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livLiberal has always been one of my strongest identities. Not necessarily the capital-L Liberal party, but the idea that the point of moral and political action is to give everybody as many choices as possible.
There's a very obvious thread in right to extreme-right wing politics, especially online, which casts liberals as the enemy. People are amazingly willing to support the most destructive and terrible policies purely because this amorphous group, The Liberals, are perceived to be against them. 'To own the libs' is a sort of clichéd motivation.
It seems that this sort of rhetoric is spreading to left-wing culture too, it's only been apparent to me in the last couple of years but it's really noticeable. "Liberals" are anyone who doesn't fully support a small number of anointed leaders, usually older white men with vaguely left-of-centre politics. Or even worse, "liberals" are anyone who actually wants to make things better for people suffering under current political regimes, because anyone who's really committed to left-wing causes should be fully accelerationist. Or, short of that, "liberals" are to blame for not sufficiently opposing cruel policies. Not the actual bigoted authoritarians who enact the policies, liberals who are supposedly too polite or too conciliatory.
You get left-wingers supporting Brexit almost entirely because most liberals are pro-Europe, not at all because Brexit advances any left-wing aims. Liberals are blamed for everything from austerity to police over-reach in enforcing the pandemic regulations. I could name you specific, card-carrying liberals who are making significant effort to uphold the rule of law and protect individual freedoms, but you wouldn't think it to see otherwise sensible people ranting on Twitter about how "the liberals" are all about locking people up for arbitrary offences. Some equally ill-defined group known as "the liberals" were also blamed for being too friendly with the Republicans when the US election had barely been declared. But I didn't see any actual liberals trying to compromise with Republicans, I only saw some Republicans trying to make a bid for sympathy, and lots of leftists (disappointed that Biden isn't Bernie) blaming the liberals for hypothetically offering it. I've also seen a fair amount of liberals getting blamed for being more willing to listen to working-class concerns about immigration than about rent; actually almost all liberals I know are, like me, pretty strongly pro-immigration, and are also concerned about housing inequality.
I'm used to the idea that people whose main political goal is to oppress others are going to hate me. But it's odd to find that people who want many of the same things I do also hate me. And I don't want to get too far down conspiracy theory rabbit holes but I do wonder if it's some kind of divide and rule propaganda, getting leftists to attack liberals instead of right-wing authoritarians. I suppose committed accelerationists are always going to hate me, because I strongly oppose deliberately making people miserable until they accept socialist politics out of desperation. And I don't expect to be popular with full-on communists but I don't think there are many of those in the mainstream left these days.
So, I sort of want to reaffirm my commitment to liberalism. I'm liberal partly because I don't think I have all the answers. Things that are politically good for me aren't necessarily politically good for people whose circumstances and personalities are very different from mine. So my politics is as much as possible about diversity and making sure as many different ways of living as possible can be accommodated. And even more I don't think any particular leader or wannabe leader has all the answers; I don't want a philosopher king, I want a robust process with checks and balances so that no one person gets to control the lives of people different from them. Because even we collectively manage to choose a genuinely good leader, that unchecked power will sooner or later get into the hands of a malicious person. I also don't want the tyranny of the majority, because there are so many axes where I'm not in the majority; if 52% of the population want to hurt the other 48%, a democracy shouldn't give them the right to do that. And if 98% want to hurt 2%, the rare minority should also be protected.
I'm liberal because I want to actually make things better for people on an individual level. Yes, it's important to consider whether an immediate intervention causes long-term harm. But I generally don't care whether helping someone is ideologically pure. One of the things I do as a liberal is give substantial regular donations to the Trussell Trust. I do agree that food banks shouldn't be necessary in an ideal society, but as a liberal I'm not willing to let people starve while trying to bring that ideal about. And yes, the Trust work with powerful organizations including the government, they're not even slightly "radical".
I'm liberal because I want everybody's life to be better, I don't want to achieve equality by denying happiness to people who are doing well. That might be financial or it might be other types of privilege (there are of course two types of privilege, I mean here the kind that everybody should have, like the right to go out in public without being harassed, not the kind that nobody should have, like being able to get away with exploiting others). One example where I parted company from leftists was that I strongly opposed university tuition fees; yes, publicly funded higher education benefits comfortable middle-class people as well as people who otherwise couldn't afford university, but that doesn't make it bad. I'm generally pro-pleasure, and I don't consider suffering to be virtuous. Redistribution can be an means to reduce the suffering caused by poverty, but I don't consider it an aim in itself.
I'm liberal because I'm not willing to consider other people as collateral damage in a revolution. There's a lot wrong with society, but war and violence are worse than what we have now. And I have very little faith that the good guys would win in a revolutionary uprising. I do strongly believe that people who have influence can use it to make people's lives better, and when people's needs are met and they're not scared, they're a lot less likely to behave cruelly. And maybe I'm wrong about that, but I'd still rather be one of the people trying to build and raise people up, than one of the people trying to destroy.
There's a very obvious thread in right to extreme-right wing politics, especially online, which casts liberals as the enemy. People are amazingly willing to support the most destructive and terrible policies purely because this amorphous group, The Liberals, are perceived to be against them. 'To own the libs' is a sort of clichéd motivation.
It seems that this sort of rhetoric is spreading to left-wing culture too, it's only been apparent to me in the last couple of years but it's really noticeable. "Liberals" are anyone who doesn't fully support a small number of anointed leaders, usually older white men with vaguely left-of-centre politics. Or even worse, "liberals" are anyone who actually wants to make things better for people suffering under current political regimes, because anyone who's really committed to left-wing causes should be fully accelerationist. Or, short of that, "liberals" are to blame for not sufficiently opposing cruel policies. Not the actual bigoted authoritarians who enact the policies, liberals who are supposedly too polite or too conciliatory.
You get left-wingers supporting Brexit almost entirely because most liberals are pro-Europe, not at all because Brexit advances any left-wing aims. Liberals are blamed for everything from austerity to police over-reach in enforcing the pandemic regulations. I could name you specific, card-carrying liberals who are making significant effort to uphold the rule of law and protect individual freedoms, but you wouldn't think it to see otherwise sensible people ranting on Twitter about how "the liberals" are all about locking people up for arbitrary offences. Some equally ill-defined group known as "the liberals" were also blamed for being too friendly with the Republicans when the US election had barely been declared. But I didn't see any actual liberals trying to compromise with Republicans, I only saw some Republicans trying to make a bid for sympathy, and lots of leftists (disappointed that Biden isn't Bernie) blaming the liberals for hypothetically offering it. I've also seen a fair amount of liberals getting blamed for being more willing to listen to working-class concerns about immigration than about rent; actually almost all liberals I know are, like me, pretty strongly pro-immigration, and are also concerned about housing inequality.
I'm used to the idea that people whose main political goal is to oppress others are going to hate me. But it's odd to find that people who want many of the same things I do also hate me. And I don't want to get too far down conspiracy theory rabbit holes but I do wonder if it's some kind of divide and rule propaganda, getting leftists to attack liberals instead of right-wing authoritarians. I suppose committed accelerationists are always going to hate me, because I strongly oppose deliberately making people miserable until they accept socialist politics out of desperation. And I don't expect to be popular with full-on communists but I don't think there are many of those in the mainstream left these days.
So, I sort of want to reaffirm my commitment to liberalism. I'm liberal partly because I don't think I have all the answers. Things that are politically good for me aren't necessarily politically good for people whose circumstances and personalities are very different from mine. So my politics is as much as possible about diversity and making sure as many different ways of living as possible can be accommodated. And even more I don't think any particular leader or wannabe leader has all the answers; I don't want a philosopher king, I want a robust process with checks and balances so that no one person gets to control the lives of people different from them. Because even we collectively manage to choose a genuinely good leader, that unchecked power will sooner or later get into the hands of a malicious person. I also don't want the tyranny of the majority, because there are so many axes where I'm not in the majority; if 52% of the population want to hurt the other 48%, a democracy shouldn't give them the right to do that. And if 98% want to hurt 2%, the rare minority should also be protected.
I'm liberal because I want to actually make things better for people on an individual level. Yes, it's important to consider whether an immediate intervention causes long-term harm. But I generally don't care whether helping someone is ideologically pure. One of the things I do as a liberal is give substantial regular donations to the Trussell Trust. I do agree that food banks shouldn't be necessary in an ideal society, but as a liberal I'm not willing to let people starve while trying to bring that ideal about. And yes, the Trust work with powerful organizations including the government, they're not even slightly "radical".
I'm liberal because I want everybody's life to be better, I don't want to achieve equality by denying happiness to people who are doing well. That might be financial or it might be other types of privilege (there are of course two types of privilege, I mean here the kind that everybody should have, like the right to go out in public without being harassed, not the kind that nobody should have, like being able to get away with exploiting others). One example where I parted company from leftists was that I strongly opposed university tuition fees; yes, publicly funded higher education benefits comfortable middle-class people as well as people who otherwise couldn't afford university, but that doesn't make it bad. I'm generally pro-pleasure, and I don't consider suffering to be virtuous. Redistribution can be an means to reduce the suffering caused by poverty, but I don't consider it an aim in itself.
I'm liberal because I'm not willing to consider other people as collateral damage in a revolution. There's a lot wrong with society, but war and violence are worse than what we have now. And I have very little faith that the good guys would win in a revolutionary uprising. I do strongly believe that people who have influence can use it to make people's lives better, and when people's needs are met and they're not scared, they're a lot less likely to behave cruelly. And maybe I'm wrong about that, but I'd still rather be one of the people trying to build and raise people up, than one of the people trying to destroy.
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(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-11 08:57 pm (UTC)thing is, and I get the impression a bunch of people missed this, the bit right before the bit I just quoted:and further along the speech, and Biden's been in federal politics for most of fifty years so we know he's got McConnell's number:so like. the leftists saying liberals are offering sympathy to 45 supporters? this view is not unsupported by the facts. it's just not the whole picture.
One example where I parted company from leftists was that I strongly opposed university tuition fees
*gawks in leftist enough to believe 'university student' should be a subset of 'paycheck job'*
also, how many of those comfortable middle-class people are closeted queer, or victims of domestic violence, or not admitting they're at political odds with their parents? FAFSA takes parental income into account until the student is like mid-twenties. other financial aid for US colleges relies on the US federal paperwork. there exist young adults who are only comfortably middle-class because they haven't dared step out of line with familial expectations yet, because if they do that before they have a diploma and a job offer, they'll lose their chances at both along with their familial financial support. it does not seem very progressive of anybody to want to maintain a system of funding tertiary education that encourages keeping these young adults under their families' control.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 02:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 01:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 02:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-13 08:14 am (UTC)And why was everyone who mattered so eager to frame it as a fixed pot of money, to be taken from some at the expense of others and lost forever once spent? Was there no sight of it being an investment for the common good?
This is a visible waypoint on the Labour Party's adoption of neoliberalism: discarding the idea of the common good, the concept of investing in people, the concept of value being created by public investment, and of egalitarianism being a value worth pursuing.
All of them set aside in pursuit of... What?
It is deeply troubling to see who has gained from this specific policy in England, and to read the dire warnings from America about how it sealed the role of education as an engine of inequality and of lifelong financial oppression.
Someone wanted all this - all of it, all the way to the social and economic disaster of the American university system - and the Labour Party was indecently eager to hand it to them.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 05:30 pm (UTC)For me, a formative political debate took place in the 90s, when a newly elected Labour (left-of-centre) government wanted to massively expand the number of people at university, and in order to do so, wanted to shift part of the cost of university onto the students rather than free at the point of access and paid out of general taxation. Conservatives wanted to keep university elitist, with no more than the top 10% attending university at all, but based on academic ability rather than financial means. (I mean, in real life it's very hard to ensure that university places are assigned on genuine academic merit without socioeconomic and other biases affecting people's opportunities, but that was the aim.) As a liberal, I wanted to expand higher education gradually and keep it free, I was possibly willing to contemplate a graduate tax but not the system we actually ended up with of forcing students to borrow money for tuition and living costs and saddling them with debt.
I wrote to the Labour Prime Minister at the time asking him to reconsider the policy of introducing tuition fees, and received a patronizing reply telling me not to worry, Labour were committed to ending the cruel and harmful practice of hunting cute adorable little foxes for sport. (They did do this, but it was unpopular with parliament and they ended up bypassing normal democratic processes to do so, which made me angry in a different way.)
I went on my first march to protest against the introduction of tuition fees, and found myself in the company of Socialist Worker Party rent-a-mob goons who were the first people I encountered who were openly anti-semitic to my face. Now of course, the very great majority of leftists want nothing to do with the SWP, and I don't blame normal leftists for the antics of that particular cult, but that's the background of why I see publicly funded higher education as a liberal cause.
There was a similar, though less impassioned, debate recently when Corbyn, generally considered to represent the left wing of the Labour party, was leader. His policy was to reduce tuition fees, and to reinstate grants for students who could jump through hoops to prove they're really poor enough to need support, but keep the same debt-based system. And leftists continued to defend that on the grounds that free university helps middle-class people.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 05:11 pm (UTC)I think you and I strongly agree about university tuition; to a first approximation there's no such thing as a rich 18-year-old, just 18-year-olds who have rich parents. But it also doesn't matter; even if publicly funded university tuition helps actually privileged people, it's still a good thing because university education is a public good, and because means tests save very little money while making people jump through hoops to prove they're deserving of funding, and I have no time for that.
I understand that Biden has a forgive student debt platform, which seems like a broadly liberal policy to me. I expect socialists / progressives to be arguing that all the employment gatekeeping excluding non-graduates is unfair, or that public money shouldn't be subsidizing academia which forms part of the colonialist and oppressive establishment, or that private universities (I gather that's most of them in the US?) shouldn't exist at all because post-18 education should be public just like school education. And it's not that I disagree, it's that I want to improve access to university for poor (or alienated) students right now more than I want to take the whole system of higher education apart. I think in general leftists are ok with debt forgiveness, and liberals are ok with pushing for reform of the education sector and the job market, but may prioritize differently, does that seem reasonable?
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-11 09:47 pm (UTC)Liberal(A), in the original sense of the liberal party, i.e. socially and/or economically permissive. I rarely see anyone who seems to mean this any more apart from one or two particularly pedantic people I know.
Liberal(B), in the sense used by friends often to claim it as an identity, who are often the good sort of liberal democrats, i.e. roughly, progressive, and valuing Human Liberty. I think that's close to your meaning (and I can probably defer to your definition since mine is completely ad hoc and probably not on target). I don't identify with this in quite the same way, but I do massively, massively agree, endorse, and support it.
Liberal(C), in the american sense of meaning "on the left wing, or at least, opposed to the right wing". AFAIR the only people I've heard talking about "owning the libs" are talking about right-wing people hating on anyone to the left of them as one giant group.
Liberal(D), seems to be american-ish and come to mean, "people who are nominally on the left but the person talking thinks are too centrist and prone to compromising with the right and not being very progressive". Obviously that could have a big overlap with (A) and maybe (B) but I suspect to be a new coinage.
I've inferred all these meanings, not seen them defined, but that's the sense I get from people I've heard talking. I don't know what connections there are I *haven't* heard. And obviously most people are not really drawing distinctions. But the hate I see seems to be mostly (a) right wingers against left wingers (b) progressives against centrists. But obviously expressed using the same word that other people identify with meaning. I really don't know how we ended up here. I *think* that the people who mostly agree are not hating who you *are*, although if they're SAYING they are, I'm not sure if that's any better :(
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-11 09:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 04:19 am (UTC)The Liberal Party, also called The Liberal/National coalition or the LNP
is the right wing party equivalent to the Tories/Republicans.
So if you ever see Australians on Twitter/Dreamwidth saying "Bloody Liberals!"
they're almost certainly talking about the LNP...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_(Australia)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 05:46 pm (UTC)Certainly not in the Brexit debate, and the tweet I saw that prompted me to post this was something like: 'Liberals: well, slavery is bad, but maybe opposing it too strongly wouldn't be popular'. Of all the accusations you could make against liberals, being pro-slavery seems just outlandish. And note, it's not the slavers who are being criticized, it's the (hypothetical) liberals for not opposing them strongly enough.
Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-12 05:43 pm (UTC)Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-12 06:04 pm (UTC)Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-12 06:25 pm (UTC)I haven't followed UK politics since before covid hit but the primary accusation in the few discussions I follwed was that the LibDems always side with the Tories, with "we convinced [the Tories] to put a tax on plastic bags in exchange for decreasing benefits for the poor" tweet from Jo Swinson as the ur-example of collaboration.
Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-12 07:27 pm (UTC)But that's the party, and I think most of what's wrong with them is that they aren't liberal enough, or aren't principled about being liberal, rather than that they're too liberal. But the bad history of the Liberal Democrat party isn't being blamed when potential or actual Labour voters are accused of being "liberal". Lots of people are calling the current leader of the Labour party a liberal, though he's a life-long Labour politician, he's just somewhat to the right of the spectrum of what's acceptable within the party.
Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-13 08:41 am (UTC)When exactly was that? Labour had an absolute majority 1997-2010.
Lib Dem coalitions
Date: 2020-11-13 10:16 am (UTC)Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-16 12:11 pm (UTC)So, I may be making that exact argument in a forthcoming post. My thesis, in a nutshell, is: the Right is always trying to converge on some form of autocracy and tyranny, and they certainly don't stop themselves; the only thing that has ever stopped them has been the Left; and that of late in the US (and I gather elsewhere) the Left has failed in its duty to do this; in particular, it's been the more middleward side of the Left – liberals – that have collapsed in their commitment and efficacy. Now, I'd propose there are multiple reasons why this has been so here, and one broad and powerful set of reasons aren't the fault of anyone on the Left (e.g. the Right just won a powerful legal battle in the 1980s that the Left just didn't understand the consequences of until to late, other huge cultural things that have been playing out since the Civil War and before) but, unfortunately, yeah, the liberal wing of the Left in the US made some devil's deals in the 1990s that they/we really should have known better than, but didn't, and now here we are.
Those deals entailed American Liberalism throwing the working class under the bus and getting in bed with corporate interests. This is why the Bernie bros so loathed Hillary Clinton – Bill Clinton basically founded this sort of corporatist liberalism, and she made it abundantly clear she was carrying that banner – and loathe Biden.
There is a very legitimate argument that the liberal swath of the Left in the US sold out workers qua workers, and that a huge mass of our present ills, up to and including the rise of Trump – who has been described as a brick the working class pitched through the window of the White House – is a product of the oppression of the vast majority of American workers at the hands of corporate interests sanctioned by the state and the widespread suffering that that has caused, and which the Right has exploited.
I say this as someone who is probably best characterized as a liberal, and if asked – people don't ask, they get wide eyed and back slowly away – it's probably the word I'd use to describe myself if I wanted to be easily understood and wasn't too worried about accuracy.
Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-16 06:11 pm (UTC)I think there is some merit to the idea that any right-wing politics is basically a slippery slope to tyranny. I'm suspicious of it, because it seems like the flip side of, raising income tax or improving healthcare always leads directly to Stalinism. But I can absolutely believe the view that the left has to constantly exert opposing force to prevent right wing tyranny. If that's the case, I find it plausible that liberals aren't fighting hard enough. I still think the fascists are to blame more than the groups that don't oppose them strongly enough, but the not opposing is still morally problematic.
Also my understanding of American class systems is really patchy and mostly based on your posts, so my ability to analyse which political tendencies are good for the working class and which bad is quite limited. The notion that Bill Clinton's corporate liberalism was bad for the working class, yes, that fits with my understanding of recent political history. And yes, Hillary Clinton and probably Biden and honestly to a great extent Obama too continued in that tradition. But the Bernie Bro thing of, Clinton is too liberal so I'm going to vote for Trump, absolutely terrifies me. It feels like an example of exactly the thing I'm talking about in my post, the idea that the left have somehow come to believe that opposing liberals is such a high priority that they are willing to join the worst of the right wing in voting for an incompetent near-fascist.
I don't however understand your characterization of Trump as being a brick for the working class. OK, he did say he was going to create manufacturing and fuel extraction jobs, but he was obviously lying. And I've seen a lot of statistics saying that actual low-earners in manual occupations mostly voted for Clinton and then Biden. Trump's base is white people with above average earnings. Trump voters look lower-middle class to my foreign eyes, but perhaps they count as working class in the US because the whole system is different. Oppressed American workers would very likely have suffered under Clinton, but Trump is actually killing them. What advantage is there to a working class person, or a socialist who prioritizes improving the lives of the working class, in voting for Trump?
Re: Overly simplified but...
Date: 2020-11-18 09:54 am (UTC)It's not just that the liberals aren't opposing them strongly enough. Though some is. Let's put it this way: when I read King's Letter from a Burmingham Jail, his famous comment about the danger of white moderates reminds me of my lifetime as a Jew, surrounded by goyim just absolutely convinced that It Can't Happen Here, and immediately, reflexively dismissive of things I and people like me said about Oh Sure It Can And Take A Load Of What's Happening. For instance, we were treated like nuts for pointing out when government policies or laws would make it easier to identify or locate members of ethnic minorities. "Paranoid". The level of the problem here is not just "not opposing them strongly enough", it's refusing to admit that terrible things that are actually happening are in fact actually happening.
There comes a point where one has to ask how willfully does one have to insist that fascism isn't a thing to be regarded as complicit in fascism's cultivation. (And white supremacism and sexism, same thing.)
But the Bernie Bro thing of, Clinton is too liberal so I'm going to vote for Trump, absolutely terrifies me. It feels like an example of exactly the thing I'm talking about in my post, the idea that the left have somehow come to believe that opposing liberals is such a high priority that they are willing to join the worst of the right wing in voting for an incompetent near-fascist.
I'm kinda with you on that. On one hand, I have some sympathy for them: sometimes, you get tired of voting for the lesser of the two evils. On the other hand, what a ghastly privileged position. The Bernie Bros weren't the people who would be most vulnerable to what ensued. The Bernie Bros didn't have the visas canceled. The Bernie Bros weren't sent to detention centers and refused legal representation in their language and their kids weren't stolen from them and put in cages. The Bernie Bros weren't going to lose their right to abortion or birth control. The Bernie Bros weren't going to get thrown out of the military or have their marriages challenged.
One of the things that I think is a great ornament of the liberalism you espouse is how it is concerned with the wellbeing of people, and is protective of them.
I don't however understand your characterization of Trump as being a brick for the working class. OK, he did say he was going to create manufacturing and fuel extraction jobs, but he was obviously lying.
Some people vote for the person to troubles to tell them the lies they want to hear. You can know they're lying, and still be pleased their lies demonstrate they at least know what you want. (Which is pretty much why LGBT people voted for Bill Clinton, no?)
And I've seen a lot of statistics saying that actual low-earners in manual occupations mostly voted for Clinton and then Biden.
Yes! This is true....
Trump's base is white people with above average earnings.
...and without higher than high school educations.
And that, right there, is why it's so incredibly important to distinguish between social class and economic class. If you don't, that's invisible. Trump's primary base is the intersection of high earning and low education.
Who is that? It's blue collar managers. It's owners of businesses in the trades. It's franchise store owners. It's retail managers. It's people who "worked their way up" without the education.
That's his real base. But they convinced a whole lot of mid-tier blue-collar workers – not the really poorly paid ones, not the ones in serious economic peril, but the ones most likely to become imperiled. Note: it was striking to me to see interviews with coal workers advocating Trump for supporting coal and his promise to bolster coal industry jobs, because, definitionally, those were people already with jobs in coal. They weren't saying "I want a job in coal", they were saying, "I have a job in coal". They weren't saying "I want there to be more jobs in coal so I can have one", or even "I want there to be more jobs in coal so more people can have one". It was left unstated: "I want my current good-paying job not to go away."
But they're working class, too.
Oppressed American workers would very likely have suffered under Clinton, but Trump is actually killing them.
I think that liberals underestimate how bad things are for a lot of the people who supported Trump, economically and otherwise. I'm not at all sure that they're suffering worse under Trump, to their knowledge. I think that largely their suffering seems to be about the same, but at least Trump acknowledges them. (They do not see the pandemic as a real thing, so it doesn't factor into their judgment.)
What advantage is there to a working class person [...] in voting for Trump?
Well, we're talking about the USA, the country that responded to a Saudi terrorist attack by invading Afghanistan. I'm just explaining their motivations and possibly their reasoning; I'm not suggesting it all actually is a good idea or worked out to their benefit in reality.
That said...
I saw this on Reddit, and I love it passionately:
If one believes that there is no help coming, that the rest of the country will stand by and watch you drown, you might vote for the party that was no more going to help you than anybody else, but promised to wreck the ship on the decks of which the watchers stood. And I think that is absolutely the dynamic that Trump tapped into: he would give them revenge against all those they saw as doing better than them (don't fascists always?), like immigrants, and racial minorities, and religious minorities, and urban "elites".
It's not very nice. But it's very human. And that's what I mean by a brick tossed through the White House window.
What advantage is there to [...] a socialist who prioritizes improving the lives of the working class, in voting for Trump?
I am tempted to dismiss it as accelerationist asshaberdashery. But rousing myself in an act of empathy, I must admit that there is a powerful consistency in voting for Obama and Trump, and voting against Clinton. The one profound commonality that Obama and Trump had was that both of them campaigned from the platform Something Is Really Wrong With This Country And We Need To Fix It. Clinton – and this is an actual quote – tried rebutting Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" by saying that she thought America is "already is great". And that's a very fair representation of her position: this place mostly works, if people don't fuck it up. That is a profoundly alienating message for people who think that Something Is Really Wrong Here. Whether left or right.
I think the Bernie Bros who voted for Trump did a terrible thing, and a terribly unwise thing. But I can certainly understand why someone would choose the candidate that validated one's bone-deep understanding that this ship is going down over the candidate that was saying that there wasn't anything so wrong with the ship that it couldn't be patched with cake.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 11:59 am (UTC)tl;dr I think you're a liberal and I think that's a good thing.
[1] except inasmuch as I'm still at a loss to explain why anyone in their right mind would vote for Boris.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 06:23 pm (UTC)I don't understand why all possible politicians who are actually part of the political spectrum aren't massively preferable to pro-virus, blatantly corrupt Johnson. A socialist is preferable to Johnson, a liberal is preferable to Johnson, a pro-business centrist like Starmer is preferable to Johnson, a normal mainstream Tory who over-prioritizes economic growth is preferable to Johnson. The fact that he still has the support of about half the electorate is really scary, but I find it totally implausible that the reason for his continued success is that voters are too liberal.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 12:02 pm (UTC)I don't think the right has ever needed to encourage lefties to turn on each other. The famously fissiparous nature of the left has been obvious since the Jacobins, Girondins, Hébertists, Thermidorians, etc and goes straight through the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the battle at Kronstadt, to the modern day.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 06:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 07:29 pm (UTC)Well, I mean, don’t let me stop you jumping at shadows…
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-12 06:58 pm (UTC)I do think any genuine liberal would reject transphobia, but I also think that leftists ought to reject transphobia because it is unfair and discriminatory, and conservatives ought to reject transphobia because it's up to an individual, not the state, to define their own gender. But there seem to be transphobes all across the political spectrum, just as many white people turn out to hold racist views even though their political affiliation should in theory prevent them from being racist.
The ridiculous free speech debate most of time doesn't feel like liberalism at all, it feels like excuse-making for prejudice. Instead of saying, I hate X minority group, people say, well, a hypothetical bigot has a free speech right to hate X minority group. That's not a liberal argument IMO.
Ad Lib
Date: 2020-11-13 12:03 pm (UTC)So yes, you've got me there.
Why not use it?
The 'liberal' label is a libel which longer means liberality and liberation.
Words have weight, and a meaning which isn't your own internal definition, nor the definition in the dictionary: it's what people hear, and it's what it means to them; and this has been changed by persistent campaigning.
In short, the word 'liberal' has had so much unwanted baggage dumped on it, that its meaning is has been buried.
So much so, that if any of us use it, it's "Oh, so you're *that*, are you?", says some critic, picking up some particularly unpleasant item from the baggage heap... And that's it, that's what you are, for everyone who listened and was eager to hear something negative about you.
It's not what you said, it's not what you are, but it's what everybody heard, and it sticks.
So: I don't use the label 'Liberal'.
And that is a matter of regret, because I am genuinely pleased to hear that you have embraced the term and strive to be everything that a liberal should be.
Re: Ad Lib
Date: 2020-11-14 07:36 pm (UTC)It's much more important to me to find common ground with people who may have different core values or different priorities in politics. If people genuinely believe that liberals are likely to be in favour of racism, arbitrary police targeting of undesirables, and even slavery, then I would like to have the opportunity to convince them that that's not what I believe. But if they're just using the word liberal to insult people not like them, then we're probably not going to be able to work together anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-13 10:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 07:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 01:54 pm (UTC)I'm partly overlapping Jack's comment here, but will say what I was going to say anyway:
I think there are at least three potentially-contradictory meanings of liberal:
1) "Classical liberal" (I know some people have issues with that term, but I can't think of a better one). Tolerance, choice, live and let live, freedom of religion/assembly/speech, the best way we can live in peace is if we allow each other to be wrong, even about important things.
2) Economically left-wing: seeing redistribution as inherently good, inequality of wealth as inherently bad.
3) Socially progressive/woke: seeing oppression along identity axes as society's biggest problem, and combating it as the most important thing.
When right-wing Americans talk about owning the libs, they mean (2) and (3), not (1). I think this is because they strongly oppose literal Communism (reasonably enough) and so they oppose anything that leans in that direction (less reasonably).
I think there is some etymological confusion between the "freedom" (1) and "generosity" (2) senses of "liberal", or between "free as in speech" (1) and "free as in beer" (2).
I think that classical liberals (1) have traditionally been economically and socially left-wing (which might have contributed to the confusion of (1) and (2)) because the right wing have traditionally had more power, but now the economic and especially social left wing has more power and ability to do classically-illiberal things in the name of combating oppression, classical liberals have found themselves less aligned with the left than previously, and in some circumstances more aligned with the right. This has caused the traditional coalition between freedom-liberals and leftwing-liberals to fragment: forced to choose between classical-liberal-freedom and leftwing-economic-and-social-redistribution, some people have gone one way and some the other, and many of them don't understand why others of their erstwhile allies went the other way, and so resent them.
I consider myself primarily a liberal in sense (1), and I'm pleased to see you write this, because I think a lot of our mutual friends have gone in the direction of (2) and (3) at the expense of (1), and wouldn't have the epistemic humility to say "I'm liberal partly because I don't think I have all the answers. Things that are politically good for me aren't necessarily politically good for people whose circumstances and personalities are very different from mine."
I also consider redistribution a means rather than an end, and I also "don't want to achieve equality by denying happiness to people who are doing well". I think of these as fairly centrist positions, but I feel like our wider bubble has drifted so much to the left that these are being decried as extreme-right positions, so I find it reassuring to see you come out in favour of them.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 03:23 pm (UTC)As opposed to, for example, those I disagree with because they think that command economies can work (these are neither exhaustive nor disjoint subsets obviously).
But there are a number of words I apparently use in highly idiosyncratic ways, and this may be one of them.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 08:36 pm (UTC)I meant to say something about Tim Farron in my original comment. He epitomised what I mean by liberalism, in that his personal religious views were anti-gay but he made a point of working for gay rights in the public sphere.
I was sad that the party with "liberal" in its name got rid of him, but I think it was because the social progressive faction (3) will not tolerate the possibility of anyone oppressing minorities even in the privacy of their own head. I think peace and human flourishing are best served when gay people are free to get married or not, and bakers are free to bake them cakes or not, and nobody tries to get either of them fired over it.
I agree it's confusing to use "liberal" to refer to economic leftists. I think it's mostly Americans who do that. I would make a point of saying "economic leftists", or maybe "communists" or "socialists", depending.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-17 02:33 pm (UTC)That's why I don't think my use of the word in that sense is totally unreasonable (in the sense I can't imagine people who do call themselves liberal objecting that I am mischaracterising them).
I would totally class Boris Johnson as a liberal in this sense, by the way, and it's the main reason I didn't want him to be Prime Minister (until the choice was between him and Jeremy Corbyn obviously).
I had hoped that at least his rampant libertinism would lead to some good results, like the rolling-back of things like the sugar tax which has made almost all drinks taste like soap, but even in that I look like being disappointed as they apparently now plan to ban advertising of high-fat foods like cheese.
I agree it's confusing to use "liberal" to refer to economic leftists
Especially as the most obvious-on-the-face-of-it meaning of 'economically liberal' is pro-free-trade, low-regulation, laissez-faire — all the things lefties are against. I agree that if you're talking about someone in favour of command economies, nationalising things, etc, 'socialist' is a better term. I'd reserve 'communist' for the people who go farther than simply wanting nationalisation of industries and fully object to private property, support government expropriation of the assets of those deemed to be too rich, etc (I'm pretty sure Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell fit in that category, even if they were never quite open about it in their manifestos).
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 08:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 04:33 pm (UTC)Which produces the bizarre opinion polls of the last many years where you have a large amount of people who are on board with socially and economically liberal policies electing people who promise to fight them until their dying day, because neoliberalism is routinely conflated with the boogeymen that fascist authoriarians use to scare their base into voting for them.
I think most of the complaints about cooperation are in the mold of "these people have repeatedly shown themselves to be fascist authoriarians who make it their agenda to ensure that your agenda never happens. Since they will not work with you, any time you try to work with them, you only give them legitimacy and a platform, stop doing that and figure out how to use the tools at your disposal to accomplish your ends."
Liberalism is generally a pretty popular position and people would be happy with a liberal government. So huzzah for people who are liberals, who might, in this day and age, have to call themselves progressives to distinguish themselves from the neoliberals that have become the first thought of liberalism.