A Tribe of Liberalism

The fragility of American conservative dogma.

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Jonah delivers another ill-advised Ruminant full of his regular grievances such as: the lack of national gratitude, the moral equivalent of war, the antiquated concept of left and right, and of course the misuses of the term fascism.

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Comments (110)
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  1. Brian The 2nd

    Thanks Jonah I love mentions of the Futurists and by extension the Vorticists who created some really before it's time art music design and poetry. Their macho pro war stance got em all killed in The Great War.
    It's like some kind of parable.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_(magazine)

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  2. Austin from Atlanta

    You have my pity. Hope you can figure things out.

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  3. Austin from Atlanta

    Jonah, as a known champion of dogmatism - where certain issues are simply settled and do not need to be revisited again and again - you should know as a matter of first order principles that there is no such thing as "making a better soda" than Coca-Cola.

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  4. Joe1776

    He just did a great podcast covering all sorts of interesting points of political history and theory, and this is your take away? What is the matter with you?

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  5. Joe1776

    I highly recommend liberal fascism. It is a great read about a part of history that is often skipped over. But did you really think pointing out how democrats were fascist would decrease the amount of finger pointing?

    Sarah 2 buckets of conservativism is great. 1) individual rights 2) moral traditions of Jerusalem and Athens. Our parties have changed in the past 30-40 years though. I remember democrats were stronger on 1 then the republicans.

    Our founders created a constitution because of people like Trump. He has limited power. I am very disheartened that he is so far ahead in polls for the primary. I think it can only be explained by 1) Cultishness (maybe about 50% of his supporters) and a complete lack of trust in our institutions including our DOJ.

    Do you think Hillary was a demagogue with the way she pushed Russia-gate? Are you at a point were you can say yes Joe Biden is corrupt and lying about not knowing anything about what Hunter was doing?

    Sometimes I feel like I am the only one that sees the horrible conduct from, Trump, Hillary and Biden.

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  6. Eazy-E

    And now your subscription helps pay Jonah's salary!

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    Delenda Est

    What the Trump era has made plain, is that Fascism is part of "normal politics" in Liberal democracies. Fascism is essentially populism; populism privileges the Liberal ideal of solidarity (ethnic, religious, national) over other Liberal values like liberty and (universal) equality. Solidarity is an essential value in Liberal-*nationalism,* and this nationalism is a necessary factor grounding the State wherein a Liberal regime can preside.

    But nationalism has a clear nisus towards privileging a certain *order* of society over the values of liberty and equality; and in a crisis, nationalistic passions can easily become Illiberal. The "order" is viewed to be the repository of a certain group of citizens whose identity is that they are the paradigmatic citizens of the state - and identity-politics drives them to defend the state and its order from enemies within and without that would threaten it. That's Fascism - it's basically when the populist-strain of Modern mass-politics breaks the banks and overwhelms the Liberal values of democracy, turning the democracy into a majoritarian tyranny.

    Fascism therefore should be carefully distinguished from Classical Liberalism or Right-liberalism. Right-liberals privilege the value of liberty over equality, and sometimes even over order in the society. Right-liberals are, in principle, the arch-enemies of the Fascists. Left-liberals, who privilege the value of equality over liberty, like the populists have their own authoritarian temptations, but in a country predicated on civic nationalism as the United States is, Left-liberals will never swoon to populism and their authoritarian temptations will never take the form of Fascism proper.

    It is the proto-Fascist populists (who traditionally skew as more insular, less educated, and more anti-intellectual) who are the actual *Conservatives* in a society. There are very many of these people, in any state - which is why Fascism is not aberration, but instead is part of the normal politics of the Modern mass-society. Right-liberals will naturally form a political coalition with the populists, given their shared skepticism of the Left's egalitarian values. And Right-liberals usually act as a moderating influence on the populists, preventing them from drifting into canonical Fascism.

    But in recent American history, the populists/the Conservatives have clearly gained the upper hand over the Right-liberals, and have embraced Fascism. They are fighting to destroy the Liberal democracy that emerged from the Crisis of the mid-20th century, and return the country to the kind of democracy that characterized the United States prior to that Crisis. For today's Left-liberals, that is not a "democracy" worth the name.

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    Ben Connelly

    Keep fighting the good fight, Jonah!

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    1. CB76

      Against whom? The liberal tormentors he hated so much in his twenties?

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  9. Pohl

    Corporatism gets a bad rap here. It has some appealing aspects as does, for example, Italy’s prewar Chamber of Deputies. Our system arguably just shunts society’s major players into the murky lobbying space everyone’s always complaining about. Corporatism might work more smoothly at some level below or alongside a people’s legislature, and it is perhaps too abstract to work at all, especially in a large, dynamic society. But we should try it somewhere, someday. (smile)

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    The Bell Tower

    America has never been great because of who we are. It’s who we try to be that separates us from other nations.

    Liberalism is the only system known to man that incentivizes moderation, tolerance, collaboration and individual freedom. The only one. All the rest are about power struggles and domination.

    That is the difference between Israel and their many enemies. It’s the difference between America and Russia or America and China.

    We don’t always or even often succeed in our aspirations but those aspirations will remain so long as we continue our commitment to the constitutional republic we were blessed to live in. That is what should be thankful for.

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