Democracy isn't dying. Liberalism is.
The Week,
by
Damon Linker
Original Article
Posted By: MissMolly,
5/22/2019 5:19:22 AM
Three years after the twin shocks of President Trump's triumph in the Republican primaries and the narrow win for "Leave" in the Brexit referendum, the evidence has never been stronger that the world has entered an era of anti-liberalism.
Later this week, voters across Europe go to the polls to vote in EU parliamentary elections that could deliver a quarter or more of the seats to the continent's right-wing populists and nationalists. Meanwhile, exit polls in India suggest that Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party will win re-election when results are announced on May 23. This follows the surprise victory in Australia of Scott Morrison's conservative coalition,
Reply 1 - Posted by:
LoneVoice 5/22/2019 6:31:26 AM (No. 68628)
FTA: "Over the past several decades, this classical understanding of liberalism has become more complicated and muddled."
Muddled? No, the word liberal has become so twisted that it has become an unrecognizable NewSpeak word. Whatever is dying it isn't liberalism. That died a long time ago. The thing that is dying is trust. We are being turned against each other by people who cynically divided us into oppressed groups and oppressor groups. A lot of people, maybe even a majority, have caught onto the manipulation and are rebelling against it.
5 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
jeffkinnh 5/22/2019 7:06:31 AM (No. 68644)
"Liberalism, by contrast, is a modification of government meant to produce balance, fairness, and wisdom."
This "definition" of liberalism is designed to cast a cloak of desirability over the word. Then the author adds, "It includes the protection of individual freedoms (rights), an independent judiciary, a free press, and the rule of law, including professional civil servants and bureaucrats who are guided by expertise and a sense of public spiritedness.". And "it adds an element of elevation".
The Left typically is given the label of "liberal" but the above definition is mostly "classical" liberalism and the definition is woefully incomplete. "Rights" as handed to us by God and described in LAWS set down BY THE PEOPLE. An "independent judiciary" as defined and constrained by LAWS set down BY THE PEOPLE. A "free press" charged with presenting truth in an unbiased manner as JUDGED BY THE PEOPLE. And "rule of law" defined by LAWS set down BY THE PEOPLE, not by the "public spirited" intentions of civil servants and bureaucrats.
Current "liberals" are trying to "elevate" us through their intentions and the use of amorphous rules whose primary goals seems to be circumvention of laws and judgements long and well defined BY THE PEOPLE. There are clear provisions for WE THE PEOPLE to come to new legal understandings but it won't be done by well intentioned "elevating" bureaucrats.
4 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
udanja99 5/22/2019 7:19:40 AM (No. 68652)
This is why I quit referring to them as liberals a couple of decades ago. They are leftists. Or Marxists.
6 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
MOBeef4u 5/22/2019 7:42:40 AM (No. 68666)
#5 is correct to call these people leftists not liberals. Check out Dennis Prager's explanation of the vey real distinctions between the two.
https://www.dennisprager.com/leftism-is-not-liberalism/
3 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Laotzu 5/22/2019 8:15:08 AM (No. 68688)
What a strange article.
The author notes the rise of nationalism and concludes that classic liberalism is dying. Implicit in that argument is that nationalism is contrary to liberty.
There is no mention of the 600 pound gorilla driving public life since Nixon created the EPA and the Department of Education-- statism, the belief held by all Leftists that only the national government can solve any "problem," and the accompanying propaganda campaign to identify "problems."
Nor is there any mention of the irrational, pseudo-religious, faux-values of Leftists ideology that daily shrink personal liberty to enact their statist agenda -- the faux-value "diversity", the wholly invented Constitutional rights of sexual deviants, the imaginary right to be free of offense, and the systemic inversion of Constitutional anti-discrimination protections into toxic and feckless affirmative action.
No, the author implicitly sees the one thing that will hold nations together -- the belief in a common set of actual principals -- as some lurking danger to personal liberty. That's a problem when the common set of actual principals are the codex of protections for personal liberty. In other words, you can't hate nationalism based on belief in liberty (the common core of all modern era western constitutions), and then bemoan the loss of liberty.
The entire problem appears to be based on the Left's success in usurping small "n" nationalism through the Nazi party, one of many times the Left has adopted language and twisted its meaning 180 degrees in the common Orwellian, propagandistic fashion.
There is nothing wrong with nationalism, because there is nothing wrong with believing in the founding, Constitutional principals of western democracies. Many citizens of the West can now see that something vital is slipping away, and they are reacting. Their reaction has nothing to do with loss of liberty. Quite the contrary.
3 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
doctorfixit 5/22/2019 9:35:38 AM (No. 68743)
Liberalism is a hate crime. Liberalism is a psychopathic ideology based 100% on lies. Like Islam, it is a pseudo-religion death cult
3 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
4freedom 5/22/2019 10:49:39 AM (No. 82054)
The Nazicrats are not going down without a fight, I think it's now 13 states have passed laws to make the electoral college ineffective, this next election with that, abolishing of voter I.D. and voter harvesting will be tough to overcome, nothing more than massive voter fraud.
2 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
stuBdoc 5/22/2019 11:59:13 AM (No. 82106)
I agree with #2, #4, and #7. The author tells us all that we need to understand about Leftism (which he hides behind the label of "liberalism"): the self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, and the belief in "elevated" bureaucrats who, with their superior education and moral authority, have the right to determine how we shall live. That he describes these things and sees them as virtues also shows why he cannot understand why Leftism is anti-democratic and is being rejected by many people all over the world.
2 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Upright2 5/22/2019 4:24:43 PM (No. 82194)
I'm not so certain. Liberalism=socialism. It doesn't seem to be waning in the next generation.
2 people like this.
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