until the early 20th century, many western nations took a much dimmer view of homosexuality, blasphemy, obscenity, etc. -- freedoms that would now be considered hallmarks of any "liberal" society.
I'm just really not sure what people are afraid of, or what they think has "ended". Do people think we're headed for another civil war? We already had one, and yet it's typical to say that the US was a "classically liberal" society both before and after. Do people think Trump is going to establish a dictatorship / one party rule? That's not going to happen, but even if he did, it's not clear to me that even that would be incompatible with classical liberalism, given how nebulous the term is.
Yes, of course. I don't see how one could seriously argue that the US have been founded on anything else.
The thing is, it isn't. Which in part caused the Civil War after long and hard attempts to maintain a precarious pragmatic compromise. Because living up to those principles was incompatible with the survival of the original US but so was not doing so.
Yes.
I don't think that's likely, but yes, of course despotism is totally compatible with classical liberalism. So long as the despot is a classical liberal. Catherine the Great being the most well known example of this.
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