So, I dont really agree much with Nate Silver politically. I've known for a while he's more moderate than me, and kinda is that weird centrist liberal-libertarian that kinda rubs me the wrong way, but he wrote an article about leftism here, and I feel like he has a point, so I want to respond to it.
I won't respond to the whole thing, but I will get to points that I see as relevant.
The essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative” by the Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand how liberalism was traditionally defined in the Enlightenment political tradition and how the term came to be used in a rather different way in the United States. To simplify: liberalism is a political philosophy that’s centered around individual rights, equality2, the rule of law, democracy, and free-market economics. There are many flavors of liberalism that emphasize these components in different ratios, running from more libertarian variants to others that see a much larger role for government.
Yeah yeah, I know quoting a right libertarian like Hayek is kinda cringe. But, I would largely agree with the above. Im a bit softer on "free market economics", but other than that I largely agree with what he's promoting here, and I've been pointing out how the far left seems to threaten that stuff as of late.
In Europe, liberalism arose in opposition to a more conservative social hierarchy — usually, feudal monarchies backed by incredibly powerful churches. So if you were looking toward Europe, it made sense to think of liberalism as denoting change. As Hayek points out, however, the United States was founded on liberal, Enlightenment ideas. Appeals to classical liberalism are in some ways appeals to American tradition, therefore. Nonetheless, left-wing “American radicals and socialists” began calling themselves “liberal” because they wanted a departure from these traditions, Hayek wrote. Thus, in the United States, we wound up in a confusing position where “liberal” can either be a synonym for “left-wing” or can refer to European-style liberalism.
I would disagree with this definition as far as the US goes. Liberals still largely support the above, just more regulated markets and some social safety nets. But yes, it's a pretty broad spectrum of ideas that do share a lot of common ideas related to things like equal rights, liberty, democracy, etc.
The mainstream media almost always uses the former definition (“liberal” just means left). However, in Hayek’s view — and mine — we should return to the original definition of liberalism. That’s because liberalism describes something distinctive. It doesn’t suffice to view liberalism as a halfway point between socialism and conservatism, Hayek thought, because in important ways it differs from both, namely in its elevation of individual rights and suspicion of central authority. Instead, he imagined a triangle that looked like this, with socialism and conservatism as two flanks and liberalism in the third corner:
I mean you can look at the triangle in the article, but I would agree with the general premise. Both leftists and conservatives are inherently authoritarian, and liberals generally are not, and need to guard against both of these traditions. We saw this at work back in the 1930s as FDR sought to advance the new deal to quash movements toward both fascism and communism and to preserve american democracy through a more reformist tradition that doesnt overturn the entire system.
In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, the distinction between “socialism” and “liberalism” gradually came to seem less necessary. Instead, the connotation of “socialism” shifted from “something adjacent to Communism” to “countries like Sweden with high taxes, free health care and tasteful furniture”. If you’re a moderate liberal like me, then Sweden-style democratic socialism might be somewhat to the left of your ideal point. But it’s still well within the acceptable range of outcomes — particularly since Sweden is a canonically individualistic, culturally liberal, WEIRD country.
And this is where I diverge from Nate's preferences. Swedish social democracy is not just in the range of acceptable outcomes, it's one of the best possible outcomes. ANd I would like to go a step further with my own ideology. My ideology is like the next step of social democracy, and one that kind of solves a lot of contradictions that often stand opposed to the more conservative elements of liberalism like inefficient government that gets too involved in peoples' lives. I want the government to step in within a liberal framework to minimize its impact on peoples' liberty, while also changing peoples' lives for the better and giving them more freedom within the liberal democratic system. I would argue my ideas actually help achieve the highest ideal of liberalism.
However, the purpose of this essay is to argue that socialism now has a worthy successor in the Hayekian triangle — what for purposes of this essay I’ll call Social Justice Leftism (SJL) but is more commonly referred to as “wokeism”.
And here we go, I wouldnt really say that SJL replacing marxism, rather, it's the social equivalent of it. Classical marxism focuses on economics. SJL is basically, as some on the right call it, "cultural marxism", or marxism applied to social issues and culture. It replaces a focus on the rich and the poor to a broader concept of oppressor and oppressed based on identity groups. Rather than focusing on how the bourgeoisie oppress the proletariat, it focuses on how whites oppress POC, and the patriarchy oppresses women, and mainstream society oppresses LGBT+, etc.
And yes, it tends to be very much counter to liberalism in practice. Rather than simply wanting equal rights, it really digs down into social structures and requires massive retooling of how things work in order to achieve the kinds of equality they think is just. In some cases their methods for accomplishing change can be quite counter to liberalism or even flat out illiberal.
It's a huge reason why i went from these people being mildly annoying to me to being almost as big of a threat as the trumpers. Because much like the trumpers, they represent a very illiberal alternative to liberalism, and one that liberalism needs to be protected against.
Proponents of SJL usually dislike variations on the term “woke”, but the problem is that they dislike almost every other term as well. And we need some term for this ideology, because it encompasses quite a few distinctive features that differentiate it both from liberalism and from traditional, socialist-inflected leftism. In particular, SJL is much less concerned with the material condition of the working class, or with class in general. Instead, it is concerned with identity — especially identity categories involving race, gender and sexuality, but sometimes also many others as part of a sort of intersectional kaleidoscope. The focus on identity isn’t the only distinctive feature of SJL, but it is at the core of it.
Mhm, I just said that, and yeah, they do like being labeled, don't they. But it is a very clear ideology that comes from a very clear academic/philosophical tradition. "Understanding the times" called it postmodernism, although they often reject that term too. They think "cultural marxism", which I think is accurate, is a right wing dogwhistle. And yeah, they dont like being criticized in general, or even being named. You point out that they have an ideology and an agenda and even that makes them irate, because to them they dont even see it. I've been noticing this, but they just think their morality is well....objective reality. They dont understand why others label them and tend to get huffy and think YOU have a right wing agenda simply for doing so. Well, sorry, here in realville, yes, this is very much a political ideology with a concrete political agenda, and it is much different than socialism, even though it is parallel to it, and a lot of modern day socialists love to "intersect" their beliefs with it.
SJLs and liberals have some interests in common. Both are “culturally liberal” on questions like abortion and gay marriage. And both disdain Donald Trump and the modern, MAGA-fied version of the Republican Party. But I’d suggest we’ve reached a point where they disagree in at least as many ways as they agree. Here are a few dimensions of conflict:
Yeah and this is where I'll start going off about how I agree with them 85% of the time but for different reasons. Because my ideology is fundamentally different even though we share some common ground and a common enemy.
SJL’s focus on group identity contrasts sharply with liberalism’s individualism.
Yeah. They dont just see individuals as individuals, they have to atomize everything into race, gender, and identity. Everything is groups. And yeah, it tends to rub me the wrong way and is a huge reason i dont like it. Especially because im basically the group the villainize (cis het white male).
SJL, like other critical theories that emerged from the Marxist tradition, tends to be totalizing. The whole idea of systemic racism, for instance, is that the entire system is rigged to oppress nonwhite people. Liberalism is less totalizing. This is in part because it is the entrenched status quo and so often is well-served by incremental changes. But it’s also because liberalism’s focus on democracy makes it intrinsically pluralistic.
Yeah i mean, as i always say, there's validity to the lens. It makes sense in an academic setting and i would consider it a subset of marxist style thought. But making it your entire worldview makes it dangerous. Because they see everything through this lens, they dont know how to turn it off, and that makes them blind to some concerns like institutional stability that liberals might favor, but also causes them to be one track minded in their goals. They ONLY know how to view these issues through such lenses. And they WAY overemphasize those goals. I've compared it to religious fundamentalism before. it really is a secular version of fundamentalism.
SJL, with its academic roots, often makes appeals to authority and expertise as opposed to entrusting individuals to make their own decisions and take their own risks. This is a complicated axis of conflict because there are certainly technocratic strains of liberalism, whereas like Hayek I tend to see experts and central planners as error-prone and instead prefer more decentralized mechanisms (e.g. markets, votes, revealed preferences) for making decisions.
Eh I dont really agree with this one as I am a liberal who can be a bit more technocratic as far as experts go. I dont really like experts and social planners in terms of specific policy details. Like my whole ideology is about restoring power to the people and away from technocrats, BUT....yeah i mean, its academic roots are one of the reasons i respect it somewhat. It is a valid perspective even if i dont like it myself.
Finally, SJL has a radically more constrained view on free speech than liberalism, for which free speech is a sacred principle. The SJL intolerance for speech that could be harmful, hateful or which could spread “misinformation” has gained traction, however. It is the predominant view among college students and it is becoming more popular in certain corners of the media and even among many mainstream Democrats.
Yeah this is one of the reasons i dont like it. Because it seems to want to restrict one of our system's most important liberties, that is, freedom of speech and self expression. The second you go full authoritarian and assault our freedom in service to your goals, you lose me. And SJWs far too interested in silencing people they dont like for my own tastes.
Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, I’ve sometimes heard people express surprise that other people they knew (whether in their real lives or on social media) turned out to be more pro-Israel or pro-Palestine than they thought. To me, it’s almost been the opposite: the reactions have been highly predictable. Leftists tend to take the Palestinian side, and liberals the Israeli one; I think it was easier for me to see this because I’ve long been sensitive to the difference between leftists and liberals. Furthermore, these views tend to be correlated with other issues that divide liberals and leftists, such as free speech and even COVID restrictions.3
I dont know why he has to keep linking this to covid restrictions. Most liberals have a technocratic side and trust the science. It's the maga people who dont. Of course nate is a right libertarian in my views who might be a bit more on the "wrong" side of that issue for my tastes.
But yeah, I actually agree, Im not the only one who has linked SJL to supporting palestine. it's all the oppressor vs oppressed, while my own ideology is more liberal, and as such I've been more sympathetic toward Israel. Still at this point I kinda hate both but if i HAD to choose, still israel. I just think Netanyahu is throwing away peoples' trust in much the same way that Bush did after 9/11.
Why is this? In some sense maybe it shouldn’t be this way — there should be more heterodox pro-Israel leftists and heterodox pro-Palestine liberal centrists. From a liberal’s perspective, however, especially from a Jewish liberal’s perspective4 — which is to say my perspective — it’s easy to see why October 7 was so divisive.
SJL has an elaborate matrix of racial and identity categories, which Jewishness has always fit awkwardly into. Jewishness is both an ethnicity and a religion. Jews in the United States are quite successful despite the extremely high historic incidence of anti-Semitism, including of course the Holocaust. Meanwhile, there’s the distinction between the Jewish people and the Israeli state. And race and ethnicity within Israel are complicated; many Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, meaning they have ancestry from the Middle East rather than Europe. So Jewishness is an edge case that makes the entire identity politics architecture look kind of dubious, if we’re being honest.
Yeah theres a weird oppression olympics going on, with jews being considered oppressors in this case and muslims the oppressed.
So what was the reaction from SJLs after an anti-Semitic terrorist attack that killed thousands of Jews? Well, there certainly wasn’t much sympathy. Instead, we got Harvard students defending Hamas. We got people tearing down portraits of hostages, hanging Palestinian flags on menorahs and polls showing an alarming rise in Holocaust denial among young people.
Yeah because to them, israel is a settler colonialist ethnostate oppressing the palestinian minority.
Now, if liberal Jews didn’t get any SJL sympathy, maybe we’d at least get some reconsideration of illiberal SJL attitudes? You know, university presidents saying: Yeah, you’re right, actually the world is a complicated place and probably it was a bad idea to divide people into 16 intersectional categories of oppressed and oppressor, good and evil, and now that I think about it I can even see how this could contribute to anti-Semitic hatred — sorry about all that!
Honestly, I consider the entire mindset to be toxic AF. I've full on rejected it because just thinking that stuff through it's like, not only is this not helpful, it's full on counterproductive.
Nope, not that either. Instead, the compromise Jews were offered — begrudgingly at every turn — was that we might have our scores slightly raised in the DEI spreadsheet and that universities would crack down on pro-Palestinian speech. As a liberal Jew, I don’t want any of that, which just entrenches the SJL view of the world.
Yeah, just...abandon the oppression olympics stuff. It's not helpful. Again, while some aspects of that views are valid, it should exist within a more limited context against a backdrop of a more shared liberal ideology.
Now, for me, I’m good at decoupling, so the intense anger I feel at some of this doesn’t translate into having any particularly radical view about what should actually be done in the Middle East, or for that matter something like who I plan to vote for as president. But it’s all been incredibly polarizing. Many people are going to be radicalized. Certainly both Jewish people and Muslims will be, in ways that will make life tougher for Joe Biden.
Yeah and the more i see this stuff going on, the more people are radicalizing. I think the whole reason we're radicalizing so much is that liberalism is in some ways failing people. Rather than having an FDR moment to pull together and change things, the status quo dug in and then people started bifurcating over all of this identity politics crap. As I keep saying SJWs and the alt right are two sides of the same coin, and they're both feeding off of each other and radicalizing in response to each other. it's a really dangerous situation to be in.
Like, even if I have questioned a lot of aspects of american democracy in recent years, I went more in the same direction Yang did in which I sought ways to strengthen it, rather than reject the entire system, as I know that's fundamentally dangerous.
But also, I suspect that an increasing number of liberals will a) more clearly recognize that they belong to a different political tribe than the SJLs and even b) will see SJLs as being just as bad as conservatives. And this will cut both ways; some SJLs will regard liberals as just as bad as conservatives — enough so that they might even be willing to deny a vote to Biden. All of this is quite bad for the progressive coalition between liberals and the left that’s won the popular vote for president four times in a row.
Were already seeing this at work with me diverging from leftists over their insanity over the past couple of years, while i just dig in and strengthen my own ideology. Im actually in a weird position where on some issues i do see leftists and conservatives as just as bad as each other. Although on other issues i agree with leftists and see liberals complicit in bolstering conservative ideology.
Still, even on economics where i agree with leftists most, Im clearly diverging from them and STILL maintain a position on the liberal side of the divide. Which is why ive diverged from the sanders left as they start calling for literal socialism.
Now, maybe the progressive coalition will get lucky because MAGA-flavored conservatism remains such an unappealing alternative to people outside the Trumpiest 30 percent of the country. But both liberals and SJLs might find temptations: for instance, liberals will be tempted by MAGA pledges to dismantle DEI on campus, even if conservatives are also quite terrible about protecting academic freedom. Meanwhile, one of Hayek’s points was that socialists and conservatives shared a tolerance, if not even a reverence, for authoritarianism. SJL and MAGA could align there as well. SJL has already moved away from the liberal tradition of entrusting people to make their own decisions — think of the since-scuttled Disinformation Governance Board, or the draconian COVID restrictions on college campuses. If Trump wins next year, this tendency will get worse, and SJLs may more openly question whether democracy works at all.
I dont see liberals as aligning with conservatives. Most liberals still hate MAGA more than the SJWs do. But I am seeing some alignment among some lefties and MAGA over populism which I see as concerning. Again, remember the jimmy dore/WOTB left? Those guys reject the social justice stuff. But they are more mainstream economic leftists who dont buy into the "woke" stuff.
The old left-right coalitions have long been under strain as America has moved away from materialist politics to the politics of cultural grievance. The clearest manifestation of this has been intense polarization based on educational attainment (the more years of schooling, the more likely you are to vote Democrat). If, however, higher educational institutions and the ideas associated with them continue to become more and more unpopular, I’m not sure what happens next.
Eh weve been stuck in cultural grievance mode for decades. It just shifted from fundamentalist christianity vs liberal secularism to SJW nonsense vs the alt right.
Also, it should be noted that social justice ideology is weird in the sense that it does intersect with liberalism, especially the more bourgeois parts of the democratic party. The dems had to shift peoples' attention away from economic issues so they leaned into and helped create this environment of cultural grievance to distract from that. But now to some extent those chickens are coming home to roost.
In the short run, this may be excellent news for conservatives — most voters aren’t college graduates to begin with, and even college-educated liberals are increasingly coming to see SJL ideas as cringey and unappealing. In the long run, as anger over October 7 and the pandemic era fades, conservatives will have to offer a more appealing alternative, as the current version of the GOP espouses lots of highly unpopular ideas of its own and only the most polarizing, MAGA-iest Republicans can reliably win Republican primaries. The past 20 years of American politics have mostly been characterized by stability: the 2020 electoral map didn’t look much different than the 2000 one. If the progressive coalition is breaking up, the next 20 could be much more fluid.
Yeah, we are undergoing a political realignment. I dont know where it will end up, but I dont think that it will take us to good places if it keeps going as it is.
But yeah. I dont always see nate's perspective eye to eye. I mean, hes clearly more conservative than me and is closer to "classical liberalism" and right libertarianism, whereas im closer to the more left wing versions he sees as tolerable, but not his cup of tea.
I likewise think similar about him, while his ideas might be part of the spectrum of liberal democracy, he's a conservative under that spectrum in my opinion. Whereas im at the more progressive fringes and having more of a front row seat to the divisions of the left and this crapshow between liberals, leftists, SJWs, and everything in between. And as you guys know, I dont like anyone, really. I'm too left for most liberals (but still a liberal), but recent political events have had me come out against the left in the past year in particularly. between the Rammstein thing, and October 7th, yeah I've been further cementing myself in the camp that I would describe vaguely as "forwardist liberal". Like Im more in line with the likes of Andrew Yang, Dean Phillips, I like John Fetterman, I can tolerate more sane leftists in government like Bernie Sanders, but yeah as i always say, bernie is a moderate compared to these modern leftist psychos. I am NOT them.
So yeah I guess my ideas do fit comfortably on the liberal side of the aisle, even if more right leaning liberals are cringey in their own way (IMO their refusal to shift left is what led to this situation in the first place).
But yeah, other than that, I largely agree and my blog over the course of 2023 represents the same shifts. I see leftism, both the socialist and the social justice variants, as a threat to american liberalism. Just as I see modern conservatism and the maga movement as a threat.
We're back in the 1930s with democracy being assaulted from both sides. I just hope we can hold it steady and rise above those counterproductive intuitions like we did back then, and that we dont go in the direction that say, germany did. Because that would be very bad.
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