Okay hold up, I am not talking about the Democrats specifically who brand themselves as liberals. I am talking the political theory as put forward by Mill, Locke etc
The “Tyranny of the Majority” is an idea wherein if you left everything to a winner take all election system smaller niche groups come under threat by forces that can frame them out of needed resources or create laws which create undue pressure - the OG philosophers were thinking religious minorities and immigrants (of a very specific sort) because they were fairly white male focused but this principle can and does get applied to racial minorities, sexual and gender minorities for example.
On the other end of the scale when you look at the systems inside the systems like the Roberts Rules of order there are protections for bodies not present. If you cannot get enough people to show up to make quorum your government cannot make decisions for the majority body it governs.
Basically because a democratic system with elected officials will favor a majority rule what happens persay if say a religious majority decides to make a move that undercuts a different religion? (to use one of the og examples) This is why even OG liberalism featured things like a bill of rights and other constitutional checks on the power weilded by the electoral base and things like separation of church and state powers.
Remember though that these systems were built by idealists. So was things like Communism which has been historically internally weak to stopping people who like power entering the government body like viruses and redirecting state resources towards their own ends while paying performative lip service to the ideals.
Liberalism is very bad at checking capitalism on it’s own because it’s founders were hyper concerned about government overreach. But remember where they come from. Crown powers had a lot of power for direct seizure of privately held property at the time. It also was written by people who really weren’t accustomed to protecting the rights of people who fell outside their system or dealing with systematic imbalances of power. There have always been exceptions to who is covered under the protection of liberalism vs peoples who are sacrificed to make the system work.
But that doesn’t mean the entire system is functionally a write off. There is some good stuff in there just overwhelmed by the capitalist forward shit that has come to cause the imminent collapse of the system. There are merits in electoral reform, blended systems that lose it’s fear of government overreach to create more publicly held goods, services and wealth and creation of caps on the high end of wealth accrual to disincentivize the existence of a billionaire class.
I see a lot of people treating liberalism as a dirty word on this platform but I think there are aspects of it’s core philosophy which are reasonable but sorely in need of a modern (socialist) update to addresses the bugs in the system. But we can’t have that discussion at all if people treat the whole philosophy as a cardboard cut out to take pot shots at.
Okay hold up, I am not talking about the Democrats specifically who brand themselves as liberals.
You have one upvote - thanks to me. I don’t see any of the people self-applying the term “liberal” rushing to reclaim that ideology from the capitalists and their sycophants.
The “Tyranny of the Majority” is an idea wherein if you left everything to a winner take all election system
To that I’d say that a “winner take all election system” would be utterly impossible in a society that could be called democratic with a straight face - but I suppose it would stand in stark contrast to the current “winner already has it all election system” that is (disingenuously) labelled “democracy” in our current world order.
So was things like Communism which has been historically internally weak to stopping people who like power entering the government body like viruses and redirecting state resources towards their own ends while paying performative lip service to the ideals.
You are talking about a feature of the way power flows through economic, political and social hierarchies - not an inherent feature of communist ideology (of course, you could say the same about liberalism) It should also be noted that there are plenty of socialists and communists around who are trying to reclaim those concepts from the abuse and warping they have suffered under (so-called) “socialist” states - who, in my opinion, were “socialist” in the same way that “Social Darwinism” was Darwinist.
Liberalism is very bad at checking capitalism on it’s own because it’s founders were hyper concerned about government overreach.
It doesn’t seem to me that liberalism wants to check capitalism at all - merely protect capitalism from itself when it’s parasitism threatens instability.
There have always been exceptions to who is covered under the protection of liberalism vs peoples who are sacrificed to make the system work.
So you are saying that the whole “the law protects some without binding them while it binds others without protecting them” thing isn’t a feature of (so-called) “conservatism” but actually just bog-standard liberalism.
I agree.
aspects of it’s core philosophy which are reasonable but sorely in need of a modern (socialist) update to addresses the bugs in the system
I don’t see any kind of compatibility between socialism and liberalism. The prospects of having the working class control the means of production would have even Mill and Locke running to the fascists for protection… but since you seem to be posting in good faith I’m willing to discuss it.
Socialism and liberalism do actually have overlaps and not all bits of the ideologies are at odds. The “working class owning the means to production” is a catch all phrase but whenever we are talking Marx we have to be cognizant of what point in history he is writing from. Nationalized services were in their absolute infancy during his lifetime. National health care, water, sanitation and fire service for instance were all things that started existing after he stopped publishing in part because of other Socialist movements he disagreed with that was making stuff happen elsewhere. Those services shift the burden of cost away from labour effectively “owning the means of production” on a piecemeal basis. American socialist movements saw a lot of success in the 1930’s creating environmental protections, banking regulations and tax structures that created room for things like, National Public Broadcasting, Library system and so on. The slow disassembly of these systems and the demonizing of socialist movements using communism as a bogeyman without a public understanding that socialism is a wider band of political thought some of which had distinctly American roots went hand in hand with the cold war xenophobia. The dismantling of peaceful socialism is recent but propagandistic. It came about because of poisoning the well and making the discussion taboo driven by a unified Christian base turning against one of the main core tenants of classical liberalism. Freedom of political thought and divorcing religion from the state.
When a lot of people treat socialism as strictly a Marx led school of thought a lot of the discussion frames out the history of Socialist movements that aim not to cause a complete collapse of the system but to peacefully through beaurcratic and changes to system leaving bits that are working to create transparency, limitations on power and enhancement of labour power. These existed alongside Marx in his time period. The criticism of Owenites being hippies who retreated to the countryside to put their heads in the sand isn’t particularly fair. They were trial running different social models. Experimenting on smaller scales and the tail end of Owen’s era became about how to change the systems from the inside. We don’t hear much about them because a lot of their models quietly were adopted and many of those features of the landscape are taken for granted as normal today.
The benefits of classical liberalism are mainly in it’s concepts of minority protections. Communism as practiced by the countries who have at least claimed to be Communist does ultimately very poorly in the protection of minorities. A lot of the talk becomes of personal sacrifice to the state (or the stateless anarchist spirit) which tends to punish any level of apostasy. It means a freedom of expression is often relegated to the bin of sacrifice. Because Marx was notoriously racist, looked at women in terms of means to produce citizens and relegated them to the sort of trad wifery we see on the Christian right. It is a frequent blind spot in his writing which a lot of the scholarship tends to attempt to amend using some of the openings made for equality forward movements that were normalized by the equality and freedoms that were fought for under the framework of liberal ideology.
My personal issue with Communism is it is overly idealistic. It is very good at pointing out the issues with power inequity and the current models of ownership but it overlooks that human cupidity is always present. A fair number of people, to their detriment at times, desire heirachy. Once the playing feild is leveled power naturally agrigates towards groups that create new hierarchies because lateral power structures are weak against vertical ones. To have Communism actually work you need everyone’s unreserved sign on with nobody secretly just playing along.
You also have the global trade problem. A currency free state is great on paper but unless you get the rest of the world to play ball under the same system you effectively trap your citizens inside the borders of your defacto new state unable to move freely outside because of a lack of liquidity in translatable funds which makes the population who agreed to adopt that policy vulnerable to a potentially abusive state.
Liberal democratic structures are very successful (mind you not good just efficient and difficult to topple) because of a balance of deferred responsibility, redundancy, structures of checks and balances and the ideals of personal freedoms and protections baked into their foundation. Getting even a corrupt one to fall into the conditions nessisary for communism to take hold is a job and a half. Getting all of them to fall at once is improbable meaning the first one to go faces an uphill struggle as other liberal democracies close ranks.
A lot of the issues we face today are issues with outdated political infrastructure but also with the generational grooming of the masses towards toxic citizenship. The chronic anxiety created by a false perception of government frivolity of funds, a desire to preserve their place and personal wealth and the simplistic narrowing of understanding of the systems as they are that lock them firmly outside the mechanisms. Wanting to just ditch it all is alluring but ultimately dangerous as it is very easy to defer to a authoritarian regime.
Not to say the tenants of liberal socialism is a cakewalk either. All of the individual issues with the system are permeable the downside is that you have to get very passionate about individual beaurcratic systems… Which is quite an ask. America particularly is a sticky problem because it’s not just a liberal democracy it’s an old liberal democracy made by very paranoid founders. Your best hope might be essentially taking advantage of the Republican inter party fissures as the party devolves into less and less coherent states while putting more pressure on Democrats to save their own skins by bringing about electoral reform. Only once you fix the foundations of the uptake system can you start restabilizing the house. Democrats at least are avid followers of the internal rules. They might have a more reliable fear of pitchforks.
Sorry for the late reply… things have been rather busy here.
The “working class owning the means to production” is a catch all phrase
I wouldn’t say that. If society cannot control the means of production democratically, this…
The dismantling of peaceful socialism
…becomes a foregone conclusion. It’s not a catch-all phrase - merely the absolute minimum necessary to render the owner-class powerless to execute the very thing you describe in your first paragraph. If they are allowed the power to do so, they will do so - it matters not what legalese a state produces to pretend that it is, or has ever been, on the side of the working class.
The benefits of classical liberalism are mainly in it’s concepts of minority protections.
I find that hard to believe. Even inside the imperial core (where liberalism is essentially de facto state religions) minorites had to wage long and arduous campaigns for even the most meagre inclusion. And then we aren’t even talking about the billions of people on the imperial peripheries (or - as I like to call them - global extraction zones) which liberal elites has always treated, at best, as expendable externalities. In fact, liberalsm’s historical tolerance for the violent subjugation and exploitation of the “other” will fill several libraries - it’s acceptance of said “other” won’t even fill one book.
I do agree that there is one type of minority that liberalism has always sought to protect - the minority that already owns all the wealth and power.
My personal issue with Communism is it is overly idealistic.
Whenever accusations of “idealism” is hurled at the left, I can’t help but think of the way we treated environmentalists back in the 80s - they were painted with the “idealism” brush so hard that the media literally portrayed them as intellectually dysfunctional caricatures (I remember because I was there) Turns out they weren’t actually being all that idealistic, were they? A lot less idealistic than the people who taught us that everything would be okay as long as “red arrow goes up,” in any case.
It’s amazing how quickly yesterday’s (supposed) “too idealistic” can become tomorrow’s “only sane option left.”
It is very good at pointing out the issues with power inequity and the current models of ownership but it overlooks that human cupidity is always present.
Certainly… but I fail to see how liberalism fixes this. In fact, liberalism’s fetishization of law has proven perfectly useful to the needs of the wealthy and powerful - as Anatole France said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor.”
A fair number of people, to their detriment at times, desire heirachy.
Certainly - the formation of hierarchies to concentrate power is something that will always have to be actively managed by any society that wishes to call itself egalitarian. But there is no rule that states that the formation and dismantling of such hierarchies cannot be done efficiently through democratic means. I’d say that the lengths liberalism will go to to prevent the democratic dismantling of hierarchies - including, but not limited to, handing power to the fascist element - is proof enough of liberalism’s fundamentally anti-democratic character.
you effectively trap your citizens inside the borders of your defacto new state unable to move freely outside because of a lack of liquidity
I’d say that the poverty liberalism cannot exist without traps plenty of people inside borders anyway. I don’t see no taxpayer-funded fascist goon squads on horseback waiting to whip Bill Gates when he crosses the southern US border, but that sure does seem to be the lot of those people liberalism treats as disposable externalities.
A currency free state is great on paper
The debate on currency and even markets is still an ongoing one on the left - it is far from settled. Besides… you’re not talking to a communist - you’re talking to a socialist.
Liberal democratic structures are very successful (mind you not good just efficient and difficult to topple) because of a balance of deferred responsibility,
There is a very big difference between “deferred responsibility” and deferred institutionalized power - the former implies consequences for the failure to meet those responsibilities (something absent from practiced liberalism essentially since the Enlightenment) while the latter absolutely does not.
redundancy,
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
structures of checks and balances and the ideals of personal freedoms and protections baked into their foundation.
These are all things that have proven easy to subvert - and that is even assuming that they were doing what they purported to be doing in the first place.
Getting even a corrupt one to fall into the conditions nessisary for communism to take hold is a job and a half.
Well… not really. The problem is that the liberal order essentially does this all by itself. The post-WW1 period is a text-book case. It’s not so much a question of “if” but more a question of “when.”
It’s technically a modern hybrid socialism strain - Social Democracy which is sometimes referred to as market socialism, Liberal-Socialism…
They are still perfectly incompatible… liberalism has been forced to appropriate socialist-sounding ideas - though nothing core to socialist thought itself - and shoe-horn them (no matter how poor the fit) into the status quo in order to prevent socialist ideas from spreading. At the end of the day, it is merely a concession designed to protect the liberal order.
Democrats at least are avid followers of the internal rules. They might have a more reliable fear of pitchforks.
Liberals have always been reliably afraid of the pitchforks. If that was all there was to it, liberalism wouldn’t have lasted very long.
It’s their very fear that makes fascism such a necessity to the liberal nation state.
As a personal request could you not chop up and reply to my posts peicemeal like this? I find it a little lazy and also just unpleasant to interface with. You seem pretty capable of putting together your own treatise and reply rather than just counterpunching and I really would appreciate the effort. It goes a long way to making these conversations enjoyable for me.
The fact that liberalism has incorperated socialist ideals into it, even in incomplete concessions to save itself I think is just a melding of the push and pull of the two systems interplaying. The two systems are not direct opposites, they are uneasy roomates. A lot of the way people interface with them looks at them as enemies but they are just philosophies. You can admire and engage with incomplete philosophies…but that’s not what’s happening. People are reacting to the name of the philosophy like it’s poison forgetting that it like everything is a work in progress. That in practice it is failing to live up to it’s on paper ideals doesn’t make it any different than any other pure philosophy. Every single system of governance that has ever existed has been corrupted at some point. Nothing gold can stay because ingratitude is generational. Anything we fight to make better unless it is maintained with utmost cultural zeal by those who come after us will collapse due to the siren song of personal individual gains. It doesn’t matter what replaces this, in any society those who have the moat participation get their say and a populace’s contentment is a weak flank. What we are experiencing now is basically just a reiteration of what has happened before again and again throughout time and political structure.
I believe in dismantling the structures of colonialism pushed by nominally liberal governments in favour of more forms of publicly held wealth and support…but at the same time I am wary of those who want to make inhuman demons of those beaurcratic institutions because they were founded by people who had blindspots. They all had blindspots. The founders of these philosophic schools were mostly a bunch of white guys in the 18th and 19th century. They lived in a completely different world than us and were fucked up by being a segregated society that inferred personhood much less readily then the average person of today on virtually all fronts. Progressivism isn’t liberal nor is it strictly socialist. The politics of identity and acceptance of the other is a compounding factor independent of those philosophies that those ideologies can choose to incorporate or just as easily become insular and regressive. Socialist groups used to scorn poc and queer people just as much as liberal in groups. There is no neutral governance. A state has power and no matter how soft they attempt to be to citizens someone will be bound by it. Where many people tap out is basically not wanting to be bound by something or wanting to have a personal say in agreeing with the allocation of funds or resources .
By breaking into teams you are rooting for and against and letting anger at the current state of affairs causes people to pull away to create unreasonable expectations of any government body. My main axe to grind is that a lot of these things people take issue with aren’t core to a specific tphilosophy… Like your example of criminalizing people sleeping under bridges. More often than not that’s some nimby bylaw that you need to fight against local citizen interests at a municipal level. That’s not some grand aspirations of a federal system, that’s people being fucking short sighted dicks and showing up to their local council meetings because they want to create their own personal mini utopias. It’s a personal ethics problem. You could place a Socialist government in charge but you are probably still going to be swimming in NIMBY pricks. We have documented fines from the medieval ages of people being NIMBY pricks to each other and a lot of those councils pre enclosure were largely self governing and long predate liberal ideology.
Treating people of a specific political label as though they have defective moral compasses simply for utilizing that term isn’t going to really help matters I don’t think. As much as people want to establish in and out groups it’s pretty unnessisary. You can basically just run individual interest groups. Like a “Pro decriminalizing human movement” group or a “Tax the everliving hell out of multi millionaires” group and have much healthier conversations than trying to construct “the left” “a Socialist” “a liberal”…because you get ridiculous infighting that serves no one. People are much more amenable to having across line discussions when it’s not structured as a team sport.
There’s also a psychological phenomenon of scapegoating at play on this platform by people who claim variable aspects of “the left” “Socialism” “Marxism” and “Communism” . By transferring all of one’s sins to the liberal goat and claiming that they are not existent in your own ideological constructed tribe is very comforting to believe but not always particularly true. You could participate in this ritual with a bunch of different groups using the same goat and some of them are just angry. They want absolution. To not be associated with the sins they’ve assigned the goat while not really having a good idea of what to reach for. I think it’s a trap that will only lead to incoherent screaming. The way we conduct business as a political community is inherently flawed because our structure of engagement is just… Egotism.
I find it a little lazy and also just unpleasant to interface with.
Have you noticed all the liberal absurdity floating around here? Problematizing liberalism and exposing it’s intimate relationship with capitalism and fascism is a pretty damn difficult job (not to mention long overdue)… and it’s no one on the left’s responsibility to make it pleasant for you on top of all that.
Having your worldview collapse from underneath you is most definitely not a pleasant thing… it’s more akin to the withdrawal symptoms one suffers after going cold turkey. I don’t blame people for avoiding it like the plague… but there is no avoiding it unless we wish to continue living in the fantasy world liberalism has tried (and, for far too long, succeeded) to substitute for reality.
And no… I’m not talking about the fake and contrived “liberal-vs-conservative” dichotomy we all see advertised on CNN and Fox, either.
It goes a long way to making these conversations enjoyable for me.
What did you think I’m on here to do? Write theses for your enjoyment?
I’m not a philosopher - I don’t even like philosophy. I didn’t learn my politics in the ivory towers of academia. My background is in propaganda - and not the type of propaganda you study in sterile lecture halls and classrooms, either.
That’s what I do on here - I disrupt propaganda that requires disrupting… and that includes yours.
So if it sounds to you like I’m “counterpunching” your narratives that’s because I am.
The only reason I’m giving you the time of day is because your arguments are rationally sound - which I find (reasonably) indicative of an honest personality - but the assumptions you base them on are terrifically flawed and must therefore be rejected together with the conclusions you reach.
I can just pull a random thing you say and demonstrate this - here’s one.
but at the same time I am wary of those who want to make inhuman demons of those beaurcratic institutions because they were founded by people who had blindspots.
Here is an assumption that can be dismissed with next-to-zero debate - if the problems these institutions pose were merely caused by “blindspots,” why would the status quo react so violently to any attempts to fix said “blindspots” from the bottom up (since, mysteriosuly, these “blindspots” only seem to affect the lives of those who are actually subjected to the actions of all these institutions)? In your framing of the issue it makes no rational sense… unfortunately, it makes perfect rational sense once you admit that the violence doesn’t protect “blindspots” - it protects interests. These institutions don’t have “blindspots” - they serve interests. When they enshrined violent (white) militias into law with the 2nd amendment it was no “blindspot” - it was to protect interests. When they enshrined (black) slavery into law with the 13th amendment, it was no “blindspot” - it was to serve interests. Interests, mind you, which has been very well served right up to the present day - the proof is in the pudding, as they say - and pretending any off this has anything to do with “blindspots” is no less ahistorical than any falsehood peddled by the alt-right.
It seems to me that you are unused to having the assumptions you base your arguments on challenged, and wants to “discuss” things only after the sacrosanctity of the status quo has been established as inviolable - and this I reject out of hand.
If you wish to continue with this discourse, you’re going to have to accept that.
Oof. I am sorry but facing the disgust you bear me doesn’t translate into a way I want to spend my time. At majority level I DO do this for enjoyment because I like to write… and maybe egotistically consider myself a philosopher albiet not one anyone is going to platform. As I saw it what both of us are doing on this forum is discourse. I am not performing for an audience regarding propaganda. From experience nobody tends to read long posts except the person I address them to. It’s part of why I keep them long. I am having a discussion with you.
I didn’t learn in the alabaster halls of acedemia. I couldn’t afford to chase a European history and philosophy degree so I just read a lot of source material. A lot of what I see happening reminds me of other points in history. When dealing with 1000 year spans no example is universal.
My take on philosophy is not American centric specifically. I am Canadian. I look at multiple democracies that have common philosophical ancestries to draw my conclusions some of which have aspects I admire and other aspects have earned nothing but my sharpest critique. America… Has very specific issues. Most of them are in places the discourse doesn’t really touch because Americans are blind to those things not being the norm.
On a personal note lot of the practical stuff I believe comes from more modern philosophers, Sarah Ahmed, Bhaskar Sunkara, Margot Susca, Ferric C. Fang etc etc etc. But adoption of a lot of the designs of government I am interested are stuck at university testing level. I know convincing people to get behind democratic lottery systems is not going to be an in my lifetime thing. There’s too many assumptions and things people hold onto regarding elections to give such radical ideas a shot. If we get lucky a Municipality level trial might be possible but there are far too many norms people cling to that require a lot of intellectual sparring. We don’t have the coffee parlors of the past and as I see it this platform is the next best thing. I use it as a training ground for learning dialectics so when I interface with politics face to face I am practiced.
I have had my share of union politics and trying to shift power structures to know that change is heartbreakingly gradual and most people who are full of fire but don’t understand the game get rebuffed by those systems… and they just become bitter. But those systems for better or worse are what is in power. Your choices in changing them are to play the game well ,get people onside through eloquence and building concensus and applying political pressure to the system to change - or to violently overthrow them… And personally I do not think violent overthrows ever work. But people don’t understand how important concensus is. Compromise and solidarity with stuff you don’t fully agree with is the engine that makes that run and we as a society were trained out of that. We are all individually acting like toddlers who think yelling and screaming will work. If everyone runs on absolute ultimatums demanding utter purity of all of their aims then nothing is achieved. Movements are atomized and inertia will breed anger until basically the pressure blows and in the end the anarchist uprising get crushed by the standing powers or the most powerful opportunist takes the wheel.
Honestly the enmity you show me here is not encouraging. If you think I am evil there’s not really a point in continuing. You have decided that I am not worth your consideration and you have your hackles up. I am not going to change your mind if you think I am scum so I will choose to part ways instead. So thank you for talking to me stranger. I appreciate your time.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.
Okay hold up, I am not talking about the Democrats specifically who brand themselves as liberals. I am talking the political theory as put forward by Mill, Locke etc
The “Tyranny of the Majority” is an idea wherein if you left everything to a winner take all election system smaller niche groups come under threat by forces that can frame them out of needed resources or create laws which create undue pressure - the OG philosophers were thinking religious minorities and immigrants (of a very specific sort) because they were fairly white male focused but this principle can and does get applied to racial minorities, sexual and gender minorities for example.
On the other end of the scale when you look at the systems inside the systems like the Roberts Rules of order there are protections for bodies not present. If you cannot get enough people to show up to make quorum your government cannot make decisions for the majority body it governs.
Basically because a democratic system with elected officials will favor a majority rule what happens persay if say a religious majority decides to make a move that undercuts a different religion? (to use one of the og examples) This is why even OG liberalism featured things like a bill of rights and other constitutional checks on the power weilded by the electoral base and things like separation of church and state powers.
Remember though that these systems were built by idealists. So was things like Communism which has been historically internally weak to stopping people who like power entering the government body like viruses and redirecting state resources towards their own ends while paying performative lip service to the ideals.
Liberalism is very bad at checking capitalism on it’s own because it’s founders were hyper concerned about government overreach. But remember where they come from. Crown powers had a lot of power for direct seizure of privately held property at the time. It also was written by people who really weren’t accustomed to protecting the rights of people who fell outside their system or dealing with systematic imbalances of power. There have always been exceptions to who is covered under the protection of liberalism vs peoples who are sacrificed to make the system work.
But that doesn’t mean the entire system is functionally a write off. There is some good stuff in there just overwhelmed by the capitalist forward shit that has come to cause the imminent collapse of the system. There are merits in electoral reform, blended systems that lose it’s fear of government overreach to create more publicly held goods, services and wealth and creation of caps on the high end of wealth accrual to disincentivize the existence of a billionaire class.
I see a lot of people treating liberalism as a dirty word on this platform but I think there are aspects of it’s core philosophy which are reasonable but sorely in need of a modern (socialist) update to addresses the bugs in the system. But we can’t have that discussion at all if people treat the whole philosophy as a cardboard cut out to take pot shots at.
You have one upvote - thanks to me. I don’t see any of the people self-applying the term “liberal” rushing to reclaim that ideology from the capitalists and their sycophants.
To that I’d say that a “winner take all election system” would be utterly impossible in a society that could be called democratic with a straight face - but I suppose it would stand in stark contrast to the current “winner already has it all election system” that is (disingenuously) labelled “democracy” in our current world order.
You are talking about a feature of the way power flows through economic, political and social hierarchies - not an inherent feature of communist ideology (of course, you could say the same about liberalism) It should also be noted that there are plenty of socialists and communists around who are trying to reclaim those concepts from the abuse and warping they have suffered under (so-called) “socialist” states - who, in my opinion, were “socialist” in the same way that “Social Darwinism” was Darwinist.
It doesn’t seem to me that liberalism wants to check capitalism at all - merely protect capitalism from itself when it’s parasitism threatens instability.
So you are saying that the whole “the law protects some without binding them while it binds others without protecting them” thing isn’t a feature of (so-called) “conservatism” but actually just bog-standard liberalism.
I agree.
I don’t see any kind of compatibility between socialism and liberalism. The prospects of having the working class control the means of production would have even Mill and Locke running to the fascists for protection… but since you seem to be posting in good faith I’m willing to discuss it.
Socialism and liberalism do actually have overlaps and not all bits of the ideologies are at odds. The “working class owning the means to production” is a catch all phrase but whenever we are talking Marx we have to be cognizant of what point in history he is writing from. Nationalized services were in their absolute infancy during his lifetime. National health care, water, sanitation and fire service for instance were all things that started existing after he stopped publishing in part because of other Socialist movements he disagreed with that was making stuff happen elsewhere. Those services shift the burden of cost away from labour effectively “owning the means of production” on a piecemeal basis. American socialist movements saw a lot of success in the 1930’s creating environmental protections, banking regulations and tax structures that created room for things like, National Public Broadcasting, Library system and so on. The slow disassembly of these systems and the demonizing of socialist movements using communism as a bogeyman without a public understanding that socialism is a wider band of political thought some of which had distinctly American roots went hand in hand with the cold war xenophobia. The dismantling of peaceful socialism is recent but propagandistic. It came about because of poisoning the well and making the discussion taboo driven by a unified Christian base turning against one of the main core tenants of classical liberalism. Freedom of political thought and divorcing religion from the state.
When a lot of people treat socialism as strictly a Marx led school of thought a lot of the discussion frames out the history of Socialist movements that aim not to cause a complete collapse of the system but to peacefully through beaurcratic and changes to system leaving bits that are working to create transparency, limitations on power and enhancement of labour power. These existed alongside Marx in his time period. The criticism of Owenites being hippies who retreated to the countryside to put their heads in the sand isn’t particularly fair. They were trial running different social models. Experimenting on smaller scales and the tail end of Owen’s era became about how to change the systems from the inside. We don’t hear much about them because a lot of their models quietly were adopted and many of those features of the landscape are taken for granted as normal today.
The benefits of classical liberalism are mainly in it’s concepts of minority protections. Communism as practiced by the countries who have at least claimed to be Communist does ultimately very poorly in the protection of minorities. A lot of the talk becomes of personal sacrifice to the state (or the stateless anarchist spirit) which tends to punish any level of apostasy. It means a freedom of expression is often relegated to the bin of sacrifice. Because Marx was notoriously racist, looked at women in terms of means to produce citizens and relegated them to the sort of trad wifery we see on the Christian right. It is a frequent blind spot in his writing which a lot of the scholarship tends to attempt to amend using some of the openings made for equality forward movements that were normalized by the equality and freedoms that were fought for under the framework of liberal ideology.
My personal issue with Communism is it is overly idealistic. It is very good at pointing out the issues with power inequity and the current models of ownership but it overlooks that human cupidity is always present. A fair number of people, to their detriment at times, desire heirachy. Once the playing feild is leveled power naturally agrigates towards groups that create new hierarchies because lateral power structures are weak against vertical ones. To have Communism actually work you need everyone’s unreserved sign on with nobody secretly just playing along.
You also have the global trade problem. A currency free state is great on paper but unless you get the rest of the world to play ball under the same system you effectively trap your citizens inside the borders of your defacto new state unable to move freely outside because of a lack of liquidity in translatable funds which makes the population who agreed to adopt that policy vulnerable to a potentially abusive state.
Liberal democratic structures are very successful (mind you not good just efficient and difficult to topple) because of a balance of deferred responsibility, redundancy, structures of checks and balances and the ideals of personal freedoms and protections baked into their foundation. Getting even a corrupt one to fall into the conditions nessisary for communism to take hold is a job and a half. Getting all of them to fall at once is improbable meaning the first one to go faces an uphill struggle as other liberal democracies close ranks.
A lot of the issues we face today are issues with outdated political infrastructure but also with the generational grooming of the masses towards toxic citizenship. The chronic anxiety created by a false perception of government frivolity of funds, a desire to preserve their place and personal wealth and the simplistic narrowing of understanding of the systems as they are that lock them firmly outside the mechanisms. Wanting to just ditch it all is alluring but ultimately dangerous as it is very easy to defer to a authoritarian regime.
Not to say the tenants of liberal socialism is a cakewalk either. All of the individual issues with the system are permeable the downside is that you have to get very passionate about individual beaurcratic systems… Which is quite an ask. America particularly is a sticky problem because it’s not just a liberal democracy it’s an old liberal democracy made by very paranoid founders. Your best hope might be essentially taking advantage of the Republican inter party fissures as the party devolves into less and less coherent states while putting more pressure on Democrats to save their own skins by bringing about electoral reform. Only once you fix the foundations of the uptake system can you start restabilizing the house. Democrats at least are avid followers of the internal rules. They might have a more reliable fear of pitchforks.
Sorry for the late reply… things have been rather busy here.
I wouldn’t say that. If society cannot control the means of production democratically, this…
…becomes a foregone conclusion. It’s not a catch-all phrase - merely the absolute minimum necessary to render the owner-class powerless to execute the very thing you describe in your first paragraph. If they are allowed the power to do so, they will do so - it matters not what legalese a state produces to pretend that it is, or has ever been, on the side of the working class.
I find that hard to believe. Even inside the imperial core (where liberalism is essentially de facto state religions) minorites had to wage long and arduous campaigns for even the most meagre inclusion. And then we aren’t even talking about the billions of people on the imperial peripheries (or - as I like to call them - global extraction zones) which liberal elites has always treated, at best, as expendable externalities. In fact, liberalsm’s historical tolerance for the violent subjugation and exploitation of the “other” will fill several libraries - it’s acceptance of said “other” won’t even fill one book.
I do agree that there is one type of minority that liberalism has always sought to protect - the minority that already owns all the wealth and power.
Whenever accusations of “idealism” is hurled at the left, I can’t help but think of the way we treated environmentalists back in the 80s - they were painted with the “idealism” brush so hard that the media literally portrayed them as intellectually dysfunctional caricatures (I remember because I was there) Turns out they weren’t actually being all that idealistic, were they? A lot less idealistic than the people who taught us that everything would be okay as long as “red arrow goes up,” in any case.
It’s amazing how quickly yesterday’s (supposed) “too idealistic” can become tomorrow’s “only sane option left.”
Certainly… but I fail to see how liberalism fixes this. In fact, liberalism’s fetishization of law has proven perfectly useful to the needs of the wealthy and powerful - as Anatole France said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor.”
Certainly - the formation of hierarchies to concentrate power is something that will always have to be actively managed by any society that wishes to call itself egalitarian. But there is no rule that states that the formation and dismantling of such hierarchies cannot be done efficiently through democratic means. I’d say that the lengths liberalism will go to to prevent the democratic dismantling of hierarchies - including, but not limited to, handing power to the fascist element - is proof enough of liberalism’s fundamentally anti-democratic character.
I’d say that the poverty liberalism cannot exist without traps plenty of people inside borders anyway. I don’t see no taxpayer-funded fascist goon squads on horseback waiting to whip Bill Gates when he crosses the southern US border, but that sure does seem to be the lot of those people liberalism treats as disposable externalities.
The debate on currency and even markets is still an ongoing one on the left - it is far from settled. Besides… you’re not talking to a communist - you’re talking to a socialist.
There is a very big difference between “deferred responsibility” and deferred institutionalized power - the former implies consequences for the failure to meet those responsibilities (something absent from practiced liberalism essentially since the Enlightenment) while the latter absolutely does not.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
These are all things that have proven easy to subvert - and that is even assuming that they were doing what they purported to be doing in the first place.
Well… not really. The problem is that the liberal order essentially does this all by itself. The post-WW1 period is a text-book case. It’s not so much a question of “if” but more a question of “when.”
They are still perfectly incompatible… liberalism has been forced to appropriate socialist-sounding ideas - though nothing core to socialist thought itself - and shoe-horn them (no matter how poor the fit) into the status quo in order to prevent socialist ideas from spreading. At the end of the day, it is merely a concession designed to protect the liberal order.
Liberals have always been reliably afraid of the pitchforks. If that was all there was to it, liberalism wouldn’t have lasted very long.
It’s their very fear that makes fascism such a necessity to the liberal nation state.
As a personal request could you not chop up and reply to my posts peicemeal like this? I find it a little lazy and also just unpleasant to interface with. You seem pretty capable of putting together your own treatise and reply rather than just counterpunching and I really would appreciate the effort. It goes a long way to making these conversations enjoyable for me.
The fact that liberalism has incorperated socialist ideals into it, even in incomplete concessions to save itself I think is just a melding of the push and pull of the two systems interplaying. The two systems are not direct opposites, they are uneasy roomates. A lot of the way people interface with them looks at them as enemies but they are just philosophies. You can admire and engage with incomplete philosophies…but that’s not what’s happening. People are reacting to the name of the philosophy like it’s poison forgetting that it like everything is a work in progress. That in practice it is failing to live up to it’s on paper ideals doesn’t make it any different than any other pure philosophy. Every single system of governance that has ever existed has been corrupted at some point. Nothing gold can stay because ingratitude is generational. Anything we fight to make better unless it is maintained with utmost cultural zeal by those who come after us will collapse due to the siren song of personal individual gains. It doesn’t matter what replaces this, in any society those who have the moat participation get their say and a populace’s contentment is a weak flank. What we are experiencing now is basically just a reiteration of what has happened before again and again throughout time and political structure.
I believe in dismantling the structures of colonialism pushed by nominally liberal governments in favour of more forms of publicly held wealth and support…but at the same time I am wary of those who want to make inhuman demons of those beaurcratic institutions because they were founded by people who had blindspots. They all had blindspots. The founders of these philosophic schools were mostly a bunch of white guys in the 18th and 19th century. They lived in a completely different world than us and were fucked up by being a segregated society that inferred personhood much less readily then the average person of today on virtually all fronts. Progressivism isn’t liberal nor is it strictly socialist. The politics of identity and acceptance of the other is a compounding factor independent of those philosophies that those ideologies can choose to incorporate or just as easily become insular and regressive. Socialist groups used to scorn poc and queer people just as much as liberal in groups. There is no neutral governance. A state has power and no matter how soft they attempt to be to citizens someone will be bound by it. Where many people tap out is basically not wanting to be bound by something or wanting to have a personal say in agreeing with the allocation of funds or resources .
By breaking into teams you are rooting for and against and letting anger at the current state of affairs causes people to pull away to create unreasonable expectations of any government body. My main axe to grind is that a lot of these things people take issue with aren’t core to a specific tphilosophy… Like your example of criminalizing people sleeping under bridges. More often than not that’s some nimby bylaw that you need to fight against local citizen interests at a municipal level. That’s not some grand aspirations of a federal system, that’s people being fucking short sighted dicks and showing up to their local council meetings because they want to create their own personal mini utopias. It’s a personal ethics problem. You could place a Socialist government in charge but you are probably still going to be swimming in NIMBY pricks. We have documented fines from the medieval ages of people being NIMBY pricks to each other and a lot of those councils pre enclosure were largely self governing and long predate liberal ideology.
Treating people of a specific political label as though they have defective moral compasses simply for utilizing that term isn’t going to really help matters I don’t think. As much as people want to establish in and out groups it’s pretty unnessisary. You can basically just run individual interest groups. Like a “Pro decriminalizing human movement” group or a “Tax the everliving hell out of multi millionaires” group and have much healthier conversations than trying to construct “the left” “a Socialist” “a liberal”…because you get ridiculous infighting that serves no one. People are much more amenable to having across line discussions when it’s not structured as a team sport.
There’s also a psychological phenomenon of scapegoating at play on this platform by people who claim variable aspects of “the left” “Socialism” “Marxism” and “Communism” . By transferring all of one’s sins to the liberal goat and claiming that they are not existent in your own ideological constructed tribe is very comforting to believe but not always particularly true. You could participate in this ritual with a bunch of different groups using the same goat and some of them are just angry. They want absolution. To not be associated with the sins they’ve assigned the goat while not really having a good idea of what to reach for. I think it’s a trap that will only lead to incoherent screaming. The way we conduct business as a political community is inherently flawed because our structure of engagement is just… Egotism.
Have you noticed all the liberal absurdity floating around here? Problematizing liberalism and exposing it’s intimate relationship with capitalism and fascism is a pretty damn difficult job (not to mention long overdue)… and it’s no one on the left’s responsibility to make it pleasant for you on top of all that.
Having your worldview collapse from underneath you is most definitely not a pleasant thing… it’s more akin to the withdrawal symptoms one suffers after going cold turkey. I don’t blame people for avoiding it like the plague… but there is no avoiding it unless we wish to continue living in the fantasy world liberalism has tried (and, for far too long, succeeded) to substitute for reality.
And no… I’m not talking about the fake and contrived “liberal-vs-conservative” dichotomy we all see advertised on CNN and Fox, either.
What did you think I’m on here to do? Write theses for your enjoyment?
I’m not a philosopher - I don’t even like philosophy. I didn’t learn my politics in the ivory towers of academia. My background is in propaganda - and not the type of propaganda you study in sterile lecture halls and classrooms, either.
That’s what I do on here - I disrupt propaganda that requires disrupting… and that includes yours.
So if it sounds to you like I’m “counterpunching” your narratives that’s because I am.
The only reason I’m giving you the time of day is because your arguments are rationally sound - which I find (reasonably) indicative of an honest personality - but the assumptions you base them on are terrifically flawed and must therefore be rejected together with the conclusions you reach.
I can just pull a random thing you say and demonstrate this - here’s one.
Here is an assumption that can be dismissed with next-to-zero debate - if the problems these institutions pose were merely caused by “blindspots,” why would the status quo react so violently to any attempts to fix said “blindspots” from the bottom up (since, mysteriosuly, these “blindspots” only seem to affect the lives of those who are actually subjected to the actions of all these institutions)? In your framing of the issue it makes no rational sense… unfortunately, it makes perfect rational sense once you admit that the violence doesn’t protect “blindspots” - it protects interests. These institutions don’t have “blindspots” - they serve interests. When they enshrined violent (white) militias into law with the 2nd amendment it was no “blindspot” - it was to protect interests. When they enshrined (black) slavery into law with the 13th amendment, it was no “blindspot” - it was to serve interests. Interests, mind you, which has been very well served right up to the present day - the proof is in the pudding, as they say - and pretending any off this has anything to do with “blindspots” is no less ahistorical than any falsehood peddled by the alt-right.
It seems to me that you are unused to having the assumptions you base your arguments on challenged, and wants to “discuss” things only after the sacrosanctity of the status quo has been established as inviolable - and this I reject out of hand.
If you wish to continue with this discourse, you’re going to have to accept that.
Oof. I am sorry but facing the disgust you bear me doesn’t translate into a way I want to spend my time. At majority level I DO do this for enjoyment because I like to write… and maybe egotistically consider myself a philosopher albiet not one anyone is going to platform. As I saw it what both of us are doing on this forum is discourse. I am not performing for an audience regarding propaganda. From experience nobody tends to read long posts except the person I address them to. It’s part of why I keep them long. I am having a discussion with you.
I didn’t learn in the alabaster halls of acedemia. I couldn’t afford to chase a European history and philosophy degree so I just read a lot of source material. A lot of what I see happening reminds me of other points in history. When dealing with 1000 year spans no example is universal.
My take on philosophy is not American centric specifically. I am Canadian. I look at multiple democracies that have common philosophical ancestries to draw my conclusions some of which have aspects I admire and other aspects have earned nothing but my sharpest critique. America… Has very specific issues. Most of them are in places the discourse doesn’t really touch because Americans are blind to those things not being the norm.
On a personal note lot of the practical stuff I believe comes from more modern philosophers, Sarah Ahmed, Bhaskar Sunkara, Margot Susca, Ferric C. Fang etc etc etc. But adoption of a lot of the designs of government I am interested are stuck at university testing level. I know convincing people to get behind democratic lottery systems is not going to be an in my lifetime thing. There’s too many assumptions and things people hold onto regarding elections to give such radical ideas a shot. If we get lucky a Municipality level trial might be possible but there are far too many norms people cling to that require a lot of intellectual sparring. We don’t have the coffee parlors of the past and as I see it this platform is the next best thing. I use it as a training ground for learning dialectics so when I interface with politics face to face I am practiced.
I have had my share of union politics and trying to shift power structures to know that change is heartbreakingly gradual and most people who are full of fire but don’t understand the game get rebuffed by those systems… and they just become bitter. But those systems for better or worse are what is in power. Your choices in changing them are to play the game well ,get people onside through eloquence and building concensus and applying political pressure to the system to change - or to violently overthrow them… And personally I do not think violent overthrows ever work. But people don’t understand how important concensus is. Compromise and solidarity with stuff you don’t fully agree with is the engine that makes that run and we as a society were trained out of that. We are all individually acting like toddlers who think yelling and screaming will work. If everyone runs on absolute ultimatums demanding utter purity of all of their aims then nothing is achieved. Movements are atomized and inertia will breed anger until basically the pressure blows and in the end the anarchist uprising get crushed by the standing powers or the most powerful opportunist takes the wheel.
Honestly the enmity you show me here is not encouraging. If you think I am evil there’s not really a point in continuing. You have decided that I am not worth your consideration and you have your hackles up. I am not going to change your mind if you think I am scum so I will choose to part ways instead. So thank you for talking to me stranger. I appreciate your time.
You don’t say.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.