I appreciate how clearly you can articulate your intentions and look forward to reading more of your posts. I find the comment sections very useful in terms of understanding what others are thinking so thank you for keeping the comment section open to all. The crazier the world becomes, the more people need to find ways to make sense of it and relate to others which can only happen through open and respectful dialogue.
Liberal as the opposite of authoritarian and as a small c conservative for things that are good is the same use of the word Timothy Ferris used in The Science Liberty, which is first read back in 2010. It clarified the distinction between liberal and progressive for me and made me feel better about calling myself a liberal again.
Thank you for being the most sensible person on the internet.
Anyone who calls you fat acknowledges that they can't think of a single damn rational or reasonable argument to contradict whatever you said to piss them off.
Thanks for an incredible and succinct definition of liberalism!
Helen, your overflowings are always welcome in my inbox. You will know that to be 'exuberant' literally means to overflow, or grow profusely. I hope you continue to find the exuberance to flow and grow here. And by the way, it seems clear to me through your writings that you have more than a liberal brain but also a liberal heart. Take good care both! x
Thank you for articulating the liberal values! I can't find anything I disagree with. Does that mean I am a ... Liberal??? Unthinkable! I've been a Conservative most of my life. "Liberal" has been a despised epithet since the 80s! How do I reconcile this cognitive dissonance???
Looking forward to reading more Overflowings to find out.
If you are a patriotic American who is proud of his founding documents, yes. The US has had a profound concept creep with the term 'liberal.' Typically, it's futile to try to reclaim words, but liberalism is more than a word. It's a philosophy of freedom and America is the only country that was founded on it. If it was just a word that had slipped and the whole cluster of concepts associated with it could be defined another way, this would be less of a problem, but they can't. Consequently, we see some American conservatives who consider themselves patriots advocating things that are unconstitutional and antithetical to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and illiberal leftists who make no pretence of wanting to uphold America's founding principles being referred to as liberals. We desperately need patriotic American conservatives to recall those on the right who have forgotten what liberalism really means and how foundational it is to the United States to a sense of constitutional pride. I am on the left so I will work mostly on the progressives who have forgotten that it is liberalism that made the progress that makes liberal democracies the best place to live if you are a woman or a racial, religious or sexual minority. And we must support each other in this effort, even when we disagree - no, especially when we disagree. I am English, but I care about the US both because many of my most loved people live there and because if you lose sight of what liberalism is, we're all in trouble (in addition to the trouble we're in all on our own). "When America sneezes, the world catches the cold."
There is the teensiest problem in using the word in the UK, in that the largest political party with the word in its name, the Liberal Democrats, is anything but liberal by this definition, being as they are a troop of cancel culture monkeys.
Maybe we could be classy, and call ourselves "classical liberals."
Or perhaps we can reclaim and re-establish the label so well the cancel culture monkeys have to choose a new name for their party! (stranger things have happened)
Yes, there's a decided difference between a liberal conservative and a classical liberal. Classical liberals & libertarians are definitely liberals and they tend to vote right for economic reasons, but they are not necessarily conservative in that political philosophical tradition.
Liberal conservative - I value family, community, cultural integrity, history, tradition, patriotism and my drive is to conserve all of those things. I reject authoritarianism as a means to achieving this. Forcing people to value any of the above or pretending they do goes against the intellectual history & philosophical traditions of the country and culture I love & want to conserve. I will defend people's right not to value them but I think they are wrong and I will argue this strongly and demand the right to do so. I probably don't argue much in favour of capitalism & free markets although I oppose the radical revolutionary agenda of Marxists and socialists. I may even disapprove of those who advocate for unrestrained capitalism and believe this focus to promote a shallow, artificial and hedonistic consumer culture that is all about acquiring possessions and advancing technology with insufficient care for the impact this has on society and takes us away from what is real and meaningful - family, community, hard work and developing personal virtues (and possibly religion)
Classical liberal (merging into libertarian) - I am freedom focused. I believe that most of society's ills can be remedied by allowing markets to flourish unhindered. Hard-working families struggling with rising rents? That's an opportunity for a private individual or company to build housing, thus accruing profit to themselves but also increasing renters options and making landlords compete to attract tenants by lowering rents. Poverty? Let businesses compete against each other to produce newer, better, cheaper products that will make them money but also lower prices of essential products. Racism? Sexism? Homophobia? Meritocracy addresses that. It's against market interests to discriminate against people who will do good work and make them money. Capitalism makes things cheaper and brings people together in relationships of trade and reciprocity. Just leave people alone to live their own lives and their own way and they will naturally sort themselves out. State interference only causes resentment and hinders the innovation and healthy competition that can make life better for everyone. I may even believe in open borders as an essential freedom and a way to attract appropriately skilled workers and not share concerns with conservatives worried about cultural integrity.
Of course, few people fit into distinct categories of political philosophy and more liberals on the right would take 25/50/75% of those values in the liberal conservative box and 25/50/75% of those in the classical liberal one rather than go "all in" with one stance.
I think it's useful to be able to think "In this area, my values are quite liberal conservative, but in this, I lean more libertarian." I am quite economically left (progressive taxes, not socialist, some regulation on markets to prevent exploitation of workers), but when it comes to meritocracy, I have much in common with the classical liberals and when it comes to love of country, history and culture, I find common ground with liberal conservatives. I think getting too bogged down in labels and trying to fit one is probably counterproductive. (Not suggesting you are advocating doing so) Most people won't fit neatly into a box, especially liberals who are bad at collectivism. We find common ground in opposing authoritarianism wherever it might arise.
This is an extremely valuable discussion. Thank you for providing such clear, well-thought-through definitions. I will work on articulating what I believe; at first glance, it stretches across all labels mentioned.
I agree that getting bogged down in labels is counterproductive; I like the idea of saying, "I'm part A in this area and part B in another area," - but it's still necessary to define well what A and B mean. Otherwise, the discussion becomes confusing or meaningless.
Laissez-faire seems to be compatible with this bullet point from Helen's list:
"The belief that all people come into the world with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and this can only justifiably be removed from any individual due to their own demonstrable harmful actions."
Liberalism is failing because it involves letting people be free to do what they want - but not free enough to fully suffer the consequences of that. SOCIETY ends up providing a safety net at great expense to pay for all the consequences of everyone’s choices & mistakes. & which we increasingly can’t afford, while many of these choices have a continuous long term (negative) impact on society itself.
Well, I don’t think liberalism does that. It only protects people from illiberal consequences. E.g., it would protect people from being arrested for saying something racist on Facebook or fired for having gender critical views, but if some people stop wanting to be your friend because of views you’ve expressed, you have to deal with that.
A principle of liberalism is that people get to make their own choices but also deal with the consequences of that. No nanny state. If you’re an adult and you want to smoke, for example, you should be able to but if you get lung cancer, that’s on you. If you want to have unprotected sex and end up having loads of kids, you are ultimately responsible for providing for them. Etc.
Who is paying for the lung cancer treatment? And all those kids out of wedlock - every single one of them is covered by Medicaid where I’m at, mom gets housing partially if not completely paid for, mom gets food stamps, etc. People literally get rescued from their bad decisions with all kinds of subsidies.
This was awesome to read. I will read this more than once lol.
I don’t make the argument 1) or 2) because like you I’ve also heard a lot of these sorts of horror stories. My dad spent his younger years in a French orphanage run by nuns, they used to hang him out of windows. My mom grew up in the Midwest in a time when women were seen as second class to men. I’ve also read historical & non fiction where you can read lots of stories like that. I don’t go so far as to advocating for a solution, because I fear there is no clean easy solution, and there is a ton of trade offs for any strategy you’d think would be the right one. I’m just consistently irritated by the direction that society is moving in so I b-tch & complain lol. But it’s insanely arrogant to try to present solutions - unless you’re just throwing stuff out there for fun/simply to ponder the idea - because A) I’m not all knowing and have limited information about the entirety of society & all it’s dynamics, B) I don’t have enough expertise in running anything let alone managing a society of millions, C) the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I also don’t trust people to police each other at all - humans seem to enjoy having excuses to be aggressive at & bully each other, they seem to like to have an ‘other’ to act out pent up cruelty & aggression on. A socially acceptable form of abusing people. You would basically need a society of high character (fair, caring, thoughtful, kind rational, good judgment, mentally & emotionally stable) people to have that work, & that’s NEVER going to happen lol.
I think that maybe a missing element here in your looking to the past as a guide - life was rougher, people were harsher & harder, there was a higher tolerance for cruelty and aggression - because there was way more on average. We are far more affluent now than people were then. Will we revert back to & tolerate the level of harshness & aggression & violence? Who knows. I think a lot of that sounds like it cross relates the general poverty of the era.
There are certain attitudes & cultural values that in theory & in best case practice I prefer from ‘the good old days’, but I’m VERY aware that humans are imperfect, often irresponsible, many are self & self serving, etc.
I'm not pretending this. I have made no such claim at all. Nor am I claiming that we live in a liberal society. I am seeking to make society more liberal.
There is no liberal lifestyle. Liberalism is the system that allows people to choose their own lifestyle. I am a liberal who chose to live what could be considered quite a conservative lifestyle, but I support other people's right not to. What we do when people's choices have negative effects on them varies according to other values we have. The 'pure liberal' approach would be laissez-faire libertarianism - just let them sort out their own solutions and don't make it the tax-payers problem. Other liberal stances diverge from this. Liberal conservatives would be likely to advocate for an increase in family values and personal responsibility. Liberal leftists would be more about sex education and reproductive freedom and a strong social welfare net.
I am a liberal leftist so you will probably disagree with me quite strongly, but it won't be my liberalism you'll be disagreeing with but my leftism. You may believe my support for our nationalised healthcare system and advocacy for more social housing and stronger programmes to help people through hard times and get them into productive work to encourage state dependency and fail to get people to take enough responsibility for their own lives. I would disagree that my position goes to those extremes but see that some can do and the merits of arguments that this prevents people from being able to rise on their merits. Balancing ensuring that people who fall on hard times, (especially children who have no autonomy in the matter) have shelter and food and opportunities to get back on their feet with ensuring that we do not encourage state dependency and disincentivise self-sufficiency is a thorny problem that we will probably always be arguing about.
But if you disagree with my support of social welfare programmes, you are definitely disagreeing with my leftism and not my liberalism. Liberalism on the economic axis is about small government, low taxes and self-sufficiency.
How does liberalism - choosing of one’s own lifestyle - avoid potentially encouraging societal decay? Many old prejudices and enforcement of lifestyles were in place for practical reasons (not all obviously) - to try to avoid the negative outcomes as well as avoid the lifestyles themselves from becoming normalized - because they are so obviously a direct cause of bad outcomes? Do you think we can reach a tipping point where having over liberal values results in societal dysfunction that is very difficult to cleanup/manage/afford?
It doesn't, in principle, but it does in practice. I'm assuming that we both think Western Liberal Democracies are better places to live in than authoritarian states and theocracies so if that is not the case, we will reach an impasse. But assuming we would both rather live here than, say, Iran, what is it that makes the difference? It's liberalism.
I want to preserve what is distinct about Western Civilisation and my cultural heritage and philosophical traditions and ensure they DON'T collapse back into obscure, authoritarian backwaters which enforce morality on people either by state sanctioned Morality Police or socially contrived ones (e.g., Cancel Culture). That's why I have worked so hard to oppose the woke. They try to impose one moral code on everyone for the good of society and I suspect it is not a regime that either of us want to live under. You might think a different kind of Cancel Culture and coercion would be better and stop society from decaying, but that, to me, would be just be a continuation of the rot infecting liberal democracies. I don't want to be cancelled for not affirming ANYONE else's beliefs or living according to their rules and I don't want you to be either.
I anticipate two objections you might make to this framing of the issue and if you would not, somebody else would, so allow me to address them here.
1) I am not talking about setting up something like the Iranian Morality Police, but going back to expectations before the sexual revolution. That was better.
I don't think it was. I can speak most to my own country, England, but in that time, things were fairly dire. About 100 years ago, my great-grandmother got dumped in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers by the man she was a maid for and by whom she had 'got herself pregnant." She had to return to work as soon as she was able to survive so she had to leave her baby there. My grandfather had a visceral fear of nuns to his dying day. They'd beat down teenage boys morning erections with a ruler.
My grandmother on the other side was stuck living with a man who beat her mercilessly because there was no divorce and leaving your husband was so shameful and she also had nowhere to go. Women taking 'happy pills' was at an all-time high in the 50s. She died of an unexplained brain hemorrhage at 40.
My uncle was arrested and beaten for being gay in the 50s when a private club bothering nobody was raided and was then persecuted by the police until he fled the country.
My mother, escaping her abusive father, arrived in London in 1960, but because the expectation was that men were the main breadwinner, women were not allowed entry to well-paying jobs or to take out mortgages in their own name and they were not paid enough to live on. In desperation to stop sharing a grubby flat with three other girls, she married a man who was a bastard and just stepped over her and went to the pub when she was miscarrying, but there was no 'no fault' divorce then and he didn't actually beat her or cheat on her so she was stuck until he agreed to divorce and then they had to stage an affair and get a private detective to film it.
This is all pretty dire, but I don't know how we'd avoid decaying back in that direction if we re-instated those old prejudices and enforcement of lifestyles. Maybe people who are heterosexual and women who don't want to have independence and find good husbands could be happy, but we need to create a society in which those who aren't fortunate enough to fit the norm or find a good partner don't end up in any of those situations.
2) I'm not suggesting anything that dramatic. I don't want to criminalise homosexuality or divorce/breaking up of families or sex outside marriage. I just want to strongly disapprove of them on a societal level.
Well, if this is just making arguments for this while defending people's rights to do it anyway, that's fine. You can make ethical arguments for the preferability of socially conservative lifestyles and avoidance of sex outside marriage and hope to influence culture. (In the UK, this is happening anyway. Teen pregnancy and unwanted pregnancy hit a peak in the 80s and has been dropping ever since. Gen Z have less casual sex than both Millennials and Gen X to the point where we're getting a bit worried about them. Gen X had the most.)
If you want to create a Cancel Culture of shaming anybody who doesn't have socially conservative beliefs and firing them and policing their speech and bodies, I'd have to oppose this. You could only succeed if enough people agreed with you, though, and they had institutional power and then, again, I don't see how you'd avoid the decay into something like an Iranian Morality Police state. And while you might hope your own form of authoritarianism will remain in power, it probably won't and you'll end up having to live under some other factions moral policing of your beliefs and actions (possibly the woke) and then you'll have contributed to breaking down the liberal protections that could have helped you.
There is no clear-cut way to stop any society collapsing or becoming dysfunctional because humans are messy and disagreeable and don't like being told what to do. No system will ever change that about humans. Liberalism is just the one that tries to manage it in the least coercive way possible and enable people to live and let live so that we don't have the bloodshed that we see in earlier times before liberal democracies and in countries that are not liberal democracies. It's not a perfect system but this is because we are not a perfect species.
Enabling of what? I’m not sure what that means because I don’t know what your position is. It could refer to not enabling people to express prejudiced views by tightening hate speech laws or not enabling people to openly be gay by being intolerant of that. (I don’t suspect you mean either of those things)
I’m saying we do the ‘live and let live’ part where we push this tolerance for letting people conduct themselves how they want to conduct themselves. But when there are serious ramifications for how people conduct themselves, because they’re not conducting themselves in a way that leads to positive outcomes for themselves/community/society - they get bailed out & don’t actually experience the full brunt of the consequences of their actions. We fund sustaining people who have made bad choices & who end up in bad situations.
I appreciate how clearly you can articulate your intentions and look forward to reading more of your posts. I find the comment sections very useful in terms of understanding what others are thinking so thank you for keeping the comment section open to all. The crazier the world becomes, the more people need to find ways to make sense of it and relate to others which can only happen through open and respectful dialogue.
Liberal as the opposite of authoritarian and as a small c conservative for things that are good is the same use of the word Timothy Ferris used in The Science Liberty, which is first read back in 2010. It clarified the distinction between liberal and progressive for me and made me feel better about calling myself a liberal again.
Thank you for being the most sensible person on the internet.
Anyone who calls you fat acknowledges that they can't think of a single damn rational or reasonable argument to contradict whatever you said to piss them off.
Thanks for an incredible and succinct definition of liberalism!
Helen, your overflowings are always welcome in my inbox. You will know that to be 'exuberant' literally means to overflow, or grow profusely. I hope you continue to find the exuberance to flow and grow here. And by the way, it seems clear to me through your writings that you have more than a liberal brain but also a liberal heart. Take good care both! x
This is so great, thank you! Sharing with the friends I have left. 🙄 Also, how would you feel about doing a “how to make proper tea” tutorial video?
;-)
Oh, gotcha. 😏
Beautiful work on the michael shermer show ! Concise and measured analysis in an age of bifurcated hysterical shenanigans
Thank you for articulating the liberal values! I can't find anything I disagree with. Does that mean I am a ... Liberal??? Unthinkable! I've been a Conservative most of my life. "Liberal" has been a despised epithet since the 80s! How do I reconcile this cognitive dissonance???
Looking forward to reading more Overflowings to find out.
If you are a patriotic American who is proud of his founding documents, yes. The US has had a profound concept creep with the term 'liberal.' Typically, it's futile to try to reclaim words, but liberalism is more than a word. It's a philosophy of freedom and America is the only country that was founded on it. If it was just a word that had slipped and the whole cluster of concepts associated with it could be defined another way, this would be less of a problem, but they can't. Consequently, we see some American conservatives who consider themselves patriots advocating things that are unconstitutional and antithetical to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and illiberal leftists who make no pretence of wanting to uphold America's founding principles being referred to as liberals. We desperately need patriotic American conservatives to recall those on the right who have forgotten what liberalism really means and how foundational it is to the United States to a sense of constitutional pride. I am on the left so I will work mostly on the progressives who have forgotten that it is liberalism that made the progress that makes liberal democracies the best place to live if you are a woman or a racial, religious or sexual minority. And we must support each other in this effort, even when we disagree - no, especially when we disagree. I am English, but I care about the US both because many of my most loved people live there and because if you lose sight of what liberalism is, we're all in trouble (in addition to the trouble we're in all on our own). "When America sneezes, the world catches the cold."
Thank you for a thoughtful and incisive comment! Totally agree. Will work to reclaim the label.
There is the teensiest problem in using the word in the UK, in that the largest political party with the word in its name, the Liberal Democrats, is anything but liberal by this definition, being as they are a troop of cancel culture monkeys.
"a troop of cancel culture monkeys" - 🤣🤣🤣
Maybe we could be classy, and call ourselves "classical liberals."
Or perhaps we can reclaim and re-establish the label so well the cancel culture monkeys have to choose a new name for their party! (stranger things have happened)
"Classical liberal" has the problem of being closely associated with a specific economic policy of laissez-faire capitalism.
Yes, there's a decided difference between a liberal conservative and a classical liberal. Classical liberals & libertarians are definitely liberals and they tend to vote right for economic reasons, but they are not necessarily conservative in that political philosophical tradition.
Liberal conservative - I value family, community, cultural integrity, history, tradition, patriotism and my drive is to conserve all of those things. I reject authoritarianism as a means to achieving this. Forcing people to value any of the above or pretending they do goes against the intellectual history & philosophical traditions of the country and culture I love & want to conserve. I will defend people's right not to value them but I think they are wrong and I will argue this strongly and demand the right to do so. I probably don't argue much in favour of capitalism & free markets although I oppose the radical revolutionary agenda of Marxists and socialists. I may even disapprove of those who advocate for unrestrained capitalism and believe this focus to promote a shallow, artificial and hedonistic consumer culture that is all about acquiring possessions and advancing technology with insufficient care for the impact this has on society and takes us away from what is real and meaningful - family, community, hard work and developing personal virtues (and possibly religion)
Classical liberal (merging into libertarian) - I am freedom focused. I believe that most of society's ills can be remedied by allowing markets to flourish unhindered. Hard-working families struggling with rising rents? That's an opportunity for a private individual or company to build housing, thus accruing profit to themselves but also increasing renters options and making landlords compete to attract tenants by lowering rents. Poverty? Let businesses compete against each other to produce newer, better, cheaper products that will make them money but also lower prices of essential products. Racism? Sexism? Homophobia? Meritocracy addresses that. It's against market interests to discriminate against people who will do good work and make them money. Capitalism makes things cheaper and brings people together in relationships of trade and reciprocity. Just leave people alone to live their own lives and their own way and they will naturally sort themselves out. State interference only causes resentment and hinders the innovation and healthy competition that can make life better for everyone. I may even believe in open borders as an essential freedom and a way to attract appropriately skilled workers and not share concerns with conservatives worried about cultural integrity.
Of course, few people fit into distinct categories of political philosophy and more liberals on the right would take 25/50/75% of those values in the liberal conservative box and 25/50/75% of those in the classical liberal one rather than go "all in" with one stance.
I think it's useful to be able to think "In this area, my values are quite liberal conservative, but in this, I lean more libertarian." I am quite economically left (progressive taxes, not socialist, some regulation on markets to prevent exploitation of workers), but when it comes to meritocracy, I have much in common with the classical liberals and when it comes to love of country, history and culture, I find common ground with liberal conservatives. I think getting too bogged down in labels and trying to fit one is probably counterproductive. (Not suggesting you are advocating doing so) Most people won't fit neatly into a box, especially liberals who are bad at collectivism. We find common ground in opposing authoritarianism wherever it might arise.
This is an extremely valuable discussion. Thank you for providing such clear, well-thought-through definitions. I will work on articulating what I believe; at first glance, it stretches across all labels mentioned.
I agree that getting bogged down in labels is counterproductive; I like the idea of saying, "I'm part A in this area and part B in another area," - but it's still necessary to define well what A and B mean. Otherwise, the discussion becomes confusing or meaningless.
There’s a lot of crossover between what you just said, and the SDP’s position. As I’m sure you’re aware!
Laissez-faire seems to be compatible with this bullet point from Helen's list:
"The belief that all people come into the world with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and this can only justifiably be removed from any individual due to their own demonstrable harmful actions."
It's compatible, yes, but it's not implied by it. Many liberals are social democrats, at the very least.
Liberalism is failing because it involves letting people be free to do what they want - but not free enough to fully suffer the consequences of that. SOCIETY ends up providing a safety net at great expense to pay for all the consequences of everyone’s choices & mistakes. & which we increasingly can’t afford, while many of these choices have a continuous long term (negative) impact on society itself.
Well, I don’t think liberalism does that. It only protects people from illiberal consequences. E.g., it would protect people from being arrested for saying something racist on Facebook or fired for having gender critical views, but if some people stop wanting to be your friend because of views you’ve expressed, you have to deal with that.
A principle of liberalism is that people get to make their own choices but also deal with the consequences of that. No nanny state. If you’re an adult and you want to smoke, for example, you should be able to but if you get lung cancer, that’s on you. If you want to have unprotected sex and end up having loads of kids, you are ultimately responsible for providing for them. Etc.
Who is paying for the lung cancer treatment? And all those kids out of wedlock - every single one of them is covered by Medicaid where I’m at, mom gets housing partially if not completely paid for, mom gets food stamps, etc. People literally get rescued from their bad decisions with all kinds of subsidies.
This was awesome to read. I will read this more than once lol.
I don’t make the argument 1) or 2) because like you I’ve also heard a lot of these sorts of horror stories. My dad spent his younger years in a French orphanage run by nuns, they used to hang him out of windows. My mom grew up in the Midwest in a time when women were seen as second class to men. I’ve also read historical & non fiction where you can read lots of stories like that. I don’t go so far as to advocating for a solution, because I fear there is no clean easy solution, and there is a ton of trade offs for any strategy you’d think would be the right one. I’m just consistently irritated by the direction that society is moving in so I b-tch & complain lol. But it’s insanely arrogant to try to present solutions - unless you’re just throwing stuff out there for fun/simply to ponder the idea - because A) I’m not all knowing and have limited information about the entirety of society & all it’s dynamics, B) I don’t have enough expertise in running anything let alone managing a society of millions, C) the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I also don’t trust people to police each other at all - humans seem to enjoy having excuses to be aggressive at & bully each other, they seem to like to have an ‘other’ to act out pent up cruelty & aggression on. A socially acceptable form of abusing people. You would basically need a society of high character (fair, caring, thoughtful, kind rational, good judgment, mentally & emotionally stable) people to have that work, & that’s NEVER going to happen lol.
I think that maybe a missing element here in your looking to the past as a guide - life was rougher, people were harsher & harder, there was a higher tolerance for cruelty and aggression - because there was way more on average. We are far more affluent now than people were then. Will we revert back to & tolerate the level of harshness & aggression & violence? Who knows. I think a lot of that sounds like it cross relates the general poverty of the era.
There are certain attitudes & cultural values that in theory & in best case practice I prefer from ‘the good old days’, but I’m VERY aware that humans are imperfect, often irresponsible, many are self & self serving, etc.
Please stop pretending that people just get to live their liberal lifestyle & no one is there being forced to pay for it on the backend lol.
I'm not pretending this. I have made no such claim at all. Nor am I claiming that we live in a liberal society. I am seeking to make society more liberal.
There is no liberal lifestyle. Liberalism is the system that allows people to choose their own lifestyle. I am a liberal who chose to live what could be considered quite a conservative lifestyle, but I support other people's right not to. What we do when people's choices have negative effects on them varies according to other values we have. The 'pure liberal' approach would be laissez-faire libertarianism - just let them sort out their own solutions and don't make it the tax-payers problem. Other liberal stances diverge from this. Liberal conservatives would be likely to advocate for an increase in family values and personal responsibility. Liberal leftists would be more about sex education and reproductive freedom and a strong social welfare net.
I am a liberal leftist so you will probably disagree with me quite strongly, but it won't be my liberalism you'll be disagreeing with but my leftism. You may believe my support for our nationalised healthcare system and advocacy for more social housing and stronger programmes to help people through hard times and get them into productive work to encourage state dependency and fail to get people to take enough responsibility for their own lives. I would disagree that my position goes to those extremes but see that some can do and the merits of arguments that this prevents people from being able to rise on their merits. Balancing ensuring that people who fall on hard times, (especially children who have no autonomy in the matter) have shelter and food and opportunities to get back on their feet with ensuring that we do not encourage state dependency and disincentivise self-sufficiency is a thorny problem that we will probably always be arguing about.
I set out my case here: https://areomagazine.com/2018/08/23/no-we-are-not-right-wing-we-are-liberal-lefties-and-we-are-many/
But if you disagree with my support of social welfare programmes, you are definitely disagreeing with my leftism and not my liberalism. Liberalism on the economic axis is about small government, low taxes and self-sufficiency.
Also thank you for taking time to write thoughtful responses & explanations
How does liberalism - choosing of one’s own lifestyle - avoid potentially encouraging societal decay? Many old prejudices and enforcement of lifestyles were in place for practical reasons (not all obviously) - to try to avoid the negative outcomes as well as avoid the lifestyles themselves from becoming normalized - because they are so obviously a direct cause of bad outcomes? Do you think we can reach a tipping point where having over liberal values results in societal dysfunction that is very difficult to cleanup/manage/afford?
It doesn't, in principle, but it does in practice. I'm assuming that we both think Western Liberal Democracies are better places to live in than authoritarian states and theocracies so if that is not the case, we will reach an impasse. But assuming we would both rather live here than, say, Iran, what is it that makes the difference? It's liberalism.
I want to preserve what is distinct about Western Civilisation and my cultural heritage and philosophical traditions and ensure they DON'T collapse back into obscure, authoritarian backwaters which enforce morality on people either by state sanctioned Morality Police or socially contrived ones (e.g., Cancel Culture). That's why I have worked so hard to oppose the woke. They try to impose one moral code on everyone for the good of society and I suspect it is not a regime that either of us want to live under. You might think a different kind of Cancel Culture and coercion would be better and stop society from decaying, but that, to me, would be just be a continuation of the rot infecting liberal democracies. I don't want to be cancelled for not affirming ANYONE else's beliefs or living according to their rules and I don't want you to be either.
I anticipate two objections you might make to this framing of the issue and if you would not, somebody else would, so allow me to address them here.
1) I am not talking about setting up something like the Iranian Morality Police, but going back to expectations before the sexual revolution. That was better.
I don't think it was. I can speak most to my own country, England, but in that time, things were fairly dire. About 100 years ago, my great-grandmother got dumped in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers by the man she was a maid for and by whom she had 'got herself pregnant." She had to return to work as soon as she was able to survive so she had to leave her baby there. My grandfather had a visceral fear of nuns to his dying day. They'd beat down teenage boys morning erections with a ruler.
My grandmother on the other side was stuck living with a man who beat her mercilessly because there was no divorce and leaving your husband was so shameful and she also had nowhere to go. Women taking 'happy pills' was at an all-time high in the 50s. She died of an unexplained brain hemorrhage at 40.
My uncle was arrested and beaten for being gay in the 50s when a private club bothering nobody was raided and was then persecuted by the police until he fled the country.
My mother, escaping her abusive father, arrived in London in 1960, but because the expectation was that men were the main breadwinner, women were not allowed entry to well-paying jobs or to take out mortgages in their own name and they were not paid enough to live on. In desperation to stop sharing a grubby flat with three other girls, she married a man who was a bastard and just stepped over her and went to the pub when she was miscarrying, but there was no 'no fault' divorce then and he didn't actually beat her or cheat on her so she was stuck until he agreed to divorce and then they had to stage an affair and get a private detective to film it.
This is all pretty dire, but I don't know how we'd avoid decaying back in that direction if we re-instated those old prejudices and enforcement of lifestyles. Maybe people who are heterosexual and women who don't want to have independence and find good husbands could be happy, but we need to create a society in which those who aren't fortunate enough to fit the norm or find a good partner don't end up in any of those situations.
2) I'm not suggesting anything that dramatic. I don't want to criminalise homosexuality or divorce/breaking up of families or sex outside marriage. I just want to strongly disapprove of them on a societal level.
Well, if this is just making arguments for this while defending people's rights to do it anyway, that's fine. You can make ethical arguments for the preferability of socially conservative lifestyles and avoidance of sex outside marriage and hope to influence culture. (In the UK, this is happening anyway. Teen pregnancy and unwanted pregnancy hit a peak in the 80s and has been dropping ever since. Gen Z have less casual sex than both Millennials and Gen X to the point where we're getting a bit worried about them. Gen X had the most.)
If you want to create a Cancel Culture of shaming anybody who doesn't have socially conservative beliefs and firing them and policing their speech and bodies, I'd have to oppose this. You could only succeed if enough people agreed with you, though, and they had institutional power and then, again, I don't see how you'd avoid the decay into something like an Iranian Morality Police state. And while you might hope your own form of authoritarianism will remain in power, it probably won't and you'll end up having to live under some other factions moral policing of your beliefs and actions (possibly the woke) and then you'll have contributed to breaking down the liberal protections that could have helped you.
There is no clear-cut way to stop any society collapsing or becoming dysfunctional because humans are messy and disagreeable and don't like being told what to do. No system will ever change that about humans. Liberalism is just the one that tries to manage it in the least coercive way possible and enable people to live and let live so that we don't have the bloodshed that we see in earlier times before liberal democracies and in countries that are not liberal democracies. It's not a perfect system but this is because we are not a perfect species.
Maybe we should take away some of the enabling & liberalism would be a bit more balanced
Enabling of what? I’m not sure what that means because I don’t know what your position is. It could refer to not enabling people to express prejudiced views by tightening hate speech laws or not enabling people to openly be gay by being intolerant of that. (I don’t suspect you mean either of those things)
I’m saying we do the ‘live and let live’ part where we push this tolerance for letting people conduct themselves how they want to conduct themselves. But when there are serious ramifications for how people conduct themselves, because they’re not conducting themselves in a way that leads to positive outcomes for themselves/community/society - they get bailed out & don’t actually experience the full brunt of the consequences of their actions. We fund sustaining people who have made bad choices & who end up in bad situations.
I like Theodore Dalrymple & also Heather Macdonald for their opinions on this sort of thing