Liberalism is not going to survive in its current form nor with mass immigration and hollowing out of domestic infrastructures via neoliberal austerity economics. These mouthpieces for Davos and Wall Street are like rats on a sinking ship.
The neoliberal capitalist shrieks as you oppose the destruction of your nation and people as he and his rootless cosmopolitan friends destroy your society for fun and profit.
lmao you live in the most prosperous, productive, and abundant time in human history. Your ancestors would assume you live in a heavenly paradise of unlimited comfort and wealth. Yet you cry like a mewling quim because you’ve been so emotionally manipulated by people who desire to control you.
I live in a rapidly deteriorating society with collapsing infrastructure and millions becoming homeless or going without basic medical care. I live in a society where the foundational demographic group will soon be a minority. You either work in tech or reside in some other upper-middle class bubble. Smartphones and online porn aren’t ’progress,’ little dude.
Which ancestor would you prefer to switch places with? A Roman slave in a salt mine? A Celtic conscript dying for the king? You’re female progenitor in 1450 dying from a routine infection? You pine for a place that doesn’t exist while blaming others for your failures.
Which nation do you find more desirable than the us? Russia? China? Turkey?
Medieval peasants had more personal freedom than the austerity poverty low wage precariat. GDP isn’t equivalent to quality of life. Russia and Turkey have a higher quality of life in some respects than the U.S. China has a better domestic infrastructure than the U.S.
Millions of Americans live a few paychecks away from homelessness and malnutrition. Moral and cultural standards are at their nadir as we can readily see all around us. Mass immigration has been an abject disaster for many segments of American society. You live in a bubble not the reality for tens of millions of Americans. Liberalism hollows out societies like termites do the structure of a home. We’re moving into the age of post-liberalism and Illiberalism as western elites become more isolated from and hostile to the people they are entrusted to govern. It’s over for you. There’s no going back to the Clinton era.
Liberalism is nothing but narrative manipulation at this point. In the main it goes something like this:
White people are inherently evil, brown people are inherently good, America and the West are colonial white supremacist and need to be erased and replaced by brown people.
My advice to you, if you don't actually inhabit the white nationalist camp, is stop watching Fox News and Newsmax. They are turning good people into agitated meat balls.
Fox exists to make boomers indignant but to continue to not question the economy and Israel. Left media exists to make the left mentally ill to support destroying the West and America.
We don't support Israel. And we are not the "left" -- unless you mean anything not MAGA/white nationalist. Grievances and gripes are not a good way to understand anyone or the world.
I think our liberal elites better come up with a grand narrative or mythos fast. A political formula able to rally the center and fend of the fringes. Otherwise our authoritarian nihilistic opponents will come up with it. Through the suffering of millions again.
After WW 2 the narrative or mythos was simple: Never Again Nazism. Never again Collectivism. A ragtag group of rebels/individuals fighting the evil homogenous empire. Of course this narrative doesn't make any sense now, when almost all institutions and elites are (neo-)liberal and when the taboo of Nazism has been muddied (I blame the Internet, especially anonymous chats and forums. Without gatekeeping and upheld norms this was a selffulling disaster). It will make sense again, when Trump and the Republicans or the AfD in Germany or RN in France get their way. However I'd much rather go without the human sacrifice.
The narrative should be simple. Something like the civic religion of "liberal nationalism" of Roosevelts USA. Something with connections to the Story of Christ (this is the most powerful story we have in the western world) without excluding Islam. I'm sure you guys can come up with something.
Never again Nazism worked until the G.I. generation died out and World War II faded out of living memory. The rise of far-right demagogues followed.
In the United States this was accompanied by liberal nationalism falling out of fashion in the 2010s. Thankfully, liberal nationalism seems to be coming back from the dead.
In general, we are in a Fourth Turning, with all that entails. Last time we were in a Fourth Turning we had World War II.
You are evil homogeneous empire, just a gay one. Whole second part of XXth century is gatekeeping right wingers and pushing Overton window to the left by baiting conservatives to be against new debauchery that government tried to normalized. But when status quo is obviously degenerate it's hard for conservatives to protect it, so they're dying breed. Sooner or later we have to go past "never again nazism" because obsession with it made society and institutions dysfunctional
Liberalism does have an idea of The Good that it’s aimed at, it’s just a very bloodless one (I say that as a liberal). But it’s wrong to say liberalism has no telos or doesn’t imply a set of values, it absolutely does. It’s stronger as a revolutionary ideology than a regime one because it’s telos is personal freedom, and as a goal that works best as a reaction to authoritarianism. It’s no accident that the high points of liberalism, the age of revolutions and the post WW2 era, were both periods where it was a reaction to autocracy.
Often solutions to the greatest problems are to be found right there, in front of everyone, and yet, people are simply not looking because they have pre-conceived notions of what an answer should consist of. Such is the case with finding "meaning."
Most people are conditioned to think that meaning must come from something outside themselves -- something, someone or some cause "larger than themselves" -- or from another dimension. Most associate meaning and spirituality with the God, faith and the supernatural.
What if these people are looking in the wrong place? Perhaps they are unwilling to challenge their fundamental beliefs about the nature of meaning and where it comes from. If you're up for task, I recommend reading and studying Ayn Rand's philosophy. (See what I mean? I bet I lost a bunch of you already because of preconceived notions about her views, nature of meaning and the nature of philosophy.)
The challenge is to really study and engage with her ideas.
Been there. Done that. She is a voice that should not be ignored because her challenges to conventional morality are quite valid, but at the end of the day her philosophy remains an elitist fiction. Religious propaganda is fed into children from the day they are born. What kind of curriculum should be used to instill Ayn Rand's philosophy to K-12 schools. Most of us encountered her philosophy as adolescents through her novels. How can her philosophy be transmitted to the broader culture (the non-elites) without the disturbing side effects and distortions we see from religious "education"?
I totally agree that Rand's provocative thinking is worth exploring on the path of intellectual development. But she definitely hasn't got the answers for the problems outlined in this article.
First and foremost, she holds that morality is a rational, scientific field. That there are real answers to questions of good and evil -- answers that can be shown to be true using reason and logic -- including where values and meaning come from. Morality, she shows, is not an issue of faith or subjective whim.
This alone is invaluable, regardless of whether you agree with her particular morality. No progress can be made as long as people think that morality, spirituality, meaning, etc. belongs to other-worldly, faith-based mysticism. As long as people think that America, liberty and meaning are rooted in religion, we will not have liberty, nor meaning.
My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. He shares many of the same limitations of your favorite philosopher but she clearly understood that a way to transmit her ideas to a broader audience was through fiction, dramas and film. However few in that broader audience understood what she was really saying. They came for the story but left the philosophy behind.
"The only legitimate function of the state is the protection of individual rights (life, liberty, property) against physical force."
Without the US Government and a lot of taxpayer money, no Internet, no Computer, no Smartphone, no Satellite, no Rockets, no AI, no Intel, no Meta, no Alphabet, no Apple, no Tesla.
National narratives have long provided one important source of publicly-sponsored meaning in modernity. For about three decades there, informed by cosmopolitan globalizing aspirations on the one hand, and by critical-left condemnations of all forms of state power on the other, progressives very foolishly jettisoned these. A colossal mistake, and one contributor to the current situation that has left patriotism as the preserve of right-wing maniacs. I think most liberals now understand what a mistake that was, so hopefully we can rebuild with that in mind.
Liberalism suffers from the imperfect conditions which birthed liberalism back in the 16-17th centuries, that is the intellectual impoverishment of Christianity.
As anyone who opens themselves to Eastern and non-western paradigms of thought learns, life is a lot more than the material reality. But it is precisely the rejection of the proofs of God as created by Christianity that birthed the conditions for the scientific revolution of the 16/17th centuries, and the lack of meaning of/with life became more apparent the further along we "developed".
It's a complicated and complex subject. But this lack of meaning has completely devastated our societies, communities and families. I know of a lot of individuals who are rejecting the modern construct, but face the problem of its incessant reach inhibiting checking out completely.
"But it is precisely the rejection of the proofs of God as created by Christianity that birthed the conditions for the scientific revolution of the 16/17th centuries"
"Avent’s non-answer is, to say the least, anticlimactic"
How could he make prescriptions which are not too personal/local for such a scope?
Values are not rational. Hume said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Liberalism is an offshoot of rationalism, and has inherited that rationalist anxiety. There is no escaping it without reining in rationalism. To restore value, reason should only be a tool and not a worldview; ignoring that will only increase the anxiety.
Ayn Rand once wrote “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” But I am more inclined to believe that the world is perishing from an orgy of self. There was a time when it was difficult to take a picture of oneself. Today we are drowning in a sea of "selfies."
Stoics! We need more Stoics in the world.
The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving that with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as well as living in accordance with nature.
We need to stop telling stories and start just living with reality as it is. Life on Life's terms. Refusing to be influenced by passions and inadequate ideas (as Spinoza would call them) and understanding what really matters and pursuing that.
As Dr. Frank Crane said back in 1914:
"Determine this year to be master of self; that you will control your thoughts, regulate your passions, and guide your own deeds; that you will not let events lead you by the nose.
Resolve to be happy. Remember Lincoln’s saying that 'folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.'" (Which Lincoln probably never said.)
If you actually read Aristotle and Plato, not just a few meme paragraphs, it's hard to take Ayn Rand and objectivism seriously for more than a few seconds. She reads like a high schooler who discovered Nietzchea and thinks "God is dead" is meant as a chide again believers. Her fictionalized political philosophy involves the discovery of a literal free energy machine and a child free commune as a premise. She makes some really good observations, when she repeats what Aristotle said.
I take Rand seriously because she is influential--- not because I think Objectivist Philosophy really has much to offer other than presenting a series of intellectual challenges that need to be answered.
It isn't unusual to find fictional works that emerge from philosophy but in the case of Ayn Rand we have a philosophy born out of fiction.
And, yes, she is just an extreme proponent of derivative ideas. I consider most of her novels to be teen fiction because her obvious messaging and edgy sexuality appeals most to the adolescent mind.
Nora Ephron summed up her rereading of "The Fountainhead" this way: '...it is better read when one is young enough to miss the point. Otherwise, one cannot help thinking it is a very silly book."
The only adaptation of her books to film over which she had complete control was "The Fountainhead." She insisted by contract that not one word of her script be changed, cut or edited. It is painful to watch talented actors like Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal and Raymond Massey struggle to make their characters anything more than puppets mouthing platitudes. The most recent adaptations of "Atlas Shrugged" were a mess of mediocrity.
Good points and I agree, her work, if not providing answers, raises the spector of perennial questions our world has refused to grapple with.
If I were to quibble, I think it's extraordinarily common for philosophy to emerge from and be embedded in fiction. I am generally unsure why people attribute that to her as a unique or rare thing.
Plato to Nietzchea used fictional stories to bring philosophy to light. Faust is a great example of philosophy in fiction. Dante...
Perhaps she's unique in writing fiction for contemporary American teens to be able to access with the sex appeal and all. And that's not nothing. It's a style for an audience that needs reaching.
Liberalism is not going to survive in its current form nor with mass immigration and hollowing out of domestic infrastructures via neoliberal austerity economics. These mouthpieces for Davos and Wall Street are like rats on a sinking ship.
The populist shrieks as he sticks his hand in your pocket
The neoliberal capitalist shrieks as you oppose the destruction of your nation and people as he and his rootless cosmopolitan friends destroy your society for fun and profit.
lmao you live in the most prosperous, productive, and abundant time in human history. Your ancestors would assume you live in a heavenly paradise of unlimited comfort and wealth. Yet you cry like a mewling quim because you’ve been so emotionally manipulated by people who desire to control you.
I live in a rapidly deteriorating society with collapsing infrastructure and millions becoming homeless or going without basic medical care. I live in a society where the foundational demographic group will soon be a minority. You either work in tech or reside in some other upper-middle class bubble. Smartphones and online porn aren’t ’progress,’ little dude.
Which ancestor would you prefer to switch places with? A Roman slave in a salt mine? A Celtic conscript dying for the king? You’re female progenitor in 1450 dying from a routine infection? You pine for a place that doesn’t exist while blaming others for your failures.
Which nation do you find more desirable than the us? Russia? China? Turkey?
Medieval peasants had more personal freedom than the austerity poverty low wage precariat. GDP isn’t equivalent to quality of life. Russia and Turkey have a higher quality of life in some respects than the U.S. China has a better domestic infrastructure than the U.S.
Millions of Americans live a few paychecks away from homelessness and malnutrition. Moral and cultural standards are at their nadir as we can readily see all around us. Mass immigration has been an abject disaster for many segments of American society. You live in a bubble not the reality for tens of millions of Americans. Liberalism hollows out societies like termites do the structure of a home. We’re moving into the age of post-liberalism and Illiberalism as western elites become more isolated from and hostile to the people they are entrusted to govern. It’s over for you. There’s no going back to the Clinton era.
Where does he blame others for his failures?
Leave it to Jonathan Rauch to clearly sum up the crisis of liberalism in a few excellent paragraphs
Great article! Thanks!
Liberals tried, and failed at this already.
Liberalism is nothing but narrative manipulation at this point. In the main it goes something like this:
White people are inherently evil, brown people are inherently good, America and the West are colonial white supremacist and need to be erased and replaced by brown people.
My advice to you, if you don't actually inhabit the white nationalist camp, is stop watching Fox News and Newsmax. They are turning good people into agitated meat balls.
Fox exists to make boomers indignant but to continue to not question the economy and Israel. Left media exists to make the left mentally ill to support destroying the West and America.
We don't support Israel. And we are not the "left" -- unless you mean anything not MAGA/white nationalist. Grievances and gripes are not a good way to understand anyone or the world.
I think our liberal elites better come up with a grand narrative or mythos fast. A political formula able to rally the center and fend of the fringes. Otherwise our authoritarian nihilistic opponents will come up with it. Through the suffering of millions again.
After WW 2 the narrative or mythos was simple: Never Again Nazism. Never again Collectivism. A ragtag group of rebels/individuals fighting the evil homogenous empire. Of course this narrative doesn't make any sense now, when almost all institutions and elites are (neo-)liberal and when the taboo of Nazism has been muddied (I blame the Internet, especially anonymous chats and forums. Without gatekeeping and upheld norms this was a selffulling disaster). It will make sense again, when Trump and the Republicans or the AfD in Germany or RN in France get their way. However I'd much rather go without the human sacrifice.
The narrative should be simple. Something like the civic religion of "liberal nationalism" of Roosevelts USA. Something with connections to the Story of Christ (this is the most powerful story we have in the western world) without excluding Islam. I'm sure you guys can come up with something.
Never again Nazism worked until the G.I. generation died out and World War II faded out of living memory. The rise of far-right demagogues followed.
In the United States this was accompanied by liberal nationalism falling out of fashion in the 2010s. Thankfully, liberal nationalism seems to be coming back from the dead.
In general, we are in a Fourth Turning, with all that entails. Last time we were in a Fourth Turning we had World War II.
You are evil homogeneous empire, just a gay one. Whole second part of XXth century is gatekeeping right wingers and pushing Overton window to the left by baiting conservatives to be against new debauchery that government tried to normalized. But when status quo is obviously degenerate it's hard for conservatives to protect it, so they're dying breed. Sooner or later we have to go past "never again nazism" because obsession with it made society and institutions dysfunctional
Thank you for providing further proof that rightwingers want kakistocracy out of a nihilistic urge for vengeance and resentment.
Are you retarded? I haven't proved any of those claims. Is this some preprogrammed criticism?
Liberalism does have an idea of The Good that it’s aimed at, it’s just a very bloodless one (I say that as a liberal). But it’s wrong to say liberalism has no telos or doesn’t imply a set of values, it absolutely does. It’s stronger as a revolutionary ideology than a regime one because it’s telos is personal freedom, and as a goal that works best as a reaction to authoritarianism. It’s no accident that the high points of liberalism, the age of revolutions and the post WW2 era, were both periods where it was a reaction to autocracy.
Often solutions to the greatest problems are to be found right there, in front of everyone, and yet, people are simply not looking because they have pre-conceived notions of what an answer should consist of. Such is the case with finding "meaning."
Most people are conditioned to think that meaning must come from something outside themselves -- something, someone or some cause "larger than themselves" -- or from another dimension. Most associate meaning and spirituality with the God, faith and the supernatural.
What if these people are looking in the wrong place? Perhaps they are unwilling to challenge their fundamental beliefs about the nature of meaning and where it comes from. If you're up for task, I recommend reading and studying Ayn Rand's philosophy. (See what I mean? I bet I lost a bunch of you already because of preconceived notions about her views, nature of meaning and the nature of philosophy.)
The challenge is to really study and engage with her ideas.
Been there. Done that. She is a voice that should not be ignored because her challenges to conventional morality are quite valid, but at the end of the day her philosophy remains an elitist fiction. Religious propaganda is fed into children from the day they are born. What kind of curriculum should be used to instill Ayn Rand's philosophy to K-12 schools. Most of us encountered her philosophy as adolescents through her novels. How can her philosophy be transmitted to the broader culture (the non-elites) without the disturbing side effects and distortions we see from religious "education"?
I totally agree that Rand's provocative thinking is worth exploring on the path of intellectual development. But she definitely hasn't got the answers for the problems outlined in this article.
First and foremost, she holds that morality is a rational, scientific field. That there are real answers to questions of good and evil -- answers that can be shown to be true using reason and logic -- including where values and meaning come from. Morality, she shows, is not an issue of faith or subjective whim.
This alone is invaluable, regardless of whether you agree with her particular morality. No progress can be made as long as people think that morality, spirituality, meaning, etc. belongs to other-worldly, faith-based mysticism. As long as people think that America, liberty and meaning are rooted in religion, we will not have liberty, nor meaning.
How does she argues that?
My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. He shares many of the same limitations of your favorite philosopher but she clearly understood that a way to transmit her ideas to a broader audience was through fiction, dramas and film. However few in that broader audience understood what she was really saying. They came for the story but left the philosophy behind.
"The only legitimate function of the state is the protection of individual rights (life, liberty, property) against physical force."
Without the US Government and a lot of taxpayer money, no Internet, no Computer, no Smartphone, no Satellite, no Rockets, no AI, no Intel, no Meta, no Alphabet, no Apple, no Tesla.
[Sarcasm Alert]
And that would be a bad thing?
[End Sarcasm Alert]
"to churches that embrace culture wars and partisan politics"
Why wouldn't they?
National narratives have long provided one important source of publicly-sponsored meaning in modernity. For about three decades there, informed by cosmopolitan globalizing aspirations on the one hand, and by critical-left condemnations of all forms of state power on the other, progressives very foolishly jettisoned these. A colossal mistake, and one contributor to the current situation that has left patriotism as the preserve of right-wing maniacs. I think most liberals now understand what a mistake that was, so hopefully we can rebuild with that in mind.
Jonathan, you might want to fix your subheading. Other than that, this was a great read!
Liberalism suffers from the imperfect conditions which birthed liberalism back in the 16-17th centuries, that is the intellectual impoverishment of Christianity.
As anyone who opens themselves to Eastern and non-western paradigms of thought learns, life is a lot more than the material reality. But it is precisely the rejection of the proofs of God as created by Christianity that birthed the conditions for the scientific revolution of the 16/17th centuries, and the lack of meaning of/with life became more apparent the further along we "developed".
It's a complicated and complex subject. But this lack of meaning has completely devastated our societies, communities and families. I know of a lot of individuals who are rejecting the modern construct, but face the problem of its incessant reach inhibiting checking out completely.
"But it is precisely the rejection of the proofs of God as created by Christianity that birthed the conditions for the scientific revolution of the 16/17th centuries"
It's like reading a reddit post from 2014
I signed up to Facebook in 2007. Does that mean I'm not part of the cool kids?
It sounds like a good book. Also sounds like it is running into Christ’s response to Satan “Man does not live on Bread alone”
Liberalism has offered a lot of bread. It does not offer much else. In fact, it makes a lot of bread by destroying the rest.
"Avent’s non-answer is, to say the least, anticlimactic"
How could he make prescriptions which are not too personal/local for such a scope?
Values are not rational. Hume said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Liberalism is an offshoot of rationalism, and has inherited that rationalist anxiety. There is no escaping it without reining in rationalism. To restore value, reason should only be a tool and not a worldview; ignoring that will only increase the anxiety.
Ayn Rand once wrote “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” But I am more inclined to believe that the world is perishing from an orgy of self. There was a time when it was difficult to take a picture of oneself. Today we are drowning in a sea of "selfies."
Stoics! We need more Stoics in the world.
The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving that with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as well as living in accordance with nature.
We need to stop telling stories and start just living with reality as it is. Life on Life's terms. Refusing to be influenced by passions and inadequate ideas (as Spinoza would call them) and understanding what really matters and pursuing that.
As Dr. Frank Crane said back in 1914:
"Determine this year to be master of self; that you will control your thoughts, regulate your passions, and guide your own deeds; that you will not let events lead you by the nose.
Resolve to be happy. Remember Lincoln’s saying that 'folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.'" (Which Lincoln probably never said.)
If you actually read Aristotle and Plato, not just a few meme paragraphs, it's hard to take Ayn Rand and objectivism seriously for more than a few seconds. She reads like a high schooler who discovered Nietzchea and thinks "God is dead" is meant as a chide again believers. Her fictionalized political philosophy involves the discovery of a literal free energy machine and a child free commune as a premise. She makes some really good observations, when she repeats what Aristotle said.
I take Rand seriously because she is influential--- not because I think Objectivist Philosophy really has much to offer other than presenting a series of intellectual challenges that need to be answered.
It isn't unusual to find fictional works that emerge from philosophy but in the case of Ayn Rand we have a philosophy born out of fiction.
And, yes, she is just an extreme proponent of derivative ideas. I consider most of her novels to be teen fiction because her obvious messaging and edgy sexuality appeals most to the adolescent mind.
Nora Ephron summed up her rereading of "The Fountainhead" this way: '...it is better read when one is young enough to miss the point. Otherwise, one cannot help thinking it is a very silly book."
The only adaptation of her books to film over which she had complete control was "The Fountainhead." She insisted by contract that not one word of her script be changed, cut or edited. It is painful to watch talented actors like Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal and Raymond Massey struggle to make their characters anything more than puppets mouthing platitudes. The most recent adaptations of "Atlas Shrugged" were a mess of mediocrity.
Good points and I agree, her work, if not providing answers, raises the spector of perennial questions our world has refused to grapple with.
If I were to quibble, I think it's extraordinarily common for philosophy to emerge from and be embedded in fiction. I am generally unsure why people attribute that to her as a unique or rare thing.
Plato to Nietzchea used fictional stories to bring philosophy to light. Faust is a great example of philosophy in fiction. Dante...
Perhaps she's unique in writing fiction for contemporary American teens to be able to access with the sex appeal and all. And that's not nothing. It's a style for an audience that needs reaching.