"The Truth is in the Middle" - The Liberal Ideal in an Era of Nationalism

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > "The Truth is in the Middle" - The Liberal Ideal in an Era of Nationalism

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Neeksy posted:

I think a part of what makes it difficult is that they really don't understand their own ideology very well, to the point that admitting even having one at all is akin to taboo. The "economic conservative, social liberal" canard is less a statement of what they actually believe in terms of policy outcomes or desired society, but rather a projection of an ideal identity that appears to be unique and discerning; they want to appear like their beliefs are put together like a shopping list that they carefully put together by weighing the merits of each idea. They want to look like a smart shopper rather than a slave to branding. It's a form of political atheism where they look upon people who buy in to an existing ideological framework as true-believer dupes that allow dogma to define their worldview for them. The reality is that these self-imagined snowflakes have no idea what many of these political terms even mean, nor how politics and civic society intersect.

I think this is key, yeah. The paradigm shift in the late 70s�80s, combined with the fall of an ideologically oppositional superpower in the USSR, cemented liberal democracy as the dominant ideology and brought about this "end of history" mindset. When your ideology is the only game in town you stop viewing it as an ideology. So you get this kind of stagnation where political offices must be respected and wonkery is king. Political differences exist because republicans are just uneducated, people would vote the right way if they knew the truth. They don't really have any beliefs.

Of course, at the same time they believe in truisms like "politics is the art of the possible", or that means testing and compromise solutions are somehow always better.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 08:16

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exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Jack Gladney posted:

What caused the world to abandon Keynes and capitalism with a robust safety net? I keep hearing about stagflation and oil crises as the prods that rose neoliberalism out of the muck, but were those crises inevitable?

This is a really naive question, but was postwar capitalism always doomed to collapse, with Milton Friedman and his pack of ghouls simply giving the system a few more years by crushing its victims to feed the top? Or could we still be living in a less racist 1963 with a big middle class and lots of work for all of the welfare state hadn't been disassembled?

I know that's a dumb question, but I'm inarticulate.

Blyth gives a nice overview here (18:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY&t=1108s

This whole talk is great btw

# ¿ Jan 21, 2017 03:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > "The Truth is in the Middle" - The Liberal Ideal in an Era of Nationalism