In this setting, liberals face a conundrum. How far should they maintain traditional liberal ideals, and how far should they move towards non-liberal, and potentially illiberal, ideologies if these seem more promising for the purposes of social change?
I’m an outsider because I’m a European who has studied politics, but I’m pretty far left and consider myself rather liberal.
I don’t believe in strong private property rights, and I consider liberal market economies to be complete failures. But I am a strong believer in political equality, consent of the governed, human rights, rule of law, secularism, and freedom of speech/press/assembly/religion.
It’s not primarily a theory of how to organize our economy. Neoliberalism fucking sucks.
To me, values like human rights and political equality cannot be guaranteed without heavy redistribution and some form of socialism.
Sounds like you’re a socialist rather than a liberal.
I don’t see them as mutually exclusive.
We take a lot of liberal values for granted these days, which ironically makes liberalism an easy target. We owe human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of press, and secularism to liberalism, not to socialism.
Socialist regimes sadly has a mixed record of guaranteeing these rights. I would rather live in a liberal non-socialist society where human rights are respected and I can assemble and protest, than in an illiberal socialist society where I am silenced and human rights are not respected. But again, I think liberal ideals can only be sustained under socialism, and any meaningful socialism can only be sustained when paired with liberal ideals.
Right now human rights and fundamental freedoms are under heavy attack, and I think we need to unite behind them. It’s weird to me that people are so hesitant to recognize their liberal heritage. The attacks on liberalism from both sides mean that we lack a lowest common denominator to rally behind - we don’t have a shared ideological basis on which we can state that freedom of speech and human rights needs to be protected.
But of course, neoliberalism destroys everything it touches, and I guess it touched upon liberalism as well. I can see why people have their reservations. Private property rights taken to the extreme—as it has been in the west—is fucking dangerous, and it’s often associated with liberalism. To me it’s more symptomatic of the feudalist shit liberalism was trying to fix in the first place.
Sure, but you can share individual values with an ideology without agreeing with it as a whole.
Oh boy, wait until you here about the record of liberal regimes when it comes to guaranteeing these rights…
Ok. What exactly is your point? I would rather live under feudalism and be healthy than live under liberalism and be quadriplegic. Does that make me a feudalist?
Some of them can, like freedom of expression, and and some of them can’t, like enclosure of the means of production by private capital.
Right now? Are you under the impression there was a time when they weren’t? The difference is that now the labour aristocrats of the global North are starting to feel the squeeze.
You mean the gilded age? The industrial revolution? The triangle trade? Liberal heritage in practice is pretty fucking grim when it comes to human rights, and only really improved when global socialist movements got strong enough to force concessions in the early twentieth century. (And is getting worse again now that that socialist movement has been broken)
Sure we do, socialism.
Neoliberalism represents the natural and inevitable progression of capitalism, profits will be maximized at the expense of workers, and the squeeze will only increase as the marginal rate is profit decreases. Neoliberalism is just a return to the natural, pre-twentieth century state of capitalism after a period of disruption.
Ok, but it’s not. Neoliberalism is only similar to feudalism in that it’s exploitative, but nothing more.