If the Democrats want to fight for "democracy" in the US, they first have to recognize and then exorcise their own illiberal demons, most particularly using the vast federal bureaucracy to force racialist and transgenderist ideologies down all our throats.
For example, it is essentially impossible to get a research grant from the National Science Foundation today without writing a paean to how the research will advance the racialist agenda.
This is illiberal, this is wrong, and it is why I now vote straight Republican, after a half century of voting exclusively for Democrats.
It's all down to flavors of illiberalism now, and I have picked my poison.
If the Democrats want to renounce their poison, I will gladly return to the fold. But I'm not holding my breath.
You make Mark's point perfectly. It's possible to acknowledge that trans people exist without believing that your average 7 year old should have to decide on their gender or your average 17 year old girl should have to compete against girls who have penises in track.
if you really believe that questioning these things "denies that trans people exist", then you are a living example of illiberalism.
Children can no more “consent” to have their healthy breasts and genitalia removed than they can “consent” to have sex with an adult. It is monstrous to believe otherwise and those who do clearly fit this description and will ultimately be held to account for their actions.
> For example, it is essentially impossible to get a research grant from the National Science Foundation today without writing a paean to how the research will advance the racialist agenda.
It shouldn't matter your view on trans and racial issues (by the way, saying "trans people and racism are real" doesn't mean you automatically win the argument) - diversity statements are essentially the same as the Soviet Union forcing all researchers to write about how their research will advance the cause of Communism, or Oxford and Cambridge requiring all professors to profess Anglican beliefs.
What is fascist illiberalism is public elementary and high schools (agents of the state) engaging in unauthorized and incompetent psychotherapy when they "socially transition" kids without parents knowledge. This is done with full support of the Democrats.
What is fascist illiberalism is the obliteration of women's sex-based rights when men are allowed to declare themselves to be women and enter any women's space place event or compettion at will, which would be written into federal law by the Equality Act, and is supported by ALL Democrats in Congress.
Do you seriously think this is a bigger threat to women's rights than the possibility of a national abortion ban? If so I don't think I can take you seriously.
I'm always skeptical of the extent to which the "illiberal leftism" I keep reading about actually exists, given that I've studied and worked in one of the bluest cities in the country for nearly a decade and have yet to meet anyone in real life who takes any DE&I pandering seriously. But even assuming it's exactly as you say... still seems like a weird thing to prioritize given all the other issues this post covers, issues that you're knowingly putting yourself on the wrong side of.
But hey, when I'm pledging allegiance to the CCP in front of my dedicated Security Monitor twenty years from now because we lost the ability to figure out who our commander-in-chief was, I'll rest easy knowing the NSF got what was coming to them.
In fact, the threat today is felt most keenly by those who actually lived under communist rule, such as USC Chemistry Professor Anna Krylov: "The Peril of Politicizing Science" https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475#
Rod Dreher's Live Not By Lies is nothing but interviews with Soviet dissidents who see echoes of Soviet ideas in the West today.
If you're not up for a whole book, there was There was an Eastern European mom on PITT that wrote about the similarities she feels (https://pitt.substack.com/p/eastern-european-mom) wrt trans ideology in schools. It's about 2/3rds of the way down the article.
Yes, the crime against humanity of sterilizing and mutilating children can and must be stopped. This horrific practice has now been effectively banned in all countries that have done systematic reviews of the piss-poor evidence that it ever did any good: UK, Finland, Sweden, and (on the path to that) Norway.
Happily red states in the US are passing similar laws now, often model legislation written by lawyers at Women's Declaration International USA, so at least some kids in the US will be protected.
It is for this reason that I, after a half century of voting for only Democrats, now vote exclusively for Republicans.
9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state in the US isn't mentioned as a reason for the slow degradation of democratic norms in the US - but it's a major cause.
You forgot to mention the USA in flames with Democratic politicians encouraging defunding the police and basically encouraging anarchy. Whole cities were even affected by mob rule.
It’s not just Republicans. Democrats support efforts to force people to use nonsense pronouns which ignore the biological reality that no one can change their sex. In addition, today many people are being forced to sign ridiculous diversity statements to get jobs, grants or admission to college. Try to be fair in your condemnations.
Given that the progressives currently control nearly every major cultural. media, university, NGO, and K-12 institution in the Western world, the illiberalism I'm most worried about is that coming from the Left.
I think it's hard to convey to Zoomers and some young Millennials the pure confidence that the US had in itself and its ideals between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 and how much more widely respected the country was around the world. What 9/11 showed Americans - and more than anyone else elite Americans in finance, government, and media - that they weren't immune from the political violence that happened overseas. Instead of confronting this reality the country lost it's goddamn mind for most of a decade.
Thinking back to Thomas Friedman's take that the US needed to throw some small country (like Iraq) against the wall to keep the world in order. Guys like him took the attacks on the Twin Towers personally.
Yup. One of the great things about being GenX is that after being raised with existential dread about nuclear war with the Soviets, the USSR collapsed right as I became an adult. Then everything was great - the 90s had a booming economy, no enemy on the horizon, people writing books about "the end of history" etc...
And then everyone lost their damn minds about 9/11. :(
(And I say that as a New Yorker - I was on the E train in Manhattan that day. I saw some terrible stuff firsthand. But I still don't understand how people drew the line from there to Iraq...)
Well - the mid to late 90s had a booming economy. My aunts and uncles are all Gen Xers and they all had some trouble getting their footing in the early half of the decade. That said, one uncle in particular has a ton of amazingly entertaining stories about living in pre-gentrification grunge era Seattle (basically the milieu in Hate by Peter Bagge, if you've ever read it).
As a Zoomer, thank you for this comment! I've only ever known the afraid, pugilistic, withdrawing US. I think you succinctly summarized the mood shift that I and my generation have only seen the results of.
I'm worried that a lot of the things mentioned in other threads are more of your "the country lost its goddamn mind" and Noah's "fear"--both the turn toward authoritarianism and the various moral/mental purity tests of the last few years. "Democracy as an idea" can save us, I think--but as a lot of the blogs I read have mentioned recently, children are being coddled, told to fear by people on all sides, and told to reach for authority at the first hint of trouble. I don't know all that many younger Zoomers who have the mental fortitude to cling to the Idea of Democracy and its main principle of *compromise,* and that worries me. I think it's in part because we didn't see anything pre-9/11, and don't know that being proud of the great American Experiment is possible.
The 90s were far from perfect. Crime in cities was sky-high (the pandemic bump doesn't come close to equaling it), bullying and homophobia were present in youth culture in a way that they are not at all today, AIDS was only just becoming not a death sentence, etc. But - after 9/11 (and to a lesser extent, Columbine, especially for teenagers and young people) by the runup to the Iraq invasion there was a national sense that the freedoms enjoyed by Americans pre-2001 were just too risky to retain, and to a great extent, they have been lost. After what this country went through with the coronavirus Winter 2020-2021 it's pretty difficult to remember that roughly 3000 excess deaths could have made such a difference but before 2001 that it was inconceivable that something like the suicide missions on the WTC, Pentagon, and Flight 93 could ever happen on American soil.
(Especially young people. I was born in '89 and even growing up there were so many more spaces for teenagers to exist in public. The idea of a bunch of 15 year olds being banned from being unchaperoned in a mall is just so galling to me I don't even know.)
The Great Recession and surveillance capitalism/housing crisis that followed just made everything worse. It doesn't and didn't have to be like this. If we work for a better future, it won't be like this in the future. I think the keys to the future success of "democracy as an idea" are a combo of YIMBYism (I have totally bought into the Housing Theory of Everything) and mass reunionization.
I mean sure the 90s weren't perfect, but for most of those problems the trendlines were moving in the right direction throughout the decade. And as we've seen with people stressed about "high crime" (HAH!) lately, the direction can influence the mood more than the absolute level.
I've seen this rise in illiberalism. I'm 68. Nixon, Buckley, Goldwater were overt and insidious. Apparently, the Halo rises on the good Jimmy Carter, and slips further off Saint Reagan.
A Four-Decade Secret: The Untold Story of Sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s Re-election
Nixon created a lot of disgusting people that were dirty, helping Reagan and Bushies. Like Nixon interfering with the Vietnam peace talks, Ronnie was interfering with Iran.
The Conservatives, from which I retired about 89-90, began a Unilateral hate amd control campaign against the "others". Limbaugh ruined millions and created what I call "Exceptionalism without accomplishment", the entitled angry white man.
Clinton Hate was next. Ralph Reed wanted Christian Sharia Law. Wayne Lapierre turned 2A into a weapon against all who wanted gun control. Newt made political philosophy personal attacks. Conservatives, who once supported life saving legislation for Clean Air, Clean Water,n Fuel Economy and Gun Control took a mew direction under the Kochs. Bork, McConnell, Scalia, Leo Leonard created the fraudulent "Originalism" then hypocrisy set in and abandoned it in Dobbs.
A question is will Climate change raise coastal seas faster than illiberalism will mangle democracies?
Despite your long chronicle of supposed right-wing illiberalism, today we live in a country where:
half the states allow a women to rip the baby out of her womb at 38 weeks for any reason,
elementary age children read comic books about blow jobs in their school libraries,
people lose their jobs for saying that black racists exist,
academics are forced to sign political loyalty oaths (DEI statements) as a condition of hiring...
You were worried about Ralph Reed and the imagined bogeyman of right-wing theocracy, that your own people created a left-wing theocracy right under your nose and you still haven't noticed.
Christian Nationalism is Christian Sharia law. Orthodoxies by intrinsic definition of exclusion, are bigoted. Texas Governor Abbott and AG Paxton are misogynist control freaks.
What's not clear.
I don't believe in religion. None. For the last half century.
Everyone has a religion. Yours is militant atheism. You are no less "orthodox" in that belief than a devout Muslim, Buddhist, or Christian. And you are no more willing to compromise with something you view as "heresy" than they are.
Why are you spitting total horseshit. You are as arrogant as you are ignorant, as well as pretty slimy. Do you have anything intelligent or coherent to talk about in a civil manner?
First, I think this is a great time for this post. I also think the post does a good job of highlighting some of the issues liberal ideals face globally and in identifying failures in how the US responded to the position it found itself in at the end of Cold War.
However, as a person who lived through that time, I think both the post and in particular the introduction does a massive injustice to what the US accomplished leading up to the 1990s.
First, there were two world wars, both of which the US was slow to enter due to isolationist tendencies. This led to two failings. First, the failure to play a more central role in the resolutions of the first war set the stage for the second world war. Second, the delay and prevarication prior to entering the second war caused incredible and potentially unnecessary suffering.
That said, considering how the first two wars went, the US was able to manage a cold war against a totalitarian foe, and avoid...wait for it....a third world war. Whatever other failures, and there are many, the US has, when it counted the country was able to hold the line for freedom (however imperfect that line is), roll back totalitarianism, and set up a world order that is much closer to a liberal, rule bound structure than it found. That is more than any of the other world powers of that period could accomplish and something people tend to gloss over...like avoiding a Third World War was a forgone conclusion. When the real probably of such a catastrophe was probably something like 60% or possibly greater.
That is my first issue, and it transcends this post. It is basically cool or seen as somehow "impartial" to blast the US for its failure in managing the great peace that it was most responsible for creating. Again, I point to the first two world wars as evidence that managing to avoid a third was exceptional.
The other consideration that I think this article misses is that both sides of the political spectrum are flirting with fascism. I live in Portland and was in a building set on fire by protestors. I observed a number of civilian, political buildings set on fire, I used to belong to the police union. It is private entity, owned by its members, and was set on fire so many times that it had to be moved out of the city. Literally, the union office for the officers working in Portland could not be in the city because the city was letting it be set on fire repeatedly and the union was worried neighbors might get hurt.
I was also right down I-5 from a literal insurrection. People freak out about January 6 (rightly so) but forget that armed individuals were allowed to take over a large section of Seattle, armed and using the threat of force to keep police out and set up a parallel government that imposed its own kind of marital law on American citizens. Not all the people living the CHOP wanted to have anarchists run their local government and had an expectation that their civil rights would be respected. While I probably lean left (or at least that's what my police friends say). But I was much more left leaning before I realized how respect for the rule of law seems to only exist when one party is accusing the other of lacking it. Apparently, it is ok to take over parts of major metropolitan cities using firearms, I guess when it is done in alleged pursuit of racial justice that is somehow not a violation of the rule of law. Just like barricading police buildings and lighting them on fire is non-violent, or burning other people's political associations is anti-fascist.
Unfortunately, at that time, we all seemed collectively loose our minds and think that it was OK to set up parallel governments, keeping out the legitimate authorities through the threat of use of force.
Guest what...if one political side starts doing that, and it is not stopped by its own party, then the other side will eventually one up them. That is exactly what we saw January 6th. "Anti-Fascists" were allowed to operate without any rule of law for months, because they felt justice dictated it. In response, proto-fascists took over the capital and interfered with a national election. Both groups seem very fascist to me and sometimes it's like we are reliving the Weimar Republic but even independents seem to want to lean one way or the other....
I am not saying that we should not be holding the January 6 protestors accountable but have noticed that only one insurrection seems to be talked about. I have also noticed that very few left leaning people are willing to acknowledge the fascist tendencies their more extreme compatriots seem to have embraced.
This sort of comprehension of reality is rare today. Too many people want reality filtered through their ideology. Rare is the person who allows reality to shape their political views instead of the other way around.
You are worried about a fear-driven rise in illiberalism and can't so much as mention the most fear-driven illiberal thing to happen in our lifetime, except for a passing reference to the "successful vaccination campaign?" It makes it so hard to take the rest of it seriously, when someone ignores the elephant in the room. Small detail, those three years in a row where our Experts and Authorities all decided to copy China, or to loudly envy them, to the extent our annoying liberal institutions prevented us from fully copying them.
India is becoming increasingly intolerant and illiberal. The prime minister has been terrible for minorities but has a 70% approval rating. His groomed successor bulldozes the houses of people who protest his state's government. India is so dependent on Russian arms and munitions that it cannot even protest the invasion of Ukraine. India is in no position to fight the Darkness; it's drawing much too close to it.
I generally respect and am aligned, within reason, with the viewpoints of Mr. Smith. Even when I'm not, I can usually respect the arguments being presented. However, to read only that Bush/Trump 'bad' and Obama/Biden 'saints' absolutely destroys the credibility of this essay. Any objective observer of the last 30 years can see that they are all cut from the same cloth they just use different methods to achieve the same goals.
I think it's unfair to equate right-wing poitics with a slide of democracy, as you seem to be implictly doing. This pretends that there is only one way to run a democracy - which is quite the opposite of what a 'liberal' world view is supposed to mean! For instance, immigration is a complex topic. Even if one recognizes the need for a liberal 'legal' immigration system to fight aging and complement skills, it is hard to naturally extend that to lax policing at the gates that allows millions on unknown / uncontrolled illegal immigrants in. This is exactly the issue that you have referenced in India's Assam as a throwaway comment. Abortion is again a complex topic - whether you agree with it or not, the right-wing believes that the foetus is a life too, with rights. Democracy exists precisely to iron out such complex issues through the voting box and other institutions.
So your sliding scale with DPRK at one end, China close it, the right-wing parties in 'democracies' of India / US after that; and finally the left-wing parties as the pinnacle of democracy is wide off the mark. You need to get off this moral high horse, to have an honest attempt at solving the world's problems
I was one of the few who opposed the war. I lost a lot of "friends" over this, and if anything they later became Trumpanzees without admitting the error of their ways. I was still in the Navy and had to be discrete but we talked about. it. To this day, not one of them will admit that the US made a grave mistake by invading Iraq.
What we did to Iraq is a crime. We owe them at least a Marshall Plan. Of course, that will never happen.
And we owe the men and women we sent over there much more than they are getting. The suicide rate among veterans is a disgrace. But now that we don't have a draft, so few people are related to or even know a veteran, that nobody cares.
Fear of change, of any type, is hardwired into our brain, just as it is for any living entity with a nervous system (some lower forms of life without nervous systems appear to also respond to fear of change but complex to study). As the rate of change of social norms and institutional structures increases there is a natural resistance to change in humans related to that seen in other animal species. Fear dominates with change for good reason. Every big game hunter will tell you that animals understand hunting season and adapt by moving into tough terrain for humans. Fear focusses the mind. This is countered by the foundational postulate of Buddhism: The only constant in reality is change. Fear of change is a dominant force in living species which have survived.
If the Democrats want to fight for "democracy" in the US, they first have to recognize and then exorcise their own illiberal demons, most particularly using the vast federal bureaucracy to force racialist and transgenderist ideologies down all our throats.
For example, it is essentially impossible to get a research grant from the National Science Foundation today without writing a paean to how the research will advance the racialist agenda.
This is illiberal, this is wrong, and it is why I now vote straight Republican, after a half century of voting exclusively for Democrats.
It's all down to flavors of illiberalism now, and I have picked my poison.
If the Democrats want to renounce their poison, I will gladly return to the fold. But I'm not holding my breath.
Both trans people and racism are real. You seem to want everyone to remain unconscious about them both.
The GOP has made it a crime to acknowledge or express those truths. Your comments are in support of fascist illliberalism .
You make Mark's point perfectly. It's possible to acknowledge that trans people exist without believing that your average 7 year old should have to decide on their gender or your average 17 year old girl should have to compete against girls who have penises in track.
if you really believe that questioning these things "denies that trans people exist", then you are a living example of illiberalism.
Children can no more “consent” to have their healthy breasts and genitalia removed than they can “consent” to have sex with an adult. It is monstrous to believe otherwise and those who do clearly fit this description and will ultimately be held to account for their actions.
> For example, it is essentially impossible to get a research grant from the National Science Foundation today without writing a paean to how the research will advance the racialist agenda.
It shouldn't matter your view on trans and racial issues (by the way, saying "trans people and racism are real" doesn't mean you automatically win the argument) - diversity statements are essentially the same as the Soviet Union forcing all researchers to write about how their research will advance the cause of Communism, or Oxford and Cambridge requiring all professors to profess Anglican beliefs.
What is fascist illiberalism is public elementary and high schools (agents of the state) engaging in unauthorized and incompetent psychotherapy when they "socially transition" kids without parents knowledge. This is done with full support of the Democrats.
What is fascist illiberalism is the obliteration of women's sex-based rights when men are allowed to declare themselves to be women and enter any women's space place event or compettion at will, which would be written into federal law by the Equality Act, and is supported by ALL Democrats in Congress.
https://womensdeclarationusa.com
Do you seriously think this is a bigger threat to women's rights than the possibility of a national abortion ban? If so I don't think I can take you seriously.
Yes, and so do many radical feminists, who are the only ones who actually understand how serious this issue is.
https://womensliberationfront.org/chandler-v-cdcr
Based comment
I'm always skeptical of the extent to which the "illiberal leftism" I keep reading about actually exists, given that I've studied and worked in one of the bluest cities in the country for nearly a decade and have yet to meet anyone in real life who takes any DE&I pandering seriously. But even assuming it's exactly as you say... still seems like a weird thing to prioritize given all the other issues this post covers, issues that you're knowingly putting yourself on the wrong side of.
But hey, when I'm pledging allegiance to the CCP in front of my dedicated Security Monitor twenty years from now because we lost the ability to figure out who our commander-in-chief was, I'll rest easy knowing the NSF got what was coming to them.
In fact, the threat today is felt most keenly by those who actually lived under communist rule, such as USC Chemistry Professor Anna Krylov: "The Peril of Politicizing Science" https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475#
Rod Dreher's Live Not By Lies is nothing but interviews with Soviet dissidents who see echoes of Soviet ideas in the West today.
If you're not up for a whole book, there was There was an Eastern European mom on PITT that wrote about the similarities she feels (https://pitt.substack.com/p/eastern-european-mom) wrt trans ideology in schools. It's about 2/3rds of the way down the article.
Yes, the crime against humanity of sterilizing and mutilating children can and must be stopped. This horrific practice has now been effectively banned in all countries that have done systematic reviews of the piss-poor evidence that it ever did any good: UK, Finland, Sweden, and (on the path to that) Norway.
Happily red states in the US are passing similar laws now, often model legislation written by lawyers at Women's Declaration International USA, so at least some kids in the US will be protected.
It is for this reason that I, after a half century of voting for only Democrats, now vote exclusively for Republicans.
9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state in the US isn't mentioned as a reason for the slow degradation of democratic norms in the US - but it's a major cause.
Well yes and 9/11 led to the Iraqi war or at least to the excuse for it.
One-two punch
Yeah, 9/11 was fairly significant; rather breathtaking omission.
It's Noah's opinion, which he stated, so it's fine. But for me personally, when I think back - that's when things began changing for the worse.
For sure and it was a colossal blunder. No argument there. Not mentioning it weakens your point IMHO.
I thought I was the only one in 2003 wondering how we became the Archetypical Evil Empire in Final Fantasy.
At least Kefka had better quotes than W.
I found your text spectacular. It was really nice to read it. Thank you and congratulations.
You forgot to mention the USA in flames with Democratic politicians encouraging defunding the police and basically encouraging anarchy. Whole cities were even affected by mob rule.
It’s not just Republicans. Democrats support efforts to force people to use nonsense pronouns which ignore the biological reality that no one can change their sex. In addition, today many people are being forced to sign ridiculous diversity statements to get jobs, grants or admission to college. Try to be fair in your condemnations.
Given that the progressives currently control nearly every major cultural. media, university, NGO, and K-12 institution in the Western world, the illiberalism I'm most worried about is that coming from the Left.
I think it's hard to convey to Zoomers and some young Millennials the pure confidence that the US had in itself and its ideals between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 and how much more widely respected the country was around the world. What 9/11 showed Americans - and more than anyone else elite Americans in finance, government, and media - that they weren't immune from the political violence that happened overseas. Instead of confronting this reality the country lost it's goddamn mind for most of a decade.
Thinking back to Thomas Friedman's take that the US needed to throw some small country (like Iraq) against the wall to keep the world in order. Guys like him took the attacks on the Twin Towers personally.
Yup. One of the great things about being GenX is that after being raised with existential dread about nuclear war with the Soviets, the USSR collapsed right as I became an adult. Then everything was great - the 90s had a booming economy, no enemy on the horizon, people writing books about "the end of history" etc...
And then everyone lost their damn minds about 9/11. :(
(And I say that as a New Yorker - I was on the E train in Manhattan that day. I saw some terrible stuff firsthand. But I still don't understand how people drew the line from there to Iraq...)
Well - the mid to late 90s had a booming economy. My aunts and uncles are all Gen Xers and they all had some trouble getting their footing in the early half of the decade. That said, one uncle in particular has a ton of amazingly entertaining stories about living in pre-gentrification grunge era Seattle (basically the milieu in Hate by Peter Bagge, if you've ever read it).
Yeah that's fair. I graduated from an engineering school in the middle of the 90s, which was a damn near perfect way to enter the job market :)
As a Zoomer, thank you for this comment! I've only ever known the afraid, pugilistic, withdrawing US. I think you succinctly summarized the mood shift that I and my generation have only seen the results of.
I'm worried that a lot of the things mentioned in other threads are more of your "the country lost its goddamn mind" and Noah's "fear"--both the turn toward authoritarianism and the various moral/mental purity tests of the last few years. "Democracy as an idea" can save us, I think--but as a lot of the blogs I read have mentioned recently, children are being coddled, told to fear by people on all sides, and told to reach for authority at the first hint of trouble. I don't know all that many younger Zoomers who have the mental fortitude to cling to the Idea of Democracy and its main principle of *compromise,* and that worries me. I think it's in part because we didn't see anything pre-9/11, and don't know that being proud of the great American Experiment is possible.
The 90s were far from perfect. Crime in cities was sky-high (the pandemic bump doesn't come close to equaling it), bullying and homophobia were present in youth culture in a way that they are not at all today, AIDS was only just becoming not a death sentence, etc. But - after 9/11 (and to a lesser extent, Columbine, especially for teenagers and young people) by the runup to the Iraq invasion there was a national sense that the freedoms enjoyed by Americans pre-2001 were just too risky to retain, and to a great extent, they have been lost. After what this country went through with the coronavirus Winter 2020-2021 it's pretty difficult to remember that roughly 3000 excess deaths could have made such a difference but before 2001 that it was inconceivable that something like the suicide missions on the WTC, Pentagon, and Flight 93 could ever happen on American soil.
(Especially young people. I was born in '89 and even growing up there were so many more spaces for teenagers to exist in public. The idea of a bunch of 15 year olds being banned from being unchaperoned in a mall is just so galling to me I don't even know.)
The Great Recession and surveillance capitalism/housing crisis that followed just made everything worse. It doesn't and didn't have to be like this. If we work for a better future, it won't be like this in the future. I think the keys to the future success of "democracy as an idea" are a combo of YIMBYism (I have totally bought into the Housing Theory of Everything) and mass reunionization.
I mean sure the 90s weren't perfect, but for most of those problems the trendlines were moving in the right direction throughout the decade. And as we've seen with people stressed about "high crime" (HAH!) lately, the direction can influence the mood more than the absolute level.
I've seen this rise in illiberalism. I'm 68. Nixon, Buckley, Goldwater were overt and insidious. Apparently, the Halo rises on the good Jimmy Carter, and slips further off Saint Reagan.
A Four-Decade Secret: The Untold Story of Sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s Re-election
https://nyti.ms/3LzfWaR
Nixon created a lot of disgusting people that were dirty, helping Reagan and Bushies. Like Nixon interfering with the Vietnam peace talks, Ronnie was interfering with Iran.
The Conservatives, from which I retired about 89-90, began a Unilateral hate amd control campaign against the "others". Limbaugh ruined millions and created what I call "Exceptionalism without accomplishment", the entitled angry white man.
Clinton Hate was next. Ralph Reed wanted Christian Sharia Law. Wayne Lapierre turned 2A into a weapon against all who wanted gun control. Newt made political philosophy personal attacks. Conservatives, who once supported life saving legislation for Clean Air, Clean Water,n Fuel Economy and Gun Control took a mew direction under the Kochs. Bork, McConnell, Scalia, Leo Leonard created the fraudulent "Originalism" then hypocrisy set in and abandoned it in Dobbs.
A question is will Climate change raise coastal seas faster than illiberalism will mangle democracies?
Despite your long chronicle of supposed right-wing illiberalism, today we live in a country where:
half the states allow a women to rip the baby out of her womb at 38 weeks for any reason,
elementary age children read comic books about blow jobs in their school libraries,
people lose their jobs for saying that black racists exist,
academics are forced to sign political loyalty oaths (DEI statements) as a condition of hiring...
You were worried about Ralph Reed and the imagined bogeyman of right-wing theocracy, that your own people created a left-wing theocracy right under your nose and you still haven't noticed.
I would politely suggest sir, that you read some different fiction, and get off Fox News, AEI, and National Review for your betterment.
It's still a theocracy even if you happen to agree with it's definition of heresy, Doug.
Christian Nationalism is Christian Sharia law. Orthodoxies by intrinsic definition of exclusion, are bigoted. Texas Governor Abbott and AG Paxton are misogynist control freaks.
What's not clear.
I don't believe in religion. None. For the last half century.
Right winger have control cults amongst them.
Everyone has a religion. Yours is militant atheism. You are no less "orthodox" in that belief than a devout Muslim, Buddhist, or Christian. And you are no more willing to compromise with something you view as "heresy" than they are.
Why are you spitting total horseshit. You are as arrogant as you are ignorant, as well as pretty slimy. Do you have anything intelligent or coherent to talk about in a civil manner?
First, I think this is a great time for this post. I also think the post does a good job of highlighting some of the issues liberal ideals face globally and in identifying failures in how the US responded to the position it found itself in at the end of Cold War.
However, as a person who lived through that time, I think both the post and in particular the introduction does a massive injustice to what the US accomplished leading up to the 1990s.
First, there were two world wars, both of which the US was slow to enter due to isolationist tendencies. This led to two failings. First, the failure to play a more central role in the resolutions of the first war set the stage for the second world war. Second, the delay and prevarication prior to entering the second war caused incredible and potentially unnecessary suffering.
That said, considering how the first two wars went, the US was able to manage a cold war against a totalitarian foe, and avoid...wait for it....a third world war. Whatever other failures, and there are many, the US has, when it counted the country was able to hold the line for freedom (however imperfect that line is), roll back totalitarianism, and set up a world order that is much closer to a liberal, rule bound structure than it found. That is more than any of the other world powers of that period could accomplish and something people tend to gloss over...like avoiding a Third World War was a forgone conclusion. When the real probably of such a catastrophe was probably something like 60% or possibly greater.
That is my first issue, and it transcends this post. It is basically cool or seen as somehow "impartial" to blast the US for its failure in managing the great peace that it was most responsible for creating. Again, I point to the first two world wars as evidence that managing to avoid a third was exceptional.
The other consideration that I think this article misses is that both sides of the political spectrum are flirting with fascism. I live in Portland and was in a building set on fire by protestors. I observed a number of civilian, political buildings set on fire, I used to belong to the police union. It is private entity, owned by its members, and was set on fire so many times that it had to be moved out of the city. Literally, the union office for the officers working in Portland could not be in the city because the city was letting it be set on fire repeatedly and the union was worried neighbors might get hurt.
I was also right down I-5 from a literal insurrection. People freak out about January 6 (rightly so) but forget that armed individuals were allowed to take over a large section of Seattle, armed and using the threat of force to keep police out and set up a parallel government that imposed its own kind of marital law on American citizens. Not all the people living the CHOP wanted to have anarchists run their local government and had an expectation that their civil rights would be respected. While I probably lean left (or at least that's what my police friends say). But I was much more left leaning before I realized how respect for the rule of law seems to only exist when one party is accusing the other of lacking it. Apparently, it is ok to take over parts of major metropolitan cities using firearms, I guess when it is done in alleged pursuit of racial justice that is somehow not a violation of the rule of law. Just like barricading police buildings and lighting them on fire is non-violent, or burning other people's political associations is anti-fascist.
Unfortunately, at that time, we all seemed collectively loose our minds and think that it was OK to set up parallel governments, keeping out the legitimate authorities through the threat of use of force.
Guest what...if one political side starts doing that, and it is not stopped by its own party, then the other side will eventually one up them. That is exactly what we saw January 6th. "Anti-Fascists" were allowed to operate without any rule of law for months, because they felt justice dictated it. In response, proto-fascists took over the capital and interfered with a national election. Both groups seem very fascist to me and sometimes it's like we are reliving the Weimar Republic but even independents seem to want to lean one way or the other....
I am not saying that we should not be holding the January 6 protestors accountable but have noticed that only one insurrection seems to be talked about. I have also noticed that very few left leaning people are willing to acknowledge the fascist tendencies their more extreme compatriots seem to have embraced.
This sort of comprehension of reality is rare today. Too many people want reality filtered through their ideology. Rare is the person who allows reality to shape their political views instead of the other way around.
You are worried about a fear-driven rise in illiberalism and can't so much as mention the most fear-driven illiberal thing to happen in our lifetime, except for a passing reference to the "successful vaccination campaign?" It makes it so hard to take the rest of it seriously, when someone ignores the elephant in the room. Small detail, those three years in a row where our Experts and Authorities all decided to copy China, or to loudly envy them, to the extent our annoying liberal institutions prevented us from fully copying them.
India is becoming increasingly intolerant and illiberal. The prime minister has been terrible for minorities but has a 70% approval rating. His groomed successor bulldozes the houses of people who protest his state's government. India is so dependent on Russian arms and munitions that it cannot even protest the invasion of Ukraine. India is in no position to fight the Darkness; it's drawing much too close to it.
Yes, this must be why the Dalits support the BJP. Because Modi is so terrible for them...
What you’re hearing are groups coddled by the INC whining that they don’t get special privileges. Stop caring about them.
I generally respect and am aligned, within reason, with the viewpoints of Mr. Smith. Even when I'm not, I can usually respect the arguments being presented. However, to read only that Bush/Trump 'bad' and Obama/Biden 'saints' absolutely destroys the credibility of this essay. Any objective observer of the last 30 years can see that they are all cut from the same cloth they just use different methods to achieve the same goals.
I think it's unfair to equate right-wing poitics with a slide of democracy, as you seem to be implictly doing. This pretends that there is only one way to run a democracy - which is quite the opposite of what a 'liberal' world view is supposed to mean! For instance, immigration is a complex topic. Even if one recognizes the need for a liberal 'legal' immigration system to fight aging and complement skills, it is hard to naturally extend that to lax policing at the gates that allows millions on unknown / uncontrolled illegal immigrants in. This is exactly the issue that you have referenced in India's Assam as a throwaway comment. Abortion is again a complex topic - whether you agree with it or not, the right-wing believes that the foetus is a life too, with rights. Democracy exists precisely to iron out such complex issues through the voting box and other institutions.
So your sliding scale with DPRK at one end, China close it, the right-wing parties in 'democracies' of India / US after that; and finally the left-wing parties as the pinnacle of democracy is wide off the mark. You need to get off this moral high horse, to have an honest attempt at solving the world's problems
I was one of the few who opposed the war. I lost a lot of "friends" over this, and if anything they later became Trumpanzees without admitting the error of their ways. I was still in the Navy and had to be discrete but we talked about. it. To this day, not one of them will admit that the US made a grave mistake by invading Iraq.
What we did to Iraq is a crime. We owe them at least a Marshall Plan. Of course, that will never happen.
And we owe the men and women we sent over there much more than they are getting. The suicide rate among veterans is a disgrace. But now that we don't have a draft, so few people are related to or even know a veteran, that nobody cares.
Fear of change, of any type, is hardwired into our brain, just as it is for any living entity with a nervous system (some lower forms of life without nervous systems appear to also respond to fear of change but complex to study). As the rate of change of social norms and institutional structures increases there is a natural resistance to change in humans related to that seen in other animal species. Fear dominates with change for good reason. Every big game hunter will tell you that animals understand hunting season and adapt by moving into tough terrain for humans. Fear focusses the mind. This is countered by the foundational postulate of Buddhism: The only constant in reality is change. Fear of change is a dominant force in living species which have survived.