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We could debate all the fundamental philosophical problems of liberalism (classical or otherwise), but what I think is the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.
Ironically, despite the contemporary right-wing movements often being accused of being reactionary, it's really the anti-woke liberals who are reactionary in the quite literal and plain meaning of the word. They think we can just turn back the clock on political and philosophical development of the last thirty, fourty, fifty years and (re)establish a liberal utopia and the last fifteen years of woke will disappear forever like a bad dream, like it never happened. Remember, this
'SJW''woke' thing is just a fad that college kids will grow out of once they enter the real world.Contemporary right-wing thought doesn't do this. It's decidedly post-liberal, not liberal or pre-liberal. It has, with maybe a few exceptions, fully embraced that liberalism has had its political moment, it has failed and the question is how to address those failures. The dialectic has progessed, one might say. Even the ironically named 'neo-reactionaries' aren't really reactionary in any meaningful sense, other than just borrowing basic, well-worn concepts from eons past. Their politics are still clearly post-liberal. I would even argue 'MAGA' (insofar it is a coherent political movement) is post-liberal, again despite the ironic name.
So my question to all those who just want to 'retvrn' to the liberalism of decades past - how to you plan to address or reform liberalism so it will won't cause woke again? What do you acknowledge are its problems? How would your changes keep the essence of liberalism so despite the changes it could still meaningfully be called liberalism? How would it not just be simply nostalgia for a past that can never be returned to, if it existed at all?
Ironically enough, the woke succeeded partially by making this very argument. There was a long tradition in the Frankfurt School of actively trying to undermine liberalism, their explicit rationale being that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order".
The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Their claimed solution to this problem was that the information environment needed to be selectively seeded with
propaganda"emancipatory" ideas which liberated people from their false consciousness, not terrible oppressive reactionary ones which maintained preexisting power structures and produced things like Nazism. Herbert Marcuse in particular loved using this argument, and it was so successful that it resulted in the domination of all of our major institutions by wokeness. They have become the "hegemonic power structure" they once criticised despite the fact that they are still masquerading as a subversive grassroots movement, their deep will-to-power makes them fail to abide by their own standards and instead suppress any kind of counter-narrative thought which might act as a check and balance to their worst impulses, and I think we both agree this was not a good thing in the slightest.I'm very aware of the many failure-modes of liberalism - they've been discussed here at length, and I think they have credence. My counter-question is "if we get rid of the woke, what do you propose to replace it with, and if you've discarded liberalism as an idea how do you plan not to fall into the same trap the woke did?" Because there's a real risk of that, and using the fact that authoritarian systems have managed to succeed in some places as a reason for why an illiberal ideology should be introduced is the root of many of the harmful social trends that are occurring today. The woke obviously thought they were doing good - virtually everybody who does harm thinks so. What kind of self-correction mechanism would this new proposed hypothetical system have to prevent false dogmas from going unchallenged? Because while the left's unhinged dogmas are most salient in today's environment, dogmatism is not the exclusive preserve of the left.
Of course, some very doomer part of me does indeed think all this debate is pointless and that people have an inherent bent toward constructing sacred cows and adopting them in a quasi-religious manner, so we're doomed to swing from dogmatic idea to dogmatic idea and the idea of constructing an environment meant to guard against any given ideology's worst tendencies is a utopian abstraction that will never materialise in the long run. As always, the only thing that ultimately matters in this dynamic is making sure you're the one on top.
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Well, one of the better-argued answers I see to this (even if I disagree with it) is that it is indeed about delaying the problem — turning the clock back thirty years buys you a few more decades — until tech comes to the rescue. There's the position that we just need to keep up 90s liberalism and fight the return of woke until AGI and the Singularity arrives and ends all human politics forever. Or then there's @mitigatedchaos's position that we need to return to "colorblind" 90s liberalism to contain racial conflict (and white identitarianism) another decade or so, at which point gene splicing technology will be safe and cheap enough to broadly use to fix all the HBD issues. (Personally, I find all these sorts overly-optimistic about the rates of technological progress.)
The next-best answer is the same one classical reactionaries often give: the second time around, we'll see the woke coming, and be better prepared to fight them off.
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This is why I think of myself as both a neoreactionary and a right revolutionary, they aren’t opposites at all rather they’re synergistic and actually necessary for one another.
Neoreaction is at its heart the recognition, mourning of, and ultimately a plan for the restoration of a lost future. It’s about triangulating where we could have been without the malign influence of the cluster of intellectual cancers that have been slowly withering down our collective will to live and will to power, and then grabbing the steering wheel and jerking it as hard as possible in that direction.
There’s no going back. If you’re fifty years old and unsatisfied with your shitty life, there’s no use trying to be young again. It’s actually pathetic to even try, we collectively recognize people doing that as living in deep denial. But it’s not too late; through honest introspection you can identify your mistakes, begin to heal and learn to love life again.
I’m not even remotely interested in indulging classical liberal’s collective midlife crisis.
I’m absolutely here. Liberalism, even in mild forms like the enlightenment are a total disaster. It’s basically a slow rolling auto-immune disease of the body politic that eventually kills its ability to reject destructive ideas. The reason those cancers took hold is because they appealed to the kinds of people who should have zero say in the government of a state. People who cannot control their own lives, people who have no understanding of how a society ought to be run, and people with malignant empathy for things that if allowed let alone encouraged by the public purse will rot the country from the inside out.
Even if you could somehow avoid the woke virus, there are other equally bad cancers: relativism, communism, cultural Marxism, various forms of decadence and depravity, tolerance for criminality, disrespect for achievement, loss of meritocracy, loss of basic virtues and politeness. We’ve become a decadent and dying society completely unwilling to acknowledge the rot, and denigrating anyone who says something is wrong.
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My suspicion as to why Liberalism was weak to wokeness was twofold.
I think that if wokeness suffers a hearts and minds defeat, as opposed to what Trump is doing, it actually would be possible to go back to liberalism. We'd have in our cultural milieu a reference to leftism going insane, which would produce antibodies against the empathy spirals that the current left uses.
That being said, I don't think that we are currently on that trajectory - I think that Trump (like Biden and Obama) is projecting a culture change top down, and that we have too much of a bifurcation in beliefs to return to it yet. I honestly think that a very major country (like, G7) has to fall specifically from wokeness (similar to the fall of the Soviet Union) before we can see the potential for it to return.
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