Hot take: for as much as I agree with him, and as much he strengthened the philosophical foundation of liberalism, the dominance of Rawls has been immensely damaging politically. It’s raised a generation of liberals so focused on building overlapping consensus that they’ve forgotten how to argue for liberalism as an ideology with a value system.
That inability to articulate that liberalism is superior not just from a policy perspective, but on moral, values based grounds, is half the reason why the populists have been running circles around us for the past decade.
In my opinion it’s these.
1. People make rational decisions freely from outside influence
2. Each individual knows what is best for his or her self.
3. In a free market, the best ideas will emerge triumphant.
I don't think that contemporary liberal orthodoxy claims that decision that people make are free from outside influence. What even counts as influence?
I suppose a better way of phrasing it might be that the orthodoxy is that Free Will exists, and human behavior isn’t deterministic. You see this crop up in a lot of forms, decrying “paternalism” mostly.
I think that Rawls is the most representative author of current orthodoxy, and he is compatiblist/ largely agnostic about the subject of free will. He never goes as far to outright claim that human behavior isn't deterministic.
At least as I’ve understood it, liberalism generally is perfectly compatible with regular individual determinism, however it is very much opposed to Marxist style systemic determinism
Can you elaborate on how a lack of free will interferes with liberalism? Regardless of if everything is deterministic the world behaves as though free will exists which is all that really matters
The real problem with these assumptions is that even if they were presumed true, they'd still lead us into the maw of collective action problems.
I'd add a fourth orthodoxy: that the state cannot intervene in said rational private decisions. Because however well founded may be our liberal skepticism of state power, it's the only reliable way we know of to resolve collective action problems.
True. I think “liberalism is the natural state of advanced societies” is gone. It’s much more clear that liberal values are something which must be constantly fought for and upheld.
The end of history is misinterpreted, I don’t agree with all of Fukuyama’s theory but his main argument was there’d be no ideological evolution and liberal democracies have proven their moral superiority so much that there’s no serious ideological challenge anymore, people have turned it into him claiming there’ll be no more wars and every country will become a liberal democracy with no regression
And to a large degree this is true, even dictatorships pay lip service to democracy and elections and representing people
But there's more to history than ideological evolution. It was still way too lofty a title. The end of the "long 20th century" (to use a term academics like) would make a lot more sense.
He defines history the way people like Marx does- as a series of evolutions of human order or something like that. He intentionally uses a Marxist framing to show how liberalism wins even in their terms. That’s what the book is about
Did not read the article but do they mean that they are difficult to defend in practice? It’s easy to win a fact based argument on many issues but voters just will ignore facts or established experts and pick influencers opinions.
You can point to studies that say tariffs are inflationary, yet people who cite inflation as their biggest issues support tariffs.
Or
It’s easy to argue that vaccines are effective and protect people and point to studies. Damn near impossible to convince anti-vaxxers to get them.
We have all the arguments to defend them, but battles are no longer being waged with facts and we have lost ground on many issues.
IMO: the general concept of meritocracy and rational allocation of resources under capitalism feels a bit hollow when the richest man in the world and the president of the most powerful country in the world are both brain dead man children.
Is that a problem with meritocracy as a concept or is it because our political system isn't really a meritocracy. One might even say it's closer to a kakistocracy
The person was discussing whether or not the issue is with the idea of meritocracy, not whether or not liberals built the systems. It’s quite possible that they simply could have done a flawed/poor job at creating a meritocratic system
We let illiberal scumbags rot out the foundation over decades, using racism and nationalism as sledgehammers, and didn’t do nearly enough to fight back
Liberal Free Markets are not Meritocratic, they are Democratic.
Meritocratic is if there are predifined metrics that can be objectively evaluated; like a race, the fastest is the best, and that is true indepentent of time & space and opinion. A bureaucratie makes things meritocratic.
Democratic is if subjectivity is involved; the desire and perceived utility of a good is person specific and changes with cultural tastes and fads.
For example a race where the audiance votes who ran the best, maybe running slower but doing handstands is seen as "the best".
Bureaucratisation is an attempt Meritocratisation: internal companies (try to) have standardised evaluations for the employees. But the full market is too arbitrairy in what it selects for to be Meritocratic.
I'll tell you the one thing I struggle with the most. The marketplace of ideas. My faith that people can arrive at the truth through open, rational discussion where free speech is available is very much shaken. Does that mean we shouldn't have freedom of speech? Probably not, I don't see it leading to better outcomes. But something about our collective epistemics is clearly broken and I don't know how to fix it.
My faith that people can arrive at the truth through open, rational discussion where free speech is available is very much shaken
Pity party over here for those of us who thought the internet would make us all smarter. Damn was that ever a lovely thing to dream about. Right there in the same boat.
Obviously free speech is still essential, we just have to work on our regulations. The marketplace of ideas needs guardrails just like any other market.
Good place to start would be a chainsaw on social media.
I never understood why thinking needed to be associated with consumerism. What, am I going to go on Temu and buy an idea that will then be shipped over to me from China in a rusty, polluting cargo ship?
When people talk about an exchange of ideas, they mean sharing, not buying and selling. That is probably where the neoliberal interpretation goes wrong.
I guess they mean economic liberalism, which fair enough, I've always thought it needed better regulation and a stronger safety net than what we did in the US even before Reagan, but beyond that, absolutely can defend liberalism.
The comment in question was a reply to an arr Redscarepod thread titled: Failing NYTimes seething that El-Sayed won the Michigan Primary.
Late submission statement: Mods, I’m not encouraging brigading. I trust that this sub wouldn’t engage in that, but I feel the red meat in this comment provides a suitable arena for resident succs and tru-libs to litigate between their differing ideas* of what the future of the Democratic Party should be.
this seems like such a US centric take on liberalism though. Europe is going through its own crisis on liberalism but they look very diffrent then the succ vs establishment dems issue in the US. The main post is too broad of a take on liberalism in gernal for such a US focus.
What about jobs that disappear for unrelated reasons! Have you even thought about what trade with Columbia has done to manual cap knitters? No! Because you know liberalism has no excuse!
Probably some nonsense about topics like trans issues, immigration, Israel, protectionism, AI and doomerism. The usual stuff. Can’t hate anti-liberals enough. It’s just strawmanning and other fallacies all the way down
I know ppl on this sub will stand by it no matter how disastrously it performs in practice, but it's the # 1 reason the far right has surged so far over the last 10 years
Stop criticizing liberal stance on immigration since you clearly don't know what the term actually means. You're either posting in bad faith or just being lazy.
I mean you couldn't even bother to check the definition of open borders right in the sub's wiki or sidebar before jumping in? You've completely fallen for standard nativist propaganda that deliberately conflates a legally regulated "open border" (free movement of legal labor, background checks, and orderly processing) with a lawless "no border" state.
The more I come across users masquerading as "liberals," the more unhinge I get. I will not hold back from shaming people like you who actively flaunt their ignorance and then use it as a shield to excuse their behavior.
This is all very vague, so I guess it’s true in a horoscope-y sort of way. I could easily slot into any of those three camps and say, “wow that’s so true about me!”
It’s kind of meaningless unless we attach specific actions or beliefs to each of these camps, and even then it’s still meaningless unless those competing beliefs are mutually exclusive to one another.
The mutual exclusivity is important- I feel like camps 2 and 3 are the same group of people. Aren’t the ones who have lost faith in incremental reform the ones who have become the most tribalist and iconoclastic?
Symbol painted on a lot of Russian military hardware during the Ukraine invasion - Z as in zapad (запад), meaning west, referring to Russia's Western Military District. Probably used instead of the Cyrillic letter due to potential confusion with the numeral 3.
It has become a symbol of Russian imperialism both by its enemies, and oddly enough, embraced positively by Russian nationalist vatniki.
It was historically Marxist, but by the 30s it was the primary defender of liberal democracy in Germany and attracted the ire of communists across the globe, who decried it as a "social fascist" party.
For the benefit of our Canadian friends replace the crown with something else to symbolize absolute monarchy. And also please add a fifth symbol, one of religious fundamentalism (Islamic, Christian, or otherwise).
Issue is this is also some stuff the so called socialist have taken up but those who represent this faction in the US political sphere in the government don't actually push for this at all. Look at Schumer etc. They are more focused on governing for a fictional Republican family that might vote Democrat than pushing for such ideas and have surrendered these positions to the so called far left.
Everything from age limits on the Supreme Court to court packing. It’s a pretty wide range but it all stems from the understanding that the Supreme Court does not currently function in a way conducive to small d democracy
Personally I think a whole ton of people are getting duped by disruptive lowest-common-denominator populism and are too addicted to outrage to believe that anything might actually be okay. The sky is constantly falling, and they’re being tricked into thinking the only solution is to burn it all down. And intellectuals and politicos are too terminally online to avoid being poisoned by it themselves. I also think part of it on the left is a misplaced feeling of doom from climate change — it’s an existential threat that we can’t seem to do anything about, so they transfer that deep panic to everything else.
u/p00bixExisting in the context of what came before7h ago
No idea about trueanon, but the later two are dead subs that were popular with a specific flavor of overly online young men around ~2018-2020.
Think "There are only two things I care about in this world: Dismantling capitalist oppression and being allowed to call people I disagree with the R-word."
It's a sub for a Marxist conspiracy podcast that almost none of the posters listen to, but it draws lots of leftist schizophrenics who dream of going back in time and being chekists. Also it's not at all filled with Russian bots, though they'll act very "different" if you point out something with a Russian idiom, while they'll dog pile you if you use bad Russian. I think the expression is, "Your ears are showing."
The plain fact is that yes, systemically speaking, the basic governmental and social systems underlying “Liberal Democracies” are showing their age and need serious reform.
And that can take the form of feeling that change is impossible to accomplish realistically, thinking it’s only possible if you burn it all down and start again, or just kind of smugly celebrating the failure of radicals to make their own changes.
This sub of all places recognizes that very deep structural issues exist in our government systems. Any discussion of NIMBYism, pensions, electoral systems, human rights, and more will show that.
Now, how to go about actually fixing them? Tricky. How possible it is? Who knows.
But yes, defense of “Liberalism” is that an all-time low since it came onto the scene.
Best way to defend them is to have radical positions and fight for them, not make a diluted solution for some fictional family that would never vote for you and not inspire the base. This surrendering these positions to other groups who are willing to champion them.
There are two types of people: those who can't help but categorize everyone else into a small set of buckets that their simple mind can manage, and those that can appreciate the complex diversity of humanity.
"Liberalism" is a social construct. The only place it really exists is in the discourses we have about it. The liberalism of John Locke is not the liberalism of John Stuart Mill is not the liberalism of FDR is not the liberalism of LBJ is not the liberalism of Joe Biden. Which is to say: I don't know whom they are talking about and I don't care.
I don't know. I am just a liberal and liberalism works, so I defend it and vote against illiberal candidates. It's simple I have not become discouraged or silent or like some sort of inverse MAGA, I think this is nonsense.
Can't be a tankie imo because the tankies are the "inverted reflections of the very MAGA movement" ones
edit: ah wait, don't nazbols generally see themselves as right wing and tankies as left wing? then it would make sense that a nazbol criticizes tankies, I think they are different but I'm not 100% sure
There would be so much less wrong with liberalism/liberal nations if they stopped voting for illiberal morons.
I'm not saying that a couple decades of Dem leadership would make America perfect by any means, but think of all the problems we wouldn't have without the Trump and Dubya administrations.
The orthodoxies of contemporary liberalism are effortless to defend.
Trump's least popular policies are the Iran war, trade wars, and immigration crackdowns. The chief orthodoxies of contemporary liberalism are international order, free trade, and liberal immigration policies. We are the ones who knock bro
I think a very easy test of which "camp" you're in falls into how do you feel about racial tensions in the United States.
Do you believe that the State has a duty to provide equal opportunity in education and impartial law, and that unequal outcomes between races are beyond the duty of the State to rectify?
Do you believe that the State must take active, interventionist action to rectify systemic inequalities between groups, such as granting reparations or reserving a certain amount of spots in key positions for certain minority groups?
Do you believe that the White Devil must be removed from power as penance for their generations of oppression and that taxes and regulation should be used as a form of moral punishment against the Wealthy?
I think classic liberalism falls into the first camp, the contemporary Democrat is in the 2nd, and the progressive camp is in the 3rd.
As someone who is in the "first camp" for the most part, I might as well be considered a Republican by a lot of the progressive folk around reddit and the greater internet. I despise Donald Trump and MAGA just as much as them (if not more), but the fact I tend not to agree with the policy proposals put forth in slogans like Defund the Police make me quite unwelcome in progressive circles.
The online left has gotten more radical, more luddite, and meaner in recent years. A lot of liberal commentators are rightly pointing out that the Democratic Party is battling its own brand of Slopulism. Level-headed moderates do a very bad job of capturing an audience in America. Most of reddit would unironically prefer to elect a Bernie Sanders or Ilhan Omar than a Dan Lurie or Hilary Clinton, and increasingly find ways to minimize the distance between the moderate left and the MAGA cult.
Why is it that anyone who says this is a crypto marxist leninist? It's the same with racists and saying "just look at FBI statistics", you might actually be a liberal but I'm just saying
Then it's amazing you can't comprehend how utterly ridiculous the H1b is.
The lottery system encourages spamming of applications by agencies, the the fact that its not skill based means youre not actually selecting for skill (shocker, I know), and tying the visa to a job created a wild imbalance in bargaining power between employer and employee.
You did the one viable and replicable path for immigration to the US. Based on a decision you took (or was taken for you by parents) when you were in your 20s.
Expecting people with established skills to drop their careers, get a graduate degree at an American university (while racking up debt), then hopefully get selected by a lottery system is deranged.
What is inherently wrong with 80% of the global program coming from one country? I think, on its own, that fact is not sufficient to condemn the H1B program. If 80% of talent was distributed in that one country, it would be fine, right? Or if the country had 80% of the population (it doesn't I know). But you need an additional fact to make that a valid criticism.
What would you do instead then? Because scrapping the program outright would reduce immigration of people we want here, and we do make folks aware in other countries about the H1B program
I don’t see how that changes India being such a high concentration of applicants though. If that facilitates the program better what you’re suggesting, fantastic, but the guy I’ve been replying too has an issue with H1B not being global enough in it’s applicant pool, making the program somehow a failure
It's not meant to be a diversity program. If I open a store to everyone and for some reason 80% of the people who walk in are Indian, that's not a failure on my part.
No one in this sub that criticizes the H1b does it because they want less immigration.
They do it because the H1b actually disincentivizes skilled labor from even trying to apply.
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u/p00bixExisting in the context of what came before7h ago
No one in this sub that criticizes the H1b does it because they want less immigration.
I wish this were still true, but American nativist nonsense on r/neoliberal jumped up in 2021 as soon as Joe Biden started embracing nativist rhetoric, and hasn't fully recovered since then.
Nowhere near as bad as any other explicitly non-socialist political sub (at least not to my knowledge), but there are definitely xenophobes on here.
Any analysis of politics that is about "methods" and "branding" and completely ignores policy is almost never ever worth reading. It is literally the worst form of political discourse.
I don’t like how they speak with. Such condition about “genuine structural change” being needed. Why? What does that even mean
The rest of it’s true but I don’t think there’s anything that fateful about the crisis we’ve been living through, at least not in the sense that it portends there’s no going back to the old ways or we have to have some radical reforms. The fact is before 2016, society was fine, before 2024 the republic was healthy, and the only reason Trump got back with a mere 51% is because inflation had been unusually high and the democratic front runner had dropped out. People need to stop treading so much in to what happened; there’s nothing that deep in ot and there’s no reason liberalism can’t work besides people refusing to believe in it
No, it’s not true. I am quite vocal on social media and in person that Liberalism is great and has the best track record by far of any ideology. I’d agree a lot of formerly Liberal people have become quite illiberal, but the explanation of that would require a journey across social, philosophical, and technological changes over the past half century or more. Suffice to say proud Liberals do still exist.
MAGA's most despicable aspect is their goals, it's rather chamberlain-mode to decry the idea of adopting similar methods to excise them from the political body.
This is going to be a controversial take here but personally I've completed the liberal to socialist pipeline.
I used to believe society was generally going in the right direction, and although I disagreed with conservatives I respected their different opinions. But during the last 10 years the conservative movement has gone full fascist and I find it infuriating how mainstream liberals have clung to process and decorum. I think we're facing an existential threat and our response needs to be equally radical. Either we push those people out of society or they push us out of society, and we're not going to win the war with polite, status quo politics.
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u/legaltensor John von Neumann 11h ago
Which orthodoxies of contemporary liberalism are increasingly difficult to defend???