"Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism" "in the Tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders"

"We need to get better at standing up for the greatest social technology ever devised."

From the always thoughtful and readable Jonathan Rauch, in Persuasion; some excerpts, though the whole thing is much worth reading:

Never in my lifetime have critiques of Locke, Smith, Mill, the British Enlightenment, and the American founding emanated from so many different quarters, attacked from so many directions, and sounded so scathing and confident. The liberal tradition has been undone by its amorality (says the right) and its injustice (says the left); it has, they charge, made society unfair, politics narcissistic, and truth meaningless.

Above all, they charge, liberalism has lost the confidence of the public—and of liberals….

[Yet] no viable system has emerged that can come close to replicating liberalism's capacity to produce knowledge, prosperity, freedom, and peace. In fact, both on its own terms and compared with all the historic alternatives, liberalism has delivered spectacular results. It is the greatest social technology ever invented, and well ahead of whatever comes second.

This paradoxical situation has me scratching my head, and I'm not alone. Why is liberalism so widely challenged and attacked, and so defensive and self-doubting, when it has so much to brag about? Increasingly, I have come to think we must look for an answer not just in liberalism's failures—though there certainly are some—but in liberals' failure of nerve….

I have made a couple of claims here: that liberalism delivers spectacular results; and that its would-be systemic competitors have not and cannot. Both claims require some defining and defending.

Begin, then, with a basic question: what do we (or at least I) mean by liberalism?

Not progressivism or moderate leftism, as the term came to mean in postwar U.S. discourse. Rather, liberalism in the tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders. It is not one idea but a family of ideas with many variants. Its central philosophy is that all persons are born free and equal. Its operational principles include the rule of law, pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority, limited government, and (subject to the other requirements) democratic decision-making. Its distinctive method of social organization is to rely on impersonal rules and open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.

Embodying those notions are three interlinked social systems: liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices (that is, decisions about truth and knowledge). By transcending tribe, renouncing authoritarianism, substituting rules for rulers, and treating persons as interchangeable, liberalism achieves what no other social system can offer, at least on a large scale: coordination without control. In a liberal system, everyone can participate but no one is in charge.

In the context of human history, everything about liberalism is radical: its rejection of personal and tribal authority, its insistence on treating persons as interchangeable, its demand that dissent be tolerated and minorities protected, its embrace of change and uncertainty. All of its premises run counter to hardwired human instincts. Liberalism is the strangest and most counterintuitive social idea ever conceived, a disadvantage offset only by the fact that it is also the most successful social idea ever conceived….

Comments

[SimonP]

The leftist critique of liberalism is really just an extension of liberalism itself. It steps back and asks the question: Well, who is this liberalism for? What are the underlying assumptions upon which we build liberal thought? We may find - and leftists often do find - that the "liberalism" we are taught in our schoolbooks imports biases and blindspots that ultimately undermine the liberal project. So the leftist critique isn't so much about abandoning liberalism, but perfecting it - better helping it to achieve its putative goals.

The rightist critique is more reactionary and revanchist. It rejects key features of what makes liberalism work. The rightist prefers to affirm, rather than notice, the kinds of blindspots and biases that the leftist wants to call out and correct. They reject the liberal order for the simple reason that liberalism would deny them the power they wish to exercise over others. Less polemically, what the right values is tradition, cohesive community, respect for authority, and social hierarchy, which are all things that liberalism either disintegrates or deeply questions.

So the rightist critique rejects the liberal outcome, and is not an extension of liberal thought the same way that the leftist critique is.

[NOVA Lawyer]

This is a fair reply. I will caveat, there is definitely a strain of authoritarianism on the left, as well, that does, indeed, question the value of liberalism and would replace it. Communism as we know it was a reaction to liberalism that, ultimately, discarded liberal ideas for authoritarian ones. The ease with which Russia slid from communism to Putin’s authoritarianism (or Viktor Orban’s) should be a warning to those who value liberalism and the things is secures (free speech, free markets, religious and ideological tolerance, etc.) yet look upon either Putin or Orban as having anything to offer.

But, yes, mainstream leftists very much value and revere liberalism and, as you say, merely seek to perfect it.

I do think the rightist critique is more centrally critical of the animating ideas behind liberalism and, instead, believes there is an ideal “liberal” nation (misunderstanding the liberalism of Smith, Kant, Locke, and, perhaps especially, the Founders as a steady state rather than a process) and that ideal nation was something like circa 1950 white America (ignoring the obvious oppression and illiberal nature of much of 1950s America, particularly for women, non-majority sexual orientations, and religious, ethnic, and racial minorities).

[Brett Bellmore]

" Communism as we know it was a reaction to liberalism that, ultimately, discarded liberal ideas for authoritarian ones."

"Ultimately"? Are you suggesting that there actually were a few minutes of communism prior to it discarding liberal ideas? Because it sure looks to me like they just went straight to authoritarianism without even dallying with liberalism.

Maybe you mean "communism" prior to anybody ever trying it?

[NOVA Lawyer]

“Maybe you mean ‘communism’ prior to anybody ever trying it?”

I was allowing for the possibility precisely to avoid the charge that, perhaps, at the outset, someone would argue, it too was an attempt to more fully realize liberal principles. But, yes, I am unaware of it ever being tried in anything other than an authoritarian way (and am sure it cannot be actually achieved by anything other than authoritarianism). It, quite obviously, was just as illiberal as fascism (one of its primary competitors for a time as the alternative to an open, free, liberal society).

Maybe shorter: I disdain communism just as much as you do, Brett.

[Brett Bellmore]

I kind of thought you did, which is why that statement confused me.

[Krychek_2]

I disdain communism as well. Communism was only made possible, however, by the abuses of the law-of-the-jungle capitalism. People really were horribly treated by the rich and powerful.

And I think conservatives would do well to acknowledge that the problems communism, at least on paper, set out to fix are real problems that really do need fixing. Just not by that method.

[NOVA Lawyer]

I absolutely agree. The privations of "law-of-the-jungle capitalism" are why communism seemed attractive to so many. I agree that it is folly for anyone (right or left) to ignore the very real problems communism (wrong-headedly) sought to address. People will choose an authoritarian "utopia" over that state of affairs.

I think that is why there are elements across the world trying to convince people that we are in that sort of situation now, so that people like Viktor Orban will seem like a reasonable, order/justice-imposing alternative, when, in fact, he's little more than a perfecting and rebranding of communist authoritarianism for a world which understands democratic capitalism won.

[GKHoff]

Communism never seemed attractive to "so many." Despite their name, the Bolsheviks were the minority revolutionary party. The vast majority of Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, Cambodians etc. did not accept the Communist ideology, it was imposed on them violently, at the cost of millions of lives.

But if you're only referring to American universities, then I agree that Communism is attractive to so many. Only it's not capitalism that drives the movement, it's the strong urge of people who are pretty much powerless to assume control of everyone else.

[NOVA Lawyer]

“so many” doesn’t mean a majority of anyone.

Your gratuitous swipe at American universities, regarded now and for many decades as the finest in the world, is noted.

Yes, Marx just critiqued capitalism for no reason, not because he thought he saw problems with it and not because he thought a critique of capitalism would be a good selling point. /sarc

Capitalism is a wonderful tool. But I get the sense that some of you worship it as if it never results in injustice or hardship even for the industrious. That’s simple minded in the extreme.

Surely you can imagine some other tool that is generally good (say automobiles), but they can be misused to injure and hurt people so a just society sets forth some rules for their use. That some people see lots of harm from automobiles if people are drive them as fast as they like wherever and whenever they like doesn’t mean automobiles aren’t wonderful tools that make the world better.

Again, in late 1800s/early 1900s children labor was a thing A bad thing. In those and other similarly abusive situations, many people were open to the idea that there was something better than capitalism and, of those, many thought scrapping it entirely might be an answer (and were wrong as history has shown). Others were never in it for the hoped for benefit to society, but only used the movement to achieve their end goal of authoritarian power (which is the only way communism ever has been or ever can be implemented). But, again, it doesn’t mean there weren’t problems that needed fixing. It’s just some cures are worse than the disease.

[Sarcastr0]

As some below have, I would push back on capitalism being the sole reason communism held allure. Tzarist Russia was not capitalist (to Marx’s chagrin).

Lots of ways to create horrible inequality; badly managed capitalism is only one of them.

The anti-immigration illiberal populists do seem part and parcel of the economically driven populism that has fueled all sorts of authoritarian regimes. Lots of possible economic and cultural reasons why that’s broadly on an upswing now. I like to think the cycle will shift back soon.

[Brett Bellmore]

"I would push back on capitalism being the sole reason communism held allure. "

Given where it actually got tried, I'd say it's not even "a" reason.

[Sarcastr0]

Well you would be wrong. We know why people became communists and being anti capitalist was one of the reasons.

[Brett Bellmore]

And yet, where did communism, governmental communism, (To distinguish it from isolated communes embedded in otherwise free societies.) get tried?

Uniformly in places that were not particularly capitalistic. This hardly suggests that it was actually being motivated by opposition to capitalism.

I think we need to stop taking the professed motivations of bloody communist revolutionaries so seriously, and look at what they actually DID. If you look at what they actually DID, you wouldn't say, "That looks like the work of somebody who wanted to save the masses from a perceived economic evil."

You'd say, "That looks like the work of somebody who was on the bottom, and wanted an excuse to violently climb to the top."

I think that's the actual allure of communism. Not hostility to capitalism, as such, but instead a desire to upset the existing social order based on one's position in it, so that you can end up on top. With communism giving you an excuse to carry out a revolution, and some superficially attractive patter to sway useful idiots with.

Communism's real allure is to people who don't do well under capitalism, and flatter themselves that this is an injustice, rather than a natural consequence of their not actually contributing much value to society under a system that rewards people for generating value for others.

University professors who look around and see businessmen living much better than their far more worthy selves, predominantly.

[Absaroka]

"Communism’s real allure is to people who don’t do well under capitalism, and flatter themselves that this is an injustice, rather than a natural consequence of their not actually contributing much value to society under a system that rewards people for generating value for others."

I think that is generally true today, but I don't think it was true in the late 1800's, and maybe through the Great Depression. Capitalism isn't shining so brightly in 1933, or in 189x when the coal company just announced it is laying off the dads because it can hire their kids for less.

[Brett Bellmore]

That's fair: Before communism got tried for the first time, somebody could legitimately have thought it would be an improvement over capitalism. They could have been innocently gullible. Once it had been tried, only the willfully blind could think that.

You might stretch that period of 'innocent communism' out maybe as far as WWII, given that people outside the USSR were being fed lies by people like Walter Duranty. But the truth was also getting out, so people who actually paid attention could figure out what was really going on. Certainly, at no time in my life have communists had any excuse for it.

[Sarcastr0]

You are coming at a strawman. Again.

[Sarcastr0]

people who actually paid attention could figure out what was really going on.

So if people shouda known, but still supported Communism, is your theory just that they were evil?

Come on, man. People can be wrong in retrospect; that's allowed.

[Brett Bellmore]

I would distinguish between evil and "negligent", Sarcastr0. I'm simply admitting that there was a period, long since past when people could innocently support communism. That "long since past" part is important: It's been a very long time since anybody had a legitimate excuse for advocating communism.

Totalitarian movements of all sorts had great currency in the US prior to WWII, central planning was the in thing. I'm just mourning that the communists didn't get the same treatment the fascists did. They'd certainly earned the same treatment.

[Sarcastr0]

I’m just mourning that the communists didn’t get the same treatment the fascists did.

We had McCarthyism, one of the most thought policy authoritarian moments in our history. You want that but this time it'll work?

We have neo-Nazis marching. We *hired Nazi scientists*. We've been secure in our institutions in being strong against fascism. As we should be about Communism

You want a purge. Based on an imaginary purge of fascists that never happened.
You are getting more and more authoritarian.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

"Law of the jungle" capitalism was no such thing. It was crony government to the core.

Free markets include being free from government cronies. Monopoly government always stacks the deck in its favor, whether capitalist, communist, monarchist, or anything in between.

[NOVA Lawyer]

"Monopoly government" I don't think you even know what you mean. You just like railing against statists and communists (both risible, no doubt), but without you, apparently, understanding much about either.

[Sarcastr0]

"True capitalism has never been tried' is just as silly utopianism as true communism has never been tried.

[Brett Bellmore]

Nothing pure has ever been tried, but the actual point is that, when you've got a mix of capitalism and crony government, why would you blame the problems on the capitalist component, rather than the crony government component?

Societies with larger fractions of capitalism tend to be better, not worse, so you'd sensibly default to blaming the problems of a mixed society on the non-capitalist component.

[Sarcastr0]

If the system requires both then making a distinction is useless.

If it does not you are back in true capitalism has never been tried.

[Brett Bellmore]

No, of course the distinction isn't useless. Capitalism produces wealth, it's really good at that. But it requires the rule of law in order to function reliably, which means at least SOME government. But, how much?

If you misattribute the negative effects of that government to the capitalism, you'll end up getting the ratio of capitalism to government wrong, and you'll end up worse off than if you'd properly made the distinction.

[Absaroka]

"If the system requires both then making a distinction is useless."

That seems a bit silly.

If you have a completely unfettered robber baron economy and you titrate in the smallest amount of regulation ("children may not be employed until age 3") that doesn't make it a centrally planned economy.

Similarly, if you have a completely centralized economy and you allow the tiniest bit of free market ("each household can grow one tomato plant in a pot, and eat the resulting tomatoes") you will have a lot more tomatoes, but hardly a free market economic system.

[Sarcastr0]

Take it up with Brett, Ab.

He's the one that's accepting that pure capitalism isn't the push, but we should still distributed the blame to what part is caused by the pure capitalism bits and what is not.

Brett thinks this is possible, because he starts from some pretty heavy 'capitalism cannot fail only be failed' so if it's bad it's some other cause.

But if you want to do evidence-based decision making, he asks the impossible.

Yes, we know the extremes, and that they're both bad. Where the ideal mix is, well that's the whole debate.
Declaring it all centrally planned so the answer is easy? That does not make anything easy.

[MaddogEngineer]

No. Where actual government communism succeeded in taking root (Russia and China), the proletariat were serfs, and what was practiced was not even law-of-the-jungle capitalism, but crony capitalism at best (as others have replied).

I don't understand (yet I do) trying to project 19/20th century framing of battles between Western labor and capital as the motivation for Eastern/Oriental communist revolutions. The reason communism didn't take root in industrialized societies (contra's Marx's central thesis) was because those systems operated well enough (producing significant economic growth) so as not to foment viable revolution. The year 1848 being the make-or-brake moment. The crony systems of Russia and China were inefficient, providing the workers with nothing and therefore nothing to lose resorting to revolution. Marx was completely wrong, about pretty much everything.

Much like the world war midwifed the Russian revolution, Eastern Europe's turn to communism was again at the barrel of a gun, not some spontaneous upraising by indigenous workers. As it was in Asia.

[Krychek_2]

I just love how, for true believing libertarians, nothing is ever the fault of capitalism. It's really not much different in theory from true believing Communists to whom nothing is ever the fault of the party, or true believing Catholics to whom nothing is ever the fault of the Church Magisterium. No, there was always some other factor -- in this case cronyism -- that is to blame.

Well, in this country, capitalism gave us child labor in which children were literally chained to factory workbenches for 12 and 14 hour shifts. It gave us company towns in which workers were paid in scrip redeemable only at the company store. It gave us 50 hour weeks with no overtime. It gave us no compensation for workplace injuries; if the worker was stupid enough to get injured it was his problem. And absolutely none of that was the fault of cronyism.

And libertarianism would have oh-so-much-more credibility if it would acknowledge as much.

[MaddogEngineer]

Oh yes, communism definitely saved us from child labor! /sarcasm

Elsewhere I was accused of a straw man, but here is one again: that capitalism can't coexist with reasonable regulations. Most people who advocate for free market capitalism will tell you that without government setting clear/impartial rules, it will relatively quickly collapse into monopoly/oligopoly. So trying to create tensions where non exists (you freemarketers don't like labor laws!) is bogus.

I will freely admit that the markets did not fairly adapt to the industrial revolution, and it took a while and a mess to sort it out with our legal system. Something socialism/central planning economies will never solve, because markets always win and the planners cannot correctly set prices and production levels at the center. They can set labor and other transparency rules (securities/commodities) but must be willing to pay attention to how the economy responds to them and be willing to adjust.

All this is a day late in reply.

[NOVA Lawyer]

You don’t seem to understand the conversation.

No one said or implied that communism saved anyone from child labor. The point was made that capitalism without regulation included chid labor. It also had other predatory practices and allowed other injustices. The view that won, and that everyone in this thread supports is that capitalism is a net good, but should be subject to reasonable regulation. The point here, though, is that those predations and injustices resulted in some people imaging completely different systems of which communism was one. However, communism both didn’t really solve the problems that made people unhappy and it added new ones to boot. That communism was evil does not mean that it didn't arise, at least in part, as a proposed solution to real problems.

Other people aren’t the left wing caricatures you’ve created in your head, but may have nuanced views that, in fact, align with yours in some specifics. If you have an honest conversation, you may be able to learn something and teach something rather than devolve into misguided snark. In fact, if you'd just cut out the first two paragraphs, your third is a reasonable, well written statement with which, you apparently don't realize, everyone in this thread agrees.

The fact that you think anyone disagrees with your third paragraph says you have a reading comprehension problem.

[NOVA Lawyer]

Yeah, I mean it's not like Dickens wrote books describing some of the awful things early versions of a society based on Mills produced or as if Marx developed his ideas in Paris, Brussels, and London, not Beijing.

The whole point of this thread has been that Marx was wrong. But he was reacting against something.

Krychek said it better, but it's worth emphasizing that, yes, communism only ended up gaining sufficient converts to take over weak states in Russia and China (and then other client states/conquests of those two, for the most part), but the ideas started in the West as a reaction to abuses by those with power. Again, a cure worse than the sickness, but there was a sickness. Society today in Western democracies is radically different (better) than in the mid-late 1800s in which the concept of communism was developed. That's not because communism was right, obviously, but because there were problems that needed to be fixed and many of them have been (if not fixed, at least dramatically improved). For example, it's illegal to chain children to work benches and force them to work.

To repeat Krychek, "libertarianism would have oh-so-much-more credibility if it would acknowledge as much."

The whole point of our system is to recognize that many people will abuse others if they can profit from the abuse. Hence, checks and balances. That's why there must be checks of some sort on everyone, because, unfortunately, no one (at least a priori) can be trusted.

[MaddogEngineer]

Of course Marx was reacting to something. People, at least me, defending capitalism don’t deny that. Yet others still proceed as if elements of his program had merit, even as they condemn him. There is no middle ground here, his theories are wrong and when implemented lead to tyranny. That’s not a denial of why he was motivated to develop them. Marx’s fundamental conceit, along with many leftists today, is that production (and wealth creation) exists for the worker’s benefit. No, no, no. There has to be a customer for the worker’s production, which central planners ignore. They want to optimize production and employment for the benefit of the workers, even if/when the product and/or its price point necessary to support those workers has no buyer. They want the “owner” to take less profit, or none at all, to allow for that. So now we have a zomby General Motors which is a retirement/healthcare provider that also makes cars. The problematic part of that is not that government was unwilling to provide better retirement/healthcare benefits forcing workers to find them elsewhere. It’s that unions coerced the company to agree to provide something that was unsustainable long term, ignoring the possibility of future competition.

That’s a whole separate question about whether children should be prohibited from working in dangerous conditions, or at all.

What you wrote is just another version of my critique about why communism didn’t take root in Western industrializing economies, despite the exploitation, as Marx predicted. My previous was not a denial of such exploitation or inequity, it was besides the point. Yet there are plenty of people still attracted to (true!) communism (which hasn’t been tried) because this time will be different and it’s only fair after all.

[NvEric]

I'll stick this here.
The European thinkers of the 19th Century wrote their economic works in a system governed by Kings and Queens, therefore their preconceptions were grave and radical to that system of government. In other words, their outlook was grim. Furthermore, their solutions used that same model: power at the top. In addition, the people of those countries had a history of being 'serfs' and had no experience of self-government and liberal thought.

Marx, et al, were products of a fucked up system, so their solutions were also fucked up.

[Sarcastr0]

Their outlook was not grim, because they were generally high enough in the social order they were not only doing fine, but listened to.

[Krayt]

By the time you’ve accepted communism as some valid state of being, you’ve accepted others may lord over you at their whim. Why even go there to start with?

“But it’s not!”, screetch those who imagine benevolent overlordship, looking glowingly on someone taking that power. We'll run it democratically!

“I need emergency powers to re-form and re-educate society.”

“O. K.” they say, approvingly.

[NOVA Lawyer]

This is a weird comment in a thread where everyone agrees communism is dangerous and awful. But, sure, like everyone above you said, communism is bad.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

They do not. Some of those comments make excuses for communism as being a reaction to government abuse, which is pretty damned bizarre. But that is how all statists think -- the only fix they know of for a putrifying government bandaid is another government bandaid on top of the old. The idea of getting rid of putrifying government bandaids is abhorrent to them.

[NOVA Lawyer]

"make excuses for communism as being a reaction to government abuse"

Stupid sock puppet doesn't understand that, for example, some people embraced communism because of racism in the U.S. (and the belief that it was less in the USSR, which was false). That's not an excuse for communism. But it is accurate to point out that liberalism's failures, or perhaps the failure to live up to liberalisms ideals, can drive people towards an evil ideology.

Explaining why people turned to evil does not excuse evil. See every villain origin story in history.

But your remaining sentences reveal that you can't comprehend something as simple as people in a bad situation may grasp for solutions that make things worse. You aren't a thinker. You're just a reactionary with preset opinions. Be better. (No one in this comment thread was a statist or excusing the evil of communism.)

[Currentsitguy]

My ex was from Moscow, pre revolution and breakup, she came over at 14 in 1984. I remember her telling of seeing a black man get off the train and being pursued by a group a children yelling "Обезьянка, покажи нам свой хвост!"' literally "Monkey, show us your tail!"

Back in the 90's she told me Ukrainians were "no better than ni**ers that can't even speak Russian properly" so that prejudice goes back a long way.

[bernard11]

Claiming that reaction to government abuse is one reason communism came to power is not making an excuse. It is describing history.

What was life like under the Czars?

[MaddogEngineer]

Not really. Because true communism has never been tried!

Some people like to talk as if they can get what they perceive as the egalitarian fruits of communism (broad economic equality), without all the negatives (use of force required to implement/maintain). A belief in private property cannot coexist with such an economic philosophy. People resist having their stuff taken away from that. But that's where the first justification narrative kicks in: you didn't fairly earn what you have, therefore it's not really yours. And we're off!

[NOVA Lawyer]

Which doesn't describe anyone in this comment thread. Nice straw man!

[SimonP]

I agree with your general observation about communism and how communist critiques of liberalism would not typically seek to "perfect" it.

I am struggling with the fact, though, that a lot of modern leftist critique traces back to Marxist critical theory, which would first have looked at the problems of liberalism through a class-tinged lens. I am not sure whether that strain of thought necessarily inclines towards collectivism and denial of liberal values, or if that is just a possible path it can take. Certainly most people writing leftist critiques now are doing so with a "perfecting" liberalism angle, but I wonder if that kind of approach might actually prove incoherent, properly considered.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"But, yes, mainstream leftists very much value and revere liberalism and, as you say, merely seek to perfect it."

There are leftists like that, though I don't see them as dominant in our current establihsment.

[Squirrelloid]

This doesn't seem like a particularly aware diagnosis.

The left wishes to impose mandates on the populace on all manner of things, things as mundane as how many miles per gallon they get from their car, to how much water their dishwasher uses. These are not 'liberal' actions in the slightest. The left does not seem to believe in limited government at all.

And the primary defenders of capitalism have been on the "right" (to the extent they can be classified as left/right at all), yet capitalism is central and indispensable to liberalism.

This doesn't mean there isn't an authoritarian right (which is increasingly ascendant). 'Left' and 'right' make little sense for describing a multi-dimensional field, and it's why the author points to attacks from both the left and the right on liberalism.

To the extent the 'right' values the things you identify, the left values central planning and government control of society to 'perfect' it. These things are just as alien to liberalism as those values on the right.

[Krychek_2]

"The left wishes to impose mandates on the populace on all manner of things, things as mundane as how many miles per gallon they get from their car, to how much water their dishwasher uses. These are not ‘liberal’ actions in the slightest. The left does not seem to believe in limited government at all."

To the extent that that's true, it's because with nearly 8 billion people on the planet, resources are about to become far more scarce than they have in the past. It's one thing when there is an abundance of land and water free for the taking, but that has not been the situation in a long time and is about to get worse. So, there can either be some regulation designed to give everybody a piece of increasingly scarce resources (the liberal solution) or wait until it's too late to fix and just watch the weak have a massive die-off (the apparently conservative solution).

And that, in a nutshell, is the basic philosophical difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals would like to fix problems before they become too big to fix, even if it means that people have to give up things they don't want to give up. Conservatives either pretend the problem doesn't really exist, or that if they ignore it long enough it might go away. If you have an alternative solution, I'm all ears.

[MaddogEngineer]

Yes, scarce resources is another justification narrative for wealth redistribution. You can’t be allowed to do/keep that, because there’s not enough to go around.

It ignores the possibility of additional wealth creation through innovation. People thought food was a finite resource, until nitrogen fertilizers were invented. And that was back when the global population was hitting one billion. That’s neither pretending the problem doesn’t exist, nor ignoring it hoping it goes away. Liberals/leftist cannot ever envision a growing pie, because their preferred policies do not encourage growth and innovation.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

It also ignores the role of prices in allocating resources, and the role of government meddling in destroying the price signal and providing yet another excuse for more government intervention to fix market government failures.

Monopoly government is the evil, and statists are its proponents.

[bernard11]

It also ignores the role of prices in allocating resources,

This may come as a shock, but there are areas where prices do not allocate resources, or do so poorly. Indeed, many of the regulations conservatives complain of are there because the market does not in fact price clean air or water or other aspects of the environment.

Similarly, prices are inefficient in monopoly or monopolistic situations. And finally, maybe there are some things that shouldn't be allocated strictly to the high bidder.

You seem to be trying for a show of economic expertise when you talk about allocation, but your scorn for the idea of market failures demonstrates ignorance instead.

[Brett Bellmore]

No, it's not a shock that there are areas where prices are not permitted to allocate resources. We already knew that.

[Krychek_2]

Enlarging the pie works until it no longer does. Yah, maybe there's some undiscovered fix out there that will take care of climate change and overpopulation, and I hope there is. Until it shows up, however, the better part of valor is to assume there isn't and plan accordingly.

[Bwaaah]

Yours is catastrophism, unproven alarmism, based in fear, to sow doubt in the the merits of markets and individual liberty.

Have you not noticed the inverse proportion of population growth to economic development? Is Greta your model scientist?

You believe in little as much as you fear the future. Your lore is of little faith. Humanity, particularly those possessed by faith and optimism, is your most feared bitch. And overconfident wordsmiths like you are mine.

[ReaderY]

Doubtless the Easter Island people, the Greenland Vikings, and many others all said the same thing. No faith. No optimism.

[ReaderY]

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

[Brett Bellmore]

If you desperately want to swing a hammer, everything looks like a nail. People who have no desire to swing hammers see far fewer nails.

[bernard11]

And libertarians seem to see everything as a nail.

[Squirrelloid]

On the one hand, the regulations rarely make sense. "Energy efficient dish washers" mostly mean needing to either pre-wash (using more water on net), or running them multiple times (using more water on net).

And markets could absolutely solve, because as water got more expensive, people would use less of it.

Similarly, would you take the bet Erlich lost at on amount of resources available? Because the amount of resources available has increased for virtually every resource on the market. Scarcity arguments have been empirically wrong so far.

(What you're missing is innovation - there will be no population bomb, nor any mass die off).

[SimonP]

The adults in the room are trying to have a conversation, Squirrel.

[Bwaaah]

Thanks, DAD. That shit only works when the kids are yours and they can't summarily dismiss you as Chief Dickhead. But they're not yours, they're not kids, this isn't your room, you've contributed nothing but an assessment of your own dick, and that makes you Chief Dickhead.

Your turn.

[SimonP]

What do you think is going on here, Mwaah?

I’m willing to tolerate the parade of imbeciles and rank amateurism here, because frankly if I didn’t there would be no point to reading or responding to the comments at all (or for that matter reading anything Josh writes). If you all want to sling shit about whatever’s top of the news cycle today, that’s fine; it’s fun, in its way. But every once in a while we get an opportunity to discuss something I find actually interesting, like political philosophy.

So it’s a bit disappointing to have a post like this devolve into the usual suspects mouthing off about how Democrats are big-state government fetishists, etc., etc. – really just rehearsing a partisan broadside we’ve been hearing for decades. But the “liberalism” the OP conveniently defines for us has nothing to do with whether the government is big or small. “Big” government can be designed in a way that respects and promotes liberal values in how policies are designed and individual autonomy protected; “small” government can undermine liberal values by disrespecting individual liberties and imposing its own collectivist order.

I dismiss Squirrel’s comment out of hand because he responds, straight off, with some tired, half-remembered examples of putatively intrusive government regulation, trying to pull the discussion into the familiar terrain of partisan point-scoring. But as I’ve noted, this just fundamentally misunderstands the OP and the point I’m making about it. Efficiency standards for consumer products are not necessarily incompatible with the kinds of liberal values the OP describes.

The only way to respond effectively to someone who aims so wildly off the mark is to walk them back to the actual topic and then address whatever of their comment remains relevant, once corrected. But sometimes that is a kind of instruction I am just not interested in doing, especially when someone so clearly seems immune to it. Hence, “the adults are talking.”

Indeed, I am not exactly sure why I am doing you the favor of describing my thinking to you, Mwaah, because I know you’re not any brighter than the rest. But there it is.

[Sarcastr0]

The primary capitalist *purists* have been on the right. But if you don't think Keynes was a capitalist, or FDR, you're on your own purity crusade, as utopian as any communist kid.

Moderation in all things, including both regulations and blind market worship.

[Squirrelloid]

I don't think FDR was a capitalist. Evidence definitely lacking.

Was Keynes a capitalist? Probably. A liberal? Sort of. (He was a neoliberal in the original sense, which abandoned some tenants of liberalism pretty explicitly). But has the left ever actually followed Keynes? Oh, they loved the 'spend more during economic downturns' part, they just ignored everything else he said. Keynes was nothing more than a tool for people who wanted the government to have more power and control, to justify actions they otherwise wanted to take. If the left truly believed in Keynes, they'd reduce spending and end programs *after* economic crises had passed. That has happened... never?

[Sarcastr0]

FDR saved capitalism!
If he was a socialist, between the bank runs and the mass demonstrations he did not lack for opportunities to make the switch.
Keynes' thinking was a big part of the New Deal, so seems you're splitting hairs not calling him anti-capitalist, if you're going to call out FDR.

Government spending and regulation are not outside of the paradigm laid out in the OP. But you're one of those that argue any tweaks are impure in your eye.

Basically, you are a housecat. Living comfortably due to policies and principles you don't understand, and have decided to resent.

[Squirrelloid]

If regulation is so pervasive that government controls the means of production, without ownership, it's not traditional socialism, but it certainly isn't capitalism. And that's largely what FDR accomplished with things like Ag boards (that still mostly exist, despite the crisis having long since passed). Ownership isn't just about pink slips, it's about who has the power to make decisions. Just because he didn't convert the country to soviet-style communism doesn't mean his policies were capitalist.

There's also decent evidence that FDR's policies made the depression last longer than it otherwise would have.

No one's saying there shouldn't be *any* government spending or regulation, but liberalism proposes a *minimal state*, not a leviathan. And while there can be disagreement as to what minimal means, it would be hard to argue FDR's policies qualify.

Which policies do you think I don't understand, and how do you think that's made my life better (as opposed to more expensive and more limited)? Be specific.

[Sarcastr0]

The Austrian School is not widely adopted, and certainly not in FDRs time.

Minimal state does not come from Hobbes or any of the enlightenment thinkers. It comes from Nozick and basically an utterly different political tradition than the OP is discussing. One where only liberty is the watchword.

Our entire world of peaceful abundance was enabled by government programs past and present.
Ayn Rand encourages self-oriented immaturity. Not much else.

[Squirrelloid]

Are you just firing wildly here? I’ll give you two ‘sort of’ hits, although you’re wrong on all the details.

I mean, I suppose it depends on what you mean by the ‘Austrian School’ here. The ideas of the early Austrians are largely economic consensus today, and were even in the 40s (ie, Menger, von Bohm-Bawerk), and are clearly classical liberals as well as Austrians. (Seriously, subjective value theory comes from the Austrian school, and was economic orthodoxy even in the 40s). It was the (original) neoliberals of the 30s and 40s who were new in FDRs time, not the classical liberals that formed the basis of Austrian thought. (Even von Mises was in a more orthodox classical liberal tradition than the original neoliberals like Ropke or Euken, or even Keynes (who is arguably neoliberal in thought, even if he never personally adopted the label – the hallmark of neoliberalism is the idea that it’s the state’s role to manage and perfect markets)).

You can’t be serious that Nozick invented the concept of the minimal state. It goes back to the early-19th century at least (examples include the writings of Frederic Bastiat, see especially his essay Justice and Fraternity, and the identical concept is represented by the term Night-Watchman State (Nachtwachterstaat), which comes from an 1862 socialist critique of limited government). And conceptually is recognizable in the ideals of constitutional government generally, and specifically including the US founding, which sought to form a government of limited and enumerated powers.

You have entirely too much faith in government programs that would hardly be supportable if looked at in any detail. You apparently can’t even concede there are a lot of bad government programs that are harmful. Government is not an inherent good, and central planning inevitably fails (Hayek has never been refuted on this point). (And much of our world of peaceful abundance is *despite* government, not because of it). That some government programs may have done good is hardly an argument that all, most, or even many government programs have done good. (Of course, you seem unwilling to name any specific government programs at all, which makes discussion harder).

You’ve clearly never actually read Rand, although nothing I’ve argued here relies on her or is based on her. (There are problems with Rand. They’re probably not the things you think they are). Not sure why you even bring her up.

[Ilya Snowman]

‘So the leftist critique isn’t so much about abandoning liberalism, but perfecting it – better helping it to achieve its putative goals’.

Well, that’s some Orwellian horseshit. The leftist critiques, from Marx, from socialists, from social democratcs, from wishy-washy crits, etc, is decidedly anti-liberal for liberalism’s ESPOUSED individualism, for its rights-centric views, for its distorted pictures of socialisation, for its (supposedly) leading to alienation, etc.

The right’s critique, which is over two hundred and thirty years old in the English tradition (and older in the cognate Continental Catholic tradition), says that liberalism is just a pie in the sky ideology. Hence the right’s critique ISN’T in regards to what makes liberalism work, but rather about why the latter doesn’t reflect reality, and so what makes society, institutions, communities REALLY work. Equally, too, in both the Tory and the Catholic social traditions, liberalism is correctly accused of missing social features, of missing institutional features (of ‘society’ itself), which go in to identity construction social solidarity.

It’s no wonder, then, that both the right and the left are more amenable to sociological and anthropological work than is liberalism.

And then of course one must consider the idiosyncratic usage of ‘liberalism’ in the American context…

Of course, as he has repeatedly demonstrated on VC, SimonP is both a consummate liar and a moron. So, he wouldn’t know ANYTHING about what the real critiques of liberalism are, let alone COULD NOT be trusted to report them accurately and honestly.

Perhaps the most under-stated, if not unstated, critique of ‘liberalism’ today is that it’s really just a veneer for ulterior political ends: imperialist, global, ones. Relatedly, most of that ideology’s adherents today are full cheerleaders of social re-engineering and of concept & word-usage policing. So, liberals’ talk of defending robust legal and political rights is belied by their own efforts to undertake and/or support exactly what Leninists, Jacobins, Mapei-socialist Zionists on Israeli Kibbutzes, and others tried to do in terms of transforming forms of consciousness (sans empirically-grounded knowledge and techniques, of course). So too, claims of supporting the notion of ‘spontaneous ordering’ vis-a-vis law ARE CONTRADICTED by efforts to police and engineer the social (and the linguistic).

A greater genealogical account of liberalism, tracing it into particular European religious developments can and should be offered, by BOTH the left and right.

[SimonP]

Mischaracterizes modern leftist critiques of liberalism, concedes the point on rightist critiques, and then backflips into a leftist critique of liberalism.

But good job on demonstrating that you've read a book at some point. Better than I can expect from most here.

[Ilya Snowman]

Entirely unconvincing and demonstrably false, but amusing.

Maybe YOU should read a book or two at some point...

Maybe you should also try to do something other than lie all the time. After all, for people who read this stuff for a living (including 'the modern leftist critiques of liberalism'), you haven't a hope in hell of gaslighting or tricking them about these matters.

On the other hand, unfortunately, adopting a more honest, informed approach would require you to be a smarter and better person than you are and could ever possibly be. (Do you reckon that's correlated with your defective brain wiring towards same-sex orientation?)

Carry on Simon, even though your ideology is dying and your fellow Americans are going to---in the least---tar and feather you soon.

[SimonP]

Entirely unconvincing and demonstrably false,...

[While demonstrating nothing...]

Comrade - you use language that is deliberately calculated to hurt. Since I know that is your intention, do you think it hurts me? Or do you think it just allows me to feel comfortable in writing you off as a fraudulent sack of shit?

[Ilya Snowman]

You’re projecting, Simon, and you should learn about tu quoque.

Keep lying, boy. You know next to nothing about the topic at hand and you don’t care that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Perhaps that makes you a good American, but it doesn’t make you a credible person.

[SimonP]

The thing is, Comrade, I might take these kinds of criticisms seriously – that I don’t know what I’m talking about, etc. – if they weren’t so reliably paired with things like gratuitous references to my sexuality or enthusing over my suffering a painful death at the hands of those you term my “betters.”

It’s just all so over-torqued. If you were a commenter whose comments were often thoughtful or engaging – whether with me or anyone else – then I might be concerned that I couldn’t convince you that I know what I’m talking about. But you’re just a troll trying to harass me and every other left-leaning commenter on here, despite the fact that we all have tools that can silence you forevermore, if we chose to use them. Your criticisms just come off as disingenuous and put-on.

Do you realize that? I am choosing to continue to see your comments. That’s how much they bother me.

[Ilya Snowman]

Don’t play with me, boy: you always lie and avoid the merits. You obviously don’t care about the truth. You obviously know little to nothing about Foucault, Althusser, Chomsky, Sandel, Hunt, the Brit Crits, etc. You obviously know nothing about the European right thinkers. You obviously know next to nothing about how present day left writers regurgitate old critiques of liberalism.

I don’t care if you believe me. For I know, definitively, that you’re both wrong and that you’re lying. It’s simply valuable to OTHER readers to point that out.

You’re not, and cannot be, a worthy or trustworthy interlocutor. Indeed, HOW can one have a sincere discourse if one has every reasonable expectation that the other party is just going to lie in every response? You have provided everyone here with good, abundant weighty reasons, via your past comments, to believe that you CANNOT BE a genuine, sincere interlocutor. Your track record speaks for itself. One cannot and should not trust you, and can have no expectation other than lies from you.

So mute me, you petulant, ignorant, dishonest, evolutionary dud. My dominant aims in responding to you are just (a) to show OTHER READERS here that and how you lie and (b) to get THEM to challenge THEIR OWN beliefs. You, yourself, are useless, OTHER THAN as a springboard. Since I expect nothing but lies from you, anything other than the merits, I treat you with the scorn and derision that you deserve. YOU ARE NOT EQUAL.

[David Nieporent]

The leftist critique of liberalism is really just an extension of liberalism itself.

This is self-flattering unmitigated bullshit. "Sure, we act like we hate liberalism, but that's just because we like it so much that we want to improve it, unlike the guys on the other side, who are just evil."

No, the leftist critique of liberalism does not arise out of liberalism. Leftists, to the extent that they adopt any liberal positions, do so as an instrumental matter. Things like free speech, property, civil liberties, due process, they treat as means to their ends, not as goods in and of themselves. Equality? Leftism focuses on factual equality, whereas liberalism is about legal equality. Liberalism values individual autonomy, whereas leftism is about collective outcomes.
​
​
This probably needs to be said on a forum like this: when I denounce leftism, I do not mean mainstream liberals/Democrats.

[SimonP]

This is self-flattering unmitigated bullshit.

Chip, I will give you an opportunity to choose how you would like this comment thread to go.

My OC is a good-faith attempt to engage the OP on the substance. You can choose to address that comment in good faith, if you'd like, and we might be able to have a productive discussion about liberalism, the "leftist" critique of it, and what is and isn't part of that critique.

Or, you can spout off and fail entirely to engage the subject at hand, choosing to instead throw a tantrum over a strawman, as you've done here. In which case, I will simply insult your intelligence and move on.

You can choose. If you would like me to engage you like an adult, please feel free to post another attempt at a response to my comment.

[Ilya Snowman]

‘My OC is a good-faith attempt to engage the OP on the substance’.

No, it’s demonstrably not, by anyone with any real familiarity with the relevant literatures.

And, again, you’ve an established record here AS a liar. So, even your claim about making a ‘good-faith attempt’ CANNOT be taken at face value here.

Adults wouldn’t regularly lie, project, and regularly slander here, let alone about things that are clear/obvious/within others' 'wheelhouses' here, as is your wont.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Because government has never intruded so much into daily life.

Never in my lifetime have critiques of Locke, Smith, Mill, the British Enlightenment, and the American founding emanated from so many different quarters, attacked from so many directions, and sounded so scathing and confident.

When people made most decisions for themselves, they could ignore government trade policies, international relations, and other such busybody stuff. But when government starts demanding obeisance to pronouns, raising energy costs, making vehicles more expensive and less useful, sticking their nose into dishwashers, toilets, shower heads, and so many other aspects of day to day life, people find it is more productive to sic government on business competitors and people they don't like rather than mind their own business.

Of course this raises tensions in society! There's a single monolithic uncontrollable monopoly government poking into everybody's lives. What else would any sane person expect? We see what the wokies expect -- blind obedience. Look at the UK arresting people for mean tweets, anything which insults the wokies. The McCarthyites at their worst were never anywhere close to minding so many people's lives to such excruciating detail. Anti-communists may have violated basic constitutional rights in stupid ways, but they didn't throw people in jail for not knowing someone's special made up pronouns, or for expressing the opinion that there aren't 57 different gender identities, or throw parents in jail for opposing the State mutilating their children on a teacher's say-so.

[NOVA Lawyer]

Other than the fact that none of your parade of horribles has actually occurred (any citation for someone thrown in jail for "not knowing someone's special made up pronouns" or your other examples of an overbearing penal system) and so your conclusions are based on a fever dream rather than reality, great comment!

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Perhaps you ignore news from Britain, legislation from California, and other unfriendly realities. I cannot help you there. If you willfully shut your eyes, I will not force you to open them.

[NOVA Lawyer]

Not a citation. All bluster, no substance.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Other than the fact that none of your parade of horribles has actually occurred "

"But when government starts demanding obeisance to pronouns, raising energy costs, making vehicles more expensive and less useful, sticking their nose into dishwashers, toilets, shower heads,"

So, your dispute is just that the government hasn't been literally throwing people in jail over pronouns, but instead has settled for lesser sanctions?

[NOVA Lawyer]

“your dispute is just that the government hasn’t been literally throwing people in jail over pronouns, but instead has settled for lesser sanctions?”

It’s not my only dispute. But when someone resorts to stupid hyperbole, that seems a thing to call out.

Tell me what pronoun shenanigans by the government has you exercised and we can talk about it. Asking me to pretend the government is throwing people in jail for using the wrong pronoun is inviting me to a fantasy world so that we can engage in the ritual Two Minutes Hate.

For the rest, which you brought back in ("raising energy costs, making vehicles more expensive and less useful, sticking their nose into dishwashers, toilets, shower heads"), you understand that almost all of these involve tradeoffs. You might like some dislike others, but safety regulations for automobiles have saved countless lives. We don't live in libertopia, and I hate low-flow shower heads and toilets as much as the next person, but pretending that a low-flow shower head is the same as telling you what medical procedure you can or can't have such that the problem with big government is exclusively on the left is dumb.

He would, presumably, like the leader of the "right" currently would like to put people in jail for burning their own flag. So if the "evils" are limited to regulations relating to automobiles and household appliances, color me unimpressed.

It's the throwing people in jail that was false and necessary for his point to have any rhetorical force.

[Brett Bellmore]

"This paradoxical situation has me scratching my head, and I'm not alone. Why is liberalism so widely challenged and attacked, and so defensive and self-doubting, when it has so much to brag about? "

The paradox of tolerance, basically. Liberals, and I mean real ones, not leftwingers wearing the name like a skin suit, understood that the fascists were a real threat, and wouldn't tolerate them in the schools after WWII. But they failed to properly defend against the threat from the left. They tolerated communists and Marxists staying in academia, and they eventually took over, especially the schools of education.

The education system is upstream of culture, and the left, which is NOT traditionally liberal, took over the transmission of culture, and used it against us.

[Brett Bellmore]

To be clear, I'm not saying that Marxists are the majority anywhere, though it wouldn't shock me in the occasional faculty. But they're common and ruthless enough to have taken over, and to frighten everybody else into compliance.

I linked a few months ago to a study of faculty attitudes, that showed that only the most left of the faculty were not afraid to express their opinions freely. Not just the conservatives were afraid, but also the centrists and moderate leftists. Only the extreme left were fearless.

Why? Because they were the ones everyone else was afraid of, even though they were actually the minority.

[SimonP]

If only we could purge all of the communists and Marxists from academia. It would be a revolution, with a dramatic impact on our culture.

[Sarcastr0]

And here once again, Brett uses his personally created worldview to rationalize authoritarianism, but for his side.

Purges, but for freedom.

[Ilya Snowman]

Tu qouque, Tankie.

[Ilya Snowman]

Meanwhile, not only did you allow this to happen, but you let them call themselves 'liberal'.

Worse still, you let the left call itself 'progressive' (rather than 'socialist', 'social democratic', 'Marxist', etc).

You YOURSELVES called them 'progressives'. It offered them a cover, a wide ambiguous label, that could then be used to help nudge people leftward.

Watch this communist, Robert Serbert, claim that he and his colleagues were being 'moderately liberal', 'moderately left wing' (at 30:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNbhfKeOO5k

This is unforgivable.

Jefferson said something to the effect of 'the price of liberty is eternal vigilance'. Well, your lot drop the ball for decades!

[ReaderY]

Liberalism, in its pure classical form, doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. It gets neither economics nor human nature right.

Its economics don’t work because it naturally tends towards increasing wealth inequality, tending to create trillionaires who may initially get wealth and power by contributing value, but who tend to keep that wealth and power by controlling resources or extracting rents or addicting people without adding value, reaching a utility ceiling and eventually more impoverishing than enriching society. Utility is non-linear. A society with one trillionaire and a million people with nothing does not have anything like the same overall social utility as one with a million millionaires.

Its model of human nature doesn’t work because it completely fails to capture what actually motivates people. People are simply not primarily motivated by economics; they are motivated by emotions that tend to be decried as irrational and promitive but whose existence can’t be exorcised by either denigration or willful blindness.

Thus both on the left and the right, alternatives that provide a framework for individuals to have a place in and derive meaning from both the community and the universe repeatedly win out over liberalism’s stuntey narrow, indeed largely non-existent, vision about what it MEANS to be human. Classical liberalism simply doesn’t care about that. But people do.

It might work for robots. It just doesn’t work for people.

It doesn’t matter if it’s more efficient if it doesn’t work. If a solution doesn’t have to work, I can solve any problem in no time and with no resources. For this reason, efficiency simply isn’t the only criterion.

It simply doesn’t work in the long run to have a general form of human society that only addresses a highly stunted form of human nature and human existence. Backlashes are inevitable.

People want to be part of a story. They don’t want to be part of a machine. They will inevitably rebel against the machine people and flock to people who have a good story to tell, a story about what their life can MEAN. And they will do this whether the people coming with the stories and the meaning have their interests and good in mind, like the Buddahs and the Christs, or don’t, like the Hitlers and the Stalins.

[Brett Bellmore]

It's hard to say that liberalism, in it's pure form, doesn't work, when nobody has ever seen it's pure form, nor is ever likely to.

This is not to say that pure classical liberalism WOULD work, I have doubts. It's just to say that all we've ever seen has been mix of liberalism and intrusive government, and it seems a bit dodgy to blame all the problems that mixture faces on the liberalism half of the mix.

Of course, the more classical liberalism, the more wealth is available to be unevenly distributed; Everybody is equal if everybody is dirt poor.

[Sarcastr0]

Why do you think the title doesn't say 'classical liberalism?'

[Sarcastr0]

Liberalism, in its pure classical form, doesn’t work

But what the OP describes is not classical liberalism: 'toleration, minority rights' are both new to the scene.

, alternatives that provide a framework for individuals to have a place in and derive meaning from both the community and the universe repeatedly win out
I don't think it's a contest. Personal meaning is not a playing field government spends a lot of time on.

[David Nieporent]

Its economics don’t work because it naturally tends towards increasing wealth inequality,

That's a feature, not a bug. We know how to decrease inequality: make everyone worse off; inequality drops during recessions. Your error is in thinking that one person getting richer makes other people poorer.

A society with one trillionaire and a million people with nothing does not have anything like the same overall social utility as one with a million millionaires.

How exactly would you end up with a society with one trillionaire and a million people with nothing? And if you did, you understand that the trillionaire's money would have no use at all, right? It's not a feudal situation where he gets to lord over everyone else because he has all the money; it's a post-apocalyptic scenario where money is worthless.

[Absaroka]

The whole essay is worth reading. I liked this: "

Third: the challengers can’t self-correct. Instead, they always compound their errors. Liberal democracies, liberal markets, and liberal science all make mistakes, because they are human; but they have built-in mechanisms for identifying and rectifying them. Liberal democracy provides for political competition and rotation in power; markets let firms and entrepreneurs fail and be replaced; liberal science connects millions of investigators in a collective search for error."

Those do seem key - government can't keep on with bad policies no matter how strongly they believe in them, because they will get voted out. Businesses can't succeed because they were granted a royal monopoly. Good knowledge displaces bad because we don't (shouldn't!) burn people at the stake for espousing heliocentrism. Doing those three things lets society stumble forward to find the maze exit.

[Sarcastr0]

A few random thoughts:

1) You describe a system that I think captures the best of our society, and is something I very much like. Not sure if that should make you nervous.

2) Locke, Smith, Mill, etc. by and large didn’t actually think that all all persons are born free and equal. But so what – the American experiment being more ambitious than anyone at the time knew is part of our exceptionalist story.

3) You can’t sleep on Marx’s critique of capitalism and the exploitation of labor problem just because Marx was wildly wrong on a bunch of other areas. The New Deal and Great Society are well in keeping with these liberal principles as you lay them out, and also compensate at least some for the race to the bottom of labor markets issue Marx identified.

4) The enlightenment project you’re speaking to was not one of operational principles, it was utopian – about how to create an ideal society. It was more in reaction to Burke that you get the broad framework paradigm.

5) The idea of liberalism as radical in the scheme of history is true but kind of trivial. Just about every society had it’s philosophical takes that were radical departures. There’s just so much conceptual space there!
What makes us different is our takes are the *good ones*.

OK now to read the comments...

[Sarcastr0]

All in all the comments were thoughtful and good.

I did enjoy the folks coming hard at communism only end up with frustrated shadowboxing because no one here is defending communism.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Rather, liberalism in the tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders.

The most salient point of intersection among those three is that Locke and some of the founders were pro-slavery. Mostly, they are notably different traditions.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Some of liberalism’s inventions – like rule of law and conducting scientific research – are not its inventions at all.

As for liberalism’s distinctive inventions, the dominant liberals are abandoning them, leaving a few left-liberals like Rauch to pen nostalgic pieces of what liberalism supposedly accomplished in the past.

If religious tolerance/freedom is a value of liberalism, the ruling liberals have given up on it, leaving nostalgic liberals like Rauch to pine for the good old days. The liberalism which actually runs things subordinates religious freedom to the sexual-liberatory policies of the day.

If republican institutions are a liberal invention (which would come as a surprise to preliberal republics like Switzerland), then the dominant liberalism is taking the axe to the roots of republican government. Casually assuming that liberal institutions will survive a complete divorce between marriage (as traditionally understood) and the perpetuation of the human species, then this sets us up for a Huxleyan world where (if we replenish the species at all) we we will replenish it with test tube babies and collective child-rearing (making sure they’re taught the modern version liberalism, not Rauch’s). The family, supposed to be a buffer between the atomized individual and the state, will no longer be serving that role.

As for democracy – or I should say “representative government” (as Mill called it), or “a republican form of government” (as the U. S. Constitution called it), the liberal establishment is not interested in having the issues it deems truly important settled through republican (small r) deliberation. International institutions, courts, large corporations are to set the agenda and let the people follow behind without being consulted.

Rauch is defending what increasingly looks like a museum-piece liberalism which is not relevant to the liberalism we have running things now. That form of liberalism looks a lot like authoritarianism. Religiously-based authoritarianism, with new and previously-unconventional religions.

And the modern, ruling liberalism, does not “deliberately leave[] the transcendent questions open,” but insists on imposing answers across the board marginalizing dissenters.

[Brett Bellmore]

"As for liberalism’s distinctive inventions, the dominant liberals are abandoning them"

Again it needs to be remembered: Late 18th century and early 19th century "liberals" and modern "liberals" aren't the same thing; The latter often don't even derive from the former. That's why we ended up needing terms like "classical liberal" or "libertarian"!

Rather, what happened was something similar to what Jack Balkin is currently, with infuriating success, pulling off with "originalism": Actual liberalism's foes, the Fabian socialists, (Who literally adopted a wolf in sheep's clothing as their emblem.) adopted a program of calling themselves by the name of their enemy, to confuse people. And succeeded in actually taking the name "liberal" over.

Today's 'liberals' are not abandoning liberalism, they're just dropping a mask. A skin suit they cut off of their enemies.

[Sarcastr0]

Read the OP Brett. Do you think it’s describing classical liberalism?

And holy shit you are getting worse in what you think about liberals.
You sound like parts of Mein Kampf talking about the Jew.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Locke, Smith, Mill, the British Enlightenment, and the American founding"...

Yes, that's exactly what it's describing: Classical liberalism.

[Sarcastr0]

Keep reading.

[Sarcastr0]

Its operational principles include the rule of law, pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority, limited government, and (subject to the other requirements) democratic decision-making.
Its distinctive method of social organization is to rely on impersonal rules and open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.

Three interlinked social systems: liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices

Transcending tribe, renouncing authoritarianism, substituting rules for rulers, and treating persons as interchangeable.

This is generally vastly more directive than the somewhat inchoate classical liberalism.
Classical liberalism does not include: "pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority" indeed minority rights is generally seen in tension with that view.

You yourself have come at democracy if it doesn't secure liberty, which is a monomania beyond even classical liberalism.

[Ilya Snowman]

'and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices... Transcending tribe, renouncing authoritarianism, substituting rules for rulers, and treating persons as interchangeable.'

LIES, as belied by liberals' longstanding, regular practices and their efforts to police speech and thought, including vis-a-vis epistemic, moral and social norms. It not just the left which does this. Liberal do too (and not just social democrats and others who hide behind the 'liberal' label, particularly in America).

'...and treating persons as interchangeable'.

This part is true. It, in part shows, why you are lying about liberals' totalitarian efforts when it comes social norms and efforts to police speech and thought (ie in an effort to help effectuate and justify social re-engineering schemes). It also reflects the BLIND, IDEOLOGICAL commitment to 'inclusiveness', free from credible, empirical (sociological, anthropological, etc) grounds to establish the congruence and compatibility of various value systems. (Hence the irony and annoyance of liberals accusing others of mere bigotry and phobias when confronted with cases of incongruence and incompatibility---ones even recognized by liberals themselves.) It helps people, on both the LEFT and the RIGHT, to see liberalism as a rather superficial ideology. A set of dogmas that presents itself as being grounded in reason and reliant upon reason.

Nor is liberalism necessarily tied to democracy; there are clear, credible examples of non-democratic LIBERAL regimes. They (or their leaders, at least) are clear, sincere liberals, nonetheless.

Most importantly, liberalism ---uncoupled from its Christian roots and rendered applicable in a 'catholic' fashion --- is now seen to be part and parcel of an evolutionarily inferior meme. A zeitgeist that leads to collapsing birth rates, to a fundamental dependency upon mass immigration of NON-liberals (and anti-liberals) to prop up liberal regimes and societies, to dysmorphias and delusions (ESPECIALLY about equality).

It's an intellectually exhausted ideology, one which helped to expedite its own undoing.

[arhar]

Liberalism is like the polytheistic religion that took Rome from a small city of thieves and refugees to an empire. Progressivism is like Christianity that displaced it. I imagine Roman conservatives not understanding how can they abandon their old Gods a for this new God, when the old Gods served them so well. But they did. Liberalism is just as gone as Jupiter cca 350.

Also, btw. progressivism is a Christian heresy. By claiming they know what universal good is and trying to bring it into the world, progressives claim to have the equivalent of the "eye of God" that is everywhere and sees and understands everything. I guess if one had told a Roman that something needs to be done because it is "good" the Roman would have asked "good for who?".

Progressives appropriated not just the concept of universal good from Christianity but they also have prophets (Marx) and apostles (Lenin, Mao), and zealots, they are always "saving" something or someone, they have equivalent sacraments, they ask their followers for sacrifice, they work to bring about paradise on earth. They play hard games of virtue like the puritans did. Progressivism has the skeleton of puritanism with altered content changes to dress it. It has in fact replaced puritanism.

[Ilya Snowman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire_(film)

You might enjoy this film if you’ve not already seen it. The parallels are superb—and unsurprising, as the script was written by a blacklisted commie.

The Roman opponents of the key policy change, expressed explicitly in the film, are vindicated by history (PACE the commie screenwriter).

Heresy or no, ‘progressives’ (as you wrongly call them) have always claimed to have knowledge they don’t actually possess. This is in part because they misrepresent their intuitions, dogmas, values, and sentiments AS knowledge and as grounding real knowledge. Even if some of them have their hearts in the right place, they are, to their core, charlatans.

[arhar]

Yes, I should have said a "gnostic Christian heresy". Gnostics, claiming some special knowledge, are always either charlatans or people who believe their own bullshit.

A key component of the Gnosticism (or charlatanry) of progressivism is the claim that there are such things as "historical eras" that begin and end based on some "laws of history" that have been deciphered and can be used to predict what's coming.

Even the division of history into antiquity, medieval ("dark ages"), and modern is another Gnostic "translation" of the Christian "eras" (before Christ, after Christ's first coming, and after the second coming).

That trick has then been appropriated to say something like "communism" (paradise on earth, perfection) must succeed "socialism" (the imperfect "now") that succeeded "capitalism" (which was the fallen state of the world before our prophet Marx showed up on the historical scene, on his first coming at least).

[Sarcastr0]

The enlightenment was all about science and reason over religion. NONE of this is Christian.

Christianity came around to the liberal project, not the other way around.

I also don't think you know what progressivism is if you're highlighting Marx Lenin and Mao for it.
Teddy Roosvelt, not a big Marxist.

[Ilya Snowman]

No, Tankie. Learn about the real genealogy of your ideology. Liberalism is borne out of that faith. It is a secularized outgrowth of it, as it were, even though it has completely failed to shed some of its religious dogmatic commitments (to human equality in some sense, say. To people being rights-bearing agents. Etc).

And don’t try to equivocate or prevaricate over what constitutes ‘progressivism’ TODAY in the United States by discussing what it meant over a century ago (and PRETENDING that Teddy has anything to do with what most Americans who self-identify as ‘progressive’ want and believe).

Do you even remember the last time you didn’t try to lie?

[arhar]

Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, the fathers of enlightenment (and many other enlightenment figures) were Christians. The universities and science of the western world came out of Christianity, not in opposition to it. Trying to understand the creation is (was) a Christian calling.

Teddy Roosevelt is inconsequential. Progressivism is mutated Marxism (which I argue is mutated Christianity).

[Sarcastr0]

That is, in fact, the main thrust of the enlightenment - everyone was Christain, but into this new thing called reason at the same time.

It was a secular project, done largely by Christians.

Teddy Roosevelt is inconsequential
Well, you sure don't know this history of progressivism.

[Ilya Snowman]

‘It was a secular project, done largely by Christians’.

This is what happens when, for example, you read political theory divorced from the authors’ social and other contexts (including their sources).

It’s what happens when you worship Hobbes, Locke, etc, without seeing where (from whom) they got many of their ideas and how those ideas actually developed.

‘Well, you sure don’t know this history of progressivism’.

I wouldn’t be surprised if YOU don’t, especially in regards to where the American progressives got most of their ideas from.