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Thread: Why Liberalism Failed… and Can’t Be Fixed

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    Why Liberalism Failed… and Can’t Be Fixed

    Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen is reviewed in the following article.

    Keep in mind he means something broader than contemporary liberal and would include classical liberalism in his critique.

    As you read this consider it as explanation for how a decaying society might well account for mass shootings and urban violence.


    Why Liberalism Failed… and Can’t Be Fixed

    ...Perhaps the best way to explain what has happened to liberalism is to look at its internal contradictions. They also help explain why its failure is only happening now.

    Dr. Deneen cites two of these contradictions: the “achieving of complete and supreme freedom,” and the liberation of an autonomous individual from “places, relationships, memberships and even identities.” He shows how radical autonomy and supreme freedom undermine the unifying principles around which society might gather.

    As people self-identify as almost anything, personal autonomy is making life impossible in society. Supreme freedom is erasing the social capital balance amassed over centuries. The result is an accelerated deterioration of society that is reaching its apex in the present state of disillusionment and fragmentation.

    That’s why liberalism now has problems. It really has wildly succeeded beyond all expectations.

    ...However, his description of liberalism as an “anticulture” deserves special mention since it explains so well today’s postmodern wasteland.

    “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that the natural condition of man is defined above all by the absence of culture.” Liberalism targeted generational customs, practices, and rituals set in time and place that traditionally make up a culture. The organic community is replaced with a collection of autonomous individuals all pursuing their own interests. They are united by nothing save a “uniform and homogenized governance of promulgated law.”

    The result is an unanchored, unpoetic society, which is everywhere and nowhere, living in the eternal present. Dr. Deneen calls this “ubiquitous and uniform anticulture” a crowning achievement, once again the product of liberalism’s success—not its failure.

    Now to salvage some of classical liberalism from its contemporary (postmodern?) branch, a quote from an essay, Edmund Burke & the French Revolutionaries: "The French Revolutionaries, Burke rightly understood, sought not just the overturning of the old, but, critically, they also desired the destruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Only by lying about the nature of the human person could they accomplish their goals. In fighting evil (or, at least as they claimed), they not only absorbed and perpetuated evil, but they mocked the good."
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Mister D (03-10-2018),Rationalist (11-03-2019)

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    Too deep for me Chris ill let Dr Who have at ya
    LETS GO BRANDON
    F Joe Biden

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    Quote Originally Posted by Common View Post
    Too deep for me Chris ill let Dr Who have at ya
    It, to me, says the liberal agenda has in its success failed in destroying society, the society that once bound us together so we took care of each other.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Common View Post
    Too deep for me Chris ill let Dr Who have at ya
    It's not too often you see this sort of critique in the US. I was actually looking to get this.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    A review of a review of Deneen's book in comparison to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, ‘Everybody Knows That Something Is Coming’

    ...Andrew Sullivan essay contrasting Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s book argues that we’ve never had it so good. Violence is way down, historically speaking, and people are healthier and better fed than ever before. Pinker’s general idea is that humanity is making real progress, and that people should ignore the doomsayers.

    Sullivan writes:

    At the same time, I was finally reading another new book, Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen. If you really want a point of view that is disturbingly persuasive about the modern predicament and yet usually absent from any discussion in the mainstream media, I cannot recommend it highly enough. A short polemic against our modern liberal world, it too is relentless. By “liberal,” I don’t mean left-liberal politics; I mean (and Deneen means) the post-Machiavelli project to liberate the individual from religious authority and the focus of politics on individual rights and the betterment of humankind’s material conditions. Deneen doesn’t deny any of the progress Pinker describes, or quibble at the triumph of the liberal order. It is, by and large, indisputable. He does something more interesting: He argues that liberalism has failed precisely because it has succeeded.

    More:

    Which is to say that both Pinker and Deneen are right, but Deneen is deeper. Deneen sees paradox in human life, tragedy even; he respects the wisdom of the aeons that Pinker is simply relieved we have left behind; and he has a perspective that Pinker — despite his vast erudition and intelligence — doesn’t seem to grasp. Pinker, for example, has no way to understand our current collective rage — why aren’t we all ecstatic about such huge and continuing “progress”? — unless he blames our gloom and grief and discontent on … bad media. It’s all the journalists’ and intellectuals’ fault for persuading people they’re sad when, in fact, they’re super-happy! And he has a faltering grasp of politics, the cycle of regimes, the vicissitudes of history, the decadence of democracies, or the appeal of tyrants. His view of history is so relentlessly Whiggish it’s almost a self-parody. His understanding of the Enlightenment, as David Bell notes, surgically removes its most popular representative, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw from the very beginning the paradoxes of liberty and reason, and, for that matter, Edmond Burke, who instantly realized the terrifying emptiness of modernity, and the furies it might unleash upon us.

    But, as Deneen understands, we are where we are. There is no going back. For our civilization, God is dead. Meaning is meaningless outside the satisfaction of our material wants and can become, at its very best, merely a form of awe at meaninglessness. We have no common concept of human flourishing apart from materialism, and therefore we stand alone. Maybe we will muddle through this way indefinitely, and I sure hope we do, numbed or placated by continuous material improvement. But it is perfectly possible that this strange diversion in human history — a few centuries at most, compared with 200 millennia — is a massive error that will at some point be mercilessly corrected; that our planet, on present trends, will become close to uninhabitable for most of its creatures thanks to the reason and materialism Pinker celebrates; that our technology will render us unnecessary for the tasks our species has always defined itself by; and that our era of remarkable peace could end with one catastrophic event, as it did in 1914. We have, after all, imperfectly controlled weapons of mass destruction, and humans have never invented a weapon we haven’t used (including nukes, of course). It is also true that humans have never lived before without a faith or cult or set of practices designed to reconcile us to death and suffering.

    Why should this continue forever? Pace Pinker, this is a question that remains terrifyingly open. For Pinker, every sharply upward graph continues indefinitely upward. But I have never seen such an astonishingly rapid ascent without an equally sudden decline, a return to the mean. Maybe I’m just a doomsayer. But it takes a remarkably sturdy set of blinkers to think it’s an impossibility.

    ...


    So I ordered Deneen’s book.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Looks good. I will read tomorrow. For now all I'll say is that some contemporary scientists have a tendency to embarrass themselves when they move outside their specific field.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    Conservatism and Its Discontents

    What I am driving at is articulated well in Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, which argues that liberal individualism is nihilistic — insofar as it possesses no coherent, metaphysically grounded vision of the good — and thus devolves over time into its opposite. “Having shorn people’s ties to the vast web of intermediating institutions that sustained them,” Deneen observes, drawing on Tocqueville, “the expansion of individualism deprived them of recourse to those traditional places of support and sustenance. The more individuated the polity, the more likely that a mass of individuals would inevitably turn to the state in times of need.” In other words, liberal individualism “frees” people directly into the encompassing arms of the state.

    It’s important to remember that liberalism and communism are both products of Enlightenment thought and both embrace the same laughably false anthropology. The architects of liberalism, Deneen explains, “rejected the classical and Christian understanding of human beings as fundamentally relational creatures—‘social and political animals’ — and proposed that liberty, rights, and justice could best be achieved by radically redefining human nature.” This redefinition understands people to be individuals fundamentally “separate from nature and one another.” This claim, rooted in both Locke and Hobbes, is unavoidably metaphysical. The human, according to liberalism, is that being which determines for itself what is reality.

    That different persons determine that reality differently necessitates the existence of a powerful force to coerce order. Writes Deneen:
    The expansion of liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle in which state expansion secures the end of individual fragmentation, in turn requiring further state expansion to control a society without shared norms, practices or beliefs. Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing (such as schools, medicine, and charity), and hollowing any deeply held sense of shared future or fate among the citizenry.
    This, according to Deneen, is why liberalism’s success is also its failure.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    What a coincidence. I just strated reading this on Thursday.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen is reviewed in the following article.

    Keep in mind he means something broader than contemporary liberal and would include classical liberalism in his critique.

    As you read this consider it as explanation for how a decaying society might well account for mass shootings and urban violence.


    Why Liberalism Failed… and Can’t Be Fixed




    Now to salvage some of classical liberalism from its contemporary (postmodern?) branch, a quote from an essay, Edmund Burke & the French Revolutionaries: "The French Revolutionaries, Burke rightly understood, sought not just the overturning of the old, but, critically, they also desired the destruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Only by lying about the nature of the human person could they accomplish their goals. In fighting evil (or, at least as they claimed), they not only absorbed and perpetuated evil, but they mocked the good."
    Let me guess...another Libertarian (what are there, four left nationwide?) telling us that the progressive butt whupping in the House last year signifies the end of liberals?

    lol...

    Here's some better prediction and facts.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...libertarianism

    https://www.thespectrum.com/story/op...tics/73795926/

    There's a bunch more out there, but I'm sure you know all about them.

    Coupla questions:

    Can you reply to this?

    https://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/the...t_cant_answer/

    Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
    How crazy alt righties got pwnd by a conervative web site:
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/berlins.../#3b7ecb78e9b5
    il·lib·er·al
    i(l)ˈlib(ə)rəladjective1.opposed to liberal principles; restricting freedom of thought or behavior
    "illiberal and anti-democratic policies
    • synonyms: intolerant, narrow-minded, unenlightened, conservative, reactionary;


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    I forgot my second question...

    Who's the Libertarian candidate for 2020, Chris?
    How crazy alt righties got pwnd by a conervative web site:
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/berlins.../#3b7ecb78e9b5
    il·lib·er·al
    i(l)ˈlib(ə)rəladjective1.opposed to liberal principles; restricting freedom of thought or behavior
    "illiberal and anti-democratic policies
    • synonyms: intolerant, narrow-minded, unenlightened, conservative, reactionary;


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