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rudatron posted:The fundamental issue is this: liberalism is inherently opposed to providing security to people, and people are drawn to anyone who can promise them that. Whether its protection from hunger, want, of from threats, real or imagined, liberalism assumes, and treats other people as if they are not moved by such guarantees. That of course everyone is already safe, or is capable and willing to act with the confidence that comes from knowing that you, personally, are safe. The ideal of the market, as composed of rational agents who (with total confidence and without doubt), must constantly act and react to the constantly shifting sands of dynamic capitalism, is treated as reality, or rather, the 'true emancipation' of human beings. To me, this isn't actually a description of liberalism in its classical form. Classical liberalism (i.e., Locke or Madison) saw the desire for personal security as the fundamental bedrock of a liberal society. It's the threat hanging over our heads that forces us to play nicely, sign onto the social contract, and recognize each other's liberties in other areas. Those dudes saw property rights and markets as an important part of a liberal state and society, but not the most important thing. I think that turn toward "the ideal of the market, as composed of rational agents with total confidence and without doubt" is a much more recent conceptual framework. It's neoliberalism, and only began developing in the 1940s or whatever. I think one big problem with modern liberalism is that those two things have become conflated. Kavros posted:A liberal in a post-boomer era will probably settle down in a general realm of where norwegian social democratists kind of sit, but we'll keep a lot of our american peculiarities. We'll eventually go single payer, and once it's a universal platform it will never be able to go back (similar to how it's untouchable even to the foulest right wing parties in other developed nations). The conservatives will bump over the hump of no return with their transphobia and eventually lose out in the same inexorable pattern that saw them losing the culture war over gay marriage. We'll be in some combination reboot and repair mode over social systems which are much more robust in literally every other developed nation, overcoming the damage of decades of work by a party that gets elected on the promise of government not working (followed by 'starve the beast' style attacks on those systems to 'prove' it). I also think this attitude is another big problem with liberalism as an ideology (both classical and neoliberalism). It's essentially Whiggish. Things are just going to naturally go our way - we don't have to struggle or fight for it to happen, and we don't have to propose any mechanism to get from here to there. History is just on our side and we can just sit back and let it happen. But I don't think that's how politics actually works. Politics is nothing but contention and getting your hands dirty and fighting. It's like, Martin Luther King didn't just say "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." He went out there and he bent it himself, in ways that were deeply unpopular and divisive even among other progressives.
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Jan 19, 2017 07:08
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 19:09 |
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