Agreed about the threat to liberalism and the conveniently nebulous threat to "freedom," "democracy," "our way of life," or whatever it is the "terrorists" are threatening.
(Scare quotes around the the "terrorists" for two reasons. Although there are real terrorists who are a real threat to human life, including both retail terrorists like al Qaida and wholesale terrorists like W, a great many people classified as terrorists have no relationship to any such organizations or activity, as the dismal record of terrorism prosecutions by the USG and the failure of Guantanamo and like outposts of the American gulag to turn up any such connections indicates; also a lot of people -- any Iraqi insurgents, for example, who are engaged in asymmetrical warfare against the US are guerrilla soldiers fighting a military occupation by time-honored though innovative and flexible means -- are classified as terrorists because it's a convenient label to stick on any enemy of imperialist occupation and aggression.)
End of disgression.
There is a tension, if not an outright inconsistency, in saying: this is the end of the liberal era because the ruling class is using the current terrorism scare to shred ancient and more recently achieved liberties, on one hand, and on the other to say, oh, liberals have and are carrying out, supporting, acquiescence to the destruction of these liberties. It's hard to have it both ways.
Of course it's true that many liberals have been uninterested in defense of liberal values and from time to time, when these come under pressure, have aggressively attacked them. And liberals like Wilson (well, he was sorta out of it by the time of the Palmer Red Scare, but his gang), or Truman with his loyalty oaths, and so forth deserve sharp critique -- for failure to live up to liberal principles! Although it is quite predictable that many will so fail under pressure.
That doesn't mean liberal sucks or the ancient liberties are a fraud. Compare: many socialists have failed to live up to socialist principles when under pressure -- Lenin & Trotsky's Red Terror, mass shooting of hostages, the crushing of the Soviet and soviet democracy at work, the installation of a single party state and the suppression of criticism. Yes, they faced civil war and famine, etc. People can debate how far the old Bolsheviks went overboard; few would say that they did not, even if some retreat from soviet democracy was forced on them by exigent circumstances. Likewise, to a lesser degree, with Castro's Cuba.
But no one here would say that socialism is discredited because self-styled socialists did these things. And if these excesses signaled "end of the socialist era," they are more accurately characterized as evidence that these efforts to start that era were premature. Perhaps, as Charles says, liberalism is also premature because it cannot be fully realized under capitalism. But in neither case we say, oh, we won't start up and fight for those ideals till later. Do we?
A related point. J.S. Mill, defending communism (of his era and as he understood it, not Marx's communism, of which he appears to have been ignorant) against capitalist critics, says that it's not fair to defend the worst of communism, its (at that time) theoretical failures against the best of capitalism, depicted without the blood and mud. Or vice versa. One compares the worse to the worst, the best to the best. So: the proper referent point for the critique of liberal failures (or failure to live up to liberal ideals) with the Red Scares, Truman-McCarthyism, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, the massacre of the Indonesian Communists, etc., is the Red Terrors of the Russian Civil War, the Yezovshschina of 1937, Zhadanovism of the early cold war, the suppression of the worker's rebellion in Berlin, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Wall. And contrariwise if one wants to talk about socialism as it should have been or night be, one has to talk about liberalism at it best -- John Wilkes, Reconstruction, the ACLU, the dissenters in Abrams and Debs, and ultimately, liberal politics in a socialist society.
Liberal ideals and ancient liberties are under threat. This is a matter for study but not for inaction. There was someone who said something about the philosophers who have only interpreted the world. We may go down into the dark ages, disappeared to undisclosed location, unable to challenge our disappearance because we cannot prove the are harmed. Let's not go down with chin on fist and furrowed brow, pondering the fate of liberalism. Let's stand up for these values that liberals of the usual mealy mouthed sort can't be counted on, as Doug as reminded us, to defend. It's always been our job to keep those spineless wimps honest, as much as anyone can. Dirty work, but someone has to do it. Who, if not us?
--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Andie:
>
> Ancient liberties are slipping through our finders
> like sand. Any more disquisitions here on the evil
> and
> reactionary nature of liberalism?
>
> ...................
>
>
> I'm not 100 percent sure of your meaning here since
> the reactionary actions you ably dissected are
> coming
> from an organ of a liberal democracy.
>
>
>
> Throughout their history, liberal democracies have
> shown an eagerness to declare states of exception
> during which "ancient liberties" slip away like sand
> between fingers or dreams upon awaking. Everyone
> here
> is familiar with the most famous examples:
> curtailment
> of press and other freedoms during WWI, internment
> of
> Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, etc.
>
> I'd argue that the first two or three decades of the
> post WWII period was a not fully polished golden age
> of liberalism. During that time, radicals and
> principled liberals were able to demand and achieve
> the expansion of liberties beyond the usual
> beneficiaries...to an uneven extent.
>
> But now we've entered an interesting and uniquely
> unnerving era which future historians may mark as
> the
> moment when liberal states broke legal and tradition
> enforced contracts with their citizenry. Throughout
> the West, throughout the endlessly praised home of
> liberal democracy, governments are announcing their
> need for expanded powers - powers largely made
> possible because of maturing and deepening
> information
> technology. Americans focus on the Bush team's love
> of secrecy and authoritarian maneuvers but a look
> across the globe reveals similar surveillance and
> suspicion based actions happening in other
> democracies.
>
> Perhaps the most curious thing is the fact that the
> alleged emergency used to justify this growth of
> surveillance - the supposed threat to Western
> civilization from Islamic terrorism - doesn't exist
> in
> the form and to the degree our governments claim.
>
> Yes of course there is terrorism and yes of course
> it's a problem and yes of course I don't want anyone
> to die while minding their own business because of a
> car bomb. It would take however, an oceans' worth of
> violence and organization more than what we've seen
> thus far from terrorist groups to topple Washington
> or
> London or Paris. And yet we're being told that this
> is
> an imminent possibility.
>
> At least in the case of the Cold War there were
> actually existing thermonuclear ICBMs targeted at
> actually existing cities (did I write "were"? no
> doubt
> the missiles are still programmed to deliver their
> payloads to more or less the same spots - that
> problem
> hasn't really been solved has it?).
>
> But now we're chasing phantoms, puffing up local
> gangs
> with RPGs and AKs into a planet-wide problem
> requiring
> cruise missiles and stealth bombers and,
> domestically,
> unlimited and unaudited surveillance systems lest
> one
> errant grain of sand slip through the Panopticon's
> grip.
>
>
> The enthusiasm many liberals have shown and continue
> to show for this constriction requires reflection.
>
> Has liberalism indeed failed, as Carrol asserts?
>
> I don't have an answer to that but I am paying
> closer
> attention to what we might call the mass
> psychological
> problem - an attachment to fear - liberalism seems
> to
> face in the uncertain 21st century.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> .d.
>
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>
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