“you’ll hear political actors, especially on the left, but also very much on the right”
Arg. I can make a list a mile long of leftists trashing liberalism even as they claim to be die-hard supporters, and yet I cannot come up with a single right-leaning politician or material group doing the same. Please explain.
“Why is liberalism so widely challenged and attacked, and so defensive and self-doubting, when it has so much to brag about?”
Oh I have my own half-baked theory based on years of confounding observation over what has become the most freakish and absurd behavior of people over politics.
Due to the astounding historical success of the nation beginning with the turn of the 20th century industrial revolution and leveraging the brilliant design of our system that is terribly flawed but superior than all others, and the success of the massive lie that parents all needed their little darlings to bypass any life struggle and get an advanced degree, we have stacked way too many high-status-seeking people-marbles in the hopper of the life-path Rube Goldberg machine.
Meanwhile, because many of these over-educated-not-really-bright people got to positions of power in the government, we made the stupid mistake of China in the WTO and NAFTA and other global trade deals that benefitted the other country over our own working class... while we also paid 4-6% of our GDP to police the world so those countries could ignore their own defense and invest in growing their industry after taking it from us. Those mistakes effectively eliminated many of the Rube Goldberg paths the marbles could take. And so the over-educated upper class people stuck in the hopper did what status-desperate people do... they forge their own path. And those paths are to make a new virtual "looting" career out of media likes and clicks.
The productive value of their new enterprise means nothing to them. They don't care that they don't really produce anything of value to the nation or world, if they can gain status and cash...they are good. And they have had to get real creative inventing ideas that are absurd by measure of what has been normie. So they come up with the most bizarre Theory/woke ideology and push it into the education system and the national media narrative. They have thousands of NGOs where they can funnel cash.
All of it is a big party of, not only non-productive activities... but destructive activities, that keep them high on the status list. And then they all look out from inside the media bubble of that party and claim that those outside are uneducated fascists and are weird. That's right... the people that have not adopted all the absurd made-up social and economic twaddle that injects non-productive chaos into the system... the people that actually make, build, grow and fix real tangible things in the economy, or otherwise need jobs to do so...
Their drift to illiberalism is really only their attempt to deconstruct the existing structures of society and the economy to come up with something different that provides them the opportunity of change to leverage for greater status, power and money.
Think of it this way, the explosion in good from the implementation of western liberalism derived from the lessons of the Enlightenment, has run its course… become a saturated market… for those upper-class elites that always want more. Psychologists have confirmed that the more a person has the more they want.
So, how do we fix the problem? In the past we have had world wars that have leveled the playing field of humanity, bringing down the elites and raising the non-elites. If we don’t want wars to solve the problem, then we need other political and policy actions to cut the wealth, power and status of the elites… sending them into a tailspin toward a place where they get back to normal. We also need to repair the Rube Goldberg life achievement machine to reopen the old productive paths. No longer should we far so many highly educated people with useless degrees in victim studies and Theory, but train engineers and welders instead.
If society does not provide the paths for good productive behavior that is additive to society, then free countries will end up with chaos as people pursue their own made-up paths that can be destructive to whole only serving the selfish wants and needs of that individual. The secret to Western success has been this historical fantastic inventory of paths… so much opportunity… that diverse people would get along for the reason that they had confidence in their ability to work harder and gain more rewards.
Where we took a massive wrong turn… allowing China into the WTO and then allowing our corporate executives and owners to export American jobs to fatten their profits. The other mistake is massive immigration exceeding the country’s capacity to care for its own citizens at the same time we took to exporting jobs and whole industries to China, Mexico and other countries.
We have exploded the supply of people needing a life-path while reducing the inventory of options… and then we stacked the nation with over-educated status-seeking elites. They are using their big educated brains and cash to create new virtual “business” that is deductive to liberalism and deductive to the health of all civilization.
At least to this child of the 20th century, supporting liberalism in the US comes down to defending the rule of law in our constitutional democratic republic. For those who want change, make it happen within our system. Any other defense brings in unnecessary levels of complexity.
Jonathon, many thanks to you for taking the bull by the horns and have been unafraid to lay cause at the feet of just all that can be “blamed” in this ongoing conundrum that the free world faces at this point in time.
Your point that says : “By contrast, while the illiberal and post-liberal contenders come in many varieties, they all, at the end of the day, require the elevation of a person or party to godlike status. In the end, they serve whomever is most ambitious, most biased, and most greedy.” Unless one is mistaken this is a reference to “human nature” running interference in the background to what may be a consideration if not a definite cause, that further complicates an already complex subject, to be sure.
As the subject of these articles are way above my pay grade, from readings for a long time, many have believed for years what has been discussed in this following video. I am not a PhD like Bret Weinstein, and I am not a connected politician. But one doesn’t have to be any of those things to plainly see things as they are, the bottom line which perhaps this short video provides, which one hopes won’t be called “pop-science” by Jonathon. And spoiler alert, there are no solutions presented in this video. Evolutionary Biologist Dr Bret Weinstein joins Neil Oliver to firstly discuss the existential threats posed by war in the Middle East but then goes onto add to what Jonathon so eruditely discusses in his article.
“Bret Weinstein: Cosmopolitan West is driving us towards an 'unquestionable' existential crisis.”
This sums up how human nature reacts when situations go bad. One doesn’t know how Jonathon feels about Bret’s opinion, but others might find his angle interesting. 😐
I realize liberalism and republicanism as having first principles of restraints on power and mutual restraints on power. I like to think of these ideas and ethos in this way. Protecting the space and relationship of free thought, judgement, and action. For me the test will come if power can be restrained and if mutual restraints on power can be realized. These two ideas maybe the greatest ideas humans have ever created.
1) This essay is great -- subject to its own (unfortunately, dire) limitations. The problem is that it leaves off precisely where it should have started. Rauch's overall point is that in building a good society, liberalism is necessary but not sufficient -- and he devotes most of his effort to arguing for liberalism as a necessity. Unfortunately, what undermines liberals' self-confidence is the realization (at the very moment of its triumph) that it's insufficient. Claiming "That's not liberalism's problem" merely highlights the insufficiency.
2) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr famously wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oiigarchy.” Institutions founded upon the epistemic regime of the Enlightenment are not immune.
3) SUMMATION: If liberalism has lost its nerve, we can always resort to blaming the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka! ;-)
“you’ll hear political actors, especially on the left, but also very much on the right”
Arg. I can make a list a mile long of leftists trashing liberalism even as they claim to be die-hard supporters, and yet I cannot come up with a single right-leaning politician or material group doing the same. Please explain.
“Why is liberalism so widely challenged and attacked, and so defensive and self-doubting, when it has so much to brag about?”
Oh I have my own half-baked theory based on years of confounding observation over what has become the most freakish and absurd behavior of people over politics.
Due to the astounding historical success of the nation beginning with the turn of the 20th century industrial revolution and leveraging the brilliant design of our system that is terribly flawed but superior than all others, and the success of the massive lie that parents all needed their little darlings to bypass any life struggle and get an advanced degree, we have stacked way too many high-status-seeking people-marbles in the hopper of the life-path Rube Goldberg machine.
Meanwhile, because many of these over-educated-not-really-bright people got to positions of power in the government, we made the stupid mistake of China in the WTO and NAFTA and other global trade deals that benefitted the other country over our own working class... while we also paid 4-6% of our GDP to police the world so those countries could ignore their own defense and invest in growing their industry after taking it from us. Those mistakes effectively eliminated many of the Rube Goldberg paths the marbles could take. And so the over-educated upper class people stuck in the hopper did what status-desperate people do... they forge their own path. And those paths are to make a new virtual "looting" career out of media likes and clicks.
The productive value of their new enterprise means nothing to them. They don't care that they don't really produce anything of value to the nation or world, if they can gain status and cash...they are good. And they have had to get real creative inventing ideas that are absurd by measure of what has been normie. So they come up with the most bizarre Theory/woke ideology and push it into the education system and the national media narrative. They have thousands of NGOs where they can funnel cash.
All of it is a big party of, not only non-productive activities... but destructive activities, that keep them high on the status list. And then they all look out from inside the media bubble of that party and claim that those outside are uneducated fascists and are weird. That's right... the people that have not adopted all the absurd made-up social and economic twaddle that injects non-productive chaos into the system... the people that actually make, build, grow and fix real tangible things in the economy, or otherwise need jobs to do so...
Their drift to illiberalism is really only their attempt to deconstruct the existing structures of society and the economy to come up with something different that provides them the opportunity of change to leverage for greater status, power and money.
Think of it this way, the explosion in good from the implementation of western liberalism derived from the lessons of the Enlightenment, has run its course… become a saturated market… for those upper-class elites that always want more. Psychologists have confirmed that the more a person has the more they want.
So, how do we fix the problem? In the past we have had world wars that have leveled the playing field of humanity, bringing down the elites and raising the non-elites. If we don’t want wars to solve the problem, then we need other political and policy actions to cut the wealth, power and status of the elites… sending them into a tailspin toward a place where they get back to normal. We also need to repair the Rube Goldberg life achievement machine to reopen the old productive paths. No longer should we far so many highly educated people with useless degrees in victim studies and Theory, but train engineers and welders instead.
If society does not provide the paths for good productive behavior that is additive to society, then free countries will end up with chaos as people pursue their own made-up paths that can be destructive to whole only serving the selfish wants and needs of that individual. The secret to Western success has been this historical fantastic inventory of paths… so much opportunity… that diverse people would get along for the reason that they had confidence in their ability to work harder and gain more rewards.
Where we took a massive wrong turn… allowing China into the WTO and then allowing our corporate executives and owners to export American jobs to fatten their profits. The other mistake is massive immigration exceeding the country’s capacity to care for its own citizens at the same time we took to exporting jobs and whole industries to China, Mexico and other countries.
We have exploded the supply of people needing a life-path while reducing the inventory of options… and then we stacked the nation with over-educated status-seeking elites. They are using their big educated brains and cash to create new virtual “business” that is deductive to liberalism and deductive to the health of all civilization.
At least to this child of the 20th century, supporting liberalism in the US comes down to defending the rule of law in our constitutional democratic republic. For those who want change, make it happen within our system. Any other defense brings in unnecessary levels of complexity.
Jonathon, many thanks to you for taking the bull by the horns and have been unafraid to lay cause at the feet of just all that can be “blamed” in this ongoing conundrum that the free world faces at this point in time.
Your point that says : “By contrast, while the illiberal and post-liberal contenders come in many varieties, they all, at the end of the day, require the elevation of a person or party to godlike status. In the end, they serve whomever is most ambitious, most biased, and most greedy.” Unless one is mistaken this is a reference to “human nature” running interference in the background to what may be a consideration if not a definite cause, that further complicates an already complex subject, to be sure.
As the subject of these articles are way above my pay grade, from readings for a long time, many have believed for years what has been discussed in this following video. I am not a PhD like Bret Weinstein, and I am not a connected politician. But one doesn’t have to be any of those things to plainly see things as they are, the bottom line which perhaps this short video provides, which one hopes won’t be called “pop-science” by Jonathon. And spoiler alert, there are no solutions presented in this video. Evolutionary Biologist Dr Bret Weinstein joins Neil Oliver to firstly discuss the existential threats posed by war in the Middle East but then goes onto add to what Jonathon so eruditely discusses in his article.
“Bret Weinstein: Cosmopolitan West is driving us towards an 'unquestionable' existential crisis.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jTmO-Q9xE
This sums up how human nature reacts when situations go bad. One doesn’t know how Jonathon feels about Bret’s opinion, but others might find his angle interesting. 😐
I realize liberalism and republicanism as having first principles of restraints on power and mutual restraints on power. I like to think of these ideas and ethos in this way. Protecting the space and relationship of free thought, judgement, and action. For me the test will come if power can be restrained and if mutual restraints on power can be realized. These two ideas maybe the greatest ideas humans have ever created.
1) This essay is great -- subject to its own (unfortunately, dire) limitations. The problem is that it leaves off precisely where it should have started. Rauch's overall point is that in building a good society, liberalism is necessary but not sufficient -- and he devotes most of his effort to arguing for liberalism as a necessity. Unfortunately, what undermines liberals' self-confidence is the realization (at the very moment of its triumph) that it's insufficient. Claiming "That's not liberalism's problem" merely highlights the insufficiency.
2) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr famously wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oiigarchy.” Institutions founded upon the epistemic regime of the Enlightenment are not immune.
3) SUMMATION: If liberalism has lost its nerve, we can always resort to blaming the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka! ;-)
...or Don Henley:
Ah, these times are so uncertain
There's a yearning undefined
And people filled with rage
We all need a little tenderness
How can love survive
In such a graceless age?
Ah, the trust and self-assurance
That lead to happiness
They're the very things
We kill, I guess
Oh, pride and competition
Cannot fill these empty arms
And the work I put between us
You know it doesn't keep me warm