andie nachgeborenen wrote:
Charles Brown wrote: Well, I will think about it. But your liberal proceduralism clearly has failed.
* * * There is no alternative. Really. None. No acceptable one. I mean, there's tyranny or civil war, but those are really bad ideas, don't you think?
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Justin, I think you are hyperventilating.
But first, a note on the proposition Charles lays down here. It won't hold water from his own point of view because it presupposes that the goal of "liberal proceduralism" is the same as the goal of Marxism. Looked at historically, however -- that is, looked at in terms of the actual goals of liberalism, it has succeeded beautifully. The USSR is gone; China is on the capitalist road; Cuba, a tiny island of a few million, is merely surviving; and leftists in the United States are overwhelmingly flocking to the banner of the war criminal Kerry. And in the foremost left-liberal journal, the debate has come down to whether the protesters in New York will (Gitlin) or won't (Featherstone) hurt the chances of that war criminal.
And that overwhelming success, of course, is the basis for your hyperventilation. All is lost and we just have to cling desperately to a little broken-masted and leaking raft in the savage seas.
Sorry I couldn't come up with a less banal metaphor (but then that's what 'western civilization' started with -- see Odyssey V).
Now on "There is no alternative. Really. None." As a beginning, how does this differ from "There has been history but no longer is any"? Self-labelled liberals no more have crystal balls than do Marxists, but implicitly you are claiming to foresee all that is to come. Surely humanity and human history have more variety than are imaged in your crystal ball.
And on the alternatives you do offer. You call them "bad ideas," but, really, neither civil war nor tyranny, as you yourself know very well, is to begin with an idea, and hence their goodness or badness as ideas is rather beside the point.
And to contemplate some real possibilities. Would civil war be a bad idea if the alternative were surrender to tyranny? Or would the tyranny of (say) a Bismarck be a bad idea if the alternative at a given time was the tyranny of a Pat Robinson?* And of course these alternatives are not quite like choosing between Green Giant and Lesueur peas on the shelf: the choice is rather how one situates oneself in the (uncertain) struggle between the alternatives as embodied in human activity of a given time and place. [*I'll be damned if I know why I have a subjunctive in the first clause and an indicative in the second???]
And while one can offer no timetable, it seems a reasonably certain prediction that at some point in the next century (or less) a choice for liberal proceduralism will entail a choice for civil war in its defense. But if one must fight, why fight for that which will only guarantee that it must be fought for again, and again, and again until the result of those struggles is an irretrievable slide into savagery? I've cited a bridge book from half a century ago before, the advice that if the contract is desperate, imagine the lay of the cards (however improbable) that gives one a chance. I think liberalism is a sure loser, however improbable the alternatives.
Carrol