Liberalism is the ONLY thing that has ANY prospect of offering even a remote chance at a civilized life. As a worldwide system? We should be so lucky. At this point it's an embattled hope in Europe, Japan, North and some of South America. (Which isn't, actually, all that bad for an ideal that 400 years ago was pretty much confined to parts of England.) Can it fix global warming, world poverty, imperialism? No. But only liberalism can provide the conditions under which WE can fix those things.
What's your alternative, the dictatorship of the proletariat? Give me a break. Liberalism hasn't lived up to its promise? No. Has it brought the age of reason? Of course not. But a few centuries ago women, blacks and propertyless could not vote. Slavery was legal. Religious requirements were formally held for citizenship. Sedition was punishable by death. Unions were criminal conspiracies.
As Marvin said, but not nearly as elegantly as I am going to put on it, you shit on the hard-won victories for which our martyrs died. (And yes, Doug, lots of them were reds: reds at their best are consistent liberals in practice, doing what self-styled liberals should do but are scared to.)
That doesn't bother you. You'd rather wallow in gloom. You have no historical perspective. You take for granted the victories we have won as if they had to happen. You ignore their terrible fragility, now under dreadful siege. If habeas corpus, free speech, formal equality, are swept away, you will feel secretly happy and vindicated. You are lucky that liberals are willing to fight for even the likes of you and don't care if the beneficiaries of our struggles don't appreciate or deserve what we achieve.
It's pretty weird to say that my liberalism is "empty" if I provide content, and the "fairly" long list" you mention consists in four items, five if you count markets, not long by my standards, or most peoples. The twelve factor list of criteria that some judges uses to test whether attorneys' fees are reasonable (I'm writing about that topic now) is longish, but most people can hold four or five fairly simple ideas in their head at once. I do list these banalities -- in other contexts I wouldn't have to -- to remind people that liberals are not monsters red in tooth and claw but in fact that most of you are liberals too. (My definition is not IN THE LEAST idiosyncratic.)
I don't know what you mean by "merely a biographical statement." "Marx was a revolutionary communist." Is that "merely a biographical statement"? Unrelated to his political beliefs? I support the program of political liberalism: I favor competitive elections, universal suffrage, extensive social and political liberties, free markets, and democratic decisionmaking over the imposition of a favored set of fundamental values. I think these are good ideas. Oops, sorry for showing the emptiness of my ideas by saying what they are. I guess their meaning should be clear without explanation.
Does that make you happier and more convinced that I have more than "biography" behind this commitment? Like, maybe I have thought about it some? You want to argue the propositions? Suggest a better alternative. I'll defend liberalism against all comers. I actually think that the conclusions are more certain than any premises, but hell, I'm a lawyer and a philosopher, I got premises up the wazoo. Drawing conclusions from premises is what I do. Wanna hear some premises? See some inferences? Happy to oblige. You'll have a lot more than pentathol to go on.
Let me ask you Carrol, are you just insulting because of health problems, is rudeness a chronic problem that you have because you never learned how to be civil? You are seriously suggesting that _I_ don't have a reasoned basis for my beliefs, just some sort of inexplicable biographical quirks? Have you sort of failed to notice that I rather annoying produce elaborately articulated justifications for everything I think whether or not I am asked? Or maybe this strikes you as "empty" because it has so much content. Or maybe it's because you still think I'm a cop. I haven't forgotten that one either. (Latecomers: some years back Carrol called me a cop, I forget why, but does it really matter? I called him rancid bucket of pigshit. I thought that was polite and generous in the circumstances)
In case you haven't noticed, despite the rather heated tone of this post, it contains reasons why liberalism is preferable to the alternatives. More are available on request. You just tell me what your alternatives are.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > But I _am_ a liberal. I am also a socialist, but
> for
> > reasons I have explained, I am a liberal and I
> think
> > you should be too and many of you probably are.
>
> The term "liberal" seems pretty empty -- as is
> partly shown by the fact
> that each time you apply it you feel the need to
> provide a fairly long
> list of the beliefs it encompasses. But the
> sentence, "I am a liberal,"
> it occurs to me, is _merely_ a biographical
> statement, difficult to
> translate into the proposition, "I support the
> program of liberalism" or
> "liberalism represents the route to the future." No
> one can argue with
> the proposition "I am a liberal," unless we were to
> demand that you
> repeat after a dose of sodium pentatol. But
> Liberalism (out there in the
> world) seems to have flunked the same test that 2d &
> 3d international
> socialism flunked: It didn't work. Its results
> simply haven't _remotely_
> measured up to the claims made for it over the last
> couple of centuries,
> and no one seems to be actively building support for
> it as a practical
> political program anyplace on earth.
>
> What are the grounds for believing that liberalism
> (as a world-wide
> system) can triumph in the next half-century or so
> while dealing with
> the growing certainty of destructive global warming,
> along with the
> struggle for energy as populations of the
> undeveloped nations cease to
> consent to their present immiseration?
>
> Incidentally, I do think Charles's implict
> assumption as to what one
> does with Marxism is wrong, and I've debated him on
> this point in the
> past. He seems to believe that the core Marxist
> activity is persuading
> others of the truth of Marxism. This seems to me to
> reduce Marxism to a
> religion. Nothing particularly follows from becoming
> convinced of the
> truth of _Capital_ or _18th Brumaire_, etc. I do not
> even attach much
> importance to persuading people that "socialism is
> good" or "we need
> socialism." That recognition must occur in the
> process of struggle
> against one or more of the evils of capitalism, and
> when I have
> (1968-71) moved people to a recognition of the
> necessity of socialism,
> it has mostly been by listening, not preaching.
> Persuading people
> directly to Marxism tends to generate those who
> mostly wish to sit by
> the side of the road (as academics or journalists)
> and lecture those
> engaged in struggle. Marxist theory has to be held
> tacitly, for the most
> part, as the shape of revolutionary thought, not as
> its content.
>
> And I was making a sober empirical observation, not
> generating zen koans
> or whatever when I wrote that most of those who make
> a socialist
> revolution, and even many of the leaders, won't
> think of themselves as
> Socialists, let alone Marxists.
>
> Carrol
>
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