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Just as a matter of observational correlation. I'm not claiming that, logically or mechanically, every uncivil person is necessarily illiberal or vice versa. Although, we both seem to agree that illiberals have a tendency to be uncivil to the outgroup.
My point was that empirically illiberalism is no strong bulwark against incivility. And so, if we are to judge a group of liberals by their purported tendency to incivility, or as generating uncivil behavior, then we can just as easily do the same thing to the illiberal group.
What is your claim, that liberalism is worse than illiberalism because liberals sometimes turn into uncivil illiberals?
But I wont deny this sometimes happens. Liberal societies can decay just as illiberal and pre-liberal ones can and have. Yet illiberals can often turn into liberals. And illiberals can delvove/schism into tribal violence for reasons that have nothing to do with liberalism. This is why I said your argument is too pat. You consider only side of one particular dynamic and present it as if it were sufficient for wholesale judgement against liberalism, but it isn't.
You should give a lot of thought to the problem of prediction. Because if you are going to reject liberalism and replace it with some illiberal ideology, then it would be nice to know that whatever you replace it with does not lead to worse failure modes. If you want to prevent conflict by preventing so called value-drift, this is necessarily a pre-emptive act. And if you cannot reliably pre-emptively determine which values are load bearing and which aren't, you are going to cause a lot of unnecessary pain and conflict by tamping down on "values diversity".
I may or may not disagree depending on how you determine whether something is or is not a core value (in a way that's not tautological). But I'm confused because you were the one who initially cast the problem in terms of liberalism. What distinction between values, ideology, and temperament are you making here?
Oh are they entirely bankrupt? You have not remotely justified that lofty claim.
We can just observe how quickly the illiberal right (ham-fistedly) reached for classical liberal defenses such as free speech when their preferences were being contested. Even now the maga conservatives consistently appeal to classical liberal principles in their efforts to root out the woke left. They could just be lying of course. But if they're not (and even if they are) that is an indication that liberal principles are game-theoreitically valuable in a way that will ensure their continuation.
Lost the first version of this, so it'll need to be a bit abreviated.
No,
You seem to be treating Liberalism and Illiberalism as equal and opposite ideological poles.
My claim is that Illiberalism is more real than liberalism, because Illiberalism is the base state and liberalism is a superstructure necessarily built atop it. Liberalism is a luxury that exists only where illiberalism has created the conditions necessary for its existence. Further, Liberalism tends to degrade those conditions, and the more Liberal we go the faster the degradation. When the conditions degrade sufficiently, Liberalism collapses back into illiberalism, often without many of the Liberals even noticing the change. Liberals who turn illiberal in a crisis are simply expressing their ideology's internal contradictions, and "more liberalism" will not solve the problem, but rather accelerate it.
Civility is not a product of liberalism. Civility emerges when values are mutually coherent, allowing the recognition of common interest and common humanity, positive-sum reciprocity, group loyalty, charity and so on. Such an environment can be codified as an ideology, which is what Liberalism is. The problem is that Liberalism confuses its progenitor civility not as a consequence of illiberal social organization, but rather as a constant feature of human nature, and concludes that since civility and its own emergence coincide, more liberalism will lead to more civility. But Civility maintains its rigor through duty, obligation, debt, conformity, enforcement, none of which Liberalism is fundamentally interested in, particularly resonant with, nor capable of maintaining from within its own ideological frame.
Liberalism, unrestrained, always degrade civility and values-coherence, until it triggers a crisis too undeniable and too acute to ignore, at which point it will transition back into the harshest forms of illiberalism and resolve that crisis with a bloody hand. The only way to prevent this ideological boom-and-bust cycle is to moderate Liberalism, to accept that "More Liberalism!" is not a universal answer to the problems of living together, and sometimes what we need is less. Likewise, actual civility requires rules and standards, and punishment for breaking them, which in a limited context can appear quite uncivil. "It's all good, man" is not a general answer to the question of how to live together; sometimes it is not all good, and something must be done as a result.
All societies decay. But our society went hard on maximizing Liberalism and then very rapidly decayed, and the most liberal portions of the population decayed the fastest. The Freeze Peach meme emerged and was rapidly propagated from the deepest-blue, most "liberal" parts of our society. And efforts at effective mass speech control and censorship. And attacks on presumption of innocence. And mass political violence as a live and effective method for pursuing social change. And severe violations of freedom of assembly and movement.
Can you point to some examples?
Schism and tribal violence are an innate and irradicable consequence of human nature, and are perfectly able to express themselves under Liberalism and Illiberalism alike.
One might turn this around and ask Liberalism to predict whether the outcome of its unlimited and yet oddly selective tolerance might not lead to worse failure modes. I can point to a long history of Western civilization that operated on levels of liberalism considerably below our current norms. Can you point to an example of how injecting population-replacement-level amounts of Muslims into sclerotic western democracies works out long-term?
In any case, I'm not sure what is to be gained by discussing the problem in the abstract; it's better pursued at the object level.
Core values are values people will compromise all other values to secure, because they are valued more than those others. Ideology is a story people tell themselves to try to encapsulate their value judgements into general rules; when they run afoul of reality, often they change. Temperament would be a term, perhaps poorly chosen, for general bearing, apparent attitude, politeness or bluntness, the register of one's voice, the minutea of how one generally communicates.
In Harry Potter, Professor Umbridge's temperament is unfailingly polite and mild. Her ideology is bureaucratic managerialism. Her core values are totalitarian power and control.
In reality, the ACLU's temperament and ideology were staunchly liberal, but in fact their core values were Blue Progressive, and when those core values came into conflict with their professed ideology, the ideology abruptly and seamlessly changed.
The failures of Liberalism as an ideology are self-evident. Europe has implemented a variety of blasphemy laws and has been busily jailing, fining, or otherwise abusing people for the words they say or even don't say, and the European and American consensus is that this is fine. America retains some narrow, formal protections on paper, but our government has proven perfectly willing to violate these protections in egregious ways, whether to punish or to censor, on a variety of pretexts. More damningly, the ideals necessary to maintain formal free speech protections simply and very obviously do not exist. A probable majority of Americans believe that speaking the N-word justifies physical assault; one jury was willing to apply this standard retroactively, acquitting a stabber because his victim responded with the N-word. Large pluralities and perhaps outright majorities believe that firing people for their speech is good and necessary. A large plurality of Americans are willing to endorse violence and even murder as solutions to political disagreement. And at the end of the day, are they wrong?
What is your defense of Liberalism? Show me how it works, where it fits in to the world around us. Show me where you think we are and how you think we got here. I claim that in our present context, Liberalism is as useful as a warm pitcher of spit. Why am I wrong?
Who, specifically? Which "Illiberal Right" are you referring to, when and in what context?
I made such appeals when I was still a Liberal, watching the Liberal consensus collapse around me. The consistent failure of such appeals is why I stopped being a Liberal: evidence showed that such defenses didn't work, because they were built on lies.
My speech, my arms, and my vote is not protected because of the Constitution and Liberal ideals. It is protected by anonymity, numbers, and an advertised bloody-mindedness toward those who would infringe upon them. These are not perfect or perhaps even very good protections, but they handily beat Liberalism, which is very clearly no protection at all.
The Liberal Game Theory argument is trash. "Don't restrict the rights of others, or they might restrict yours." But if I recognize rights for others when I am in power, and then I lose power and they gain it, they are completely free to refuse to recognize my rights. And then, having violated my rights, if they lose power and I regain it, Liberals will not agree that I should refuse to recognize their rights in turn, thus providing the consequence their "game theory" relies on.
“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles” is a pattern Liberal "Game Theory" has no answer for, but Illiberalism can handle easily and honestly. We should not live by lies. Skokie Liberalism is gone forever, and pretending otherwise will not help you. Liberal Maximalism depended on a fundamental lack of knowledge of the consequences of its policies. We have that knowledge now in abundance. Lessons have been learned, and will not be soon forgotten.
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