As demonstrated in several of the comments to it so far, the main issue with this post is use of the ruined term 'liberal'. A lot of the people you might categorize as illiberal public intellectuals would not agree that many of your characterizations of liberal values do not describe their own too.
It seems to me that when you talk about 'the liberal game' you actually mean something closer to simple 'meritocracy', which is a lot more politically neutral-sounding, but with the implication that the 'liberal' society produces results which are close to the ideal version of it: about as fair, neutral, objective, equal opportunity, etc., as human societies can hope to achieve.
Your argument seems to be that people who don't win in actual meritocracy are hungry for excuses for why they should have won, and would have, if not for having been the victim of some unfair injustice. They are also hungry for opportunities to still 'win' by underhanded means, by knocking rightful winners down and being put in their place, with a cover-story that everyone is socially obliged to support - that instead of identity-based bias and favoritism this is actually a 'correction' in the direction of the ideal.
My point is that you are framing this as an attack on 'liberalism', as if anyone actually cares about the political philosophical debate about values except for a tiny number of intellectuals. But actually, the attack is really on meritocracy, and whatever 'liberal' values serve to make things more meritocratic are just a kind of mere infrastructure that must be demolished to hurt the real enemy. When you blow up a bridge or a ball-bearing factory so the enemy cannot use it, you are obviously not fighting a "war on bridges" or a "war on ball bearings", but a war on the real enemy via the mechanism of undermining the basis of their capacity to thwart your objectives.
Now, it is true that no one wants to admit they are attacking meritocracy, and so they indulge in some bogus cover stories about how it is worth blowing up traditional 'liberal' norms because those norms were inherently bad. I can see how a lot of people who were not in on the inside joke would thus never get the joke and thus start taking these positions seriously, especially in subsequent generations who never hear a word of disagreement about it, because disagreement gets crushed.
Still, while some of these people may be genuinely and self-consciously illiberals as an ideological matter, I think most of these folks are only consciously or subconsciously going along with it to the extent that it furthers their own interests in overcoming the obstacles that meritocracy places in the path of the furtherance of their interests.
Are SJWs and SJW-adjacent professionals really illiberal, or are they simply more effective at using the existing tools of liberalism to outcompete their rivals? Under liberalism, social competition is sublimated to the courtroom, the boardroom, the legislature, and the banking house. Glory through combat is mostly forbidden and considered déclassé.
SJWs may oppose many components of the neoliberal agenda per se, but so did many archliberals: for most of the 19th century, the US ran tariffs of around 30%, while during the same time, Victorian Britain ran tariffs more like 5%. The line between liberal and illiberal is not really decided by something like neoliberal trade vs. List/Hamiltonomics, in the same way that liberal vs. illiberal is not determined by the presence of an income tax versus no income tax. Middle America is liberal: they are mostly disputing issues of internal structure and foreign policy rather than crying out to restore the Stuarts.
Being pressured by overeducated sans-culottes to forsake important meritocratic values is a battle within liberalism. Trying to define it as illiberal vs. liberal is the same sort of error as defining the Cold War as a fight between the liberal US versus the illiberal USSR. The Cold War was a struggle for the future of liberalism.
With the meritocracy stuff, the defense just didn't show up to fight and just immediately surrendered to Big Brother internally, like the meme with the dude who puts the stick in his own bike tire and then says "illiberalism did this." Nah man, they just didn't defend themselves and what happens when you don't defend yourself is you get killed by someone who wants to get rid of you. It's a lot like when someone gets a default judgment against them and doesn't realize what that means. If you don't show up, you lose.
The attack on liberal values by the illiberal left is far more dangerous, as you write, than criticism towards the elites expressed by the illiberal right. The illiberal left is revolutionary, the illiberal right is reformist. Do you entertain the possibility of an alliance between the liberal meritocracy and the illiberal right? Is this not the synthesis that Peter Thiel and his circle are pursuing?
Social justice as I understand it is a core liberal value. That any society has an obligation to take care of the disadvantaged and any individual capable of helping the less fortunate should do so. For example, the Child Tax Credit/Allowance is a form of social justice that is consistent with liberal values.
I object to your use of "social justice" in your post. I think it's a misleading phrase and does not express what you are trying to say.
This is particularly interesting in light of recent news that Harvard seems to have joined the UC system in no longer requiring SAT's.
Arnold, I'd be curious on your thoughts with respect to the consequences of that change.
My guess is it will undoubtedly be used to change the nature of students admitted to "elite" institutions and is perhaps tied to law suits alleging discrimination against Asians. I suspect that the average raw intellectual power of students at these institutions is going to plummet if this policy is kept in place as it will be used to accept not the most intellectually talented, but the most socially preferred (legacy, etc).
Will this over sufficient time lead to destruction in prestige of these universities? (Perhaps top tech/finance firms will no longer focus recruiting at these institutions as heavily?)
Will this lead to market opportunities for MIT/Caltech and or new institutions (U Austin?) that perhaps may more explicitly select for top academic students?
Re: "People flourish in liberal societies. We have achieved material and moral progress." Liberal societies have achieved moral progress by embracing ethical individualism, but they also have come to undermine ethics of individual responsibility by indulging a culture of social and psychological excuses for self-defeating behaviors.
Re: "people who are not satisfied with their status under the liberal-values game are trying to change the rules in order to gain status for themselves." A puzzle: Why do many successful people, who enjoy high status under the liberal-values game, want to change the rules in favor of those who aren't satisfied with their status under the liberal-values game? Perhaps they are confident that they themselves would succeed in any game, thanks to their high smarts, drive, and emotional intelligence?
One would think many people reflect on social justice issues because the recognition of their privileged status is valuable in an intellectual and interior way, rather than as a weapon to amass more status.
I pretty much agree although I don't see the need for a meta opinion or whether right illiberalism is worse than left illiberalism). I will point out that, "they started it." :) Republicand appealing to social conservative arguments -- crime drugs, terrorism, same-sex marriage, abortion, immigration [a caricature version of each issue, to be sure] -- to oppose Democrats tax and transfer policies.
As demonstrated in several of the comments to it so far, the main issue with this post is use of the ruined term 'liberal'. A lot of the people you might categorize as illiberal public intellectuals would not agree that many of your characterizations of liberal values do not describe their own too.
It seems to me that when you talk about 'the liberal game' you actually mean something closer to simple 'meritocracy', which is a lot more politically neutral-sounding, but with the implication that the 'liberal' society produces results which are close to the ideal version of it: about as fair, neutral, objective, equal opportunity, etc., as human societies can hope to achieve.
Your argument seems to be that people who don't win in actual meritocracy are hungry for excuses for why they should have won, and would have, if not for having been the victim of some unfair injustice. They are also hungry for opportunities to still 'win' by underhanded means, by knocking rightful winners down and being put in their place, with a cover-story that everyone is socially obliged to support - that instead of identity-based bias and favoritism this is actually a 'correction' in the direction of the ideal.
My point is that you are framing this as an attack on 'liberalism', as if anyone actually cares about the political philosophical debate about values except for a tiny number of intellectuals. But actually, the attack is really on meritocracy, and whatever 'liberal' values serve to make things more meritocratic are just a kind of mere infrastructure that must be demolished to hurt the real enemy. When you blow up a bridge or a ball-bearing factory so the enemy cannot use it, you are obviously not fighting a "war on bridges" or a "war on ball bearings", but a war on the real enemy via the mechanism of undermining the basis of their capacity to thwart your objectives.
Now, it is true that no one wants to admit they are attacking meritocracy, and so they indulge in some bogus cover stories about how it is worth blowing up traditional 'liberal' norms because those norms were inherently bad. I can see how a lot of people who were not in on the inside joke would thus never get the joke and thus start taking these positions seriously, especially in subsequent generations who never hear a word of disagreement about it, because disagreement gets crushed.
Still, while some of these people may be genuinely and self-consciously illiberals as an ideological matter, I think most of these folks are only consciously or subconsciously going along with it to the extent that it furthers their own interests in overcoming the obstacles that meritocracy places in the path of the furtherance of their interests.
Are SJWs and SJW-adjacent professionals really illiberal, or are they simply more effective at using the existing tools of liberalism to outcompete their rivals? Under liberalism, social competition is sublimated to the courtroom, the boardroom, the legislature, and the banking house. Glory through combat is mostly forbidden and considered déclassé.
SJWs may oppose many components of the neoliberal agenda per se, but so did many archliberals: for most of the 19th century, the US ran tariffs of around 30%, while during the same time, Victorian Britain ran tariffs more like 5%. The line between liberal and illiberal is not really decided by something like neoliberal trade vs. List/Hamiltonomics, in the same way that liberal vs. illiberal is not determined by the presence of an income tax versus no income tax. Middle America is liberal: they are mostly disputing issues of internal structure and foreign policy rather than crying out to restore the Stuarts.
Being pressured by overeducated sans-culottes to forsake important meritocratic values is a battle within liberalism. Trying to define it as illiberal vs. liberal is the same sort of error as defining the Cold War as a fight between the liberal US versus the illiberal USSR. The Cold War was a struggle for the future of liberalism.
With the meritocracy stuff, the defense just didn't show up to fight and just immediately surrendered to Big Brother internally, like the meme with the dude who puts the stick in his own bike tire and then says "illiberalism did this." Nah man, they just didn't defend themselves and what happens when you don't defend yourself is you get killed by someone who wants to get rid of you. It's a lot like when someone gets a default judgment against them and doesn't realize what that means. If you don't show up, you lose.
The attack on liberal values by the illiberal left is far more dangerous, as you write, than criticism towards the elites expressed by the illiberal right. The illiberal left is revolutionary, the illiberal right is reformist. Do you entertain the possibility of an alliance between the liberal meritocracy and the illiberal right? Is this not the synthesis that Peter Thiel and his circle are pursuing?
Social justice as I understand it is a core liberal value. That any society has an obligation to take care of the disadvantaged and any individual capable of helping the less fortunate should do so. For example, the Child Tax Credit/Allowance is a form of social justice that is consistent with liberal values.
I object to your use of "social justice" in your post. I think it's a misleading phrase and does not express what you are trying to say.
This is particularly interesting in light of recent news that Harvard seems to have joined the UC system in no longer requiring SAT's.
Arnold, I'd be curious on your thoughts with respect to the consequences of that change.
My guess is it will undoubtedly be used to change the nature of students admitted to "elite" institutions and is perhaps tied to law suits alleging discrimination against Asians. I suspect that the average raw intellectual power of students at these institutions is going to plummet if this policy is kept in place as it will be used to accept not the most intellectually talented, but the most socially preferred (legacy, etc).
Will this over sufficient time lead to destruction in prestige of these universities? (Perhaps top tech/finance firms will no longer focus recruiting at these institutions as heavily?)
Will this lead to market opportunities for MIT/Caltech and or new institutions (U Austin?) that perhaps may more explicitly select for top academic students?
An observation and a question:
Re: "People flourish in liberal societies. We have achieved material and moral progress." Liberal societies have achieved moral progress by embracing ethical individualism, but they also have come to undermine ethics of individual responsibility by indulging a culture of social and psychological excuses for self-defeating behaviors.
Re: "people who are not satisfied with their status under the liberal-values game are trying to change the rules in order to gain status for themselves." A puzzle: Why do many successful people, who enjoy high status under the liberal-values game, want to change the rules in favor of those who aren't satisfied with their status under the liberal-values game? Perhaps they are confident that they themselves would succeed in any game, thanks to their high smarts, drive, and emotional intelligence?
One would think many people reflect on social justice issues because the recognition of their privileged status is valuable in an intellectual and interior way, rather than as a weapon to amass more status.
I pretty much agree although I don't see the need for a meta opinion or whether right illiberalism is worse than left illiberalism). I will point out that, "they started it." :) Republicand appealing to social conservative arguments -- crime drugs, terrorism, same-sex marriage, abortion, immigration [a caricature version of each issue, to be sure] -- to oppose Democrats tax and transfer policies.