Reddit reviews Why Liberalism Failed (Politics and Culture)
We found 7 Reddit comments about Why Liberalism Failed (Politics and Culture). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Per Nisbet and Deneen, it does logically follow that a hyper-liberal view of immigration (it is immoral to bar people from moving across states, open-borders), would require an expansion of the state to uphold order and replace the stability and social trust original communities had a priori the effective dissolution of them via widespread immigration. Individualism and the state march hand in hand.
But this political compass is fucking absurd, on that I think we can all agree.
Patrick Deneen's much talked about recent book Why Liberalism Failed critiques liberalism from a communitarian perspective. Although Deneen is not left-wing, his views significantly overlap with leftist criticisms of liberalism. His critique is multi-faceted and I cannot do justice to all of it in one comment. I recommend you read this article written by Deneen which summarizes his position.
In short, liberalism is based upon the system that autonomous individuals stripped from all contingencies would decide upon. These individuals are either those in Locke's state of nature or behind Rawls' veil of ignorance. But we are not, in fact, such autonomous individuals fully separate from social ties. Through the institutions liberalism has put in place, however, we are increasingly made into such individuals. This has profound negative effects in many aspects of life, including high levels of loneliness, declining marriage and birth rates, and the predominance of capitalism which leads to great economic inequality. Thus, liberalism is failing because we are facing the effects which result from its success.
If you'd like to read his full book, you can buy it here.
Briefly I want to develop some comments I was making in reply to another thread.
By publishing this article now, and having another one titled "I’m a Shooting Survivor. If You’re Going to Pray for Us, Here’s How" beside it, it can be argued that CT is linking racism to one recent mass shooting and ignoring others, and by doing so accepts and reinforces a simplistic narrative that makes the problem worse.
I only have 10 minutes, I will just say we have to move beyond racism as a monolithic explanation.
What is the Church doing about the War on Boys? Fatherlessness and divorce?
The collapse of community? Liberalism's devolution into narcissism and boutique identify formation?
(Ran out of time for links.)
About the loss of dignified work for those unable or uninterested in college? About the cosmopolitan elites densification efforts?
About the total despair of a generation whose has been hysterically told there is no hope since birth because of impending climate disaster? That 22% of millennials say they have no friends (alienation). Young men told they are toxic? The rise of nones and incels?
Not to mention mental illness, still stigmatized by many Christians as a lack of faith?
https://www.amazon.com/Before-Church-State-Sacramental-Kingdom/dp/1945125144
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/01/liturgy-of-liberalism
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/11/a-christian-strategy
https://www.amazon.de/Why-Liberalism-Failed-Politics-Culture/dp/0300223447
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/01/conservative-democracy
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It's not that hard to find reasonable conservative critics of 'the liberal order' who are not calling for a LARP-y reconstruction of western institutions. Unlike the left, the anti-liberal right actually has states that it can point to (e.g. Hungary, Poland) as reasonably good cases of their politics at work.
> Liberalism, writes Patrick Deneen, "has been for modern Americans like water for a fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in which we have swum, unaware of its existence.”
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>Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, isn’t talking about the liberalism of the left, the liberalism of Elizabeth Warren or Nancy Pelosi. He’s talking about the liberalism that drives both the left and the right, the one that elevates individual flourishing over groups, families, places, nature.
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>That’s the liberalism that is wrecking our societies and our happiness, Deneen says, and while the left and the right often disagree on how to achieve it, they're both disastrously bought into its core ideas.
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>Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, has become a quiet sensation, gaining plaudits from conservative pundits and even showing up on Barack Obama’s reading list. His is a radical critique, and while I disagree with much of it, the things it gets right are important.
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> For the next two years, I delved into the literature on Venezuela with renewed interest. Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold’s book, A Dragon in the Tropics, it turned out, was particularly well-researched and compelling. Since I could no longer get my writing published in any of the outlets for which I’d previously written, I redirected my energies into making a new film entitled In the Shadow of the Revolution with the help of a Venezuelan filmmaker and friend, Arturo Albarrán, and I wrote my political memoir for an adventurous anarchist publisher. But what preoccupied me more and more were the larger questions of socialism versus capitalism, and the meaning of liberalism.
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> I’d visited Cuba twice—in 1994 and again in 2010—and now, with my experience of Venezuela, I felt I’d seen the best socialism could offer. Not only was that offering pathetically meagre, but it had been disastrously destructive. It became increasingly clear to me that nothing that went under that rubric functioned nearly as well on any level as the system under which I had been fortunate enough to live in the US. Why then, did so many decent people, whose ethics and intelligence and good intentions I greatly respected, continue to insist that the capitalist system needed to be eliminated and replaced with what had historically proven to be the inferior system of socialism?
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> The strongest argument against state control of the means of production and distribution is that it simply didn’t—and doesn’t—work. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding—and in this case, there was no pudding at all. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen socialism fail in China, fail in the Soviet Union, fail in Eastern Europe, fail on the island of Cuba, and fail in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. And now the world is watching it fail in Venezuela, where it burned through billions of petro-dollars of financing, only to leave the nation worse off than it was before. And still people like me had insisted on this supposed alternative to capitalism, stubbornly refusing to recognize that it is based on a faulty premise and a false epistemology.
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> As long ago as the early 1940s, F.A. Hayek had identified the impossibility of centralized social planning and its catastrophic consequences in his classic The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s writings convinced the Hungarian economist, János Kornai, to dedicate an entire volume entitled The Socialist System to demonstrating the validity of his claims. The “synoptic delusion”—the belief that any small group of people could hold and manage all the information spread out over millions of actors in a market economy—Kornai argued, leads the nomenklatura to make disastrous decisions that disrupt production and distribution. Attempts to “correct” these errors only exacerbate the problems for the same reasons, leading to a whole series of disasters that result, at last, in a completely dysfunctional economy, and then gulags, torture chambers, and mass executions as the nomenklatura hunt for “saboteurs” and scapegoats.
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> The synoptic delusion—compounded by immense waste, runaway corruption, and populist authoritarianism—is what led to the mayhem engulfing Venezuela today, just as it explains why socialism is no longer a viable ideology to anyone but the kind of true believer I used to be. For such people, utopian ideologies might bring happiness into their own lives, and even into the lives of those around them who also delight in their dreams and fantasies. But when they gain control over nations and peoples, their harmless dreams become the nightmares of multitudes.
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> Capitalism, meanwhile, has dramatically raised the standard of living wherever it has been allowed to arise over the past two centuries. It is not, however, anything like a perfect or flawless system. Globalization has left many behind, even if their lives are far better than those of their ancestors just two hundred years ago, and vast wealth creation has produced vast inequalities which have, in turn, bred resentment. Here in California, the city of Los Angeles, “with a population of four million, has 53,000 homeless.” Foreign policy misadventures and the economic crash of 2008 opened the door to demagogues of the Left and the Right eager to exploit people’s hopes and fears so that they could offer themselves as the solution their troubled nations sought to the dystopian woe into which liberal societies had fallen. In his fascinating recent jeremiad Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen itemizes liberal democracy’s many shortcomings and, whether or not one accepts his stark prognosis, his criticisms merit careful thought and attention.
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> Nevertheless, markets do work for the majority, and so does liberal democracy, as dysfunctional as it often is. That is because capitalism provides the space for ingenuity and innovation, while liberal democracy provides room for free inquiry and self-correction. Progress and reform can seem maddeningly sluggish under such circumstances, particularly when attempting to redress grave injustice or to meet slow-moving existential threats like climate change. But I have learned to be wary of those who insist that the perfect must be the enemy of the good, and who appeal to our impatience with extravagant promises of utopia. If, as Deneen contends, liberalism has become a victim of its own success, it should be noted that socialism has no successes to which it can fall victim. Liberalism’s foundations may be capable of being shored up, but socialism is built on sand, and from sand. Failures, most sensible people realize, should be abandoned.
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> That is probably why Karl Popper advocated cautious, piecemeal reform of markets and societies because, like any other experiment, one can only accurately isolate problems and make corrections by changing one variable at a time. As Popper observed in his essay “Utopia and Violence”:
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> > The appeal of Utopianism arises from the failure to realize that we cannot make heaven on earth. What I believe we can do instead is to make life a little less terrible and a little less unjust in each generation. A good deal can be achieved in this way. Much has been achieved in the last hundred years. More could be achieved by our own generation. There are many pressing problems which we might solve, at least partially, such as helping the weak and the sick, and those who suffer under oppression and injustice; stamping out unemployment; equalizing opportunities; and preventing international crime, such as blackmail and war instigated by men like gods, by omnipotent and omniscient leaders. All this we might achieve if only we could give up dreaming about distant ideals and fighting over our Utopian blueprints for a new world and a new man.
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> Losing faith in a belief system that once gave my life meaning was extremely painful. But the experience also reawakened my dormant intellectual curiosity and allowed me to think about the world anew, unencumbered by the circumscriptions of doctrine. I have met new people, read new writers and thinkers, and explored new ideas I had previously taken care to avoid. After reading an interview I had given to one of my publishers a year ago, I was forwarded an email by the poet David Chorlton. What I’d said in that interview, he wrote, “goes beyond our current disease of taking sides and inflexible non-thinking. I’m reading Havel speeches again, all in the light of the collective failure to live up to the post-communist opportunities. We’re suffering from a lack of objectivity—is that because everyone wants an identity more than a solution to problems?”
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> Clifton Ross writes occasionally for Caracas Chronicles, sporadically blogs at his website, [www.cliftonross.com](http://www.cliftonross.com/) and sometimes even tweets @Clifross
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> Note:
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> 1 Considerable confusion surrounds the definitions of “socialism” and “capitalism.” Here, I am using “socialism” to mean a system in which the state destroys the market and takes control of all capital, as well as the production and distribution of goods and services. I am using “capitalism” here to refer to a market economy in which the state, as a disinterested party, or a “referee,” sets guidelines for markets but allows private actors to own and use capital to produce and distribute goods and services.
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How many democratic states aren't currently threatened by the rise of populist demagogues, of either ideological flank?
Democracy worked really, really, really, really well between... oh, probably about the end of World War II in 1945 and the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000. It took another decade to see that Putin was no aberration, and that liberalism, broadly speaking, was actually starting to fail under the weight of the democratic mob. Now we've got populist demagogues rising up or already in power in nearly every polity. Most of those polities have been democracies for less than a century; many for less than thirty years. There is not a single person currently running for President in the United States who is not a populist demagogue -- even people who are not constitutionally inclined toward demagoguery have been forced to adopt it to appeal to the mob, like Elizabeth Warren. Since Walter Mondale destroyed the caucus system with the "smoke-filled room" canard, very few presidential candidates have been statesmen, and certainly all those actually elected did so on the backs of populist demagoguery.
Unshackled democracy has been wildly successful for our whole lives, but we're not that old. A political system that falls apart after a mere century doesn't seem all that successful to me, nor would it to John Adams -- hence that quote. Hopefully we aren't actually witnessing the end stages of liberalism. Liberalism is wonderful. But we are going to need to make significant structural reforms, I think, including reigning in the will of the mob, if we want to save it.