Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears
- 6 years ago
Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears
A system like our ideal liberal democracy, which does not place any constraints on critiques of leaders, authorities
and institutions; and does not allow any suppression of ideas no matter how dangerous to the system or objectionable to its citizens; and does not permit itself to select who can come in, or stay, based on their acceptance/rejection of fundamental liberal democratic values, has both:
(1) guaranteed perpetual generation of conditions of normative threat, and all the activation, polarization, and conflict that that produces, and
If a liberal democracy were to allow those things, it would no longer be a liberal democracy.
In addition to the economic setbacks experienced in heavily Republican regions of the country, Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues
that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”
He makes a case very similar to Stenner’s:
The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles
and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, observes
that “believers in liberal democracy have unilaterally disarmed in the defense of the institution” by agreeing in many cases with the premise of the Trump campaign: “that the country is a hopeless swamp.” This left Democrats “defenseless when he proposed to drain it.”
are the liberals who are willing to say that liberal democracy has worked?
A system like our ideal liberal democracy, which does not place any constraints on critiques of leaders, authorities
and institutions; and does not allow any suppression of ideas no matter how dangerous to the system or objectionable to its citizens; and does not permit itself to select who can come in, or stay, based on their acceptance/rejection of fundamental liberal democratic values, has both:
(1) guaranteed perpetual generation of conditions of normative threat, and all the activation, polarization, and conflict that that produces, and
If a liberal democracy were to allow those things, it would no longer be a liberal democracy.
In addition to the economic setbacks experienced in heavily Republican regions of the country, Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues
that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”
He makes a case very similar to Stenner’s:
The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles
and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, observes
that “believers in liberal democracy have unilaterally disarmed in the defense of the institution” by agreeing in many cases with the premise of the Trump campaign: “that the country is a hopeless swamp.” This left Democrats “defenseless when he proposed to drain it.”
are the liberals who are willing to say that liberal democracy has worked?