This is going to sound tautological, but liberalism is under attack because liberalism is under attack.
This is a pretty good descriptive definition of liberalism: "We use markets to determine who has economic resources. We use democracy to determine who has political power. And we use science to determine who has truth."
I don't believe many populist would attack these liberal principles. On the other hand, elites are and have been consistently pushing back the role of markets, democracy, and science and expanding alternative methods of distributing economic resources, controlling political discourse, and determining acceptable and operational truths.
Simply put, you have it backwards. Elites are systematically dismantling liberalism while maintaining its facade. This is the true attack on liberalism. Populists are attacking liberalism as ineffectual and a facade in reaction. But in practice, populists would largely be happy to return to liberalism in practice. And Elitists are happy to continue to destroy it.
I think you are largely correct, in that the elites (mostly the political sort) have been trying to erode liberty in favor of authoritarianism. They want power and control, along with the benefits that brings. Unfortunately the Marxist line of thought has got people convinced that they will use that power to improve everyone's lives, as opposed to using that power to control everyone's lives and extract what they will. Apparently we have been so long free of abusive unanswerable power that we have forgotten what that looks like, and why our ancestors fought so hard to be free of it in the first place.
As to the populists, I think they are a very mixed bunch. I have seen some very authoritarian populists, effectively the elite authoritarians with different colored shirts, and some very liberty focused populists. I agree though that most general people would be pretty happy to revert back to a standard liberalism.
I think on the democracy angle, the issue was that we used democracy to determine what political power would exist and who would have it. As a result people seemed to vote fore "More, and for my guys" over and over. The early 20th century move towards unlimited democracy was a bad move.
I think you make to a very important point when you distinguish between the scope of politics (how much of life is controlled by politics) and method of political power (democratic voting).
I think the term "democracy" has always been problematic within liberalism because it focuses attention completely on method but not on scope. This is in reverse of the true relative importance. That is, WHAT is decided politically (as opposed to what's left to individual and market decisions) is much more important than HOW it's decided.
Democracy can mean everyone casting a vote on who gets to be absolute dictator. At the other extreme, it can mean everyone a minarchist order in which everyone largely governs themselves and votes are conducted to grant political power to a few who have expanded authority over a limited number of issues (not an absolute dictator who gets to decide what I can have for dinner).
My (controversial, I guess) position is that when we talk about liberal democracy, we are talking about something closer to the latter. There's an almost Orwellian mis-use of terminology here, because most of the movement toward "unlimited democracy" has, in fact, been a reduction in the scope of democracy.
Both the left and right founder on this point. Extreme right wing reactionaries will call letting women and minorities vote "unlimited democracy" and say it's to blame. Extreme left wingers will say that letting women and minorities vote is a triumph of democracy even as they drastically reduce the scope for personal autonomy (which is what we'd consider "true" democracy).
Indeed. Method is great and important, but I think in the early days people mistakenly believed the jealousies of power would mean scope would be self limited via the method. Who would think that people would vote for their state to have less power than the federal government, or that Congress would delegate so much power to the executive branch? Or that citizens would give so much of their autonomy away? Whoops.
The misuse of terms, both intentionally strategic and from ignorance, is a big problem. The very point of the Constitution, that the federal government is extremely limited in what it is allowed to do, is entirely lost on people, who want unlimited government scope to deal with whatever issues raise the "there ought to be a law" flag in their brains. I think part of the problem is that most political thinkers haven't wanted to spend much time thinking about what the government should be allowed to do, instead spending time thinking about how it should do whatever the people decide it should do. That is, thinking about what the government should consider its scope, and why, is less sexy to most people than why the government should do all the things they want it to do.
I don't know, I have been extremely frustrated with people on the right lately on this point, so maybe it is making me hyper focus on it. It does seem to me that if you asked people, some very large majority would be absolutely fine with massive government scope and power, so long as the government promises to do with it whatever they like. Humans seem to have great difficulty considering "Wait... what if they don't? What do we do then?"
"The early 20th century move towards unlimited democracy was a bad move."
It was the end of our hope for Liberty. Wilson's unilateral (and unconstitutional) move to declare the 16th and 17th Amendments "ratified" despite lacking the Constitutionally required documentation literally inverted our Constitution from a document of tightly constrained powers of taxation and spending to virtually unlimited taxation and spending - with no oversight by the States in the form of Senators accountable to State legislatures.
The notion that allowing every adult to vote (including those who are not self-sufficient) will result in superior representation in Congress is equivalent to the theory that it is possible to pick up a turd by the"clean end."
It's challenging to define "liberalism" because liberalism is itself a definitional battlefield. The different liberal factions each claim different constructions of the term. So, it is ambiguous.
>True liberalism is not a natural belief system. The natural belief system is “freedom for me, but not for thee.” People easily succumb to Fear Of Others’ Liberty (FOOL). In America, the high status of our Founding Fathers, who held liberal beliefs, helped us to stave off the FOOLs.
Correct; and I think this FOOL issue requires some unpacking because I don't think that it is entirely irrational. If you perceive that other people are going to use their political liberty to take away your political liberty, your FOOL is rational. Another issue is that there are multiple kinds of liberty, but we tend to use the word interchangeably. If you see it as national liberty (freedom of my nation from external domination), individual liberty (my personal freedom to do as I wish), political liberty (my freedom to control my affairs through the political process), and so on, then many debates start to look like fights over what kinds of tradeoffs between liberties we are going to get.
For example, a fan of late-19th century American liberalism might not see a contradiction in saying that his liberalism requires absolute freedom of contract, but is less doctrinaire on free trade. An early 20th century liberal will say that free trade is essential, but that freedom of contract should be malleable, and that a good modern liberal understands that the state must step in to even the scales when it comes to contracts. A post-1960s liberal would tend to see freedom of contract as an anachronism, is pro-free trade on utilitarian grounds, and sees absolute individual freedom when it comes to media consumption and expression as completely sacrosanct. A post-2015 liberal is against free markets, against free speech, is pro aggressive nuclear war, anti-industrialization, but utterly committed to absolute sexual and pharmacological freedom without restraints.
An archaic liberal from the 18th century will be somewhat baffled on the issue of contract because modern contract law did not exist then, but many of them would at least tolerate slavery, with radicals gesturing towards a day when it might no longer be needed (like even Aristotle did). There's a lot that can be said on this topic beyond the reasonable scope of a comment.
"It's challenging to define "liberalism" because liberalism is itself a definitional battlefield."
Ding ding ding!
Actually, REAL (Classical) Liberalism is well defined and internally consistent. It is the one and only theory of Liberty and individual rights; the only path to an emotionally and psychologically healthy win-win society.
Faux liberalism, fabricated by Marxists around 1900 as a regurgitation of Marx, named "social liberalism," and touted as "the next evolution of Liberalism!" as a propaganda campaign to give Marxists a way to hide in society, is literally the antithesis of real Liberalism.
"Why now? What is it about 21st-century America that finds liberalism threatened?"
I want to craft an elegant story about social technologies and changes in the construal level (psychological distance) affecting the existing systems. How much was upheaval in the past dependent on the new technology and its intersection with social interactions and relations. Radio, Trains, Cars, TV, etc. One reads a book like 1848 and the army moves in a matter of days by train. The news travels equally fast or faster over thousands of miles. How much did radio and other inventions contribute to the Nazis and the rise of Fascism, likewise FDR's popularity and electoral success. Smart phones and social media and the Revolt of the Public are well worn topics on this newsletter/blog. Never has a conspiracy been easier to coordinate and never has a conspiracy been easier to expose. The socially lubricated coordination of every variant of FOOL has never been greater.
On the other hand I am rereading Sowell's A Conflict of Visions right now and it seems as if every third page has a block of text that would apply to the New Right as they were posted about yesterday. The New Right may be on net more constrained than the Social Justice Warriors marching off to War, but such is often the case with the hybrid vision and the right is not so constrained when they are looking to a past that is distant enough in history to be beyond most, if not all, persons lifetimes and wanting to tear down constraints on them bringing their vision to bear and crushing their enemies, constraints like separation of church and state. We have dueling hybrid visions both containing unconstrained portions, different in unconstrained degree, but in the end not different in kind. This lends itself to the simpler answer as stated, "The natural belief system is “freedom for me, but not for thee.”" Folk marxism is the default and will need to be guarded against and constrained ad infinitum.
Principles do not change. Real (Classical) Liberalism (i.e. Sowell) is actually on the rise; faux liberalism (leftist "social liberalism," the antithesis of real Liberalism) is on the decline - and thank goodness. Perhaps there is still hope for Liberty.
The Founding Fathers of our nation wouldn’t be too surprised to see their liberal order in decay today. Benjamin Franklin called it “a republic ... if you can keep it” and said “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Liberalism can only survive if protected by a second principle - “virtue” for Franklin or “wisdom” for Leo Strauss.
I’m not saying that people today are less virtuous or wise, but it is true that elites are no longer operating in a culture where they will be punished for deviations from norms of virtue and wisdom (See also Trump, Donald). Politics is downstream of culture, and we have a culture problem.
The dominant cultural force that enforced norms of virtue / wisdom is Christianity. I know no one wants to go there but it is true. Liberalism arose from Christian assumptions, and is declining on the heels of a decline of the Christian worldview. That’s not to say that Christians themselves always support liberalism, but rather that the prerequisite for liberalism is the pervasive presence of Christian assumptions in culture or in “the air we breath.” Christianity declined first among the elites and the Left (starting in the 19th century or even before) which allowed anti-Christian Marxist ideas to gain a foothold in the 20th Century. The further and broader decay of Christianity since then has only meant further erosion of the support structure for liberalism.
Christian principles arose from thousands of years of pragmatism, bolstered by the Socratic method. The principles of Classical (REAL) Liberalism are independent of religion and can be derived logically from simply observing the universe.
Christ was murdered because he posed a threat to the power of the priesthood (Pharisis). His teachings included a message that the people did not need priests to "interpret the will of God" for them - they could read the words for themselves and "church" (the original word was a verb meaning "the coming together of two or more people in the spirit of God") anywhere at all. Generations of rabbis saw their future disappearing should this interpretation gain widespread acceptance, and so they pressured Pontius Pilate to have him put to death.
It's all about power.
The Roman Catholic Church was a direct backlash to / abomination of Christ's words, culminating in the Inquisition (reestablishment of the unlimited power of the clergy).
Spiritual seeking is a worthy personal goal. Organized religion is inevitably a power-seeking self-serving entity.
The Church was fully corrupt, but the power of Christianity wasn’t in its hierarchy but in its doctrine. It was the image of a God who, rather than bask in His superiority over subservient mortals, became mortal Himself and sacrificed Himself for His people. The image of man and woman, senator and slave, Jew and Samaritan, as loved children of God, no one class or tribe greater than the other. The image of Christ, the greatest of all, washing the apostles feet. The widow’s mite. The admonition to turn the other cheek. He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. This all flipped the scrip from the old way of seeing the world and led to a unique society and culture. It didn’t happen all at once, but over time.
Putting aside the fact that, out of all the societies that have existed, real liberalism only ever arose in the Christian one, could liberalism hypothetically have arisen in a non-Christian culture? I wouldn’t take it for granted. The philosophical/religious assumptions that prop up liberalism (for example, “men are by nature all free, equal, and independent”) are non-obvious and cut against the grain of human nature. That this view has become dominant in all its implications should be considered a very special coincidence for those that don’t believe in the hand of providence.
"Putting aside the fact that, out of all the societies that have existed, real liberalism only ever arose in the Christian one,..."
When you start from a false assumption, the very best you can ever hope for is to be "accidentally correct." You aren't that lucky. Many of the principles of Classical Liberalism arose from ancient Greece, which predated Christianity. Reason doesn't have a preferred religion.
Ok, I see what you mean. For me, liberalism starts at “men are by nature all free, equal, and independent,” which I think was a unique and revolutionary output of Christian society. But certainly many of the other foundational pillars like rule of law, democracy, and protections of citizens against government tyranny didn’t depend on Christian assumptions.
And the dinosaur in the room gets ignored? What revolution did we go through in the past 60 years? We had a gigantic demographic chance from women mostly raising children to women mostly working in the public spere. Liberalism has clearly been taken over by young women that are too long educated. Not only taken over, they've significantly changed to address their neurosis. Most of the issues of today have a direct lineage to the feminisation of society. And it is not even mentioned?
> What we are experiencing is not an outbreak of spontaneous chaos and collapse, but the unwelcome imposition from above of a solidifying order of control, cold as iron and heartless as ice. This order is driven by a quiet fury at existence that our own civilization has birthed, and it is intent on replacing our organic reality with a new, managed regime in which everything will be subject to its surveillance and control and ordered to its will. But of course this order cannot be true order at all – for it bears no accordance with Truth – but only an order false, twisted, and terrible, which must necessarily superimpose itself on true reality by force. It is a tyranny in the truest sense; chaos all over again, but dressed up in robes of false and illegitimate authority. And so, unsurprisingly, wherever this false order’s cold, unliving hand grasps the earth, there disorder, decay, and a sick absurdity grow unchecked.
In Howard County Maryland the quality of schools has been declining. What was once one of the best public school districts in the nation has been corrupted by DEI ideology. Kids are undisciplined - because discipline in unequitable - and so the bottom half of students are doing far worse (the better students always succeed because they have a home and attitudes that allow success despite distractions).
In any case, this decline of quality is accepted and excused away. Everyone is trying! Results don't show how hard we are trying! Such is the corrosive nature of DEI ideology.
At the beginning of this school year the school district's bus system horrendously failed. Buses were horribly late or never arrived to take kids to school or pick them up. This is a scandal people care about! The COO of the school district has been fired. How dare you not get the buses to show up on time!
The COO deserved to be fired. The person is either incompetent or unprepared for the job. But the Superintendent and school administrators should also be fired. The failure of kids to learn basic Math & English matters far more than failed bus transportation. But missed bus routes are an easy identifiable target and so that is the problem that gets everyone excited. That the schools are failing to educate children is just "bad luck".
The conceptual error here is that it is somehow not 'liberalism' to use state power in the ways essential to the preservation of liberalism.
Liberalism has two levels, and that higher level needs different thinking, rules, and authorities.
Thinking liberalism required both levels of game to be played by the same rules was a common big mistake that ended predictably in disaster.
There is no liberal way to raise the status of liberals and liberalism, when the status-raising institutions are controlled jealously by non-liberals without any such constraining qualms regarding ends and means.
In much the same way that you cannot beat your armed opponent into agreeing to fight by the Queensbury rules, by yourself following Queensbury rules, when he won't.
Unless you are lucky enough to be 100x stronger, which you can sustain for a limited time, but not forever, until the very point when your opponent can call you a beautiful loser and chump. Which is what happened.
The meta-level rules for "protecting the rules of the game" must necessarily be different from the object level "rules of the game" because the stakes are so much higher.
It's easy to criticize "new right" but for better or worse "use state power" is at least a plan, whereas "we need to raise the status of ... " is underpants gnomes wishful thinking and also implicitly accepting the demise of liberalism if the alternative would require playing hardball.
Rise of the Midwit FOOLs is a side effect of mass affluence, universities' loss of truth as their telos, and the general breakdown of institutions. #1 example is Elon Musk, "anti-war activist" and "free speech advocate".
I too am skeptical of "the solutions proposed by the New Right". They are too keen to pin 21st c. liberalism's malaise on things that sound rather like conspiracy theories - 'Marxist intellectuals' and 'managerial elites' - rather than acknowledge the complexity of things. How, as you say, "liberalism is not a natural belief system" and hence the (largely unwitting) complicity of millions in undermining it. (I have made this very same point several times on Christopher Rufo's Substack and, judging by the response, a very lot of people agree).
But I take issue with you on "But Torenberg’s account will do."..."We use democracy to determine who has political power". Not so...or not anymore. The tripartite 'separation of powers' was a great idea in its time but various 20/21st c. developments - mass communications technology and bureaucratised public 'education' have rendered it no longer viable. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
- can't build homes because of NIMBYs (local homeowners wield too much political power over distributing land, an economic resource)
- cancel culture means your politics determines my ability to keep my job (an economic resource)
- large companies can lobby and get tax breaks or bailouts whereas small businesses can't use politics as effectively to gain economic resources. The ROI from using politics increases as firm size and concentration increases
An underexplored strand to me is materialism. We are materialist to an almost comical degree, if there weren't things at stake other than ourselves. And we celebrate materialism in immigrants and select for only that. ("Select"! Ha.) A friend of mine who likes air-conditioned walking and people-watching did her "mall walk" in her town yesterday. She texted me that she felt very safe because there were armed guards swarming over the mall. She hadn't seen that before. I don't know if this was because of the whole shoplifting flash mob thing, or because there was somebody stabby there recently. She then texted that she had just passed a store called "King of Bling" in case I needed to give anyone a gift. /s We decided the problem with the mall is that Amazon killed it, or maybe big box stores even before that; not to mention ultra-"fast fashion" from Asia (itself well-represented at the mall with a store of its own, "Everything $7", the sign in homemade letters).
The American shopping mall was once a cheery place, as evidenced by the fact that movies used to often stage scenes therein.
She became increasingly depressed and I don't think she'll mall walk anymore.
But what I didn't say to her is that the demographic the mall must now court with the middle class having fled, is the same demographic most likely to steal from it, and/or to be settling beefs on its premises. (To be fair I think the recent stabber was just crazy or high.)
I expect most commenters here are concerned about law and order, quite naturally, despite their libertarian leanings. They are concerned for the owners of threatened businesses, be they Walmart or Nordstrom or Foot Locker or Prada or Homegoods (! - yes, that happened in the selfsame town the other day, the whole loaded shopping carts business; and for foreign readers, well - I don't know how to analogize it - but just assume it's pathetic* anyone would want to either pay for or steal things from Homegoods).
The conservative recognizes that culture is already thoroughly degraded by the outsized role things like handbags and shoes and electronics have been permitted in our national life, as objects of worship (along of course with drugs). There has been a failure to parent. No, I don't refer to a failure to parent among the underclass - I mean a failure of paternalism toward the underclass, which abdication of responsibility has now gone so far that combined with the erosion of other values once held by the elite, even the ability to hold onto the idea of positive value, the attitudes and values of the underclass - who suffer no such neurosis or what-have-you - have attained almost-total cachet, before which all else recedes. This is exacerbated by their being the ones who have the babies, obviously, and the only ones who are urged to have babies.
Maybe everybody used to have to moderate their desires, hold them up for comparison to those of others - ironically, because I'm pretty sure people now *believe* they are more open to experience. They do all that air travel. I think they also think they are less concerned with material things "because they don't want/need gifts".**
There was more that was shared back and forth between classes - the history of 20th century music is basically this - rather than unidirectionally toward whatever is low. Bob Dylan in his recent book made a point about how, to listen to the hot new music - you used to have to sit through everything else that was on the e.g. Jack Paar show that night. Because it was the shared mainstream TV show!
People feel like they've won somehow, when they find their little niche of interests. Look what I learned on Youtube! Let me tell you about this cool new show or recording. Some might even say the "music is better than ever" (in their little niche, that no one else has ever heard of, and that will never be played over a grocery store speaker). But the larger culture is only a tale of loss, and crudeness and idiocy - masked, always, by our material comfort. Which materialism even the right leans on, all the time, to deflect from discussion of serious things.
*I never claimed to be a populist.
**I remember thinking when gift-free children's parties became a thing, it was a sign that people had so much, and gave their children so much, on a regular basis - that gifts could no longer hold any value, not even the value of "I thought about you in getting this". A photo shows my mother's wedding gifts laid out on cloth-lined tables in their living room, for friends [her mother's friends, most of all] to view. How embarrassing, I used to think. How 50s! How thoroughly aspiringly middle class. A stupid person (which I am exactly half the time) looks at that and sees materialism. Everything on those tables meant a lot to people who rarely ever bought anything, for themselves least of all, and rarely threw anything away or replaced anything that could be fixed.
"human potential is being squandered on a massive scale" => This seems an awful lot like the justifications provided by Communism and Nazism for creating dictatorships that would give birth to a new man, a man capable of achieving his full potential...
I increasingly see the left’s goal as authoritarianism and they moving steadily in that direction. Elections at the local level are conducted to minimize turnout, and maximize government employees’ influence. Hardly democratic. The takeover of education and libraries is well documented. No library carries every book, but if a library does not carry the books leftists want, the library “bans”. books. Censorship is a near constant. Financial black lists are a reality. The 2020 election and the propaganda of the American government was kgb worthy. The media - all media not just “news” - is a propaganda arm for leftists. It is well past time to stop viewing disagreements with leftists as a opportunity to have an discussion. Leftists goals are subjugation, they are dangerous.
This is all important but it feels like something is missing. Were most Americans truly more autonomous in the 1950s than today? And in areas where autonomy has diminished, how much is attributable to DEI or government bureaucracy? A small business owner likely chafes under bureaucratic rules, but most Americans? It seems like there's a combo of deeper discontent mixed with a blinkered salience mechanism.
Most folk sort of think "democracy" is the same as "human rights", but they're each different. Most want human rights, either with or without democracy, but have noticed that democracies are usually far better on human rights, both personal & social/ economic, as well as freedom.
The freedom to disagree is among the most important freedoms.
"Why are free institutions under assault?"
Because, starting with colleges around ... 1972 (with Roe! and Nixon's huge landslide election), academia has been illegally discriminating against hiring Republicans.
Since other discrimination was illegal AND the illegality was enforced, the secret discrimination was allowed, and has metasized like a cancer. This assault by college "liberals", in "free" institutions has:
1) made the colleges, K-12 schools, media, government, and most college grad "managerial elite" of business orgs be inside institutions that are NOT free, and
2) Since they are not free, their current structure should be reformed, which requires some kind of assault, with many thinking it better for the org to be dismantled rather than have a failed reform.
Moving the Overton Window to include discussion of ending some orgs should also make it better to reform them into once again being free institutions; and AFTER that, we should stop assault/ calls for more reform.
This is going to sound tautological, but liberalism is under attack because liberalism is under attack.
This is a pretty good descriptive definition of liberalism: "We use markets to determine who has economic resources. We use democracy to determine who has political power. And we use science to determine who has truth."
I don't believe many populist would attack these liberal principles. On the other hand, elites are and have been consistently pushing back the role of markets, democracy, and science and expanding alternative methods of distributing economic resources, controlling political discourse, and determining acceptable and operational truths.
Simply put, you have it backwards. Elites are systematically dismantling liberalism while maintaining its facade. This is the true attack on liberalism. Populists are attacking liberalism as ineffectual and a facade in reaction. But in practice, populists would largely be happy to return to liberalism in practice. And Elitists are happy to continue to destroy it.
I think you are largely correct, in that the elites (mostly the political sort) have been trying to erode liberty in favor of authoritarianism. They want power and control, along with the benefits that brings. Unfortunately the Marxist line of thought has got people convinced that they will use that power to improve everyone's lives, as opposed to using that power to control everyone's lives and extract what they will. Apparently we have been so long free of abusive unanswerable power that we have forgotten what that looks like, and why our ancestors fought so hard to be free of it in the first place.
As to the populists, I think they are a very mixed bunch. I have seen some very authoritarian populists, effectively the elite authoritarians with different colored shirts, and some very liberty focused populists. I agree though that most general people would be pretty happy to revert back to a standard liberalism.
I think on the democracy angle, the issue was that we used democracy to determine what political power would exist and who would have it. As a result people seemed to vote fore "More, and for my guys" over and over. The early 20th century move towards unlimited democracy was a bad move.
I think you make to a very important point when you distinguish between the scope of politics (how much of life is controlled by politics) and method of political power (democratic voting).
I think the term "democracy" has always been problematic within liberalism because it focuses attention completely on method but not on scope. This is in reverse of the true relative importance. That is, WHAT is decided politically (as opposed to what's left to individual and market decisions) is much more important than HOW it's decided.
Democracy can mean everyone casting a vote on who gets to be absolute dictator. At the other extreme, it can mean everyone a minarchist order in which everyone largely governs themselves and votes are conducted to grant political power to a few who have expanded authority over a limited number of issues (not an absolute dictator who gets to decide what I can have for dinner).
My (controversial, I guess) position is that when we talk about liberal democracy, we are talking about something closer to the latter. There's an almost Orwellian mis-use of terminology here, because most of the movement toward "unlimited democracy" has, in fact, been a reduction in the scope of democracy.
Both the left and right founder on this point. Extreme right wing reactionaries will call letting women and minorities vote "unlimited democracy" and say it's to blame. Extreme left wingers will say that letting women and minorities vote is a triumph of democracy even as they drastically reduce the scope for personal autonomy (which is what we'd consider "true" democracy).
Indeed. Method is great and important, but I think in the early days people mistakenly believed the jealousies of power would mean scope would be self limited via the method. Who would think that people would vote for their state to have less power than the federal government, or that Congress would delegate so much power to the executive branch? Or that citizens would give so much of their autonomy away? Whoops.
The misuse of terms, both intentionally strategic and from ignorance, is a big problem. The very point of the Constitution, that the federal government is extremely limited in what it is allowed to do, is entirely lost on people, who want unlimited government scope to deal with whatever issues raise the "there ought to be a law" flag in their brains. I think part of the problem is that most political thinkers haven't wanted to spend much time thinking about what the government should be allowed to do, instead spending time thinking about how it should do whatever the people decide it should do. That is, thinking about what the government should consider its scope, and why, is less sexy to most people than why the government should do all the things they want it to do.
I don't know, I have been extremely frustrated with people on the right lately on this point, so maybe it is making me hyper focus on it. It does seem to me that if you asked people, some very large majority would be absolutely fine with massive government scope and power, so long as the government promises to do with it whatever they like. Humans seem to have great difficulty considering "Wait... what if they don't? What do we do then?"
"The early 20th century move towards unlimited democracy was a bad move."
It was the end of our hope for Liberty. Wilson's unilateral (and unconstitutional) move to declare the 16th and 17th Amendments "ratified" despite lacking the Constitutionally required documentation literally inverted our Constitution from a document of tightly constrained powers of taxation and spending to virtually unlimited taxation and spending - with no oversight by the States in the form of Senators accountable to State legislatures.
The notion that allowing every adult to vote (including those who are not self-sufficient) will result in superior representation in Congress is equivalent to the theory that it is possible to pick up a turd by the"clean end."
See my adjacent post. The confusion is intentional; leftists are actually the antithesis of real (Classical) Liberalism.
Liberalism is just fine. Leftism is declining.
It's challenging to define "liberalism" because liberalism is itself a definitional battlefield. The different liberal factions each claim different constructions of the term. So, it is ambiguous.
>True liberalism is not a natural belief system. The natural belief system is “freedom for me, but not for thee.” People easily succumb to Fear Of Others’ Liberty (FOOL). In America, the high status of our Founding Fathers, who held liberal beliefs, helped us to stave off the FOOLs.
Correct; and I think this FOOL issue requires some unpacking because I don't think that it is entirely irrational. If you perceive that other people are going to use their political liberty to take away your political liberty, your FOOL is rational. Another issue is that there are multiple kinds of liberty, but we tend to use the word interchangeably. If you see it as national liberty (freedom of my nation from external domination), individual liberty (my personal freedom to do as I wish), political liberty (my freedom to control my affairs through the political process), and so on, then many debates start to look like fights over what kinds of tradeoffs between liberties we are going to get.
For example, a fan of late-19th century American liberalism might not see a contradiction in saying that his liberalism requires absolute freedom of contract, but is less doctrinaire on free trade. An early 20th century liberal will say that free trade is essential, but that freedom of contract should be malleable, and that a good modern liberal understands that the state must step in to even the scales when it comes to contracts. A post-1960s liberal would tend to see freedom of contract as an anachronism, is pro-free trade on utilitarian grounds, and sees absolute individual freedom when it comes to media consumption and expression as completely sacrosanct. A post-2015 liberal is against free markets, against free speech, is pro aggressive nuclear war, anti-industrialization, but utterly committed to absolute sexual and pharmacological freedom without restraints.
An archaic liberal from the 18th century will be somewhat baffled on the issue of contract because modern contract law did not exist then, but many of them would at least tolerate slavery, with radicals gesturing towards a day when it might no longer be needed (like even Aristotle did). There's a lot that can be said on this topic beyond the reasonable scope of a comment.
"It's challenging to define "liberalism" because liberalism is itself a definitional battlefield."
Ding ding ding!
Actually, REAL (Classical) Liberalism is well defined and internally consistent. It is the one and only theory of Liberty and individual rights; the only path to an emotionally and psychologically healthy win-win society.
Faux liberalism, fabricated by Marxists around 1900 as a regurgitation of Marx, named "social liberalism," and touted as "the next evolution of Liberalism!" as a propaganda campaign to give Marxists a way to hide in society, is literally the antithesis of real Liberalism.
"Why now? What is it about 21st-century America that finds liberalism threatened?"
I want to craft an elegant story about social technologies and changes in the construal level (psychological distance) affecting the existing systems. How much was upheaval in the past dependent on the new technology and its intersection with social interactions and relations. Radio, Trains, Cars, TV, etc. One reads a book like 1848 and the army moves in a matter of days by train. The news travels equally fast or faster over thousands of miles. How much did radio and other inventions contribute to the Nazis and the rise of Fascism, likewise FDR's popularity and electoral success. Smart phones and social media and the Revolt of the Public are well worn topics on this newsletter/blog. Never has a conspiracy been easier to coordinate and never has a conspiracy been easier to expose. The socially lubricated coordination of every variant of FOOL has never been greater.
On the other hand I am rereading Sowell's A Conflict of Visions right now and it seems as if every third page has a block of text that would apply to the New Right as they were posted about yesterday. The New Right may be on net more constrained than the Social Justice Warriors marching off to War, but such is often the case with the hybrid vision and the right is not so constrained when they are looking to a past that is distant enough in history to be beyond most, if not all, persons lifetimes and wanting to tear down constraints on them bringing their vision to bear and crushing their enemies, constraints like separation of church and state. We have dueling hybrid visions both containing unconstrained portions, different in unconstrained degree, but in the end not different in kind. This lends itself to the simpler answer as stated, "The natural belief system is “freedom for me, but not for thee.”" Folk marxism is the default and will need to be guarded against and constrained ad infinitum.
Principles do not change. Real (Classical) Liberalism (i.e. Sowell) is actually on the rise; faux liberalism (leftist "social liberalism," the antithesis of real Liberalism) is on the decline - and thank goodness. Perhaps there is still hope for Liberty.
The Founding Fathers of our nation wouldn’t be too surprised to see their liberal order in decay today. Benjamin Franklin called it “a republic ... if you can keep it” and said “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Liberalism can only survive if protected by a second principle - “virtue” for Franklin or “wisdom” for Leo Strauss.
I’m not saying that people today are less virtuous or wise, but it is true that elites are no longer operating in a culture where they will be punished for deviations from norms of virtue and wisdom (See also Trump, Donald). Politics is downstream of culture, and we have a culture problem.
The dominant cultural force that enforced norms of virtue / wisdom is Christianity. I know no one wants to go there but it is true. Liberalism arose from Christian assumptions, and is declining on the heels of a decline of the Christian worldview. That’s not to say that Christians themselves always support liberalism, but rather that the prerequisite for liberalism is the pervasive presence of Christian assumptions in culture or in “the air we breath.” Christianity declined first among the elites and the Left (starting in the 19th century or even before) which allowed anti-Christian Marxist ideas to gain a foothold in the 20th Century. The further and broader decay of Christianity since then has only meant further erosion of the support structure for liberalism.
Christian principles arose from thousands of years of pragmatism, bolstered by the Socratic method. The principles of Classical (REAL) Liberalism are independent of religion and can be derived logically from simply observing the universe.
Christ was murdered because he posed a threat to the power of the priesthood (Pharisis). His teachings included a message that the people did not need priests to "interpret the will of God" for them - they could read the words for themselves and "church" (the original word was a verb meaning "the coming together of two or more people in the spirit of God") anywhere at all. Generations of rabbis saw their future disappearing should this interpretation gain widespread acceptance, and so they pressured Pontius Pilate to have him put to death.
It's all about power.
The Roman Catholic Church was a direct backlash to / abomination of Christ's words, culminating in the Inquisition (reestablishment of the unlimited power of the clergy).
Spiritual seeking is a worthy personal goal. Organized religion is inevitably a power-seeking self-serving entity.
The Church was fully corrupt, but the power of Christianity wasn’t in its hierarchy but in its doctrine. It was the image of a God who, rather than bask in His superiority over subservient mortals, became mortal Himself and sacrificed Himself for His people. The image of man and woman, senator and slave, Jew and Samaritan, as loved children of God, no one class or tribe greater than the other. The image of Christ, the greatest of all, washing the apostles feet. The widow’s mite. The admonition to turn the other cheek. He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. This all flipped the scrip from the old way of seeing the world and led to a unique society and culture. It didn’t happen all at once, but over time.
Putting aside the fact that, out of all the societies that have existed, real liberalism only ever arose in the Christian one, could liberalism hypothetically have arisen in a non-Christian culture? I wouldn’t take it for granted. The philosophical/religious assumptions that prop up liberalism (for example, “men are by nature all free, equal, and independent”) are non-obvious and cut against the grain of human nature. That this view has become dominant in all its implications should be considered a very special coincidence for those that don’t believe in the hand of providence.
"Putting aside the fact that, out of all the societies that have existed, real liberalism only ever arose in the Christian one,..."
When you start from a false assumption, the very best you can ever hope for is to be "accidentally correct." You aren't that lucky. Many of the principles of Classical Liberalism arose from ancient Greece, which predated Christianity. Reason doesn't have a preferred religion.
Ok, I see what you mean. For me, liberalism starts at “men are by nature all free, equal, and independent,” which I think was a unique and revolutionary output of Christian society. But certainly many of the other foundational pillars like rule of law, democracy, and protections of citizens against government tyranny didn’t depend on Christian assumptions.
And the dinosaur in the room gets ignored? What revolution did we go through in the past 60 years? We had a gigantic demographic chance from women mostly raising children to women mostly working in the public spere. Liberalism has clearly been taken over by young women that are too long educated. Not only taken over, they've significantly changed to address their neurosis. Most of the issues of today have a direct lineage to the feminisation of society. And it is not even mentioned?
N. S. Lyons:
> What we are experiencing is not an outbreak of spontaneous chaos and collapse, but the unwelcome imposition from above of a solidifying order of control, cold as iron and heartless as ice. This order is driven by a quiet fury at existence that our own civilization has birthed, and it is intent on replacing our organic reality with a new, managed regime in which everything will be subject to its surveillance and control and ordered to its will. But of course this order cannot be true order at all – for it bears no accordance with Truth – but only an order false, twisted, and terrible, which must necessarily superimpose itself on true reality by force. It is a tyranny in the truest sense; chaos all over again, but dressed up in robes of false and illegitimate authority. And so, unsurprisingly, wherever this false order’s cold, unliving hand grasps the earth, there disorder, decay, and a sick absurdity grow unchecked.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/25-years-of-upheaval
In Howard County Maryland the quality of schools has been declining. What was once one of the best public school districts in the nation has been corrupted by DEI ideology. Kids are undisciplined - because discipline in unequitable - and so the bottom half of students are doing far worse (the better students always succeed because they have a home and attitudes that allow success despite distractions).
In any case, this decline of quality is accepted and excused away. Everyone is trying! Results don't show how hard we are trying! Such is the corrosive nature of DEI ideology.
At the beginning of this school year the school district's bus system horrendously failed. Buses were horribly late or never arrived to take kids to school or pick them up. This is a scandal people care about! The COO of the school district has been fired. How dare you not get the buses to show up on time!
The COO deserved to be fired. The person is either incompetent or unprepared for the job. But the Superintendent and school administrators should also be fired. The failure of kids to learn basic Math & English matters far more than failed bus transportation. But missed bus routes are an easy identifiable target and so that is the problem that gets everyone excited. That the schools are failing to educate children is just "bad luck".
The conceptual error here is that it is somehow not 'liberalism' to use state power in the ways essential to the preservation of liberalism.
Liberalism has two levels, and that higher level needs different thinking, rules, and authorities.
Thinking liberalism required both levels of game to be played by the same rules was a common big mistake that ended predictably in disaster.
There is no liberal way to raise the status of liberals and liberalism, when the status-raising institutions are controlled jealously by non-liberals without any such constraining qualms regarding ends and means.
In much the same way that you cannot beat your armed opponent into agreeing to fight by the Queensbury rules, by yourself following Queensbury rules, when he won't.
Unless you are lucky enough to be 100x stronger, which you can sustain for a limited time, but not forever, until the very point when your opponent can call you a beautiful loser and chump. Which is what happened.
The meta-level rules for "protecting the rules of the game" must necessarily be different from the object level "rules of the game" because the stakes are so much higher.
It's easy to criticize "new right" but for better or worse "use state power" is at least a plan, whereas "we need to raise the status of ... " is underpants gnomes wishful thinking and also implicitly accepting the demise of liberalism if the alternative would require playing hardball.
Rise of the Midwit FOOLs is a side effect of mass affluence, universities' loss of truth as their telos, and the general breakdown of institutions. #1 example is Elon Musk, "anti-war activist" and "free speech advocate".
I too am skeptical of "the solutions proposed by the New Right". They are too keen to pin 21st c. liberalism's malaise on things that sound rather like conspiracy theories - 'Marxist intellectuals' and 'managerial elites' - rather than acknowledge the complexity of things. How, as you say, "liberalism is not a natural belief system" and hence the (largely unwitting) complicity of millions in undermining it. (I have made this very same point several times on Christopher Rufo's Substack and, judging by the response, a very lot of people agree).
But I take issue with you on "But Torenberg’s account will do."..."We use democracy to determine who has political power". Not so...or not anymore. The tripartite 'separation of powers' was a great idea in its time but various 20/21st c. developments - mass communications technology and bureaucratised public 'education' have rendered it no longer viable. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
We are increasingly using politics - not markets - to determine who gets economic resources.
When politics determines economic success, the stakes in politics become much higher.
Examples:
- can't build homes because of NIMBYs (local homeowners wield too much political power over distributing land, an economic resource)
- cancel culture means your politics determines my ability to keep my job (an economic resource)
- large companies can lobby and get tax breaks or bailouts whereas small businesses can't use politics as effectively to gain economic resources. The ROI from using politics increases as firm size and concentration increases
An underexplored strand to me is materialism. We are materialist to an almost comical degree, if there weren't things at stake other than ourselves. And we celebrate materialism in immigrants and select for only that. ("Select"! Ha.) A friend of mine who likes air-conditioned walking and people-watching did her "mall walk" in her town yesterday. She texted me that she felt very safe because there were armed guards swarming over the mall. She hadn't seen that before. I don't know if this was because of the whole shoplifting flash mob thing, or because there was somebody stabby there recently. She then texted that she had just passed a store called "King of Bling" in case I needed to give anyone a gift. /s We decided the problem with the mall is that Amazon killed it, or maybe big box stores even before that; not to mention ultra-"fast fashion" from Asia (itself well-represented at the mall with a store of its own, "Everything $7", the sign in homemade letters).
The American shopping mall was once a cheery place, as evidenced by the fact that movies used to often stage scenes therein.
She became increasingly depressed and I don't think she'll mall walk anymore.
But what I didn't say to her is that the demographic the mall must now court with the middle class having fled, is the same demographic most likely to steal from it, and/or to be settling beefs on its premises. (To be fair I think the recent stabber was just crazy or high.)
I expect most commenters here are concerned about law and order, quite naturally, despite their libertarian leanings. They are concerned for the owners of threatened businesses, be they Walmart or Nordstrom or Foot Locker or Prada or Homegoods (! - yes, that happened in the selfsame town the other day, the whole loaded shopping carts business; and for foreign readers, well - I don't know how to analogize it - but just assume it's pathetic* anyone would want to either pay for or steal things from Homegoods).
The conservative recognizes that culture is already thoroughly degraded by the outsized role things like handbags and shoes and electronics have been permitted in our national life, as objects of worship (along of course with drugs). There has been a failure to parent. No, I don't refer to a failure to parent among the underclass - I mean a failure of paternalism toward the underclass, which abdication of responsibility has now gone so far that combined with the erosion of other values once held by the elite, even the ability to hold onto the idea of positive value, the attitudes and values of the underclass - who suffer no such neurosis or what-have-you - have attained almost-total cachet, before which all else recedes. This is exacerbated by their being the ones who have the babies, obviously, and the only ones who are urged to have babies.
Maybe everybody used to have to moderate their desires, hold them up for comparison to those of others - ironically, because I'm pretty sure people now *believe* they are more open to experience. They do all that air travel. I think they also think they are less concerned with material things "because they don't want/need gifts".**
There was more that was shared back and forth between classes - the history of 20th century music is basically this - rather than unidirectionally toward whatever is low. Bob Dylan in his recent book made a point about how, to listen to the hot new music - you used to have to sit through everything else that was on the e.g. Jack Paar show that night. Because it was the shared mainstream TV show!
People feel like they've won somehow, when they find their little niche of interests. Look what I learned on Youtube! Let me tell you about this cool new show or recording. Some might even say the "music is better than ever" (in their little niche, that no one else has ever heard of, and that will never be played over a grocery store speaker). But the larger culture is only a tale of loss, and crudeness and idiocy - masked, always, by our material comfort. Which materialism even the right leans on, all the time, to deflect from discussion of serious things.
*I never claimed to be a populist.
**I remember thinking when gift-free children's parties became a thing, it was a sign that people had so much, and gave their children so much, on a regular basis - that gifts could no longer hold any value, not even the value of "I thought about you in getting this". A photo shows my mother's wedding gifts laid out on cloth-lined tables in their living room, for friends [her mother's friends, most of all] to view. How embarrassing, I used to think. How 50s! How thoroughly aspiringly middle class. A stupid person (which I am exactly half the time) looks at that and sees materialism. Everything on those tables meant a lot to people who rarely ever bought anything, for themselves least of all, and rarely threw anything away or replaced anything that could be fixed.
"human potential is being squandered on a massive scale" => This seems an awful lot like the justifications provided by Communism and Nazism for creating dictatorships that would give birth to a new man, a man capable of achieving his full potential...
I increasingly see the left’s goal as authoritarianism and they moving steadily in that direction. Elections at the local level are conducted to minimize turnout, and maximize government employees’ influence. Hardly democratic. The takeover of education and libraries is well documented. No library carries every book, but if a library does not carry the books leftists want, the library “bans”. books. Censorship is a near constant. Financial black lists are a reality. The 2020 election and the propaganda of the American government was kgb worthy. The media - all media not just “news” - is a propaganda arm for leftists. It is well past time to stop viewing disagreements with leftists as a opportunity to have an discussion. Leftists goals are subjugation, they are dangerous.
This is all important but it feels like something is missing. Were most Americans truly more autonomous in the 1950s than today? And in areas where autonomy has diminished, how much is attributable to DEI or government bureaucracy? A small business owner likely chafes under bureaucratic rules, but most Americans? It seems like there's a combo of deeper discontent mixed with a blinkered salience mechanism.
Real (Classical) Liberalism is on the rise.
Everything about leftists is a lie, including their usurped self-chosen label of "liberals."
Classical Liberalism principles are incapable of leading to any form of authoritarian / totalitarian government. They are summarized as:
The primacy of individual rights (not "group" or "collective" rights, which are discriminatory)
Small government dedicated primarily to PROTECTING individual rights
Low taxes
Minimal regulations
The objective Rule of Law
These principles are literally antithetical to the Demunist political platform.
Most folk sort of think "democracy" is the same as "human rights", but they're each different. Most want human rights, either with or without democracy, but have noticed that democracies are usually far better on human rights, both personal & social/ economic, as well as freedom.
The freedom to disagree is among the most important freedoms.
"Why are free institutions under assault?"
Because, starting with colleges around ... 1972 (with Roe! and Nixon's huge landslide election), academia has been illegally discriminating against hiring Republicans.
Since other discrimination was illegal AND the illegality was enforced, the secret discrimination was allowed, and has metasized like a cancer. This assault by college "liberals", in "free" institutions has:
1) made the colleges, K-12 schools, media, government, and most college grad "managerial elite" of business orgs be inside institutions that are NOT free, and
2) Since they are not free, their current structure should be reformed, which requires some kind of assault, with many thinking it better for the org to be dismantled rather than have a failed reform.
Moving the Overton Window to include discussion of ending some orgs should also make it better to reform them into once again being free institutions; and AFTER that, we should stop assault/ calls for more reform.