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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

Another excellent essay!

Yet lurking in the mist behind all these interesting ideas is that great orange beast who may be slouching out of Mar-a-Lago on his way towards Washington again...

I've mostly enjoyed Fukuyama over the years, especially his attention to 'thymos' and its role in human psychology and society, and I guess 30 years ago it made sense that maybe every group could have its thymos appeased by getting its own parade, its own TV series (ideally by Ken Burns), and some patronage here and there...well, that was a more optimistic time!

It seems that since Trump everyone who is not explicitly conservative (or some flavor of crank or contrarian) have all suddenly hit upon the same idea for 21st-century governance: We have no choice but to hand over our societies to an unelected globalist elite who will make all our decisions based on enlightened benevolent technocracy (which is pretty much whatever the Ivy League-NGO complex says it is at any given moment) aka We need to destroy the village in order to save it.

So while the American Left is basically undergoing a public nervous breakdown and will be reduced to the intellectual level of a crackhead for the foreseeable future, their opponents, who claim to want to revive virtue, restraint, tradition, etc, are led by the literal incarnation of all that is opposite of that, the most American of all Americans, History's most hilarious infant, Nero in diapers.

I don't know where Mike Judge stands on the list of most influential political philosophers, but I think of all possible visions of the American future, his "Idiocracy" seems the most likely.

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Brian Villanueva's avatar

I just put the book on reserve at my library, but I do think it's fair to ask why anyone is still listening to Fukuyama after his reports of history's demise were so greatly exaggerated.

What you describe here sounds a lot like what I hear from Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, and many other non-woke liberals. It boils down to: "we need to get back to the nice friendly liberalism that existed in the 1990's" [or insert your favorite decade.] It's a myth.

Your analysis of the problem is right on: liberalism's claim of value neutrality is an illusion. Claiming that "individual autonomy" is the highest moral good is itself a values-laden statement, which cannot be logically justified by liberalism itself. That's why Patrick Deenen believes the ideology is self-destructive. I would add that liberalism's claim (via Mill) that "my rights only stop at your nose" requires a large state to adjudicate the inevitably increasing number of conflicts between rights and noses, power which will inevitably be turned into a values enforcement mechanism by one side or the other (enter today's woke commissars or apparently DHS's now defunct Mis-information Bureau.)

I look forward to reading the book, but I strongly suspect I will remain in Deenen's camp. Whether it was the Enlightenment or the Reformation or nominalism or the Great Schism that got us here, we need a way out of this morass before we all kill each other or bring in a dictator who will use force to make sure we don't. A rediscovery of federalism could buy us a few decades, but fundamentally, it is not possible to build a society on nothing but "everyone gets to to whatever he wants". We survived for 250 years on the shared cultural (mostly Christian) inertia of 17 centuries, but we've run that down now. A society that doesn't agree on the meaning of man, woman, baby, family, marriage, or even the definition of human itself... has poor long term prospects.

It gives me no pleasure to say it, but liberalism is dead. Let's stop kicking its corpse around the room and look for viable alternatives. (And Sohrab Amari and his half dozen integralists don't count.)

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