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Notes -
The future Liberals want by Noah Smith on substack. It’s not that interesting a vision really: the future of the West is highly diverse, urban, self-expressive (trans accepting), and abundant with oh thanks an olive branch for conservatives.
I think the bizarre thing about this is that Noah — as woke, neolib as it comes — felt the need to write this at all. Everyone knows this is the vision; it’s all we hear about! Conservatives all know that this is what is on offer if society remains on autopilot towards the future too.
What strikes me about it is a vision of total anomie and dissolving of any sense of common culture and this is supposed to be good. Each nations singular (or maybe 2-3 tops) religion replaced by anything or nothing. Each national ethnic group replaced by a multicultural hodge podge with inclusion and acceptance for all. Diversity of income (inequality). Imagine there are no countries…
I can’t help wonder what families are supposed to be like in this vision — or indeed if they really exist. Is a world of radical self invention fuelled by technology compatible at all with human flourishing as its always been known: freedom to choose the burdens we bear for maximum meaning. What if blank slatism wasn’t a description of the world, but a challenge!
It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).
Reading this, i had a shiver along my spine, imagining the role that my people and country would have in this liberal utopia:
A people deprived of its mythos and ancestries in the name of building an inclusive future, where all our two millennia-old symbols and texts are modified in order to accomodate other people that share nothing with us.
Supported and put together only by a foreign ideology that had no presence here until the end of the nineties, and completely alien to our political tradition, and where dissenting against it (probably for purely self-interested reasons, being a nation and all of that) can make you fall in the enemy camp, represented by the non-liberal ideology or culture of the day, that is probably way nearer and similar to our culture than the Washington D.C dream.
All of this in exchange of...
Absolute self-expression, that is the thing the we do not have and made us way more saner and healthier than the anglosaxons
And good urbanism... oh, we have that.
The cherry on the top is that we are supposed to reach this marvelous future not as the metropole that absorb capital and resources and bright people, but as the peripherical nation that had 30 years of stagnation and decline, and that is approaching other decades of stagnation and decline, while receiving only the poorest and less fit of the people of the third world.
Yeah, this is hell for us, not the future.
Yup... "model immigrants" are classed as "white adjacent" in this so called oppression hierarchy. We will have to see if the US becomes less attractive as an immigration zone in the future.
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