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In my latest essay, I try to list the major points I'm aware of that puncture the progressive narrative on economics, without trying to directly touch on the Culture War's social fronts.
Reality Has a Poorly Recognized Classical Liberal Bias
I think most people here have enough exposure to libertarianism that they are at least aware of these issues (even if they don't agree with them). If you think I missed one or I'm somehow dead wrong please do indicate so.
Classical liberalism is unsustainable, probably inherently because espousing it means leaving yourself defenseless against parasites of liberalism, such as various forms of communism.
And no, you can't simply declare 'we won't have nice people and nice things in my liberalism' to avoid the progressive cancer.
So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias. Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else. Same as e.g. the brief window of political sanity in farming civilization while people who survived thru civil wars were in power.
In the long run we are all very much dead. But perhaps giving up on classical liberalism altogether is premature.
And the "something else" is hard here. If we have reached the End of History, but liberal democracy is insufficiently "liberal" to be economically feasible then where we go next seems bad. I'd argue going back to the old ways.
I'd argue many people do, not economic reality. Public choice theory teaches us this. Then you can get into "liberal" vs. "democracy" but that's a whole thing.
a) It's not about economics.
Politics is the art of the possible. Saying impossible things are desirable is mostly useless.
Classical liberalism has all the electoral appeal of I dunno, raw oysters. Sure the right people will like it but you're still basically SOL.
In a big enough country, ideology and cope can paper over cracks in economic reality for a very long time. Heck this even works in a small country -consider Argentina! People can stay deluded for generations on end if they can. (e.g. society is rich enough because you're exporting money etc). Witness US education system which is mostly regressing.
Any system that runs out of other people's money is going to struggle. Any system that cannot wage war effectively via the means of production is going to struggle. You may not be interested in economics; but economics is interested in you.
Classical liberalism is a lot less far-fetched than Marxism, and yet. It's very much not literally impossible. Certainly it's possible to make marginal improvements even if we never achieve my particular vision of utopia.
Electoral appeal can change. Sometimes rapidly. My hope is that the next crisis event is used to steer us in a good direction, not an even worse one.
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