Why is Everything Liberal?
Liberalism came to fear ideals. After all, their very existence evinces some standard that is superior to the human individual and his or her personal preferences, causing he or she — knowing of nothing but a world in which their own agency is taken as the prime source of meaning – to be offended by them. For the liberal, the very principle of the ... See more
the critic • The death of Ideals
Keely Adler added
Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Having denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by
... See morenationalreview.com • A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review
Jonathan Simcoe added
Writes Gopnik, “What liberalism has in its favor are the facts. Liberals get nothing accomplished—except everything, eventually.”11 Liberals, he tells us, believe in reform rather than revolution because the results are in: it works better. More permanent positive social change is made incrementally rather than by revolutionary transformation. This
... See moreHelen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
The question agitating every defender of democracy is: How can this be reversed? A more precise phrasing would be: How are legitimate elites selected in a democratic society?
Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Capitalism, for example, is the purely liberal economic system. After having implemented this system, we learned that utterly unregulated capitalism is a catastrophe—this was what Karl Marx was reacting against. Paradoxical as it may seem, because of the power of monopolies and the influence of dishonest actors, a free market requires regulation—an
... See moreHelen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
“The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re... See more
Attention Required! | Cloudflare
Kyle Steinike added
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly descri... See more
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly descri... See more
Alara and added
It would be naïve to assume that any liberal democracy (or any society) can long survive with all of its conceptual foundations gutted. Either it will collapse into civil conflict, or those foundations will be replaced brick by brick by the New Faith, until it is transformed into an unrecognizable edifice that is neither liberal nor democratic. Now... See more
N.S. Lyons • The Upheaval
Tom White added