"Liberalism lowers the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table: you can believe what you want, but you must do so in private life and not seek to impose your views on your fellow citizens."
The problem is that, without final ends, we are left with emotivism when it comes to different moral viewpoints.
That leaves social science the task of justifying moral viewpoints, as “empirical.” For example, the belief that all humans are created in the image of God and therefore deserve equal treatment is no longer available, so instead we rely on social science to to justify belief in human equality. They obliged by claiming that humans are all the same “under the skin” and therefore deserve equal treatment (race is a social construct).
This causes perverse incentives to generate social science research that justifies certain moral beliefs, and also creates a risk that these moral beliefs can be nullified if/when the social science is proven wrong.
Fukuyama is persuasive in giving three justifications, but are those also the ingredients and are all three necessary for liberalism's survival? If one atrophies, say economic growth, is liberalism doomed, because prosperity is paramount and the other two justifications have little relevance without, or are dependent upon, that prosperity? Or what if prosperity can be achieved without the others, as in modern China, where there is relative prosperity and a degree of respect for property rights, but little allowance for diverse opinions or moral respect for the dignity of the individual? The points addressed by Fukuyama's first and second justifications are there addressed by dissuasion (Brave New World) and repression (1984) ("You don't need to assert your individual political and social voice because our common prosperity provides you with all you can ever desire; and woe betide if you do, as we will make sure your voice will never be heard ever again, at all.")
We don't really know the answer because, over the medium term at least, all three justifications have largely been present since liberalism first emerged. My sense is that all three are key, but that even without the third, the other two justifications apply; it is just that the argument is much more difficult to make and the siren voices of other approaches are more tempting. Many will say - what's the point of peace and of all having a voice if we live in grinding poverty, when others have prosperity without those things? This is, reduced to their bare essentials, what the populist movements sweeping the West are really saying.
Eventually, though, even with peace and prosperity, if there is no pragmatic management of diverse views and no free choice, the pressure cooker will explode. It may take years, but it will happen. This is not the same argument as liberals made in justifying Chinese accession to the WTO. It is not saying that pluralism and respect for the individual are essential for prosperity. You can create, as the CCP has done, a sufficiently workable legal system that ensures private property rights are protected, with only some areas marked off as no-go zones, such that prosperity is achieved. The proportion of disputes encroaching on those no-go zones is small enough to mean the legal system generally works. But it will be the repression of individual and different voices that will ultimately tell.
Without reform, the system will blow. If CCP control of China continues, it will be because it does reform and moves closer to a liberal system, allowing diverse voices to be heard and allowing individuals more choice. How and when that move is made will determine how messy the process is. Here's hoping for something more gentle than explosive.
In Cold war 1947-1991 both sides produced and used propaganda, Western was based on 18th century context: church and aristocrats ruled and genuine classical liberalism fought against that — not against modern democratic governments! Eastern propaganda disappeared with fall of Soviet Union, but western propaganda is still with us; USA never cleaned up it’s dirty laundry after 1991: the big change from infowar to infopeace is missing, after every type of war, all parties change dramatically. If 1991-1995 we would have seen the dramatical US change to information peace from information war, lot of things would have been better: climate change would have been stopped for example, because big businesses wouldn’t have this power they have right now, they got their power because political foundations after 1991 were and are still dirty and are not based on sciences.
Greedy opportunistic lying liberals are do-nothing failures at basic governance. Experts at letting others try, fail, swooping in to pick up any pieces of value all while decrying others efforts. Jigs up. The world figured the grift out.
In this, I find myself in agreement with the argument. It is hard not to agree. I am a liberal too — not out of fashion, not out of club loyalty, and certainly not because the word carries any special glamour these days. Quite the opposite: in many places, “liberal” is now pronounced the way people once said “plague,” only with less precision and more saliva at the corner of the mouth.
The particular grotesque of our age is that the most enthusiastic looters of freedom usually arrive through freedom’s own back door. They exploit the tolerance of an open society, the slowness of the rule of law, the wide corridors of free speech — and once they are comfortably inside the house, they begin carrying out the furniture and announcing that liberalism itself is no longer necessary. Like a guest who eats the dinner, then sets fire to the house because it has too many windows.
I would not even call them “dark forces.” I would call them parasites of freedom. That is more precise. They attach themselves to the very order that permits their existence, then weaken it from within until freedom becomes a suspicious word, pluralism a form of disorder, doubt a sign of treason, and liberalism the public enemy. And much of society is perfectly willing to assist, because the system keeps repeating with priestly patience that liberalism is the horned devil himself. After a while, even people who could not define the word begin crossing themselves at the sound of it.
That is the saddest part, and also the funniest — if one still has the strength to laugh at the sight of people learning to hate freedom precisely because they once had enough of it to take for granted. Liberalism is not in trouble because it has been intellectually defeated. It is in trouble because many have been persuaded that everything inconvenient, unstable, unfamiliar, or morally uncomfortable must somehow be its fault. It is an old political trick: first exploit openness, then close the door in the name of order.
And in the end the room always smells the same: less freedom, more slogans, louder voices — and that familiar stale odour which history has, far too many times, tried to sell as salvation.
If liberal institutionalism tells you cooperation is possible, it just can’t tell you why it so often isn’t. Institutions don’t generate political will. They organize it when it already exists, which is why you need other frameworks to explain the gaps.
every state functions through eliciting plural policy perspective from plural groups, checks & balances, and succession process. the liberal position that these components are unique to europe, the west, representative democratic state forms, and some unique formal ideology of these constituents, either now or in history, is inaccurate and currently a rationale for western destabilization and aggression in defense of the bloc, and excuse for inaction and failure to address domestic challenges. liberal perspective 'whoever and whatever is legitimized by the representative outcome' is a dodge from actual policy actual remedy actual specific effort to meet challenges. the evolving economic base has real needs that the aging liberal superstructure doesnt address. a good government is not one with a specific form of state or alliance with some attribute of the west, but one that addresses the specific needs of a country to ascend its productivity, knowledge and security
global prosperity has rendered the western alliance an economic minority without foundation to continue global hegemony. the hegemony is disintegrating and being replaced with a multi polar relation. consequently the global liberal metro colony of like employed and like minded persons, and the ubiquitous global paradigm of liberalism and freedom are disintegrating, the colonists orphaned and able to reimagine their political position as patriotic unifiers instead of anti national culture dividers.
the woke victimology episode was an extreme indication of the graying of the liberal paradigm of neutrality toward ethics, that performed in the simpler industrial epoch but is not equipped for emerging automated society and the higher education, conceptual and autonomous ethical capacity that it will demand of citizens. the procreative capacity of families and classrooms is needed to raise children toward challenge and hence develop stable emotion and psychic structure able to learn and become the renaissance practitioner - parent - citizen that automation will require. Liberal neutrality toward ethics opposes this practice finding it deeply oppressive of the individuals absolute freedom. Censorship of social media and learning liberal neutrality paradigm such as Effective Altruism into machines is proceeding. Likely fording into automation / AI / Compute without severe unnecessary new hazard will require elevating ethic signal, from the reservoir of ethics in families, literary canon and senior multi millennial old ethic systems (indic, abrahamic, materialism, and ancestor veneration) that are not neutral but rather biased in favor of the human journey. Ethic systems evolve through practical interpretation by families faced with changing society, and through demographic selection, more effective ethic paradigms and practices raising more stable children, who in turn raise more stable children, etc and over generations ineffective ethic and practice is removed from national cultures.
The problem is not that this justifications are wrong, but that they are historically contingent—and increasingly detached from the conditions that once sustained them. This defense of liberalism remains analytically confined to its historical functions—peace, autonomy, and growth—without really examining the structural conditions that made these possible. Besides, what is presented as endogenous growth is, to a significant extent, the historical outcome of exogenous appropriation.
This topic reminds me of the situation in and after the Black Plague. Countries lost big swaths of their population, production fell, demands fell and inequalities increased and got entrenched.
The reasons for that was, according to some, that the interests of those with lands, capital and titles was protected, while the general population was not.
The Industrial Revolution and the new world(s) changed this. Mind you, this is from the European perspective, because conquests were of course traumatic for those conquered.
The Industrial Revolution forced through new dynamics were workers got bargaining power and redistribution ensued. It was not perfect as the world continued to struggle against egalitarian mindsets and this kept the growth down even if the growth were great even so.
Yes, economic liberalism played a role because it eases the flow and it forces new dynamics, but liberalism that isn’t regulated will do the opposite. So now that the global markets are so connected as they are, can the nearly monopolistic situations take us back somewhere we do not want to be, were the dynamics get entrenched in “the landed’s” favour and new dynamics won’t be available.
…something that brings me to the big tenets of “the free market”: Equal access to the market for goods and services.
…meaning that for liberalism to function must the market be protected, ie regulated, to facilitate economic liberalism and taxation must ensure that demands encourage new dynamics. Currently does governments seem dead set on winning the competition, rather than doing liberalism and market mechanics, so the tendency seems to encourage monopolistic tendencies.
There is no such thing as liberalism only liberalisms. While classical liberalism is the product of Enlightenment principles and class struggle, such as universal suffrage, the same cannot be said about neoliberalism which has been a disaster for Western democracies. This form of liberalism has massively corroded the trust in democratic participation and institutions, as its once raison d’tre of the “regulation of violence” has been replaced in many societies by the extractive behaviour of state entities and officials—not violent, just coercive. Neoliberalism has failed in the economic sphere by widening inequalities and decoupling the relationship between labour income, effort and reward—wealth today is accrued more by asset holdings and financialisation than by strivers in the commodity labour market. And social liberalism, while undoubtedly more progressive than the totalitarian alternatives, has invented new patterns of intolerance and discrimination (think of those discriminatory DEI initiatives). However, unlike in the nineteenth century, the modern Left does not know what to replace neoliberalism with. Just as liberalism is an incoherent and contradictory ideology, there are currently no new imaginaries of how a better society could emerge from a sense the West has become stuck in its own age of stagnation. When people struggle with meaning and citizens lose hope in liberal institutions, that is when things turn nasty, as we are seeing in the rise of the far right across Europe and economic nationalism in the United States. Liberalism is in trouble.
Liberalism is an ideal worth cherishing, protecting and, when required, defending. More than any form of societal form, it streers humans toward its good, decent, peaceful living tendencies, which benefits humanity as a whole. Governments and institutions have a huge role to play in creating and maintaining a respectful, equitable, prosperous and peaceful world.
This is a really clear articulation of why liberalism has been so resilient as a coordinating framework.
One thing I’ve been thinking about alongside this is whether the pressure liberalism is under now isn’t just political, but structural.
If no single ideology can fully account for the complexity of reality (especially under pluralism), then even well-justified systems like liberalism start to strain—not necessarily because they’re wrong, but because they’re being asked to do too much.
From that angle, the challenge becomes less about defending or replacing liberalism, and more about how we design systems that can hold disagreement without needing to resolve it fully.
In other words—coordination without forced convergence.
Curious how you’d think about that in relation to liberalism’s future durability.
He argues liberal democracy is the final form of political organisation. I’m saying, it’s not that liberalism “wins”, it’s that all ideologies are structurally insufficient under real pluralism.
"Liberalism lowers the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table: you can believe what you want, but you must do so in private life and not seek to impose your views on your fellow citizens."
The problem is that, without final ends, we are left with emotivism when it comes to different moral viewpoints.
That leaves social science the task of justifying moral viewpoints, as “empirical.” For example, the belief that all humans are created in the image of God and therefore deserve equal treatment is no longer available, so instead we rely on social science to to justify belief in human equality. They obliged by claiming that humans are all the same “under the skin” and therefore deserve equal treatment (race is a social construct).
This causes perverse incentives to generate social science research that justifies certain moral beliefs, and also creates a risk that these moral beliefs can be nullified if/when the social science is proven wrong.
Well liberalism is still a religion at the end of the day, humans may never be beyond religion and purely 'rational'. That's not how we work.
Historically seen, liberalism is one of the best inventions in our human global history
Fukuyama is persuasive in giving three justifications, but are those also the ingredients and are all three necessary for liberalism's survival? If one atrophies, say economic growth, is liberalism doomed, because prosperity is paramount and the other two justifications have little relevance without, or are dependent upon, that prosperity? Or what if prosperity can be achieved without the others, as in modern China, where there is relative prosperity and a degree of respect for property rights, but little allowance for diverse opinions or moral respect for the dignity of the individual? The points addressed by Fukuyama's first and second justifications are there addressed by dissuasion (Brave New World) and repression (1984) ("You don't need to assert your individual political and social voice because our common prosperity provides you with all you can ever desire; and woe betide if you do, as we will make sure your voice will never be heard ever again, at all.")
We don't really know the answer because, over the medium term at least, all three justifications have largely been present since liberalism first emerged. My sense is that all three are key, but that even without the third, the other two justifications apply; it is just that the argument is much more difficult to make and the siren voices of other approaches are more tempting. Many will say - what's the point of peace and of all having a voice if we live in grinding poverty, when others have prosperity without those things? This is, reduced to their bare essentials, what the populist movements sweeping the West are really saying.
Eventually, though, even with peace and prosperity, if there is no pragmatic management of diverse views and no free choice, the pressure cooker will explode. It may take years, but it will happen. This is not the same argument as liberals made in justifying Chinese accession to the WTO. It is not saying that pluralism and respect for the individual are essential for prosperity. You can create, as the CCP has done, a sufficiently workable legal system that ensures private property rights are protected, with only some areas marked off as no-go zones, such that prosperity is achieved. The proportion of disputes encroaching on those no-go zones is small enough to mean the legal system generally works. But it will be the repression of individual and different voices that will ultimately tell.
Without reform, the system will blow. If CCP control of China continues, it will be because it does reform and moves closer to a liberal system, allowing diverse voices to be heard and allowing individuals more choice. How and when that move is made will determine how messy the process is. Here's hoping for something more gentle than explosive.
In Cold war 1947-1991 both sides produced and used propaganda, Western was based on 18th century context: church and aristocrats ruled and genuine classical liberalism fought against that — not against modern democratic governments! Eastern propaganda disappeared with fall of Soviet Union, but western propaganda is still with us; USA never cleaned up it’s dirty laundry after 1991: the big change from infowar to infopeace is missing, after every type of war, all parties change dramatically. If 1991-1995 we would have seen the dramatical US change to information peace from information war, lot of things would have been better: climate change would have been stopped for example, because big businesses wouldn’t have this power they have right now, they got their power because political foundations after 1991 were and are still dirty and are not based on sciences.
Greedy opportunistic lying liberals are do-nothing failures at basic governance. Experts at letting others try, fail, swooping in to pick up any pieces of value all while decrying others efforts. Jigs up. The world figured the grift out.
https://amzn.to/47ZlXZ0 (sponsored link)
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so kewt!
goo ddog.
In this, I find myself in agreement with the argument. It is hard not to agree. I am a liberal too — not out of fashion, not out of club loyalty, and certainly not because the word carries any special glamour these days. Quite the opposite: in many places, “liberal” is now pronounced the way people once said “plague,” only with less precision and more saliva at the corner of the mouth.
The particular grotesque of our age is that the most enthusiastic looters of freedom usually arrive through freedom’s own back door. They exploit the tolerance of an open society, the slowness of the rule of law, the wide corridors of free speech — and once they are comfortably inside the house, they begin carrying out the furniture and announcing that liberalism itself is no longer necessary. Like a guest who eats the dinner, then sets fire to the house because it has too many windows.
I would not even call them “dark forces.” I would call them parasites of freedom. That is more precise. They attach themselves to the very order that permits their existence, then weaken it from within until freedom becomes a suspicious word, pluralism a form of disorder, doubt a sign of treason, and liberalism the public enemy. And much of society is perfectly willing to assist, because the system keeps repeating with priestly patience that liberalism is the horned devil himself. After a while, even people who could not define the word begin crossing themselves at the sound of it.
That is the saddest part, and also the funniest — if one still has the strength to laugh at the sight of people learning to hate freedom precisely because they once had enough of it to take for granted. Liberalism is not in trouble because it has been intellectually defeated. It is in trouble because many have been persuaded that everything inconvenient, unstable, unfamiliar, or morally uncomfortable must somehow be its fault. It is an old political trick: first exploit openness, then close the door in the name of order.
And in the end the room always smells the same: less freedom, more slogans, louder voices — and that familiar stale odour which history has, far too many times, tried to sell as salvation.
If liberal institutionalism tells you cooperation is possible, it just can’t tell you why it so often isn’t. Institutions don’t generate political will. They organize it when it already exists, which is why you need other frameworks to explain the gaps.
the triple expiration of western liberalism:
every state functions through eliciting plural policy perspective from plural groups, checks & balances, and succession process. the liberal position that these components are unique to europe, the west, representative democratic state forms, and some unique formal ideology of these constituents, either now or in history, is inaccurate and currently a rationale for western destabilization and aggression in defense of the bloc, and excuse for inaction and failure to address domestic challenges. liberal perspective 'whoever and whatever is legitimized by the representative outcome' is a dodge from actual policy actual remedy actual specific effort to meet challenges. the evolving economic base has real needs that the aging liberal superstructure doesnt address. a good government is not one with a specific form of state or alliance with some attribute of the west, but one that addresses the specific needs of a country to ascend its productivity, knowledge and security
global prosperity has rendered the western alliance an economic minority without foundation to continue global hegemony. the hegemony is disintegrating and being replaced with a multi polar relation. consequently the global liberal metro colony of like employed and like minded persons, and the ubiquitous global paradigm of liberalism and freedom are disintegrating, the colonists orphaned and able to reimagine their political position as patriotic unifiers instead of anti national culture dividers.
the woke victimology episode was an extreme indication of the graying of the liberal paradigm of neutrality toward ethics, that performed in the simpler industrial epoch but is not equipped for emerging automated society and the higher education, conceptual and autonomous ethical capacity that it will demand of citizens. the procreative capacity of families and classrooms is needed to raise children toward challenge and hence develop stable emotion and psychic structure able to learn and become the renaissance practitioner - parent - citizen that automation will require. Liberal neutrality toward ethics opposes this practice finding it deeply oppressive of the individuals absolute freedom. Censorship of social media and learning liberal neutrality paradigm such as Effective Altruism into machines is proceeding. Likely fording into automation / AI / Compute without severe unnecessary new hazard will require elevating ethic signal, from the reservoir of ethics in families, literary canon and senior multi millennial old ethic systems (indic, abrahamic, materialism, and ancestor veneration) that are not neutral but rather biased in favor of the human journey. Ethic systems evolve through practical interpretation by families faced with changing society, and through demographic selection, more effective ethic paradigms and practices raising more stable children, who in turn raise more stable children, etc and over generations ineffective ethic and practice is removed from national cultures.
The problem is not that this justifications are wrong, but that they are historically contingent—and increasingly detached from the conditions that once sustained them. This defense of liberalism remains analytically confined to its historical functions—peace, autonomy, and growth—without really examining the structural conditions that made these possible. Besides, what is presented as endogenous growth is, to a significant extent, the historical outcome of exogenous appropriation.
This topic reminds me of the situation in and after the Black Plague. Countries lost big swaths of their population, production fell, demands fell and inequalities increased and got entrenched.
The reasons for that was, according to some, that the interests of those with lands, capital and titles was protected, while the general population was not.
The Industrial Revolution and the new world(s) changed this. Mind you, this is from the European perspective, because conquests were of course traumatic for those conquered.
The Industrial Revolution forced through new dynamics were workers got bargaining power and redistribution ensued. It was not perfect as the world continued to struggle against egalitarian mindsets and this kept the growth down even if the growth were great even so.
Yes, economic liberalism played a role because it eases the flow and it forces new dynamics, but liberalism that isn’t regulated will do the opposite. So now that the global markets are so connected as they are, can the nearly monopolistic situations take us back somewhere we do not want to be, were the dynamics get entrenched in “the landed’s” favour and new dynamics won’t be available.
…something that brings me to the big tenets of “the free market”: Equal access to the market for goods and services.
…meaning that for liberalism to function must the market be protected, ie regulated, to facilitate economic liberalism and taxation must ensure that demands encourage new dynamics. Currently does governments seem dead set on winning the competition, rather than doing liberalism and market mechanics, so the tendency seems to encourage monopolistic tendencies.
There is no such thing as liberalism only liberalisms. While classical liberalism is the product of Enlightenment principles and class struggle, such as universal suffrage, the same cannot be said about neoliberalism which has been a disaster for Western democracies. This form of liberalism has massively corroded the trust in democratic participation and institutions, as its once raison d’tre of the “regulation of violence” has been replaced in many societies by the extractive behaviour of state entities and officials—not violent, just coercive. Neoliberalism has failed in the economic sphere by widening inequalities and decoupling the relationship between labour income, effort and reward—wealth today is accrued more by asset holdings and financialisation than by strivers in the commodity labour market. And social liberalism, while undoubtedly more progressive than the totalitarian alternatives, has invented new patterns of intolerance and discrimination (think of those discriminatory DEI initiatives). However, unlike in the nineteenth century, the modern Left does not know what to replace neoliberalism with. Just as liberalism is an incoherent and contradictory ideology, there are currently no new imaginaries of how a better society could emerge from a sense the West has become stuck in its own age of stagnation. When people struggle with meaning and citizens lose hope in liberal institutions, that is when things turn nasty, as we are seeing in the rise of the far right across Europe and economic nationalism in the United States. Liberalism is in trouble.
Liberalism is an ideal worth cherishing, protecting and, when required, defending. More than any form of societal form, it streers humans toward its good, decent, peaceful living tendencies, which benefits humanity as a whole. Governments and institutions have a huge role to play in creating and maintaining a respectful, equitable, prosperous and peaceful world.
This is a really clear articulation of why liberalism has been so resilient as a coordinating framework.
One thing I’ve been thinking about alongside this is whether the pressure liberalism is under now isn’t just political, but structural.
If no single ideology can fully account for the complexity of reality (especially under pluralism), then even well-justified systems like liberalism start to strain—not necessarily because they’re wrong, but because they’re being asked to do too much.
From that angle, the challenge becomes less about defending or replacing liberalism, and more about how we design systems that can hold disagreement without needing to resolve it fully.
In other words—coordination without forced convergence.
Curious how you’d think about that in relation to liberalism’s future durability.
He converted this in depth in The End of History — last section of the book.
He argues liberal democracy is the final form of political organisation. I’m saying, it’s not that liberalism “wins”, it’s that all ideologies are structurally insufficient under real pluralism.
One reason why I advocate global, borderless and decentralized citizenships and polities.
https://thenetworkstate.com/dashboard