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Just a bit too pat and simplistic. Looking around, it seems to be precisely the illiberals of all stripes who cannot engage civilly.
if liberalism generates values diversity, then illiberalism has a symmetric failure mode whereby, due the illiberals' need to enforce cultural uniformity, tribal boundaries are formed along literally any cleavage site in value-space (no matter how close the groups' values may be in absolute terms), and are amplified until civil behavior becomes impossible. Indeed, some of the most horrific and bloody human conflicts have been between some of the most culturally similar tribes.
It seems to me that you are begging the question; do you recognize a population of illiberals of any stripe who nonetheless engage civilly, or is the identifying mark of the illiberal an inability to so engage?
How many of the illiberals you actually observe emerged from uniformly liberal environments? How many of them used to be liberals themselves? How many of them arrived at illiberalism through liberal arguments pursuing liberal ends by liberal means? How many of them even recognize that they are now illiberal?
What percentage of Europeans would agree that Europe no longer has any meaningful claim to free speech principles? Would you agree that Europe no longer has any meaningful claim to free speech principles?
Do you believe that "free speech" is a coherent, actionable concept that has been in meaningful effect? If so, where and when? Do you expect its return?
I am skeptical that people who lose the capacity for mutual toleration are actually close in values-space in any meaningful way. Could you give some concrete historical examples of people losing the capacity for mutual civil behavior despite coherent values?
On the other hand, I observe large human cultures operating in highly cohesive, cooperative ways for centuries. Few of these long-term-successful cultures appear to me to have been equally or more liberal than our present society in the modern era, and most and perhaps all of them were much, much less liberal.
Does it seem that way? I don't think I gave any indication that I believe only liberals can be civil. Illiberals of a tribe can often be civil to illiberal members of the same tribe.
As for the rest of your questions, they come across as an antagonist gishgallop. Instead of subjecting me to a barrage of questions that clearly veil some point you are trying to make, you would do well to simply state your point clearly.
Now it is you who are begging the question.
If your idea of "too different in values" applies to two groups of Arab muslims who have the same genetics, same language, same religion, same basic economic modes, who disagree over point of theological authority, then your conception of distance in value space is hardly meaningful and not useful as a predictor of conflict. It's probably borderline tautology, for obviously any conflict arises over some difference or another.
We agree that we can't tell whether a group of people being civil with one another are liberal or illiberal. The question is if we can tell whether a group of people being uncivil are liberal or illiberal. You seemed to be claiming that uncivil = illiberal. If my argument is that both civility and liberalism break down under sufficient values-incoherence, and you reply that people being uncivil are displaying illiberality, the problem is whether evidence can distinguish between our hypotheses. I agree that illiberals are uncivil to those they oppose, but the question is why. I am also pointing out that liberals observably turn into illiberals and embrace incivility, which your argument doesn't seem to account for, and which it really ought to, given the numerous horrifying examples of the problem.
I think my questions were quite reasonable, but I can reframe in the form of a statement, if you like.
Liberal ideology led directly to present strains of illiberalism, by obvious and publicly observable attempts to implement Liberal principles. This happened quite uniformly all across America and the Western world in general, all at the same time, very decisively, and with surprisingly little conflict from within Liberal culture. Illiberalism did not defeat Liberalism, it very clearly emerged from it by obvious extrapolation from Liberal principles.
Often, this Liberal > Illiberal transformation happened very publicly and obviously in numerous prominent organizations, and even in specific notable individuals, and both those transforming and those watching them transform recognized that the transformation was being driven by pursuit of specific, clearly-articulatable Liberal principles. They were not rejecting Liberalism, but rather their Liberalism was self-destructing.
These Liberal > Illiberal transformations are fundamental changes, such that where the transformed have ended up is, from the outside, very obviously incompatible with what were presumed to be bedrock principles of Liberalism, and yet many of the transformed do not themselves recognize that they are no longer Liberal in any meaningful sense. The best example here is probably Free Speech: both America and Europe claim strong adherence to freedom of speech, but the principle is rapidly dying out in America and is more or less entirely dead in Europe, and neither society seems to have common knowledge of this fact.
This seems like a reasonable point, given how fraught prediction is in general... And yet it seems to me that attempting to assess core values and the conflicts between them still gives better predictive value than trying to label people as "liberal" or "illiberal" based on ideology or apparent temperament. Some examples:
No one on the Blue side saw Freeze Peach coming, near as I can tell. No one on the Blue side saw Trans Rights coming; it was still being treated as a punchline in Blue entertainment as little as a year before it became a bedrock issue for the Blue Tribe vanguard. No one saw the collapse of the atheist movement coming. No one of consequence saw the ACLU flip coming.
My recollection is that Conservative Christians did see the general flip toward illiberalism on the part of Blue Tribe coming as far back as the 90s, and arguably much further back than that, based on an assessment of values rather than surface ideology.
Currently, it seems to me that a lot of people have predicted a hundred of the last zero collapses of Woke, and have consistently underestimated political radicalization in general. On the other hand, quite a few people have been wrong in symmetrical but opposite ways, so maybe it's a wash.
Despite this, it seems to me that the arguments for Liberalism that I'm aware of are, at this point, entirely bankrupt, and rely on ignoring the evidence of cultural evolution over the last few decades. Zunger's thesis, near as I can tell, remains unassailable: Tolerance is not a moral precept, and Liberalism's collapse seems to be an obvious consequence of Liberal axioms to the contrary. If you think otherwise, I'd be quite interested in your arguments.
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