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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.