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Your post is topical, because a couple days ago I was blathering about something like this on the The Fifth Column's subreddit. It's also an evergreen topic here so maybe no great coincidence.
Should you read it? Well, I didn't want to edit or consider it much more as I would feel obligated to if I posted it here. It's mostly notepad scratch.
The Fifth Column's episode spent a lot of time focusing on Trumps anti-DEI measures. As Good Liberals they oppose this. Not because they'll be ineffective or unnecessary, though they touch on both of those, but because they are illiberal orders. This wasn't a surprise for me. The hosts are moderately consistent in taking Good Liberal positions when it comes to culture war stuff. For example, they criticized a lot of the anti-woke education legislation to manage curriculums.
It's one of the few podcasts I will listen to and the only politics podcast. They make me laugh. If you can think about free speech advocate, market oriented recovering libertarians you'll get a pretty good idea of the hosts and the content without donating 60 minutes of your time.
From what I can tell liberals are a dying breed. I didn't make the above post to convince people liberalism was dying. I merely wanted to say this was a blind spot for the hosts. That liberals are consistently bad about throwing tomatoes from the sideline while losing respectfully. A trope that can be overstated in spaces such as this one, but with a measure of truth.
Ardent believers want losing to actually be a demonstration of strength. I think that's a weird way to consider losing, but to each their own. With that I conclude liberalism is dying.
Who is going to carry liberalism to the end of the century?
It's a lot of weight to put on The Federalist Society and FIRE*. At some point we may decide this is a Ship of Theseus issue. Nominally liberal people call undemocratic measures life lines for democracy, hate speech laws are necessary to preserve liberal society, and so on. People will stop trying to call illiberal policies liberal ones and we'll know it's dead.
There's been too much change in the last 40 years. Liberalism has already forked a dozen times. Big picture, I believe the hold of 19th and 20th century thinkers are fading further into history, although people have not found a way to supplant them. I don't foresee a lot of ways in which we'll see more liberals 30 years from now. I lament this, but hope it all works out.
Values and ideas don't proliferate without believers and practitioners. Liberals are too easy going. Satisfied to merely complain about their principles on the chopping block. What gives them such confidence -- if it is confidence and not hubris -- I do not know.
To me, people like TFC hosts seek more concerned with purity as opposed to direction while having a strong bias to status quo.
Take the anti DEI EOs. Are they perfect? No. But they also exist in the backdrop of 60 years of civil rights law they Lin fact (if not form) required legal discrimination against whites. These EOs don’t undo that but they are a small counterweight that gets closer to the liberal position.
Or take the public school debates. They had on Rufo and Kmele argued basically we shouldn’t ban woke but talk about it and other teaching. Rufo made two points: 1) someone has to decide the curriculum and if the public is paying for it then why can’t the public decide and 2) there is an opportunity cost to teaching anything.
IIRC, Kmele’s view was that we should do school choice and he simply ignored opportunity cost. Rufo wasn’t opposed to school choice (he supported it) but he didn’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. And because of Rufo schools are now more classically liberal whereas if Kmele had his way they’d remain illiberal. I’m not saying that’s the outcome Kmele wants but it’s the problem when you’ll only accept pure policies.
Yes. This seems like a common affliction. I assume it's due to being embedded or adjacent to the media ecosystem, big cities, and the blob in general. The respectability status pipeline. Part of what's wrong with it, with our understanding of liberalism, is that it convinces people that doing nothing is honorable. We are (hopefully) not captains on a sinking ship or defending the Alamo to the last. "We" are steering a nation of people towards some future.
Ah, yeah I remember that. Close to my recollection as well. I even believe him when he says as much, but it's still a side step. More tomatoes from sidelines, more conscientious objecting. Maybe at the end of engaging with the trade offs you still think Rufoism and Trump EO's are bad. That'd be fine, but engaging is important. I won't knock him too much for that, because he does seem fairly consistent. Perhaps if there were more people carrying the banner there could be more room for conscientious objecting. In our own recent history I don't think liberals had many bannermen. If that's the norm, then it looks a lot like surrendering the field.
Yeah, I agree. Rufo has proved a lot. I'd quibble to disagree about this or that. Sometimes his warfare offends me. He accepted a reality that the culture war should be fought, staked an explicit position in it, and pursued it. He found allies where they could be found. I have a lot of respect for that.
I mentioned over on reddit, possibly here at some point, that pop liberal extraordinaire Jonathan Haidt said in 2024 he thinks dismantling the bureaucracy in academia will require top-down enforcement. This made a significant impression on me, because this is the let's organize and work together to get back on track Heterodox Academy guy. That's a yuge concession and it's difficult for me not to respect someone who will make something like it.
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