On Thursday, November 10, 2022 at 8:04:06 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
On Monday, September 19, 2022 at 12:13:39 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
On Saturday, September 17, 2022 at 4:34:42 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
"Liberalism aimed to free people to discover and express their individual identities, apart from coercive interference. But by uprooting people from historic communities and social roles, the radical right predicted, liberalism would trigger an
anxious preoccupation with group belonging. The triumph of liberalism would therefore coincide with its collapse. By pressing people to ask, “Who am I?” its social logic would lead them back to the most basic human question, “Who are we?” At its
heart, the radical right was a response to this spiraling crisis of belonging. It argued the crisis could not be solved by returning to conventional national or religious identities, since that would merely restore a sick patient to a condition when its
symptoms first appeared. The solution to the crisis would require Western culture to unlearn a millennia-long mistake, sustained by centuries of Christian belief, that attempted to ground its legitimacy outside of itself. Political life does not depend
on truths or values that transcend our identities, the radical right claimed, or on a biblical vision of human unity. It depends on recognizing that human identity, at its most primordial level, is something inherited. To an age of growing individualism,
this movement’s message was powerfully dissonant: Your identity does not belong to you alone. It joins you forever to those of your kind, and separates you forever from those who are alien. To know and to affirm this inheritance is to live a meaningful
life; to deny it is the greatest tragedy; to be denied it the greatest injustice." (From the Introduction of "A World After Liberalism"
https://www.amazon.com/World-after-Liberalism-Philosophers-Radical-ebook/dp/B098RF76YH?asin=B098RF76YH&revisionId=f62dfff2&format=1&depth=1
According to Mathew Rose, Liberalism is as successful as it is self-destructing. Rose then introduce 5 thinkers who might dominate the
post-liberal world. But his book does not focus on the most intriguing question.
Can Liberalism reborn like the legendary Pheonix?
IF YES, under what condition and how long would it take?
From his perch of being a Council member of National Endowment For Humanities(NEH) and Senior Fellow and Director
of the Barry Center on the University and Intellectual Life, Mathew Rose seems to have resigned to the inevitably rise
of a new conservatism and a world after (Western) liberalism.
"We are living in a postliberal moment. After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds.
Its most serious challenge does not come from regimes in China, Russia, or Central Europe, whose leaders declare the
liberal epoch is “at an end.”1 It comes from within Western democracies themselves, where intelligent critics, and not just
angry populists, are expressing doubts about its most basic norms.
Critiques of liberalism are as old as liberalism itself, of course, and its ideas have never gone unchallenged. For centuries,
philosophers have questioned it from all sides. They have blamed it for increasing inequality and exploitation, and for
corrupting culture and religion. They have been especially skeptical of its vision of human beings as rights-bearing individuals
who are defined by their ability to choose. But if our moment is not novel in every respect, it is jarringly new to some of us.
The idea that human equality, minority rights, religious toleration, or cultural pluralism might be rejected out of principle, and
not blind prejudice, is bewildering to many. They are ideas associated with antiquated books and defeated causes—with people
living in the past, not looking toward the future.
A new conservatism, unlike any in recent memory, is coming into view. Ideas once thought taboo are being reconsidered; authors
once banished are being rehabilitated; debates once closed are reopening. There is disagreement about how this intellectual space
opened up, but there is no doubt who is filling it. Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are
vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable. To a remarkable degree, they dissent from an orthodoxy that
seemed settled as recently as 2016."
Stephen M Walt 's January 19, 2022 article is prescient. He was correct in calling NATO/EU foreign policy based on liberalism flawed and illusional.
"The situation in Ukraine is bad and getting worse. Russia is poised to invade and demanding airtight guarantees that NATO will never, ever expand farther to the east. Negotiations do not appear to be succeeding, and the United States and its NATO
allies are beginning to contemplate how they will make Russia pay should it press forward with an invasion. A real war is now a distinct possibility, which would have far-reaching consequences for everyone involved, especially Ukraine’s citizens.
The great tragedy is this entire affair was avoidable. Had the United States and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism and relied instead on realism’s core insights, the present crisis would not have
occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today. The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/19/ukraine-russia-nato-crisis-liberal-illusions/
Foreign policy: Realism and Liberalism
"At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there
is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them
from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete
for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other
advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future,
which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the
possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.
Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more
or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—
liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and
the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that
embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that
conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other
illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets,
and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially
when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.
After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer relevant and liberal
ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct."
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)