What about the idea that liberalism is a project concerned with preventing tyranny and advancing the common good by limiting the power of government, reifying individual rights, and establishing a rule of law to both protect democracy and to protect AGAINST its excesses? (Or did I just go to a very bad high school?)
I’d just like to add that any critique of liberalism focusing ONLY on libertinism and moral relativism should also account for growing wealth inequality and declining institutional responsiveness. Absent that, it risks blaming individual libertinism not only for social anomie and domestic violence, but also for the obvious crack-up of the so-called “rules-based international order.”
What is liberalism? In this writer’s opinion, the TL:DR is this. It’s about privileging the individual over the group. What I want, over what the community wants of, or from, me. The triumph of individual liberty over what Schmitt called ‘volksgruppenrecht’ - or people’s group rights. The primacy of my own ideas over tradition, nature or even scientific reality.
Who critiques liberalism?
Well, from the ‘Right’, you correctly identify Lind et al. But I’d suggest the critique of liberalism on the Right goes much further back. Indeed, while it may be uncomfortable for some to acknowledge, the European New Right was attacking the liberal, capitalist right for its abandonment of the *national* group in the 1970’s. From Alain de Benoist, through Michael Walker, Armin Mohler, Tom Sunic and Substack’s own Nick Griffin, this group cut genuinely new intellectual ground by attacking the libertarian and anti-communist right as being fundamentally about raising individual consumer choice to the highest political virtue. The Thatcherite notion that there’s ‘no such thing as community’ alienated a group for whom organic national identity was the obvious basis for political organisation.
On the Left, liberalism’s critics have taken a slightly different tack. Writers like Orwell, Lasch, Paul Embery (also on Substack) and the excellent Jean Claude Michea, as well as countless Old Left types hankering for socialism as it was pre-1968, attack the left-liberal ascendancy for its abandonment of the *working class*. The current obsession on the so-called Left with refugee rights, personal sexual orientation and gender ‘choices’ distracts from the real, material challenges faced by workers in developed countries - and repels actual workers from getting involved in organised labour.
These tendencies go back to the 1970’s and earlier - but what they all have in common is a concern for the welfare of the group, rather than the individual.
And then, I’m eager to ask how any critique of liberalism positions itself with regard to the current global surge of authoritarianism. This especially concerns the United States, where the liberal order is now under sustained attack directed from the White House. Should we think of Donald Trump as a morally relativistic libertine, or as a fascist who merely enjoyed hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and the girls?
What about the idea that liberalism is a project concerned with preventing tyranny and advancing the common good by limiting the power of government, reifying individual rights, and establishing a rule of law to both protect democracy and to protect AGAINST its excesses? (Or did I just go to a very bad high school?)
I’d just like to add that any critique of liberalism focusing ONLY on libertinism and moral relativism should also account for growing wealth inequality and declining institutional responsiveness. Absent that, it risks blaming individual libertinism not only for social anomie and domestic violence, but also for the obvious crack-up of the so-called “rules-based international order.”
What is liberalism? In this writer’s opinion, the TL:DR is this. It’s about privileging the individual over the group. What I want, over what the community wants of, or from, me. The triumph of individual liberty over what Schmitt called ‘volksgruppenrecht’ - or people’s group rights. The primacy of my own ideas over tradition, nature or even scientific reality.
Who critiques liberalism?
Well, from the ‘Right’, you correctly identify Lind et al. But I’d suggest the critique of liberalism on the Right goes much further back. Indeed, while it may be uncomfortable for some to acknowledge, the European New Right was attacking the liberal, capitalist right for its abandonment of the *national* group in the 1970’s. From Alain de Benoist, through Michael Walker, Armin Mohler, Tom Sunic and Substack’s own Nick Griffin, this group cut genuinely new intellectual ground by attacking the libertarian and anti-communist right as being fundamentally about raising individual consumer choice to the highest political virtue. The Thatcherite notion that there’s ‘no such thing as community’ alienated a group for whom organic national identity was the obvious basis for political organisation.
On the Left, liberalism’s critics have taken a slightly different tack. Writers like Orwell, Lasch, Paul Embery (also on Substack) and the excellent Jean Claude Michea, as well as countless Old Left types hankering for socialism as it was pre-1968, attack the left-liberal ascendancy for its abandonment of the *working class*. The current obsession on the so-called Left with refugee rights, personal sexual orientation and gender ‘choices’ distracts from the real, material challenges faced by workers in developed countries - and repels actual workers from getting involved in organised labour.
These tendencies go back to the 1970’s and earlier - but what they all have in common is a concern for the welfare of the group, rather than the individual.
And then, I’m eager to ask how any critique of liberalism positions itself with regard to the current global surge of authoritarianism. This especially concerns the United States, where the liberal order is now under sustained attack directed from the White House. Should we think of Donald Trump as a morally relativistic libertine, or as a fascist who merely enjoyed hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and the girls?