Whatever with the hyperventilation stuff, I haven't a clue what you mean. I will say, though, that the "goal" of liberal proceduralism has not been the destruction of Marxism; if LP helped with the demise of Marxism as a movement, it is because it offered workers ways to get wome of what they wanted without risking the dangers of revolution. If LP has a goal it is the maintenance of a free society where people can live together but disagree on fundamentals without killing each other. This is comptaible with socialism. Even with non-market socialism.
I also don't get your raft metaphor.
As to whether TINA is a sensible position about LP, well, I am willing to entertain proposals for alternatives. BM hasn't any except imposing his suffering-reduction views on people who disagree with him, apparently without liberal procedures like voting, hearings, etc. Charles holds up Cuba and Vietnam -- tyrannies. Fairly soft as tyrannies go, but tyrannies nonerheless. So while I don't exclude the idea that we may be able to somehow respect fundamental differences, cooperate, and come to decisions without fighting -- and yet do this in a way that is not recognizably liberal proceduralist, in 25 years of thinking and reading about politics, I have not heard what that way might be.
I think the values of liberal proceduralism are priceless -- we have had to fight for them before, we may again.
You nitpick when you say the alternatives to LP I mention are not ideas -- civil war and tyranny. Well, LP isn't an idea, it ius a set of practices. And civil war is a consequence of people in a non LP environment attempting to impose their own views by force. As for tyrannies, some of them come with ideologies. Marxism-Leninism, Nazism. Etc. Thsi is not a serious point you make here.
Sure, some tyrannies are better than others. Sure, sometimes we need to fight to maintain LP. ThAt doesn't mean that the better tyrannies or the fighting are better than LP.
Liberalism a sure loser? I guess then we are all doomed. At least unless you can point to a plausible better alternative. Recall my institutional definition of LP: representative government elected by universal suffrage from competing political parties in a context of extensive civil and political liberties. Which of those elements do you want to get rid of, Carrol?
jks
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?
-----
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
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040829/e7e06fe6/attachment.htm>