I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjudicable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement.
— Wayfarer

Let's make it a little clearer. Deep questions of value and meaning are matters for individual judgment; how could they be otherwise? You can't look them up in a textbook. What you mean, I think, is that subjectivism believes that human judgment has no further court of appeal, where it might receive an answer as to whether the judgment is correct or not. In that sense, these judgments are either based on subjective considerations that don't necessarily hold from one person to the next, or they are unfounded by a first principle of rationality. — J

Yes, you've put your finger on the core of the issue. It's not that I dispute the necessity of individual conscience in matters of value and meaning—on the contrary, I believe it's fundamental. But when conscience is understood as operating in a vacuum, with no orientation toward something beyond the self, then we begin to slide into a kind of subjectivism by default. That is, moral and existential judgments are no longer seen as having truth value—only personal significance.

This is where Protagoras' dictum, “man is the measure of all things,” becomes relevant. In its modern form, it translates into the belief that each person determines what is true or good for themselves. But Plato's critique in the Theaetetus still holds weight: if each individual's judgment is equally valid, then there is no way to distinguish between wisdom and ignorance, or truth and error. That undermines not only moral philosophy, but the very idea of reasoned discourse

For Plato—and for the classical tradition more broadly—there is a real Good, not merely as a cultural construct, but as a reality to which human reason and conscience are oriented. The challenge of philosophy is not to invent values, but to perceive them properly, through moral discernment, reflection, and a kind of intellectual eros.

The modern difficulty is that, with the decline of metaphysical traditions (including Christianity), we've retained the form of conscience and moral autonomy, but severed it from the structure that once gave it direction. And so we end up with a curious inversion: the authority of the individual is absolute, but the content of what they believe is seen as purely personal. Hence, nihil ultra ego. It's what I was saying earlier in this thread.

I thoroughly agree with everything you say here (until the last paragraph). To go from "each individual must make their own judgments, illuminated by reason and conscience as best they can" to "all individual judgments are equally perspicuous and moral" is the mistake, and a big one. I appreciate too your calling out the difference between inventing values and perceiving them properly. (You may not agree, but I'd consider the deduction of values from some intellectual first premises to be the same as inventing them, for all the defense that can be given of them.) What's needed is vision, noetic perception, self-knowledge, opening of the heart or third eye or [fill in favorite spiritual tradition]. I don't see relying on philosophy for that, though again you may disagree, and think more benevolently of it.

So, the last paragraph: "the authority of the individual is absolute, but the content of what they believe is seen as purely personal." Guess it depends who you're listening to. Among my friends, and based on the non-philosophical stuff I read, I'd say rather that there's a kind of double-mindedness about the whole matter. In one mood, Ben upholds his absolute right, and everybody's, to their own beliefs. In another mood, he's quick to invoke the most time-honored, religiously derived reasons why we should share his beliefs, and is very concerned that we understand and agree, impersonally! I think the need to provide public justification for private beliefs is still very strong, at least in the U.S. (though it may be fading fast), and that's a good thing.

I thoroughly agree with everything you say here (until the last paragraph). To go from "each individual must make their own judgments, illuminated by reason and conscience as best they can" to "all individual judgments are equally perspicuous and moral" is the mistake, and a big one. — J

It's a thorny issue and one which I've by no means resolved. But I appreciate the opportunity to try and spell it out in response to your perceptive remarks.

I think the need to provide public justification for private beliefs is still very strong, at least in the U.S. (though it may be fading fast), and that's a good thing. — J

Seems to me a characteristic one would want an engineer to have (the engineer who designed the plane you are going to be flying in, for example) is an appreciation for the value often found in the consideration of justifications for private beliefs.

Doing so plays an important role in social primates, such as we are, having the ability to think synergistically and learn from each other.

What is a good thing?

We're justifying racist policies. — AmadeusD

I am not; I don't know about you. I'm merely saying that unfairly disadvantaged groups may warrant additional rights.

It depends what your definition of hate speech is, and this is always the problem. I am 100% against any kind of hate speech legislation because (even taking the underlying loadedness of your question as legitimate) no one has that authority. We cannot rely on 'perceived hate' because that's utter bollocks, and so we need an objective measure. — AmadeusD

I think this is disingenuous. Hate speech is readily recognizable. If someone says, referring to a human racial group, "kill all Xs" or "Xs are inferior and should be treated not as human but as animals" or any statement of that kind that is hate speech. Are you saying that such should be allowed on public forums?

I don't think such things should be allowed even in relation to animals. If someone said, for example, "torturing dogs is good fun, we should all do it", or said that about any other animal, I believe that should be banned on public forums too. What you are not allowing for is that there are impressionable people who may be influenced by such hateful propositions.

I don't see relying on philosophy for that, though again you may disagree, and think more benevolently of it. — J

I believe that this is where philosophy started, but that it's not necessarily where it has remained. But one of the things I liked about John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is that he takes this broad and holistic view of philosophy which updates the language of philocophical praxis in the light of science, but tries to retain that sense of striving for the 'unitive vision' (hence his frequent appeals to neoplatonism.) But that is a separate discussion. (Take that comment as a footnote ;-) )

Hate speech is readily recognizable. — Janus

This is exactly the problem. You think this. So do people who think misgendering is hate speech and needs to be a criminal offense. The use of the word 'niggardly' has been touted as hate speech. Some people think saying "Black people can be racist" is hate speech. You disagree, I'm sure.

We don't agree on utterances about animals entirely - those sorts of things are often said as sarcasm etc... and this is not captured by such a view on 'hate'. And so the point still stands:

no one has that authority — AmadeusD

Your (one's; not your particularly) views are not everyone's. No, 'hate' is not as obvious as you seem to want it to be. If only...
I will say though, you're right, in my view, to insinuate that only clearly harm-motivated statements could be considered hateful. I'm not opposed. But that isn't obvious (or, what comes under that banner isn't obvious). Just ftr, I agree, those types of statements, generally, should have at least some kind of consequence attached. That might be social, though. I'm unsure how I feel.

Are you saying that such should be allowed on public forums? — Janus

(i'm largely jesting here) Now, this comes across disingenuous. I don't think i've said anything that would insinuate this. I didn't mention any type of utterance, for instance. I'd think the answer is 'it depends on the context'. Literally asking someone to harm and animal should be. Joking about what kind of a person would say "x" or "y" shouldn't be. And its hard to tell, sometimes.

What you are not allowing for is that there are impressionable people who may be influenced by such hateful propositions. — Janus

I am. But I'm anti nanny-state type legislation. I think those with this view should stop thinking the lowest common denominator is the best way to inform ourselves.

So do people who think misgendering is hate speech and needs to be a criminal offense. — AmadeusD

Misgendering is not clearly hate speech. I don't believe it qualifies as such. It doesn't follow that there are no clear cases of hate speech. You seem to be mounting a "slippery slope" argument.

We don't agree on utterances about animals entirely - those sorts of things are often said as sarcasm etc... — AmadeusD

That's a weak response! What, you think that someone who posted on public forums that th3ewy think it is good to torture animals for fun would be just "being sarcastic'. If you really think that, then it's ridiculous!

I don't think i've said anything that would insinuate this. I didn't mention any type of utterance, for instance. I'd think the answer is 'it depends on the context'. — AmadeusD

I didn't say anything about you insinuating anything. I asked you a question which apparently you don't want to answer. The examples, and others like them, are clear examples of hate speech. The context is the public forum. Do you think such utterances should be allowed on public forums?

I am. But I'm anti nanny-state type legislation. I think those with this view should stop thinking the lowest common denominator is the best way to inform ourselves. — AmadeusD

It has nothing to do with informing ourselves. It has to do with influencing those who are the least informed in ways which are inimical to social life. Why would you not want to prevent such a thing?

Oh, yikes, I didn't mean the "fading fast" was a good thing! I'm with you -- public accountability is vital.

I don't believe it qualifies as such. It doesn't follow that there are no clear cases of hate speech. — Janus

I assume you will read the rest of my comment, and delete this eventually?**

That's a weak response! — Janus

If you think so. But it goes to the core of why "hate speech" is a nebulous, unweildy term giving us nothing to legislate effectively. So, I'm happy to agree to disagree. It's an important point, on my view.

you think that someone who posted on public forums that th3ewy think it is good to torture animals for fun would be just "being sarcastic'. — Janus

If you think this isn't possible, I have several bridges up for sale. One of them goes the entire way across 4Chan.

I asked you a question which apparently you don't want to answer. — Janus

You asked me a disingenuous question which was a reasonable response to something I did not say. I wont defend some position I don't hold. I don't want to answer it because it doesn't apply to me. "Are you saying that..." is an implication. Not sure that you can avoid that...IN any case I also directly answered you in detail** :

Literally asking someone to harm and animal should be. Joking about what kind of a person would say "x" or "y" shouldn't be. And its hard to tell, sometimes. — AmadeusD

Just ftr, I agree, those types of statements, generally, should have at least some kind of consequence attached. That might be social, though. I'm unsure how I feel. — AmadeusD

AAn additional note is that forums are free to police their own content. The Law doesn't need to be involved.

Are you perhaps skimming these replies? I am not being rude, but having missed those two passages above is a big flag for what you're saying..

Why would you not want to prevent such a thing? — Janus

I want to prevent the state having control over what people are allowed to hear and see. Now, as is obvious in my above quotes of myself, I agree there are exceptions to this. Literally inciting violence is one. So, if you have an issue with acts (i can only assume that's the problem. You can't be insinuating that people having thoughts is hate speech) subsequent to some speech act, then you police those acts. Which we already do, and this is a deterrent enough in my view. It's not an author's fault that some wacko took their writing and did something abhorrent with it. It's that person's fault for doing something wacko. There is no transitive blame on actions to my mind. Orchestration or inciting are different things, so again, there are exceptions - but they are specific and conceptually different to "criminalising hate speech".

You seem to be mounting a "slippery slope" argument. — Janus

More than this: I am telling you that is what's already happening, in practice, when we talk about Hate Speech publicly. It is a slippery slope. Yes, there are clear cases. There are vastly more unclear ones. It is a slippery slope and at least the last five to ten years has been an excercise in kowing to the least-resilient and reasonable among us, I think (if you don't, that's cool and explains a lot but that is then our conflict, not what Hate Speech is).

More than this: I am telling you that is what's already happening, in practice, when we talk about Hate Speech publicly. It is a slippery slope. Yes, there are clear cases. — AmadeusD

None of the rest of what you said is cogent as I see it, so I won't respond to it; I don't like wasting time. I might agree that the criteria that determine what counts as hate speech has been unreasonably extended in some arenas of the social sphere.

However, that is irrelevant to the argument that there are clear examples of hate speech, which in my view, it is right to disallow. Do you disagree with that? You haven't actually answered my questions about whether you would allow the examples I gave and the like.

"Our conflict" seems to me to be that you, on the grounds that some things are unreasonably counted as hate speech and should not therefore be banned, conclude that no hate speech should be banned. Perhaps I've misunderstood you, but you have not clearly answered the questions I posed.

I might agree that the criteria that determine what counts as hate speech has been unreasonably extended in some arenas of the social sphere. — Janus

Possibly, this resolves it. If we're both seeing this, is it just the degree which is in question? Hard to tell. It seems like you're arguing something a little stronger.

Do you disagree with that? You haven't actually answered my questions about whether you would allow the examples I gave and the like. — Janus

Yes I have. And i've requoted those replies above. I cannot see that its possible you've missed this:

IN any case I also directly answered you in detail** :

Literally asking someone to harm and animal should be. Joking about what kind of a person would say "x" or "y" shouldn't be. And its hard to tell, sometimes.
— AmadeusD

Just ftr, I agree, those types of statements, generally, should have at least some kind of consequence attached. That might be social, though. I'm unsure how I feel.
— AmadeusD
AAn additional note is that forums are free to police their own content. The Law doesn't need to be involved.

Are you perhaps skimming these replies? — AmadeusD

Are you skimming? It would explain why you saw that as non-cogent, if not how you missed these quotes lol.

conclude that no hate speech should be banned — Janus

You have certainly misunderstood. Certain things should be restricted speech. It is not on the grounds of 'hate'. It is on the grounds of predictable negative acts as a result (inciting is a clear case here, as I'm sure you'll agree). Saying "Trans women are not women" doesn't fall into this category. That's my gripe. That's it. There's no way to make that distinction in law without allowing an arbitrary authority to decide what does and doesn't come under that head. Surely this is clear?

Okay, I did somehow miss your answers...in a bit of a hurry...I know that's no excuse, so apologies seem to be in order.

So, it now seems we are not substantially disagreeing at all...

Saying "Trans women are not women" doesn't fall into this category. — AmadeusD

Here we might disagree somewhat...I agree it doesn't qualify as hate speech, but if someone who is biologically male identifies as a woman and wishes to be treated as such, I think to do so is the decent thing to. What would you lose by that? Or if you find it offensive you could simply have nothing to do with them.

On the other hand, to tell such a person that they should not identify as a women would be bordering on being hateful. and would certainly be unwarrantedly intrusive and grossly impolite.

Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. I’m more persuaded by arguments like this:

What is this supposed to be, some sort of guilt by association argument? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t know enough about yours politics to situate your critique of liberalism on a left-right spectrum. Maybe you can help. Did you think that Pope Francis was too liberal? What are your thoughts on the ideas coming out of the Claremont Institute? Are they generally to the right of your position on most issues, or do you find yourself in agreement with them on most things?

I recently listened to a very interesting discussion between Sam Harris and Tom Holland. It is about the ties between secularism, liberalism, and Christianity. The discussion towards the end about the way Islam encounters secular/Christian culture was on point for Wayfarer's thesis.

grossly impolite. — Janus

Depends on the context, but yes, that could be the case. We're more than welcome to not associate with impolite people, or those with whom we vehemently disagree. That actually seems a peculiarity of the TRA argument: You are wrong/morally corrupt/an asshole for not accepting our opinions and self-images (to the point that not engaging in sex with someone because they are the sex you are not attracted to is considered "phobic". That's bonkers, imo.

My position (I don't quite hold this, just making a point) that trans women are not women is both a very wide-spread view (i.e, you can't bat it down by saying its unusual or fringey, and therefore on the extreme of impoliteness)and one which can be supported on several conceptions of the issues of gender and sex (not all, no - I think that's the point). Even remonstrating with a trans person to perhaps revaluate their self-image also, is not even impolite. Indelicate? Sure. But If I am under the impression my son/s is/are mentally unstable, and he claims to be trans, i will explore the instability first. There's nothing wrong with this. Affirmation at the first is dangerous and extremely irresponsible, imo.

if someone who is biologically male identifies as a woman and wishes to be treated as such, I think to do so is the decent thing to. What would you lose by that? — Janus

Generally speaking, I agree, but as with quite a few nuanced takes, it really depends on the circumstance. If there's some form of a threat, you can fuck off. I'm not going to call you what you want because you're angry. FTR, I do not care what I am referred to as. Even my name, beyond legal documents, isn't important to me. It seems more important to others given how unusual it is.

I do not identify as Male. I am Male. I do not 'identify' as a man, either. That is the course on which Males are taken by the world. Some aberration is required to offset this. And when there's an aberration, we're free to say something even like this:

"Having a transgender identity is a break with reality. It is not right to say that this is not a mental aberration. But we generally treat all others with mental aberrations with respect, care and support. We can do that here too".

If you don't like that, don't interact with that speaker, no? You don't have any right to prevent that opinion be stated or even disseminated.

Another good one:

The first thing to note is the title of the book itself—The Politics Of The Real—indicates that Schindler thinks Liberalism’s chief defect is it encourages an order of putative “peace” at the expense of the truth of things as they really are. The Liberal order seeks to keep the peace via a very minimal account of what constitutes “the good” precisely in order to avoid the often socially divisive arguments that inevitably accrue to any strong account of the good. Better to bracket concepts like “the good” in order to avoid such conflicts while opening a civil space for free individuals to “privately” hold whatever account of the good they deem appropriate. So long, that is, as they do not seek to impose their idiosyncratic notions on others.

However, as Schindler notes, this is to subvert the very goodness of the good per se and only grants “equality” to all such notions by first trivializing them as equally irrelevant to the social project. In other words, Liberalism, in seeking the “good” of social amity, subverts the very thing it seeks to preserve by robbing the very concept of all goods of its reality as something holding a moral purchase in the public domain. Goods are only goods if they are viewed as true and real things, embedded in the very fabric of things; they exist antecedent to any of our private opinions and choices and therefore impose upon us the limits necessary for true freedom in the first place.

In a rich insight, Schindler builds upon this critique and points out that this rejection of the realness of goods leads to a situation wherein there are no natural limits to State power. This rejections means there are no moral and spiritual realities transcending the State and both limiting its power and forming its structure.

For example, the Liberal order claims for itself the right to self-limitation in matters of the good, which shows that it views no other limits on its powers than those it itself imposes. But that self-limitation creates a situation where the lines of limitation can move, willy-nilly, at the whim of the State since it recognizes no moral or spiritual sovereignty independent of its own sovereignty. It claims for itself a monopoly on such policing powers even as it masks the latent totalitarianism in such a regime through “granting” the “right” of private citizens to pursue the good on their own.

Other serious problems

Truth is a casualty as well since, as Schindler points out at the beginning of his text, in order for there to be a “res publica” in the first place the Liberal State must ignore the meddlesome and annoying question of “what is this thing in its essence” as the chief determiner of what constitutes the good. It resorts instead to the marginalization of all such metaphysical and delimiting questions into the realm of the purely subjective. Obviously, the State cares about “truth” in the practical domain of commerce and in the legal realm as it pursues justice as fairness. But it undermines these same realities by failing to embed them in a proper theory of the good which alone can hold them together and which alone can keep them from degenerating into a kind of technocratic proceduralism.

Nor does Liberalism have any inner principle for recovering such a theory of the good since it has been, since its inception, a movement characterized by a scorched-earth rejection of all previous moral and spiritual traditions. That includes the tradition and teaching embodied by the Church, which alone is capable of bearing forward the givenness of the good. Borrowing from thinkers such as Augusto del Noce and Pierre Manent, Schindler views the Liberal project as anti-Christian in its core.

And it is most especially anti-Catholic, insofar as it rejects the particular form of Catholicism as the very public embodiment of the coming together of Greek wisdom, Roman law, and Jewish theology—a synthesis that formed the moral and spiritual tradition of the West. And it does so because this “form” claims public warrant and is rooted in an ongoing development of a “private” Revelation that can have no such public warrant since it is not something accessible to the universal canons of secular reason.

Nor does it matter that many of the American founders spoke, theistically, of “nature’s God” as the source for all of our natural rights in the social contract. Because what they meant by “nature” was the Newtonian machine of closed and fixed laws and what they meant by God was the God so understood as the “divine architect” of this machine and whose “reality” only extended as far as universal reason can discern. Which really amounts to no God at all, especially as science marches forward and closes all of the gaps in our knowledge of nature’s autonomous operations. This is what happens to all “divine architect” formulations since God’s causative transcendence is viewed competitively with regard to nature’s causative immanence and leads to a flat-footed view of causation such that “if nature did this, then God didn’t” and vice versa.

All real religious traditions therefore are now trivialized and marginalized and relegated to the realm of private taste as “scientism”, and a vulgar pragmatic empiricism rushes in to take their place.

An anti-tradition tradition

Seen in this light, “religious freedom” in a Liberal order is no real freedom at all, but is in point of fact a kind of anti-freedom. The State, in “granting” freedom to religion, makes it clear that such freedom privileges only those forms of “religion” that make no strong claims about the public nature of the good, of God, of things spiritual. It privileges religion in the same manner as it privileges my choice of a Big Mac rather than a Whopper, which is to say it isn’t really privileging religion at all, but is instead merely privileging all such private tastes in matters that it views as trivial to the social contract. And in so redefining the social standing of religion it delegitimates Catholicism in its most essential aspects.

Thus is Liberalism an anti-tradition tradition, which is what makes it uniquely corrosive to the Christian evangel of the realness of God in time and space, as well to the Catholic belief that the Church is the very extension of the Incarnation into and within the flow of history. Therefore, there is no sense in which Catholicism can accommodate itself to such an ordo on a theoretical level and there is no sense in which Catholicism can make peace with such an ordo even on a practical level.

And this is why wherever the Church does try to accommodate itself to Liberalism, it dies.

This is also why, according to Schindler, Whig Thomism is such a flawed project. Murray’s thesis flies in the face of the demonstrable facts of the intellectual history of Liberalism and mistakes Liberalism’s smiling face toward a certain kind of religion as a gesture of “peace” devoid of deeper intent. The big lie of Liberalism is that it does not constitute a confessional creed of any kind—and Murray and his followers buy into that lie. And it is a lie because all States are necessarily confessional, which is to say, all States are ultimately theological.

Furthermore, the illiberalism we see erupting today, far from being an “aberration”, is the full-flowering of the procedural emptiness and metaphysical vacuity at the core of Liberalism which is only now coming into full view. It often takes time for the inner logic of an idea to unfold, especially when it is competing with other ideas that provide a counterweight. And in the American instance that counterweight was the cultural hegemony of a pan-Protestant theology whose ecclesiology was so “low” that for a time America itself was its “church.” And this could happen because such a low ecclesiology, with its quasi-gnostic denominationalism, allowed for a hyper-individualistic and largely “interior” vision of what it meant to be “saved.”

But that cultural hegemony has long been in our rearview mirror and so now we can see for the first time what America looks like when it is stripped of the last vestiges of even such an attenuated “traditioning”—a stripping that was inevitable due to the corrosive nature of Liberalism in the first place. What we are seeing now is what Liberalism looks like when its full nihilism takes over...

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/05/25/a-profound-critique-of-liberalism-essential-analysis-of-integralism/

“D.C. Schindler’s “The Politics of the Real” is a brilliant addition to the postliberal movement. By understanding liberalism as a distortion of the Christian order, we can recognize it as a sustained war upon reality. And we can understand a true postliberalism as nothing more or less than the New Evangelization, the effort of converting entire social orders to Christianity.”(William Bednarz)

“Liberalism is the political form of evil.”( D.C.Schindler)

The first thing to note is the title of the book itself—The Politics Of The Real—indicates that Schindler thinks Liberalism’s chief defect is it encourages an order of putative “peace” at the expense of the truth of things as they really are. The Liberal order seeks to keep the peace via a very minimal account of what constitutes “the good” precisely in order to avoid the often socially divisive arguments that inevitably accrue to any strong account of the good. Better to bracket concepts like “the good” in order to avoid such conflicts while opening a civil space for free individuals to “privately” hold whatever account of the good they deem appropriate. So long, that is, as they do not seek to impose their idiosyncratic notions on others.

Damon Linker, in a an essay for the NYT, examines a contemporary critique of liberalism going back to Carl Schmitt and taken up by Leo Strauss, the Claremont Institute and Adrian Vermeule:

Carl Schmitt (who died in 1985) developed his most influential ideas during the turbulence and ineffectual governance of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In his view, liberalism has a fatal weakness. Its aversion to violent conflict drives it to smother intense debate with ostensibly neutral procedures that conceal the truth about the nature of politics. That truth is revealed in emergency situations: Politics often requires making existential decisions about the good of the nation — and especially about who should be considered its friend and who its enemy. Liberalism’s supposed incapacity to make such primordial distinctions led Schmitt to the view that there exists “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”

For Schmitt, someone must serve in the role of sovereign decider. Legislatures aren’t fit for it, because they easily devolve into squabbling factions. Neither are administrative bureaucracies, because they often defer to established rules and debate without resolution. Both contributed to making the later years of Weimar what Schmitt described, in a lecture from 1929, as an “age of neutralizations and depoliticizations.”

Few on the American right today explicitly credit Schmitt for shaping their views of presidential power. That isn’t true of Leo Strauss (who died in 1973), the German-Jewish émigré from Weimar who has influenced several generations of conservative academics and intellectuals in the United States. In his most influential book, “Natural Right and History,” Strauss subtly tames Schmitt’s views of politics, without mentioning him by name, and presents them as the pinnacle of political wisdom.

Strauss sets out a timeless moral standard of what is “intrinsically good or right” in normal situations as the just allocation of benefits and burdens in a society. But there are also “extreme situations” — those in which “the very existence or independence of a society is at stake.” In such situations, the normally valid rules of “natural right” are revealed to be changeable, permitting officeholders to do whatever is required to defend citizens against “possibly an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy.”

The Claremont Institute extended this intellectual line in America. Founded in 1979 in California by four students of Harry Jaffa, who studied with Strauss in the 1940s, the institute has cultivated a distinctive account of American history. It begins with veneration for the country’s founding, which institutionalized timeless moral verities. It continues with reverence for Abraham Lincoln’s displays of statesmanship, both before and during the Civil War, which deepened and perfected the American polity by fulfilling the promise of its founding.

For the next half-century, the United States became the living embodiment of the “best regime” described in the texts of ancient political philosophers.Then came the fall: First Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive movement, and then the New Deal during the Great Depression, introduced the notion of a “living Constitution” that evolves to permit the creation of an administrative state staffed by experts. This form of administrative bureaucratic rule, often aided and abetted by the judicial branch, stifles statesmanship. That’s why Claremont-affiliated scholars have been at the forefront of attempts simultaneously to roll back the administrative state and to consolidate executive power in the office of the president.

Finally, Adrian Vermeule, of Harvard Law School, combines explicit Schmittian influence with a desire to revive and apply elements of medieval political theology to the contemporary understanding of the presidency.

Are there any strands of this thinking you are sympathetic to, and if so, which ones?

Are there any strands of this thinking you are sympathetic to, and if so, which ones?

Very little, except for the observation re the impotence of legislatures. I think this has fairly obviously tended to hold true, with the executive taking on more power. There is a parallel to how monarchs were able to radically expand their power in the early modern period, generally with the support of urban populations and the peasantry, since a strong monarch was seen as a check on recalcitrant elites. In the same way, legislatures are seen as both ineffective on national defense and impotent in the fact of powerful elite interests. I don't think that's an unfair judgement either, particularly in the context of America's donor-centric ridiculously short two year election cycles, where campaigning essentially never stops.

The Claremont Institute is not against liberalism though. I think only left-leaning liberals would tend to see it thus. And that's only because they associate "real liberalism" with their particular brand of progressive liberalism. For instance, Claremont describes itself as a "champion of small government and free markets," the boilerplate pronouncement of right liberalism. Neocons aren't against liberalism; they have so much faith in liberalism that they have tended to embrace rather extreme economic coercion to spread it, or outright use of violence to "force others to be free."

They might be more skeptical about democracy, but then I think anti-democratic sentiment within liberalism is even stronger on the political left these days. There is a lot of angst about populism and "low-information voters" for instance. Coverage of Brexit is a great example. You can also find all sorts of left-leaning analysis on "the threat of illiberal democracy."

This sentiment is sort of in line with the old Greek conception of democracy as leading to anarchy, but I think it's actually quite distinct because the real concern is that the "exceptional individuals" will have their freedom constrained by "the mob." But, on the liberal view, the "exceptional individual" is the driver of cultural, technological, and economic progress (progress being the great idol and a subject of almost religious faith). It's the same way "start-up tech culture" shouldn't be forced to suffer due to the demands of recalcitrant mediocre workers. So, if there is conflict between the freedom of the exceptional individual and democracy (which there is), so much the worse for democracy (granted "protecting minority rights" is a more palatable way to portray this opposition to democracy).

In general, conservatives are anti-democratic in not wanting migration to shift the constitution of the nation and its laws and culture (despite having pushed quite hard for that same migration). I think they are simply unable to own up to an inherit contradiction in conservative liberalism. Conservatives value "tradition," culture, and religion, and liberalism demolishes these things. They are in the odd position of arguing for unrestrained capitalism AND trying to protect traditional culture, even though the former flattens out and destroys the latter. Capitalism is diabolical in the full sense of the word.

Left liberalism has the same sort of problem. It wants a robust, all-encompassing welfare state, but then liberalism destroys the very sense of common identity and culture that originally built support for large scale redistribution and elite acquiesce to it in the first place. When "everywhere is everywhere is else," why exactly would a billionaire or leaders of mega corps have much civic spirit? The polity becomes just an administrative apparatus serving the interests of the liberated individual (particularly the exceptional one).

One elephant-in-the-room question I feel obliged to ask, is, to those for whom political liberalism is the problem, does Donald Trump's form of conservatism represent a solution? Because it seems to me that at least some of those who he's sorrounded himself with - I'm thinking Russell Vought, in particular, Head of Office of Management and Budget, and chief architect of the notorious Project 2025 - are very much grounded in anti-liberal ideology. Here's another Damon Linker piece, on Vought, in the NY Times.

Conservatives have railed against the growth of the federal government that started in the Progressive Era, and especially the exponential expansion of what’s come to be called the administrative state — the numerous departments and regulatory agencies of the executive branch.

Mr. Vought has harshly criticized this progressive vision of the federal government’s role in American life, which has been driven by numerous developments in political culture. Congress passed laws that sometimes amounted to vague statements of intent, leaving judgment calls to the career civil servants who staff the regulatory bureaucracies. The courts adopted a deferential stance toward those bureaucracies, and presidents often opted not to exercise adequate guidance over the bureaucracies they nominally oversee and run.

For Mr. Vought and like-minded conservatives, the results of these developments place the country in a “post-constitutional moment” in which we’ve grown accustomed to being ruled by an unelected and unaccountable “fourth branch” of government.

This “fourth branch” stands above and apart from the separation of powers, imposing its own agenda and defending its own distinct interests, and it is this — “the woke and weaponized bureaucracy,” as Mr. Vought has called it — that he has promised to dismantle. As he wrote in his contribution to Project 2025, “nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.” ...

In Mr. Vought’s view, along with other conservatives who embrace the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea of extra-political independence is “not something that the Constitution understands.” The president heads the executive branch; these departments and agencies reside within it; that puts the president in charge of them, empowered by the voters who elected him. In short, he is their boss, and they must do as he wishes. The idea that they can operate independently of such oversight and accountability is incompatible with self-government.

The second area of reform Mr. Vought highlights involves the president reasserting the constitutional power to impound, or claw back, funds appropriated by Congress. Until 1974, presidents enjoyed broad (though not unlimited) impoundment powers based on the presumption that Congress sets a ceiling but not a floor for federal spending. But with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed in response to Richard Nixon’s supposed abuse of the impoundment power, Congress acted to remove this power from the presidency. ...

I do from time to time read conservative media outlets, and while I agree with some of what I read, overall I find American political conservatism, at this point in history at least, quite a toxic culture. Likewise their attraction to Erdogan and Putin, I strongly suspect on the grounds of their hostility to gender equality and gay rights among other factors. And so on. If so, I have to say, in spite of my philosophical agreement with many of the criticisms of liberalism (especially its underlying scientism), that if this is representative, then the remedy is worse than the disease. It would make me, were I an American voter, a Democrat for sure.

Or is there another vein of 'principled conservatism', and, if so, who represents it?

I'm no expert on Russell Vought, but this strikes me as another case of progressive liberals identifying conservative liberals as "not real liberals," even though they are still making their arguments for conservative liberalism on the basis of liberal values and anthropology. The only thing that seems illiberal here is the lifting up of religion and culture, not the antipathy to the "deep state."

Of course, democracy isn't necessarily wed to liberalism. As I said above, the two are actually normally actually in tension. But Vought seems to be arguing for a stronger executive as an enhancement of democracy, on largely liberal grounds. That is: "the executive should be stronger because they are selected by the 'people' and the people need the liberty to dispense with the administrative state and interference from the career civil service, as these are themselves a constraint on liberty."

Such a position is contradictory in two ways:

A. It's the very free market and marketization and commodification of everything, which conservatives have long supported, that leads to the growth of the administrative state into all corners of public and private life. The market dismantles the old institutions and culture and then the legal system and state must come in to stabilize market failures left in the wake of this deconstruction. So, conservatives support the very thing that leads to democratic demand for the "deep state" in the first place. One might suppose that the only reason attacks on the career civil service are even successful is that people have forgotten about the problems of unregulated capitalism that it was originally enlarged to tackle. Now that food inspectors, etc. are gone, companies will once again try to up profits by dumping chalk into milk, etc. People will get upset and demand a re-expansion of the administrative state.

B. The "Christian Nationalism" thread is more explicitly illiberal, but it is contradicted by the strong commitment to capitalism and classical liberal principles (it also is not based on a coherent alternative anthropology, political metaphysics, or conception of the human/common good in the way the confessional state was). Basically, it's just the desire to somehow maintain culture and tradition, even as the movement seeks to empower and advanced the very forces of capitalism that have dismantled culture and tradition in the first place.

"Christian nationalism" isn't, in most forms, a return to the confessional state. It's instead a sort of incoherent fever dream of "liberalism, but Christian"—a return to America's history that is obviously impossible given the progress of liberalism. Citizens of liberal states receive two decades of positive indoctrination in liberalism's preferred materialist metaphysics, and this means that any alternative system is largely inaccessible to them without their overcoming a great deal of bias and conditioning. Hence a non-liberal understanding of human liberty, telos, and the common good is unlikely on any large scale. People have been sold on "the world is just little balls of stuff bouncing in the void, which exist for no reason at all, and this is what 'science says,' and to reject it is to reject light bulbs, automobiles, and vaccines and return to the Middle Ages" since pre-school. Religion here exists as a carve out, a sui generis space of "private" "spiritual" "faith-based" (as opposed to "evidence-based") belief. Such a view obviously excludes a conception of spiritual goods as precisely those goods that do not diminish when shared. It makes them inherently private and atomized.

It strikes me as one of the paradigmatic features of liberalism. The solution to the problems generated by liberalism is always "more liberalism!" (just more conservative or more progressive).

The most obviously illiberal thing I know Vought has said is that the US should prioritize Christian migrants. But why is this illiberal? It's not obvious why selecting immigrants who share a faith with the dominant faith of the polity that is accepting migrants is "illiberal" or how exactly it is supposed to constrain the freedom of citizens to have more (or less) co-religionist migrants living amongst them. If we read about a Greek polis selecting migrants in this way, I don't think "this is a constraint on liberty for the current citizens" would be our first thought. Rather, the charge of "illiberalism" here relies on the liberal axiom that the Church (and culture) are something people need to be "freed from," with both contained to the atomized "private realm." Yet since religion is the primary way humanity has historically framed the ultimate human good that is to be promoted by the polis, this exclusion ultimately reveals itself to be totalitarian; it cannot avoid making a strong positive pronouncement on the whole of the human good and enforcing it in all spheres of public life.

It's worth considering why, in general, it is not considered damaging to "liberty" to select migrants based on their "economic qualifications " and ability to "grow the economy," but it is considered damaging to "liberty" to select them on the basis of their ability to assimilate to the dominant culture.

The Claremont Institute is not against liberalism though. I think only left-leaning liberals would tend to see it thus. And that's only because they associate "real liberalism" with their particular brand of progressive liberalism. For instance, Claremont describes itself as a "champion of small government and free markets," the boilerplate pronouncement of right liberalism. Neocons aren't against liberalism; they have so much faith in liberalism that they have tended to embrace rather extreme economic coercion to spread it, or outright use of violence to "force others to be free."

They might be more skeptical about democracy, but then I think anti-democratic sentiment within liberalism is even stronger on the political left these days — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are those who would beg to differ with your assessment of the Claremont Institute as not anti-liberal. Casey Michel , reviewing Katherine Stewart’s book, ‘Money, Lies and God’ writes of the Claremont Institute:

"It is the final group, the “Thinkers,” that presents arguably Stewart’s most insightful sections. These are the figures like Eastman and his allies who posit themselves as the ideological, intellectual class crafting the contours of Trumpism—and identifying the kinds of legal cover Trump can use to dismantle American democracy. Much of this cohort can trace directly back to the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization where Eastman remains a senior fellow. As Stewart points out, it is the Claremont Institute where the “erstwhile reverence for America’s founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany’s fascist period, into material support” for Trumpism. 
The institute’s modus vivendi centers on the “Straussian man in action”—the man who bends history to his own ends, regardless of the consequence and regardless of democratic legitimacy. Stewart writes: 
His mission is to save the republic. He must tell a few lies, yet he is nonetheless a noble liar, at least in his own mind. He acts in the political world, where natural right reigns, and not merely in the legal world where lawyers are supposed to toil. Aware of the crooked timber from which humanity is made, he is prepared to break off whatever branches are needed for the bonfire of liberty.

This core Claremont belief leads to the yearning for a so-called “Red Caesar”—a masculine leader untrammeled by anything like democratic oversight or political pushback, grabbing a society by the throat and forcing it back into a world in which men, and especially white men, are once more restored to the top of America’s sociopolitical hierarchy. Indeed, there is an almost obsessive approach at Claremont to restoring supposed masculinity within American society. Stewart traces this belief system at Claremont—where, she says, all of the board members “appear to be male”—to Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., who wrote a 2006 book called Manliness and “counts as nobility among Claremont’s extended family.” As Mansfield argued, “gender stereotypes are all true”—including, bizarrely, that women would make bad soldiers because “they fear spiders.”
As Stewart details, Mansfield was “far too sophisticated to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries—but in the private sphere, “those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant.” This belief has seeped into Claremont’s bones and manifested itself at Claremont many times over. There is a Claremont Fellow named Jack Murphy who once said that “feminists need rape.” There was another Claremont official who gave a talk titled, “Does Feminism Undermine the Nation?” There is the promotion of work by an author named Coston Alamariu—better known by his nom de plume “Bronze Age Pervert”—who oozes undiluted misogyny and rails against “the gynocracy.” As Alamariu wrote, “It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization”—and the only way forward is to “use Trump as a model of success.”
These Claremont-based “Thinkers” also include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who has contributed to the Claremont publication American Mind and “appeared as an honored guest on Claremont podcasts.” Yarvin’s affections for despotism have been widely reported elsewhere, but it is his historical ignorance that highlights just how shallow the Claremont men’s pretensions at intellectualism truly are. Not only does Yarvin preposterously believe that “European civilization” wasn’t responsible for any genocides before the Holocaust—as if genocides in places like the Africa, North America, or even Ireland and Ukraine never existed—but he further maintains that America now needs to collapse into dictatorship in order to rebuild.  
The “men of Claremont frame their not-so-hidden longing for revenge as a series of ruminations about the rise of an American Caesar,” Stewart writes. “And when that ‘Red Caesar’ arrives, he can thank the oligarchs for funding his rise, and he can thank the rank and file of the movement for supporting him in the name of ‘authenticity.’ But he would owe at least as large a debt of gratitude to the unhappy men of Claremont, those spurned would-be members of the intellectual elite … for explaining just who he is, and why he should go ahead and blow the whole place up.” 

Taken together, Money, Lies, and God paints not only a devastating picture of the state of American democracy (as if one was needed) but one that also contributes texture and context to understanding the current American political moment. The book convincingly argues that, when it comes to figures like Eastman or Leo or any of the men affiliated with the Claremont Institute, calls for dialogue and civility are futile. “In earlier times this may have been sage advice,” Stewart writes. “Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” American democracy isn’t simply dying. It is, as Stewart observes, being murdered."

Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily equate democracy with liberalism. There is a lot of right and left liberalism that is quite skeptical of democracy and the tyranny of "the mob" over the individual.

The Manosphere is really just hyper-liberalism. Mark Fisher rightly identifies gangster rap culture and its notion of "keeping it real" as the end state of liberalism in "Capitalist Realism." To "keep it real" is to abolish all sentiment and to become most fully an atomized, self-interested, egoist utility maximizer. Homo oecononimicus is a sociopath for whom all relationships are transactional, for whom power relations define all human relationships and for whom the Good is defined fully in terms of power and epithumia. Thymos is only allowed to enter into the picture in terms of one's "rep," one's ability to credibly signal the use of violence to impose one's will vis-á-vis the conquest of sensible goods.

You see the same thing in hypercompetitve cut throat "reality" TV, where the ideal contestant in also a sociopath. This is "reality," the really real of the "state of nature." In many ways, the Manosphere is just the spread of this phenomenon to the middle class. The Manosphere's "alpha Chad" is very much the image of the power focused gangster constrained by nothing but his own will and directed by nothing but his own appetites, whose gratification is the fullest realization of freedom. "Might makes right" is just market logic become totalized and absolutized.

As Deleuze and Guattari among others have noted, capitalism desacralizes everything. Thymos and logos are pushed out of human concern. Instead we have Mill's ideal where the "constraints of custom" are severed, the late-night TV culture where absolutely nothing is serious or sacred. This is why the Manosphere and Alt-Right (and intellectual discourse in general) are dominated by irony. The human of late-capitalism, particularly the male, is emotionally and spiritually constipated, subject to the tyranny of epithumia and the death of eros and the other.

This is all the fruit of liberalism, not some extrinsic opposition to it in the way reactionary monarchism or confessional states were. If it contradicts liberalism that's because liberalism is beset by internal contradictions. And of course, the solution on the left is just "more liberalism." The administrative and carceral state must expand. We need enhanced hate speech laws to throw the defectives in prison, and enhanced welfare to meet more biological needs so that fewer people "rebel."

But these people aren't really rebelling, they are simply becoming the people liberalism tells them they are "by nature" and should be. They are engaging in the same "no-holds-barred" competition that progressive liberalism's obsession with "meritocracy" creates in more cultivated forms in the elite.

The most obviously illiberal thing I know Vought has said is that the US should prioritize Christian migrants. But why is this illiberal? It's not obvious why selecting immigrants who share a faith with the dominant faith of the polity that is accepting migrants is "illiberal" or how exactly it is supposed to constrain the freedom of citizens to have more (or less) co-religionist migrants living amongst them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My father is a Zionist, and when I was 14 he moved the family to Israel with the expectation of settling there permanently. It didn’t work out for various reasons and we returned to the States, but what I learned in the year we spent there was that a democracy based on Jewish nationalism is not a robust democracy. Even if the intent is equal treatment for Jews and non-Jews alike, in practice the biases in favor of Jewish religion and culture translate into the institutionalization of unequal treatment. I’m an atheist , but I would never dream of prioritizing atheist migrants over religious ones, any more than I would prioritize white migrants over people of color simply because whites happen to be the dominant population of the U.S. We tried that for 40 years when strict immigration limits were set in the 1920’s to keep out Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe, as well as Asians, under the pretext that they could not assimilate ‘American’ values.

It's worth considering why, in general, it is not considered damaging to "liberty" to select migrants based on their "economic qualifications " and ability to "grow the economy," but it is considered damaging to "liberty" to select them on the basis of their ability to assimilate to the dominant culture — Count Timothy von Icarus

Frankly, I think we tend to underestimate both the ability of migrants to assimilate to the dominant culture and their ability to contribute to its economy. We undervalue the tremendous motivation involved in choosing to leave one’s home country for a foreign land.

Religion here exists as a carve out, a sui generis space of "private" "spiritual" "faith-based" (as opposed to "evidence-based") belief. Such a view obviously excludes a conception of spiritual goods as precisely those goods that do not diminish when shared. It makes them inherently private and atomized.

It strikes me as one of the paradigmatic features of liberalism. The solution to the problems generated by liberalism is always "more liberalism!" (just more conservative or more progressive). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Everything you’ve said so far makes you sound like a kind of Socialist Christian Nationalist. Maybe I’ve been missing it in your posts, but I don’t get a clear sense of what kind of political system you are advocating for. Is this something you’ve concocted in your own head, inspired by your forays into Aristotle and Medieval theology, or does it exist somewhere else? What I mean is, is there an example of a political system that exists now or has existed in the past somewhere in the world that you think comes close to your alternative to liberalism, are are you spinning out your own utopia in the tradition of half-baked political thinkers like Chomsky and Fisher? Can you point me to contemporary political theorists who articulate a post-liberal political vision that resembles what you have in mind? Would you say that Bernie Sanders’ socialism comes closer to your model than conservative and progressive liberalism? If Sanders were to repackage his socialism with a religious emphasis would that come closer to what you have in mind?

BTW, if anyone is interested in reading a particularly dismal anthropology, I would highly recommend Rollo Tomassi's "The Rational Male." His book on religion is a particularly good example.

The thing is though, if you pair back all the Manosphere-speak in the book, the decrying of "manginas" and terse formulations of the imperatives of evolutionary psychology in catch-phrases like "beta need and alpha seed" (it is truly atrocious), what you'll find is a view of humanity that isn't that far off mainstream liberal welfare economics, or the more "enlightened liberalism" of guys like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris. It's basically those anthropologies boiled down to their essence and stripped of all social niceties or appeal to sentiment, and then presented in particularly low-brow form.

It is, I'd argue, in many ways a "demonic" anthropology; it's pretty much the anthropology of Dante's damned in Hell (which of course borrows from a wide history of conceptions of demonic, fallen man).

Phil Cary says that one of the key differences between ancient and modern thought is that the ancient were chiefly afraid of degenerating into beasts, whilst today we are scared of becoming machines. But actually, given mainstream philosophy of nature, I'm not sure there is really all that much difference between these two outcomes anymore. The brute just is a particular sort of machine.

The thing is though, if you pair back all the Manosphere-speak in the book, the decrying of "manginas" and terse formulations of the imperatives of evolutionary psychology in catch-phrases like "beta need and alpha seed" (it is truly atrocious), what you'll find is a view of humanity that isn't that far off mainstream liberal welfare economics, or the more "enlightened liberalism" of guys like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris. It's basically those anthropologies boiled down to their essence and stripped of all social niceties or appeal to sentiment, and then presented in particularly low-brow form. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s easy to attack, but more difficult to lay yourself on the line by committing to a detailed alternative to liberal politics that others can then pick apart. I already know what you’re rejecting. I want to know exactly what it is you’re selling.

My father is a Zionist, and when I was 14 he moved the family to Israel with the expectation of settling there permanently. It didn’t work out for various reasons and we returned to the States, but what I learned in the year we spent there was that a democracy based on Jewish nationalism is not a robust democracy. Even if the intent is equal treatment for Jews and non-Jews alike, in practice the biases in favor of Jewish religion and culture translate into the institutionalization of unequal treatment. I’m an atheist , but I would never dream of prioritizing atheist migrants over religious ones, any more than I would prioritize white migrants over people of color simply because whites happen to be the dominant population of the U.S. We tried that for 40 years when strict immigration limits were set in the 1920’s to keep out Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe, as well as Asians, under the pretext that they could not assimilate ‘American’ values.

Well, first I'd just point out that Israel is very much a liberal ethno-state, not a confessional state. Most modern liberal states were founded as ethno-states (and in Europe this involved a vast project of ethnic cleansing). "A German state for the German people." "An Algerian state for Algerians (and not just equal rights in a French state)." "A Kurdish state for Kurds and a Tibet for its people, etc."

This is still a mainstream idea; nationalism was sublated by liberalism and remains a pillar of its legitimacy. But Israel faced particular internal and external challenges that stopped it from embracing the liberal drive to homogeneity in Europe. This might have more to do with the size and cohesion of their minority population more than anything else. As German children born today face becoming minorities in Germany by middle age we are seeing a fascist party become a major political player in a state where citizens undergo an extensive protective indoctrination against fascism and where the far right faces significant state repression and censorship. The bet of globalized neo-liberalism was that it could digest and destroy culture rapidly enough to make replacement migration a feasible solution to falling birthrates. I think there is ample evidence in the rise of the far-right to show that this bet is not paying off. The leftist response so far seems to be mostly to advocate for greater state powers of coercion, and perhaps even a turn away from popular democracy, to resolve this issue. However I am skeptical that this would work even if they could win elections (which I am also skeptical of).

Anyhow, my original point wasn't whether such restrictions would be wise, but rather that I cannot see how they have any immediate bearing on the liberty of current citizens, save for liberalism's particular ideological preference for severing the individual from custom and culture as a means of promoting "liberty."

However, when large numbers of migrants of a particular background have concentrated in Europe they have at times advocated for their own communitarian festivals, corporate events, legal systems, and ways of life. And liberalism has, in general, not been willing to accommodate this. Liberalism can be indifferent to the culture and religion of new arrivals precisely because it bars culture, custom, and religion from public life and from defining the common good around which the polity is organized. It's an "any color you like, so long as its white," sort of thing, i.e. "any culture you like, so long as it remains irrelevant to the realities of market and administrative state."

But I'd argue that the only reason liberalism can be this accommodating is because of capitalism's tendency to eradicate culture and particularity in the first place. Also, it's worked so far because the cumulative effects of the replacement migration strategy are back loaded. It's one thing when 10% of a population is recent arrivals. It's another when that climbs to 50% in a generation, particularly when new arrivals become a sizeable majority in younger age brackets and the working aged population, while natives make up the lion's share of an extremely expensive pensioner population whose benefits crowd out investment in the young (now majority minority). In many ways, it seems like a recipe for a return to ethnopolitics in the long run (which we're already seeing today), and it's a dynamic driven by neo-liberalism's growth fetish.

Frankly, I think we tend to underestimate both the ability of migrants to assimilate to the dominant culture and their ability to contribute to its economy. We undervalue the tremendous motivation involved in choosing to leave one’s home country for a foreign land.

It's the capacity of modern liberalism/capitalism to break down culture that matters here. There are minority populations who migrated into locales across the globe who remain culturally, religiously, and even genetically distinct even after centuries in their new homeland (e.g. minorities in Iraq or Syria). The sort of assimilation seen in modern liberalism is not a historical norm. It's not that pluralistic societies didn't exist in the past, they absolutely did. It's that they remained pluralistic generation after generation, rather than becoming rapidly homogeneous.

This history is precisely what gives lie to liberalism's claim to be "value neutral" and to not engage in positive indoctrination. In general, when we see assimilation in history, as opposed to long term pluralism, it is because of (often coercive) regimes to attain homogeneity (e.g. Rome in the western half of the empire, Chinese imperial policy, the Spanish Reconquista, etc. ).

It’s easy to attack, but more difficult to lay yourself on the line by committing to a detailed alternative to liberal politics that others can then pick apart.

"Just offer a realistic alternative to a totalitarian and now globally hegemonic force." A tough ask! Unfortunately, I think humanity will have to weather the collapse of liberalism and it's attendant ecological disasters before any decisive break is possible. Maybe the God of progress will save us, but I doubt it.

What likely comes after liberalism has been described variously as a sort of "techno-feudalism," a combination of technocratic rule and "consent-based" corporate (often patronage-centric) governance for those with the skills of connections to still be "economically viable" in the era of artificial intelligence. We can already see this new system coming into being in the new "company towns" (Musk just won his vote for his "Starbase" community), planned cities like Telosa or the Saudi "Line," or the global elite's capacity to create legal city-states like Próspera, or communities like Fisher Island and the Villages (I am shocked that one named Galt's Gulch hasn't opened). "Voluntary" citizenship in such communities (based on "consent") will be incentived by the collapse in funding for public services that is already hitting developed countries who are still early in their demographic crises.

Changes in military technology that privilege small elite cadres with expensive training and equipment are occuring on a scale not seen since the stirrup led to feudalism and the rise of the mounted, hereditary knight in Europe. What happens when the mobilization and buy in of "the people" is no longer necessary for winning wars? Or, as Michelle Alexander says of the plight of inner city African American populations, what happens when elites no longer want to exploit the people's labor but just see them as a problem/burden to be contained? Probably nothing good for public services, particularly when this is paired with the divisive demographic conditions mentioned above.

Hence the emergence of the "consent-based," marketized corporate citizenship as a marketized "escape" from low quality public safety and services (we already see this dynamic with US school districts and localities to some extent). This is, at least, the sort of theory that is appealing to the West's oligarchs these days, and it has a certain sort of economic logic to it.

What this opens up is the prospect for the return of the polis as the fundamental political unit, a more natural scale for governance. And this in turn opens up the possibility of creating communities that aren't based on liberalism. This is far more difficult today, because liberalism says: "you're perfectly free to pursue your own alternatives, it's just that these must have no real authority (power) over individuals, and you have to pay for liberalism's institutions first and then use whatever is left over for any alternative, while also being unable to force members to pay for any alternative in the way the state does." So, one reform to push for is to say "let state funding follow the citizen to their communities of choice, rather than corralling it into liberal institutions and saying 'you're free to fund your own alternative,' as if this wasn't essentially an economic impossibility for most of the population."

So for instance, if you don't want your child to undergo 180 days of liberal indoctrination a year for the first two decades of their life, the economic reality for most families will mean spending a substantial share of all household income on education (if decent options even exist in a locale the family can afford, which is unlikely for most). Likewise, one can organize for an alternative civil society and provision of welfare only after one has paid for the liberal version, something that is only slightly plausible today because the liberal version has been financed by tremendous debt, but which will become impossible when taxes are raised to fund the tsunami of liabilities that are already on the books.

A polis based around a more robust conception of the common good would do many things differently. For instance, the purpose of education would be the development of virtue and happiness, not workforce preparation and enabling people to meet whatever desires they happen to develop. It would probably provide for civil defense through universal citizen military service instead of a standing professional (and increasingly mercenary) army/police force. And it would foster specific festivals and common events/rthyms as opposed to restricting these in the interests of individual and commercial interests (e.g. the old Church calendar had holidays very regularly, as opposed to just a handful during which much commerce still continues.

Catholic philosophy has the most robust development of such alternatives, but arguably this is simply because Catholicism has maintained the only strong university/intellectual system outside of liberalism. Orthodoxy certainly has many of the same intellectual resources. Whereas Protestant Christian nationalism tends towards "liberalism with Christian characteristics," and so is self-undermining.

The irony is that entry into Catholic intentional communities sort of requires becoming a liberal exceptional individual first, both due to the need to cultivate heterodox beliefs one will not be exposed to in liberal institutions and because it requires wealth.

Not that other formulations wouldn't be possible, I have just not seen them developed. I hope they will be, since, although a confessional society can be pluralistic (and indeed, can safeguard religious freedom in a way liberalism will always deny) it would nonetheless be beneficial for many people. Yet I know of no secular intentional communities outside the history of rapidly collapsing communes or ethnic colonies. In general, secular criticisms of liberalism are just that, criticisms, not alternatives, perhaps because they are often wed to the materialist metaphysics that leads to liberalism in the first place.

I certainly give you points for imagination. You’ve broadly assessed the modern history of political and economic structures and, rather than aligning yourself with an already existing model, you want to start over with a sweeping new vision, albeit one which draws from ancient and medieval
sources. My first observation about such an approach is that it stems from what I would call an ‘apocalyptic’ interpretation of where we are now. In the apocalyptic view, something is terribly wrong and rotten at the very core of current practices. From your perspective, contemporary politics and economics are unmoored from a proper moral ground, so it is inevitable that the world will drift toward greater and greater moral collapse if it doesn’t change course. There will be more totalitarian and hegemonic repression, ecological disaster, a return to feudalism:

"Just offer a realistic alternative to a totalitarian and now globally hegemonic force." A tough ask! Unfortunately, I think humanity will have to weather the collapse of liberalism and it's attendant ecological disasters before any decisive break is possible. Maybe the God of progress will save us, but I doubt it… What likely comes after liberalism has been described variously as a sort of "techno-feudalism," a combination of technocratic rule and "consent-based" corporate (often patronage-centric) governance for those with the skills of connections to still be "economically viable" in the era of artificial intelligence… what happens when elites no longer want to exploit the people's labor but just see them as a problem/burden to be contained? — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I mentioned, it’s not as if you think there were periods in human history where large swaths of culture practiced approaches to politics and economics grounded in moral rectitude. For you, there was never such a pre-Capitalist, pre-liberal Eden from which humanity was expelled. For
you the only path is forward into a brave new world.

A polis based around a more robust conception of the common good would do many things differently. For instance, the purpose of education would be the development of virtue and happiness, not workforce preparation and enabling people to meet whatever desires they happen to develop. It would probably provide for civil defense through universal citizen military service instead of a standing professional (and increasingly mercenary) army/police force. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For my part, I have never bought into the apocalyptic narrative, the ‘things have gone terribly wrong and we need a whole new approach’ kind of thinking. I suspect such musings have more to do with projections from one’s personal experience of crisis than a neutral assessment of the cultural scene. When writers like Noam Chomsky, Giles Deleuze or David Graeber proclaim their wholesale rejection of modern political and economic culture I read this as their failure to understand important aspects of the relation between human nature and disrcursive practices.

I image how if they were given the power to magically wish into being their preferred social structure it would inevitably evolve into some variant of an already existing system, not due to immoral or coercive forces but because it happens to express what we need and what works for us at present, even if it is always far from perfect, and always in process of reform and modification. With regard to your preferred utopia, I think the political power of the states is more than enough to allow for retreat from secularism where there is enough of a consensus in favor of it, but as far as outright secession from the liberal capitalist state, I don’t think there is anywhere near the appetite for rejection of capitalism as you apparently do. To be honest ,give. your view that we have never had an adequately moral social system, I can’t help but suspect that no utopian plan for humanity that you can invent would relieve you of your sense that human beings are on the wrong track.

I have never bought into the apocalyptic narrative, the ‘things have gone terribly wrong and we need a whole new approach’ kind of thinking. — Joshs

Just to highlight this: I agree, and too often, in authoritarian hands, it turns into "Make X Great Again!" with results we can all observe daily. We, meaning Western democracies, in fact have taken a whole new approach, in roughly the last century, and as a result things are vastly better off for women, poor countries we used to exploit, working people, people of color, and people with illnesses and disabilities. (Not nearly good enough, but a lot better.) Now if we can only stop killing the planet, we might actually get somewhere. I guess the "things" that are supposed to have gone terribly wrong are certain European intellectual arguments about virtue. Hmm. On balance, surely this is less important than eradicating polio? Anyway, people seem about as virtuous, taken one by one, as they ever were.

That would make sense if Trumpism and the rise of the far-right in Europe were some sort of foreign, extrinsic force attacking liberalism from without, rather than something produced by liberalism's own contradictions. But Trump is just an extension of trends within liberalism (and not just the US) going back decades.

Likewise: "you either affirm neo-liberalism and late-capitalism or you want a return of polio, Jim Crow, slavery, etc." seems a bit much. Do any of the traditionalist critiques you have in mind argue for a return to such things? I doubt it. So what's the claim then, that all of the advancements you've listed were primarily caused by liberalism and would simply be unachievable without it? That without liberalism one must have slavery?

Historically, liberalism actually opposed many of the things you mentioned, often quite aggressively, and only grudgingly acceded to them due to its need to combat socialism (or when it was outright defeated on these issues). The end of child labor laws, advent of state pension systems, the end of Jim Crow—these were all grudgingly accepted by liberalism after being advocated for primarily by socialists (but to be fair, progressive liberals too). Often (as in the case of federal support for the end of segregation) liberalism explicitly embraced these in terms of them being a "lesser evil" in the fight to contain communism. For instance, liberalism only "stopped colonialism" after killing millions of people trying to sustain it (and in the French case, seriously considering using nuclear weapons on Vietnam to "keep it free"). The military defeat of the liberal nations then becomes, in the revisionist history, "something nice liberalism did." But the liberal states didn't give up their colonies because of "open ended liberal debate," but because they lost on the battlefield or risked immanently doing so if they tried to force the issue.

Competition was a check on liberalism and in order to compete liberalism had to sublate elements of nationalism and socialism, making them core parts of liberal norms (e.g. "an Algeria for Algerians," not just liberal rights for Algerians under a French state; the adoption of core elements of the socialist platform into virtually all liberal states). I don't think it's any coincidence that median wages across the developed world stagnated, despite robust productivity growth, as soon as liberalism's last opponent collapsed, or that standard of living and life expectancy began to decline following the triumphant "End of History" victory. What the "End of History" did was let liberalism and capitalism go back to being more fully themselves—back towards the Guilded Age, but with Christianity also increasingly out of the way as a rival/check on capitalism.

Polio and measles are interesting things to mention, since these are coming back in the US thanks to the liberal ethos and erosion of all sources of authority outside the coercive power of the state.

At any rate, critiques of liberalism do not claim that liberalism and capitalism erode tradition and culture over night. Indeed, that they don't is part of the problem re the politics of replacement migration. They have done so steadily however, which is precisely why these critiques claim we have Trump, a Europe that is unable to stomach short term declines in consumption to check Russian aggression, etc. Yet the dominant, hegemonic, now globalized force at "the End of History," which faces no real rivals, somehow manages to defend itself by claiming its flaws are mostly really just attacks from without (this is, IMO, only plausible in the case of radical Islam).



Right, that's a pretty common response, and in line with Fukuyama's argument. Liberalism is inevitable and human nature. I disagree on that obviously. I will just note that this same claim was long advanced by reactionary monarchists in much the same way. Monarchy was natural. It was in line with human nature itself. It was inevitable, and evidence to the contrary was a temporary aberration. This was also the claim of Marxism. It too was inevitable. Both collapsed, and there were signs that they would do so prior to the fact. For my part, I don't think humanity can reach the End of History while life entails the contradictions that liberalism embodies. Just the problem of the Last Man identified by Fukuyama should have been enough to clue him into that IMO.

But the end of the Ancien Régime, the Tsardom, and the Soviet Union were not the apocalypse. The end of liberalism will not be the "end of the world," even if "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." It will almost certainly be painful though, as was the death of the monarchies, but that was hardly a reason to keep traditional monarchies around forever, or to be a reactionary.