So one of my initial reactions is that the US has explicit founding commitments to free speech and natural rights that those other countries do not. I’ve known about these sorts of things for a while. Lived in Scotland and they were banning air guns and passing a bill to create a bureaucrat with full parental authority in the case of each individual child (including the legal authority to refuse to let a parent take their child to church).
On the whole, the US is still better than anywhere else that I can see. But we need citizens to stand up and fight for classical liberalism and natural rights if we’re ever going to restrain our government again and see fidelity to the Constitution in our institutions.
These two paragraphs from Shullenberger to me nails what has happened:
"Not so long ago, liberal opinion was smitten with Silicon Valley’s “disruptive” agenda. Pundits, journalists, and officials all proclaimed the democratizing power of digital platforms, which they saw (dubiously) as the force behind the Arab Spring. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton placed “internet freedom” at the center of foreign policy, and President Barack Obama issued Silicon Valley–esque bromides about “smart government” in the State of the Union. In the same period, left-leaning reporters and academics praised the merry-prankster antics of Anonymous—a loose organization of self-identified trolls united mainly by opposition to all restrictions on free expression online.
In the wake of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump, the liberal media and political class changed their views. Suddenly, the risk was no longer that foreign dictators would crack down on “internet freedom”; it was that the excessive freedom offered by the internet would lead Western nations to embrace dangerous extremist ideologies. Anonymous message boards such as 4Chan, previously celebrated as spaces of amorphous rebellion, were now viewed as toxic breeding grounds for the reactionary ideas of the alt-right. Many of those who had praised the power of tech platforms for challenging dictators barely five years earlier seemed to conclude the dictators might have been onto something, and they now demanded crackdowns and censorship."
How about countries in Central/Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Estonia, etc.) or Balkans? When discussing Europe, you neglected the most interesting half of the continent.
Yes, I do have a fondness for the eastern half of Europe. But I wanted to focus here on Western Europe, where classical liberalism as a philosophy was (mostly) born.
Have you come across the recently published "Dawn of Everything.." by David Graeber and David Wengrow who point to the interactions of early European settlers with North American indigenes and their influence on the origins on European philosophy?
Rod Dreher submitted dozens of articles from living in Hungary last summer. He summarized Hungary as a place where Jews can go to synagogue without fear, and 2 men can walk down the street holding hands without fear. Victor Orban certainly has his problems, but if liberalism is about being able to live life as you see fit without lies or fear, those sound like a good start.
In Poland, criticizing the Catholic Church or the Bible can possibly get you two years in jail. In most cases, the prosecutor will not pursue the matter, or you will only end up paying a fine, but the legal threat exists.
How close does Switzerland get? The constitution is technically founded on the same principles as America and we have a pluralist and participatory democracy. That being said, even here wokeness is seeping in from above (media and culture), but appears to be slowed down by language barriers and inherent decentralisation.
When I was thinking through potential exceptions while writing this Switzerland was actually one of the only countries I could think of, along with maybe Denmark. Switzerland has always been a remarkable little island of sanity in Europe; I hope it can stay that way.
Not sure what your point is. The issue was whether Denmark was liberal, not whether it was doing the "right thing". Expanding penal power in that way must be regarded as illiberal, no matter if you think it's good or bad.
The issue is not about enforcing borders (which is, of course, completely legitimate) but about expanding the penal system in an illiberal way. As a concrete example, people (whether citizens or not) who live in so-called "ghettos" in Denmark get a doubled sentences for committing crimes. This clearly violates the tenet that all citizens should be treated equally in the eyes of the law.
Yeah Switzerland might be the only option if I ever expatriated from the US. Kevin Williamson and others have convinced me. It’s a beautiful country. Been there once and my cousin lives there.
"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"
This is sad but very true. Don't forget that in Canada Bill C-6 was just passed, voted for and celebrated by liberals and "conservatives" alike, which prohibits "conversion therapy". Only one way, though, mind you! It's totally fine if you convert someone to homosexual or transgender, but totally not fine if it goes the other way. We also have the honour of having some of the most draconian covid regulations and vaccine mandates in the world, just haven't quite caught up to Austria and Australia.
America is still the freest country on Earth--and we are no longer free--the time to stand up and protest, to exercise mass civil disobedience, is yesterday folks! We must ALL stand together as one if this creeping death of authoritarianism is to be defeated peacefully. And that is the better option. Peaceful protest is the only way t prevent violence. If enough people do not take the time to engage peacefully and politically, there will be a civil war 2.0 in the USA. I can promise you that.
What is utterly about the West’s so-called ‘liberalism’ is it is anything but liberal.
For instance, anything that smacks of ‘racism’, ‘antisemitism’, or ‘homophobia’ is banned in media, academia, and entertainment. Anything suspected of ‘anti-gay’ sentiments cannot climb up the ladder in most institutions. David Chappelle discovered how hard it is for even a famous comedian like himself to make fun of trannies(what else are trannies good for?). Imagine what would happen to anyone’s career if he suggested a TV show or a film about the Nakba tragedy.
So, it’s not about repressive Chinese vs liberal West. The so-called ‘liberal West’ is utterly illiberal, coercive, and censorious when it comes to certain views and expressions. All this globo-homo and tranny-wanny stuff didn’t rise up the cultural totem pole out of organic popularity and unfettered mass taste but because they were promoted and pushed onto the populace, especially young impressionable minds, by the powers-that-be. It's not about 'gay rights' but 'gay might' aided and abetted by Jewish supremacism. When Jews who are 2% of the population but control 95% of media use their power for tribal-gangster purposes, how can we say the current order is 'liberal'?
It comes down to one form of repression vs another kind of repression. If it must be repression, the Chinese kind is preferable than the kind in the West(and its puppets)that goes out of its way to shame, suppress, and blacklist anyone suspected of harboring views critical of or damning toward Jews, blacks, and homos(and trannies). My guess is the S. Korean media bans anyone who decries K-pop as worthless gay-pop where males dress and act like pussyboys.
Even lesbian ‘terfs’ are beginning to realize how the game is really played. It’s not about a free contest of ideas and views but about one side using its muscle to promote A while prohibiting B.
Twitter and Facebook allows anyone to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who attack people and burn down cities, but see what happens when you say Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero.
My ideal would be a world where all ideas and expressions get equal play. Let homos do their homo thing, and let normos call out on homo decadence. Let blacks blurt out their nonsense, and let whites call out on black thuggery. Let Neocons call for more Wars for Israel, and let goyim say ‘Hell No’ to Zion. But the system is skewed to favor one side over the other. We saw this with Covid hysteria where all the skeptics were silenced or marginalized. Trust the SCIENCE, as if the deep state and big pharm own the science.
Words matter, and the impression that the Proglob is about ‘liberalism’ has misled everyone. Conservatives keep bashing ‘liberalism’ when the problem is the illiberalism of the Proglob. And it’s not even leftist or ‘far left’ as the Proglob is all about the hierarchical elitism of Jews, blacks, and homos. Just ask the Palestinians how ‘egalitarian’ the Proglob is. Antifa types are totally funded and guided by Jewish tribal-capitalist elements, the last thing on whose mind is equality with goyim.
And BLM certainly isn’t about equal justice as it overlooks the overwhelming fact of black thuggery and violence while pushing the hysterical notion that white cops are committing genocide against blacks. The logic of BLM is the life of one black thug(like George Floyd) is more valuable than the lives and properties of all the victims of black brutality. Of course, black lives strangely gain sanctity ONLY WHEN killed by whites. White ‘racists’ must have the Midas Touch when it comes to blacks. When blacks die from fatal contact with other blacks, they are just dead ni**az. But when they die from contact with whites, they turn into saints and angels… even if they died of drug overdose or by resisting arrest with threats and violence against police.
Proglob mustn’t be called ‘liberal’. It is mandatorian.
This is why we must stop using the term 'liberal' to describe our enemies. Free Speech, for example, has been a liberal value. The current Jewish-controlled West is Oligarchic and Mandatorian, not 'liberal'.
Not liberals but mandatorians, statists, Zionists(or ultra-rightist Jewish supremacists), corporatists, elitists, globalists, and gangstoids.
They use the term "progressives" and I've taken to using that. It's a name that doesn't sound like you're trying to insult them but still distinguishes them from "liberals". It also has the benefit of accurately describing the underlying philosophy of most of them: "we're making progress toward the utopia of perfect people -- a true heaven on Earth." (It would be a totalitarian hell in reality, but just like Soviet Russia, you wouldn't be allowed to say so.)
Very disappointed to see you embrace the erroneous position that many maintain today that Liberalism no longer exists. Liberalism is not something that only exists through constitutionalism and political implementation, Liberalism is the philosophical system that gave birth to the modern paradigm as a whole. The way we understand morality, politics, science, etc are all based on liberal notions of life that perpetuated a metaphysical paradigm shift away from God and into secular individualism. From that philosophy came the economic implementation of these ideals and interpretation of technological advancements. Everything that followed in modern history came from these central tenets. Marxism is unambiguously just a progression of the existing liberal framework into new modes of production for example. Liberalism's influence in the world is felt in every inch of the earth even if most countries are not sufficiently liberal because of how hegemonic the West has been in modern history.
Our crisis today is not that Liberalism doesn't exist, it's that Liberal philosophy is becoming outdated and obsolete because of a fundamental contradiction of legitimacy. Self-determination in the globalized world is no longer enough to legitimize Liberalism when there's so many people required to submit to state authority and our sense of individuality has diminished. Liberalism is certainly imploding but it will never ever "die" until there is another inherent shift in how humanity interprets reason, science, religion, worship and selfhood. That hasn't occurred yet and probably won't. What you see as the dissolution of Liberalism is actually the natural progression of Liberalism. It was always destined to contradict itself and tear down its own pillars; it's an incorrect philosophy of life from the very start and alternative worldviews will outlive it.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive positions. I also think liberalism contained the seeds of its own demise. Where I probably disagree with you is that I think "Wokeness" is the (or a) successor ideology to liberalism (as produced by liberalism) that you think hasn't emerged yet.
I don't see Wokeness as distinct from Liberalism, it's easier to understand it as a development of Liberalism weaponized to maintain its own hegemony. To sustain itself in its crisis of legitimacy, Liberalism has gradually moved into a more progressive ideological variant that is conducive to its global hegemony wherein it manufactures a sense of collective identity without sacrificing the basis of individuality that underpins it. Traditional identities like family, nation and religion are replaced with identities forged from the effects of cosmopolitanism that Liberalism itself has created such as mass immigration, sexual promiscuity and gender fluidity, all of which justified under a liberal ontology of self-expression and equality. From this you get things like the LGBT and racial identitarianism. Wokeness certainly contradicts Liberalism but it's only through Liberalism that it could ever exist and be accepted. That's why Wokeness is so widely endorsed by American institutions and corporations. It's impossible to use Classical Liberalism to repel this new ideology when the grand priests who govern us have already awoken into the next stage and are baptizing virtually everyone under the age of 30.
At least, that's how I see it. We can at least agree that Woke ideology will devastate the globe if it extends beyond the West.
Yes, I would agree that Wokeism is an extension of the Enlightenment Liberal celebration of the individual. It is also a perversion of the Liberal idea of the individual because it unmoors the individual from all social norms. That is what I see as the Primary Thesis of Queer Theory: Nothing is Normal. Thus it produces a pure freedom of the individual identity, while at the same time imprisoning the individual into separateness from all other individuals. That is the perverse genius of the Postmodern Turn, the antisocial fountain from which all Wokeism springs. Thanks, Mr. Foucault; I hope you and your friends are finding this all very entertaining, wherever you are.
Well put. Is it incompetence or a wilful attempt to roll out the bumps in society to make a dull, compliant mass of pastry that can be moulded at will?
As my wife says, 'and both'. It's a lot easier to lower the bar by passing stupid laws than to address root causes, because that would involve admitting that society is fucked, probably due to ecological and population pressures, the fact that as things get easier people get lazier, shifting baselines of what is deemed necessary to life, etc. To sort out root causes is hard and unpopular, so it doesn't get done.
Then there is a need to mould people into identical lumps of dough so they can work in Amazon warehouses without going mad, in a gilded cage where being "yourself" means what trainers you wear, docile and "safe", while Bezos circles our precious Earth in his Cockrocket.
People are sleepwalking into 1984 and don't want to be woken up because then they'd have to get off their flabby backsides and do the hard work.
William Ophuls book "Immoderate Greatness" spells out the trajectory of civilisations and we are in the oligarchic decadence phase by the look of it. Hooray.
I guess the question on my mind is, how much did any country ever live up to the liberal ideal? Was it ever more than mouthing empty words while the machine ticked on as the machine does?
Is there any room for a real alternative? Can we find any way out of this trap besides praying for an asteroid strike to implement the Kaczynski Solution?
Hell, the Constitution has been a dead letter for a long time now. Just say the magic words "Muh National Security Abracadabra!" and watch The Bill of Rights vanish before your very eyes.
And if we are going on tour, look at Ukraine and its crackdown on press freedom, murder of journalists, etc.. But not a peep of protest from The Enlightened West.
The line "Dutch police opened fire on protestors with live ammunition" I find tendentious. They were not peaceful protesters, rather rioters (below, some photos from the protest). I don't know the specifics of the case, but I imagine the shots were fired in self defense or because the riots go out of hand. I don't think the shots had anything to do with the protests being about Covid.
I think freedom of speech is still quite robust in Holland. Politicians in Parliament can say offensive things. Holland's most famous right wing politician, Geert Wilders, was aqquited a few years ago when accused of racist speech, he even said the Koran should be burned (of course I don't agree with him saying this, but just as an illustration). I am more afraid of Brussels than of our government.
On the other hand, when I published a piece on my blog critizing the LGTB movement, I postponed for a few days because I feared the possibe backlash from friends and aquitances, and I made it harder for would-be employers to find the blog ( I was looking for a job at the time). Nothing happened, and I got some positive comments. Maybe those fears arose because I follow the American news relating to Woke stuff, with all the cancellations etc. and I projected the situation in the States onto Holland.
It is hard to say just where the illiberal repression of free speech began its present incarnation. When I was a college student in the early 1970s, Political Correctness was just taking off on campus and the energy was mostly coming from feminists. But I think the general idea of speech control in the politically liberal campus environment has a deeper root in the postmodernist philosophy movement fronted by Foucault and his associates. I think that is where we first find the proposition the twin propositions that (1) Language is the basis for human reality (i.e., there is no agreed-upon external reality, just language-based subjective descriptions), and (2) All social interactions are based on power (i.e., in every relationship you are either the oppressor or the oppressed).
Importantly, Foucault (and his tribe) never claimed to be socially progressive, or even liberal in the Enlightment sense. My own interpretation of the postmodern philosophers is that they were (are) fundamentally nihilist in their worldview. They see humans as individuals only; society, for them, is only a cloak over each person's essential isolation and loneliness. Each person must create his or her own identity, essentially from thin air, and must necessarily defend that identity against every other person's identity (since all relationships are power-based).
All of the present insanity regarding identity politics, grievance theory, critical theories of all flavors, intersectionality, and so on, are extensions of postmodern philosophy's fundamental dogma: that reality is socially constructed through language. In that context, it becomes logical to define your own identity as an intersection of some multiplicity of named identity categories (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.), with the unfortunate endpoint that you actually have no identity of your own; you're just a collection of group memberships. As a result, postmodernism leads to a pair of unhappy endings: first you become nothing more than an isolated, atomic individual, and second you surrender your individuality to an accumulation of abstract categories.
So one of my initial reactions is that the US has explicit founding commitments to free speech and natural rights that those other countries do not. I’ve known about these sorts of things for a while. Lived in Scotland and they were banning air guns and passing a bill to create a bureaucrat with full parental authority in the case of each individual child (including the legal authority to refuse to let a parent take their child to church).
On the whole, the US is still better than anywhere else that I can see. But we need citizens to stand up and fight for classical liberalism and natural rights if we’re ever going to restrain our government again and see fidelity to the Constitution in our institutions.
These two paragraphs from Shullenberger to me nails what has happened:
"Not so long ago, liberal opinion was smitten with Silicon Valley’s “disruptive” agenda. Pundits, journalists, and officials all proclaimed the democratizing power of digital platforms, which they saw (dubiously) as the force behind the Arab Spring. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton placed “internet freedom” at the center of foreign policy, and President Barack Obama issued Silicon Valley–esque bromides about “smart government” in the State of the Union. In the same period, left-leaning reporters and academics praised the merry-prankster antics of Anonymous—a loose organization of self-identified trolls united mainly by opposition to all restrictions on free expression online.
In the wake of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump, the liberal media and political class changed their views. Suddenly, the risk was no longer that foreign dictators would crack down on “internet freedom”; it was that the excessive freedom offered by the internet would lead Western nations to embrace dangerous extremist ideologies. Anonymous message boards such as 4Chan, previously celebrated as spaces of amorphous rebellion, were now viewed as toxic breeding grounds for the reactionary ideas of the alt-right. Many of those who had praised the power of tech platforms for challenging dictators barely five years earlier seemed to conclude the dictators might have been onto something, and they now demanded crackdowns and censorship."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/01/the-scapegoat
Also, this article is on a similar theme and may be of interest to readers:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-race-to-the-bottom-on-internet-ded
How about countries in Central/Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Estonia, etc.) or Balkans? When discussing Europe, you neglected the most interesting half of the continent.
Yes, I do have a fondness for the eastern half of Europe. But I wanted to focus here on Western Europe, where classical liberalism as a philosophy was (mostly) born.
Have you come across the recently published "Dawn of Everything.." by David Graeber and David Wengrow who point to the interactions of early European settlers with North American indigenes and their influence on the origins on European philosophy?
Rod Dreher submitted dozens of articles from living in Hungary last summer. He summarized Hungary as a place where Jews can go to synagogue without fear, and 2 men can walk down the street holding hands without fear. Victor Orban certainly has his problems, but if liberalism is about being able to live life as you see fit without lies or fear, those sound like a good start.
Those are all even worse in this regard.
How so?
Poland and Hungary are openly Illiberal, though that's not the case in the Baltics.
Can you give a specific example of illiberal law e.g. in Poland? How about other countries, like Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Greece?
In Poland, criticizing the Catholic Church or the Bible can possibly get you two years in jail. In most cases, the prosecutor will not pursue the matter, or you will only end up paying a fine, but the legal threat exists.
Though on the opposite side of the wokists.
How close does Switzerland get? The constitution is technically founded on the same principles as America and we have a pluralist and participatory democracy. That being said, even here wokeness is seeping in from above (media and culture), but appears to be slowed down by language barriers and inherent decentralisation.
When I was thinking through potential exceptions while writing this Switzerland was actually one of the only countries I could think of, along with maybe Denmark. Switzerland has always been a remarkable little island of sanity in Europe; I hope it can stay that way.
Nah, not Denmark. https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/6/1540/6255418
"We find that Denmark expands penal power to regulate non-citizens, deter migration and uphold national interest."
Heaven forbid a country regulates non-citizens, deters migration and worst of all... upholds national interests!
Not sure what your point is. The issue was whether Denmark was liberal, not whether it was doing the "right thing". Expanding penal power in that way must be regarded as illiberal, no matter if you think it's good or bad.
Which tenants of classical liberalism (not neo liberalism) does enforcing borders violate?
The issue is not about enforcing borders (which is, of course, completely legitimate) but about expanding the penal system in an illiberal way. As a concrete example, people (whether citizens or not) who live in so-called "ghettos" in Denmark get a doubled sentences for committing crimes. This clearly violates the tenet that all citizens should be treated equally in the eyes of the law.
Yeah Switzerland might be the only option if I ever expatriated from the US. Kevin Williamson and others have convinced me. It’s a beautiful country. Been there once and my cousin lives there.
"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"
DJT, Warsaw, July 6, 2017
This is sad but very true. Don't forget that in Canada Bill C-6 was just passed, voted for and celebrated by liberals and "conservatives" alike, which prohibits "conversion therapy". Only one way, though, mind you! It's totally fine if you convert someone to homosexual or transgender, but totally not fine if it goes the other way. We also have the honour of having some of the most draconian covid regulations and vaccine mandates in the world, just haven't quite caught up to Austria and Australia.
America is still the freest country on Earth--and we are no longer free--the time to stand up and protest, to exercise mass civil disobedience, is yesterday folks! We must ALL stand together as one if this creeping death of authoritarianism is to be defeated peacefully. And that is the better option. Peaceful protest is the only way t prevent violence. If enough people do not take the time to engage peacefully and politically, there will be a civil war 2.0 in the USA. I can promise you that.
What is utterly about the West’s so-called ‘liberalism’ is it is anything but liberal.
For instance, anything that smacks of ‘racism’, ‘antisemitism’, or ‘homophobia’ is banned in media, academia, and entertainment. Anything suspected of ‘anti-gay’ sentiments cannot climb up the ladder in most institutions. David Chappelle discovered how hard it is for even a famous comedian like himself to make fun of trannies(what else are trannies good for?). Imagine what would happen to anyone’s career if he suggested a TV show or a film about the Nakba tragedy.
So, it’s not about repressive Chinese vs liberal West. The so-called ‘liberal West’ is utterly illiberal, coercive, and censorious when it comes to certain views and expressions. All this globo-homo and tranny-wanny stuff didn’t rise up the cultural totem pole out of organic popularity and unfettered mass taste but because they were promoted and pushed onto the populace, especially young impressionable minds, by the powers-that-be. It's not about 'gay rights' but 'gay might' aided and abetted by Jewish supremacism. When Jews who are 2% of the population but control 95% of media use their power for tribal-gangster purposes, how can we say the current order is 'liberal'?
It comes down to one form of repression vs another kind of repression. If it must be repression, the Chinese kind is preferable than the kind in the West(and its puppets)that goes out of its way to shame, suppress, and blacklist anyone suspected of harboring views critical of or damning toward Jews, blacks, and homos(and trannies). My guess is the S. Korean media bans anyone who decries K-pop as worthless gay-pop where males dress and act like pussyboys.
Even lesbian ‘terfs’ are beginning to realize how the game is really played. It’s not about a free contest of ideas and views but about one side using its muscle to promote A while prohibiting B.
Twitter and Facebook allows anyone to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who attack people and burn down cities, but see what happens when you say Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero.
My ideal would be a world where all ideas and expressions get equal play. Let homos do their homo thing, and let normos call out on homo decadence. Let blacks blurt out their nonsense, and let whites call out on black thuggery. Let Neocons call for more Wars for Israel, and let goyim say ‘Hell No’ to Zion. But the system is skewed to favor one side over the other. We saw this with Covid hysteria where all the skeptics were silenced or marginalized. Trust the SCIENCE, as if the deep state and big pharm own the science.
Words matter, and the impression that the Proglob is about ‘liberalism’ has misled everyone. Conservatives keep bashing ‘liberalism’ when the problem is the illiberalism of the Proglob. And it’s not even leftist or ‘far left’ as the Proglob is all about the hierarchical elitism of Jews, blacks, and homos. Just ask the Palestinians how ‘egalitarian’ the Proglob is. Antifa types are totally funded and guided by Jewish tribal-capitalist elements, the last thing on whose mind is equality with goyim.
And BLM certainly isn’t about equal justice as it overlooks the overwhelming fact of black thuggery and violence while pushing the hysterical notion that white cops are committing genocide against blacks. The logic of BLM is the life of one black thug(like George Floyd) is more valuable than the lives and properties of all the victims of black brutality. Of course, black lives strangely gain sanctity ONLY WHEN killed by whites. White ‘racists’ must have the Midas Touch when it comes to blacks. When blacks die from fatal contact with other blacks, they are just dead ni**az. But when they die from contact with whites, they turn into saints and angels… even if they died of drug overdose or by resisting arrest with threats and violence against police.
Proglob mustn’t be called ‘liberal’. It is mandatorian.
This is why we must stop using the term 'liberal' to describe our enemies. Free Speech, for example, has been a liberal value. The current Jewish-controlled West is Oligarchic and Mandatorian, not 'liberal'.
Not liberals but mandatorians, statists, Zionists(or ultra-rightist Jewish supremacists), corporatists, elitists, globalists, and gangstoids.
They use the term "progressives" and I've taken to using that. It's a name that doesn't sound like you're trying to insult them but still distinguishes them from "liberals". It also has the benefit of accurately describing the underlying philosophy of most of them: "we're making progress toward the utopia of perfect people -- a true heaven on Earth." (It would be a totalitarian hell in reality, but just like Soviet Russia, you wouldn't be allowed to say so.)
Very disappointed to see you embrace the erroneous position that many maintain today that Liberalism no longer exists. Liberalism is not something that only exists through constitutionalism and political implementation, Liberalism is the philosophical system that gave birth to the modern paradigm as a whole. The way we understand morality, politics, science, etc are all based on liberal notions of life that perpetuated a metaphysical paradigm shift away from God and into secular individualism. From that philosophy came the economic implementation of these ideals and interpretation of technological advancements. Everything that followed in modern history came from these central tenets. Marxism is unambiguously just a progression of the existing liberal framework into new modes of production for example. Liberalism's influence in the world is felt in every inch of the earth even if most countries are not sufficiently liberal because of how hegemonic the West has been in modern history.
Our crisis today is not that Liberalism doesn't exist, it's that Liberal philosophy is becoming outdated and obsolete because of a fundamental contradiction of legitimacy. Self-determination in the globalized world is no longer enough to legitimize Liberalism when there's so many people required to submit to state authority and our sense of individuality has diminished. Liberalism is certainly imploding but it will never ever "die" until there is another inherent shift in how humanity interprets reason, science, religion, worship and selfhood. That hasn't occurred yet and probably won't. What you see as the dissolution of Liberalism is actually the natural progression of Liberalism. It was always destined to contradict itself and tear down its own pillars; it's an incorrect philosophy of life from the very start and alternative worldviews will outlive it.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive positions. I also think liberalism contained the seeds of its own demise. Where I probably disagree with you is that I think "Wokeness" is the (or a) successor ideology to liberalism (as produced by liberalism) that you think hasn't emerged yet.
I don't see Wokeness as distinct from Liberalism, it's easier to understand it as a development of Liberalism weaponized to maintain its own hegemony. To sustain itself in its crisis of legitimacy, Liberalism has gradually moved into a more progressive ideological variant that is conducive to its global hegemony wherein it manufactures a sense of collective identity without sacrificing the basis of individuality that underpins it. Traditional identities like family, nation and religion are replaced with identities forged from the effects of cosmopolitanism that Liberalism itself has created such as mass immigration, sexual promiscuity and gender fluidity, all of which justified under a liberal ontology of self-expression and equality. From this you get things like the LGBT and racial identitarianism. Wokeness certainly contradicts Liberalism but it's only through Liberalism that it could ever exist and be accepted. That's why Wokeness is so widely endorsed by American institutions and corporations. It's impossible to use Classical Liberalism to repel this new ideology when the grand priests who govern us have already awoken into the next stage and are baptizing virtually everyone under the age of 30.
At least, that's how I see it. We can at least agree that Woke ideology will devastate the globe if it extends beyond the West.
Yes, I would agree that Wokeism is an extension of the Enlightenment Liberal celebration of the individual. It is also a perversion of the Liberal idea of the individual because it unmoors the individual from all social norms. That is what I see as the Primary Thesis of Queer Theory: Nothing is Normal. Thus it produces a pure freedom of the individual identity, while at the same time imprisoning the individual into separateness from all other individuals. That is the perverse genius of the Postmodern Turn, the antisocial fountain from which all Wokeism springs. Thanks, Mr. Foucault; I hope you and your friends are finding this all very entertaining, wherever you are.
Well put. Is it incompetence or a wilful attempt to roll out the bumps in society to make a dull, compliant mass of pastry that can be moulded at will?
As my wife says, 'and both'. It's a lot easier to lower the bar by passing stupid laws than to address root causes, because that would involve admitting that society is fucked, probably due to ecological and population pressures, the fact that as things get easier people get lazier, shifting baselines of what is deemed necessary to life, etc. To sort out root causes is hard and unpopular, so it doesn't get done.
Then there is a need to mould people into identical lumps of dough so they can work in Amazon warehouses without going mad, in a gilded cage where being "yourself" means what trainers you wear, docile and "safe", while Bezos circles our precious Earth in his Cockrocket.
People are sleepwalking into 1984 and don't want to be woken up because then they'd have to get off their flabby backsides and do the hard work.
William Ophuls book "Immoderate Greatness" spells out the trajectory of civilisations and we are in the oligarchic decadence phase by the look of it. Hooray.
This one hurt to read, I'll be honest.
I guess the question on my mind is, how much did any country ever live up to the liberal ideal? Was it ever more than mouthing empty words while the machine ticked on as the machine does?
Is there any room for a real alternative? Can we find any way out of this trap besides praying for an asteroid strike to implement the Kaczynski Solution?
Many of those European countries never had classical liberalism i.e. protection of free expression to begin with, did they?
Hell, the Constitution has been a dead letter for a long time now. Just say the magic words "Muh National Security Abracadabra!" and watch The Bill of Rights vanish before your very eyes.
And if we are going on tour, look at Ukraine and its crackdown on press freedom, murder of journalists, etc.. But not a peep of protest from The Enlightened West.
Context is everything.
The line "Dutch police opened fire on protestors with live ammunition" I find tendentious. They were not peaceful protesters, rather rioters (below, some photos from the protest). I don't know the specifics of the case, but I imagine the shots were fired in self defense or because the riots go out of hand. I don't think the shots had anything to do with the protests being about Covid.
I think freedom of speech is still quite robust in Holland. Politicians in Parliament can say offensive things. Holland's most famous right wing politician, Geert Wilders, was aqquited a few years ago when accused of racist speech, he even said the Koran should be burned (of course I don't agree with him saying this, but just as an illustration). I am more afraid of Brussels than of our government.
On the other hand, when I published a piece on my blog critizing the LGTB movement, I postponed for a few days because I feared the possibe backlash from friends and aquitances, and I made it harder for would-be employers to find the blog ( I was looking for a job at the time). Nothing happened, and I got some positive comments. Maybe those fears arose because I follow the American news relating to Woke stuff, with all the cancellations etc. and I projected the situation in the States onto Holland.
Pictures of that fateful night in Rotterdam:
https://cdn.businessinsider.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ANP-440914864-800x533.jpg
https://cdn.businessinsider.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ANP-440914026-800x533.jpg
It is hard to say just where the illiberal repression of free speech began its present incarnation. When I was a college student in the early 1970s, Political Correctness was just taking off on campus and the energy was mostly coming from feminists. But I think the general idea of speech control in the politically liberal campus environment has a deeper root in the postmodernist philosophy movement fronted by Foucault and his associates. I think that is where we first find the proposition the twin propositions that (1) Language is the basis for human reality (i.e., there is no agreed-upon external reality, just language-based subjective descriptions), and (2) All social interactions are based on power (i.e., in every relationship you are either the oppressor or the oppressed).
Importantly, Foucault (and his tribe) never claimed to be socially progressive, or even liberal in the Enlightment sense. My own interpretation of the postmodern philosophers is that they were (are) fundamentally nihilist in their worldview. They see humans as individuals only; society, for them, is only a cloak over each person's essential isolation and loneliness. Each person must create his or her own identity, essentially from thin air, and must necessarily defend that identity against every other person's identity (since all relationships are power-based).
All of the present insanity regarding identity politics, grievance theory, critical theories of all flavors, intersectionality, and so on, are extensions of postmodern philosophy's fundamental dogma: that reality is socially constructed through language. In that context, it becomes logical to define your own identity as an intersection of some multiplicity of named identity categories (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.), with the unfortunate endpoint that you actually have no identity of your own; you're just a collection of group memberships. As a result, postmodernism leads to a pair of unhappy endings: first you become nothing more than an isolated, atomic individual, and second you surrender your individuality to an accumulation of abstract categories.