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Michael Berkowitz's avatar

This was very good. It would make a good reading for a Civics class. I have one quibble and one substantive comment:

The quibble is that when you write "Liberal government does not exist to inculcate virtue or specific religious beliefs," you direct that against your conception of antiliberals wanting to mandate religion. It's not so much unfair as misleading to ignore the "liberals'" practice of mandating what amounts to the religion (as John McWhorter has termed them) of "wokeism".

What seems a substantive point that needs to be addressed is the treatment of emergencies. Although it's not a mathematical analogue to Goedel, it seems like every system of governance can encounter situations that can't be handled successfully within the system. John Adams may have thought he was confronting such with the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln obvious thought so with the suspension of Habeas Corpus.

By definition, this can't be planned for. I bring it up because one facet of our current troubles is the ease with which everyone slips into thinking that the rules don't apply because this is an emergency that the rules can't handle. It's not a philosophy, it's an attitude, or a just a weakness, and it turns everything into Flight 93. Because of that, I think that any explanation of the fundamentals of our liberal order meant for people of our time needs to highlight the issue and its dangers, in a way that I don't think was necessary in earlier ages.

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Longestaffe's avatar

"Antiliberals also argue that the liberal focus on rights reflects and drives an individualism that undermines social bonds and group solidarity. A system of rights gives short shrift to the responsibilities we have toward others and to the duties we owe them. Liberals point out that we do have a duty: to respect the rights of others. Antiliberals will reply that this conception of duty is too thin to sustain a decent society."

They'd be right, if that were the long and short of liberal individualism. Many otherwise thoughtful commentaries on the state of modern society deplore individualism as if it were the same thing as selfishness. However, the essence of individualism among thinking people is a sense of personal agency that leads naturally to a sense of personal responsibility. A mature liberal individualist -- even a maturing one, from the onset of reason -- looks at the world and at other individuals as if from a tiny seat in the eye of God. Dickens captures this perspective in A Christmas Carol, in the conversation between Ebenezer Scrooge and Marley's ghost. When Marley laments his own "life's opportunity misused," Scrooge falteringly argues, "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

Antiliberals are not exponents of benevolent duty so much as jealous conformists and disciplinarians. Liberals, including conservative ones, are the kind of individualist who faces the world with a sense of personal gratitude cum responsibility.

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