Nietzche's prescient attack on Liberalism

[Magical Realist]

This will please the more conservative among us. The idea of the "virtue-signaling" egalitarian devolving into the tyrannical elitist...


“You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers—erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

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[...] “You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers—erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

Alessio Pellegrini: Absolute freedom is unchecked lawlessness; powerful individuals will arise again in the vacuum. To preempt such warlords and strong men, a victorious rebel leadership must constitute a dictatorship of the people, to protect them from that primeval Return.

Patricia Peem: Cynicism is the corrosive, impossible expectation that good works should not be fundamentally dependent on self-interest and pretentiousness [moral superiority].

Saul Alinsky: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.

Jael Dominguez: The hecklers of convention and tradition will often implement another rigid canon themselves, if they triumph.

George Bernard Shaw: I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England .... but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not a bit of it.

[...] All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"

[...] Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains...

George Orwell: Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The Who: Yeah. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Max Stirner: Proudhon, like the communists, fights against egoism. That is why they are continuations and consequences of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something universal, something alien. [...] Since they’re enemies of egoism, they are therefore Christians, or more generally, religious people, believers in ghosts, dependents, servants of whatever universal (God, society, etc.).

[Syne]

Why would anyone think such sentiments are not backed by history?

[Magical Realist]

Here we get a sense in which an overzealous anti-liberalism could in practice lead to a sort of "will to power" or fascist ethic. But the problem with all power ethics is that they always have to test themselves against something resistant. Something to be strong against. The warrior ethic is only needed in a time of war. After the war it deteriorates into its own solipsistic prison. And it is this inherent reflective obsession with itself that seals its eventual doom.

"Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving,—by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle… Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one’s cause, one’s self included. Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other instincts; for instance, over the instincts of “happiness.” The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea—grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams. The free man is a warrior."--------------Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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Below, Gray echoes that absolute freedom breeds the return of despotism. His complaint (akin to Stirner's) seems to be that liberalism, like Christianity, pursues the will-o'-the-wisp of utopia or a "communal society of all" (divine universalism). Contending that history is not really progressive, but just the cyclical gamut of human nature. "Seeming improvements, if there are any, can very easily be reversed."

He argues that secular and liberal belief in progress is actually "derived from an erroneous Christian notion of humans as morally autonomous beings, categorically different from other animals. This belief, and the corresponding idea that history makes sense, or is progressing towards something, is in Gray's view merely a Christian prejudice."

Left wing criticism of liberalism #1
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/...liberalism

EXCERPTS: British political philosopher John Gray ... is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party [...that...] he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary.

[...] He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities...

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

[...] Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today. Many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”). And what happened was not that values changed on their own, but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work, and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone.

Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran.

Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life -- which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be...

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The gist: In the course of its neutrality, liberalism tries to accommodate too many different groups, some of which may feature beliefs that are against liberalism's own principles. Ergo, trying to please everyone or avoding favoritism guarantees a level of dissatisfaction for many.
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Left wing criticism of liberalism #2
https://theconversation.com/liberal-has-...ted-262217

re: Kevin M. Schultz, author of Why Everyone Hates Liberals

EXCERPT: Schultz pinpoints 1964 as a key year when American liberalism began to lose its prestige. As he describes in detail, there was a marked change in political tone between 1963 and 1964, when Black radicals started to criticise white liberal allies, whom they had come to regard as spineless and hypocritical. From this point, white liberal crystallised as a term of abuse on the political Left.

Schultz appears sympathetic to the Black civil rights leaders of the time, whose impatience with the pace of change was understandable. But he also reminds us of the considerable effort, self-sacrifice and achievements of white liberals during the 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in dramatic initiatives such as the landmark Civil Rights Act.

[...] The white liberals’ optimism about human nature and the possibilities for incremental progress clashed with the Black activists’ prophetic sensibility, their more pessimistic view of human nature, and their demands for national repentance and total transformation of American society.

This points to a larger problem that only became more difficult in the decades that followed. It’s one thing to defend the rights and freedoms of one or another oppressed group, viewing the issues from a traditional liberal perspective. It’s a different thing to defend a group’s rights and freedoms by adopting whatever ideology or rationalisation the group itself (or its leaders) might develop.

Moreover, as oppressed groups recognise each other’s struggles and form pragmatic political coalitions, they tend to see analogies between each other’s causes and attempt an ideological synthesis. As they do so, they are likely to seek insights from whatever sources they can find. Importantly, they needn’t confine themselves to ideas and thinkers from the liberal political tradition.

Thus, liberals can find themselves supporting demographic groups whose representatives are, in turn, nourished by various kinds of religious fervour – or else by Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and other -isms that are not especially concerned with liberalism’s traditional ideas, such as freedom and toleration. Goals might be shared at a high conceptual level, but with starkly different perceptions of legitimate methods and acceptable costs.

In this setting, liberals face a conundrum. How far should they maintain traditional liberal ideals, and how far should they move towards non-liberal, and potentially illiberal, ideologies if these seem more promising for the purposes of social change?

When rapid and comprehensive change seems imperative, might this justify illiberal methods, such as attempts to control what people say and think? In the past, revolutionaries have often believed so, but the conflict with traditional liberalism is obvious.

RELATED: Liberal Neutrality

[Magical Realist]

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

I saw this fallacy in progressive liberalism with the Occupy Wall street movement. Suppose you are right and the current financial system IS unfair and corrupt. What will you replace it with? How on earth would you uproot something so baked in as the banking and stock exchange system in the first place? It's like suddenly concluding that the cement industry is corrupt and should be replaced. But with what and how? As usual every utopian dream devolves into the very tyranny it is rallying against. Power always corrupts, even when distributed fairly among do-gooders.

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Here it boils down to liberalism being a supporter of or sycophant of capitalism...
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Left criticism of liberalism #3
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/...eactionary

EXCERPT: Liberalism’s core error, in this view, comes from a mistake in its vision of democracy. Liberals support democracy as a matter of principle, believing that individuals have a right to shape decisions that affect their lives in deep and important ways.

But liberals curiously excludes parts of economic life from this zone of collective self-determination, seeing the market as a place where people have individual but not collective rights. Liberalism sees nothing wrong with the heads of Amazon and Facebook making decisions that have implications for the entire economy.

So long as capitalists are free from democratic constraint, leftists argue, liberal democracy is on dangerous footing. The super-rich use the power their accumulated wealth provides to influence political life, rearranging policy to protect and expand their fortunes. The rise of neoliberalism is, per the socialist writer Peter Frase, this process in action: proof that capitalism will invariably corrupt liberalism’s promise of freedom and equality.

For all their anti-liberal rhetoric, virtually none of today’s serious left critics of liberalism are Stalinists or Maoists — that is, opponents of democracy itself. They believe in liberal rights like freedom of expression, and pursue their revolutionary agenda through social organizing and democratic elections.

They champion Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, despite the fact that the policies he advocates stop well short of democratizing the workplace or abolishing capitalism. That’s because they see the electoral victory of an avowed “democratic socialist” and policies like Medicare for All as the beginning of a long process, necessary steps for replacing eventually capitalism with something better.

Many of the sharpest left-wing critics of liberalism do not frame themselves as opponents of liberal democratic ideals. Rather, they argue that they’re the only people who can vindicate liberalism’s best promises.

“In describing my own political trajectory, I often talk about my parents’ liberal politics, and my own journey of discovery, through which I concluded that their liberal ideals couldn’t be achieved by liberal means, but required something more radical, and more Marxist,” Frase writes. “That’s what I’d call socialism, or even communism, which for me is the ultimate horizon.”

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Left wing criticism of liberalism #4 (the color-blind neutrality of liberalism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_col...#Criticism

EXCERPTS: Abstract liberalism utilizes themes from political and economic liberalism, such as meritocracy and the free market, to argue against the strong presence of racism. Some suggest it results in people being for equality in principle but against government action to implement equality, described by some sociologists as laissez-faire racism.

[...] In 1997, Leslie G. Carr published "Color-Blind Racism" which reviewed the history of racist ideologies in America. He saw "color-blindness" as an ideology that undercuts the legal and political foundation of racial integration and affirmative action.

[...] Sociologist Ginger Jacobson criticized color-blind ideology as enabling systemic racism by permitting members of a hierarchical society to deny the obstacles people who are on the lower end of that hierarchy face.

[...] Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes that majority groups use color-blindness to avoid discussing racism and discrimination. This is supported by sociologist Jason Rodriquez who writes that color-blindness is a way to disconnect race from discussions of inequality in society.

[...] Amy Ansell of Bard College argues that color-blindness operates under the assumption that we are living in a world that is "post-race", where race no longer matters. She argues this is not true and if it was that race would not be taken into consideration even when trying to address inequality or remedy past wrongs.

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Below, something more down the middle. A recognition that extreme identity/race consciousness was over the top, but not endorsing a total return to colorblindness, either.
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Why I’ve grown skeptical of colorblindness
https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-i...rblindness

EXCERPTS: Advocates of colorblindness are right to worry about the dangers of overemphasizing race. ... I’m reminded of a time of illiberal progressive excess: cancellations, censoriousness, and a convoluted lexicon dictating how to speak about identity. To make matters worse, as Musa Al-Gharbi has shown in his recent book, the “symbolic capitalists” at the helm of this progressive excess often ignored both the actual attitudes and material conditions of the minorities they purportedly sought to represent.

[...] Hughes, for example, is especially pessimistic about any sort of racial identification and treats it as categorically bound to divide. “We overcome divisions among people not by emphasizing differences but by emphasizing similarities, and race concepts, by their very nature, emphasize differences,” he writes. To avoid this division, we should “strive to ensure that our personal relationships don’t get infected with toxic race thinking of any sort.”

[...] I agree that these are real risks of excessive race consciousness, but I also worry that this assessment is too pessimistic. ... The most strident proponents of colorblindness don’t fully appreciate this process of identity formation. They downplay how collective identities have often helped people form a rich sense of who people are and what they believe about the world.

[...] None of which is to say that critiques of race consciousness are invalid, or that actually, something like Ibram X. Kendi’s adage that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination” is correct. The wrongheadedness of the identitarian left remains wrongheaded, and adopting it has negative personal and political consequences. But agreeing that we should leave illiberal wokeness behind does not require an overly pessimistic attitude toward race, or to downplay the permission structure that has spawned a callous, old-school racism in some corners of society.

The challenge -- and it’s frankly one that few take up -- then seems to be for liberals to recalibrate some of our key assumptions about what our discourse about race looks like today, to eschew some skepticism and replace it with curiosity. Doing so will require recognizing the good in collective identities -- but not at the expense of liberal principles. It should compel us to envision a way of thinking about racial identity that’s conscious without being commandeering, that’s wary of how it can overshadow our individuality but also appreciates its unifying potential.

[Magical Realist]

"The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And then the sacred "will of the people" becomes blinder, baser, colder and more dangerous than the will of any tyrant.

When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break. So today.

Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being."
-- D. H Lawrence