NationStates Jolt Archive

Liberals used to stand for equal rights for women and minorities. They used to stand for a strict separation of church and state. They were the guardians of human rights. Now look at us. Many liberals have become appologists for Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and other horrid regimes.

I think the root of this is postmodernism. Many postmodernists like to say that one cannot judge anything to be objectively better than another. By logical extension one cannot judge an open and free western society to be better than a repressive theocracy. Some liberals have even suggested that poverty and lack of education caused the 9/11 attacks, even though the hijackers, and their leaders are wealthy or at least middle class and well educated.

I have two questions for the people on this forum.

1 Do you agree that liberalism has abandoned it's goal of spreading equality and freedom?

2 What do you think is to blame for this?

Yes, I think that postmodernism has a lot to do with the relativism of the modern liberal. There is an undeniable difference between democracy and theocracy, and the attempts to relativise them are ridiculous. Liberalism was responsible for some of the greatest advances in civil and political rights in history, but now too many have become simply the opposition. They lack ideas and only oppose things because they can.

Probably the rise of conservatism during the 1980's with Reagan. They became afraid that liberalism was dying and shifted to an almost reactionary liberal opposition (an oxymoron?). However, the end of the Cold War was one of the greatest victories for democracy since WWII, but this was lost to the postmodern liberals due to their opposition policy.

Bill Clinton's policies can be seen as the real continuation of liberalism.

badger badger badger

1 Do you agree that liberalism has abandoned it's goal of spreading equality and freedom?

Yes.
2 What do you think is to blame for this?
You hit the nail on the head.

I think that the whole idea of moral equivalence falls into the same specious trap that you get with the "well, how do you know you're really alive and in this universe, and not in some dream, or in some exotic simulation?"

There comes a point where you have to draw a frame of reference, by forming postulates. Postulates are adhered to by faith. In math, we can refer back to the core postulates that underly our mathematics - but at the very root of things, we have to hold to a few unprovable postulates - or our whole mathematical view of the world falls apart. In religion, we refer back to the core postulates that underly our religion - we have to hold to a few unprovable postulates - or our whole religious view of the world falls apart.

If you run around saying that every system is morally equivalent, even if one goes out of its way to value human life, and the other thinks of shooting women in the head in a football pitch because she listened to music - you're going to have your whole view of the world fall apart.

Two things will then happen. You won't know what to believe. And no one will want to listen to anything you have to say, because you'll sound like an ass.

You have to pick a few postulates, and stick to them. Moral equivalence is a one way trip to idiocy.

Has postmodernism emasculated liberalism? only if you want it to.

In the United States, yes. In Canada, we have long known that our Liberal party does not stand for traditional liberalism, but rather "get damn comfy on that fence post, ride public opinion for all its worth, and sell your mother to the Devil if it will keep you in power".
Frankly, I blame vocal hard-liners onthe left, who rather than explain their own goals and ideas simply attack the right, and using "then enemy of the enemy is my freind" as philosophy side with anyone else the right doesn't like.

I find it telling that although our Founding Fathers were not hard core religious men themselves, they felt it necessary to protect religious liberty. It was central to their beliefs that we have that liberty.

I find it telling that the anti-slavery movement in the US arose in the churches - not on the floors of the various state legislatures.

I find it telling that African-Americans found their strongest voices of the Civil Rights movement in their religious leaders.

Because these people stand for something. They stake out a moral position.

If you don't draw a line somewhere, no one will listen to you - much less argue with you.

Liberals used to stand for equal rights for women and minorities. They used to stand for a strict separation of church and state. They were the guardians of human rights. Now look at us. Many liberals have become appologists for Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and other horrid regimes.

I think the root of this is postmodernism. Many postmodernists like to say that one cannot judge anything to be objectively better than another. By logical extension one cannot judge an open and free western society to be better than a repressive theocracy. Some liberals have even suggested that poverty and lack of education caused the 9/11 attacks, even though the hijackers, and their leaders are wealthy or at least middle class and well educated.

I have two questions for the people on this forum.

1 Do you agree that liberalism has abandoned it's goal of spreading equality and freedom?

2 What do you think is to blame for this?


I loathe postmodernism and it hasnt just gutted liberalism, it has gutted the united states as a whole.

Postmodernism has lead to the unwavering neverending lies that come out of the republican party and the administration's unwavering refusal to answer questions and the failure by the media or the left to force these things as an issue.

Essentially, politics and the media now exist as one big cesspool of garbled gibberish that never touches on anything important or factual. Both sides have agreed to keep it this way and I dont forsee it ever getting better here in the US.

I don't think Post-modernism is the root of the sympathy to miltant revolutionaries like Osama. I think that though many liberals do not advocate or believe in death, that they do think the twin-towers was a fair target. Aside from the cost of the building and the loss of lives, you don't find any liberals sympathizing with the companies who were hurt by the attack, nor any that are concerned that Capitalism was attacked that day.

Liberals are also more inclined to see things from other people's perspectives. I would rather understand my "enemy" than fear and loathe him. Even though I wouldn't advocate his actions, I understand that he is also oppressed by the situation that America has put him in. In many ways, muslim revolutionaries advocate more of the same things we do than Republicans. They just happen to be in a worse situation right now.

I don't think Post-modernism is the root of the sympathy to miltant revolutionaries like Osama. I think that though many liberals do not advocate or believe in death, that they do think the twin-towers was a fair target. Aside from the cost of the building and the loss of lives, you don't find any liberals sympathizing with the companies who were hurt by the attack, nor any that are concerned that Capitalism was attacked that day.

Liberals are also more inclined to see things from other people's perspectives. I would rather understand my "enemy" than fear and loathe him. Even though I wouldn't advocate his actions, I understand that he is also oppressed by the situation that America has put him in. In many ways, muslim revolutionaries advocate more of the same things we do than Republicans. They just happen to be in a worse situation right now.


A good point is made here.

One can understand the causes and the essential validity of an attack like the destruction of the world trade center without condoning it or supporting the attackers.

Contrarily, only in a society castrated by postmodernism and its associated apathy can a leader go on televisison and explain how the enemy is a "group of folks" that simply "hate our freedom" without being thrown out or worse.

I fail to see how it would have helped our effort in World War 2 to "understand Hitler and sympathize with his perspective".

I fail to see how it would have helped our effort in World War 2 to "understand Hitler and sympathize with his perspective".

Well, maybe, if we had done that, the UK would not have gone the appeasement road (had they understood Hitler) and maybe the US would have joined in WWII before Pearl Harbour.

I fail to see how it would have helped our effort in World War 2 to "understand Hitler and sympathize with his perspective".


We already did. The Nazi Eugenics movement stemmed from the American Eugenics movement. Forced Sterilization and bans on race-mixing were laws in the US long before they were in Germany. Many Americans did sympathize with Hitler, but because he was fighting our soldiers, he became the enemy.

I fail to see how it would have helped our effort in World War 2 to "understand Hitler and sympathize with his perspective".


It wouldnt have mattered so much in a real war like ww2 but in more contemporary times, where the danger of large scale conventional war and conquest is nonexistant for developed countries, prevention of conflicts and attacks becomes a matter of addressing their causes.

I should hope that you understand it is impossible to prevent terrorism by building walls or invading countries, it will only ever stop when people stop having enemies which they would die to hurt.

Well, maybe, if we had done that, the UK would not have gone the appeasement road (had they understood Hitler) and maybe the US would have joined in WWII before Pearl Harbour.

No, I'm talking about the way they use the concept "understanding your enemy" today.

To most people this now means apologizing for their behavior.

"He was a criminal because he had a bad childhood."

"They hijacked the planes because they feel oppressed."

So, in WW II, that would have translated as:

"He wants to stuff Jews in ovens because he had a hard time economically in his youth in proximity to a Jewish neighborhood."

I could care less, you know. In each case, these people are making a moral choice - a choice they could just as easily take the other way - and I do not believe for a moment that they have "no choice".

No, I'm talking about the way they use the concept "understanding your enemy" today.

To most people this now means apologizing for their behavior.

"He was a criminal because he had a bad childhood."

"They hijacked the planes because they feel oppressed."

So, in WW II, that would have translated as:

"He wants to stuff Jews in ovens because he had a hard time economically in his youth in proximity to a Jewish neighborhood."

I could care less, you know. In each case, these people are making a moral choice - a choice they could just as easily take the other way - and I do not believe for a moment that they have "no choice".

Ahhh. Well, it wouldn't have helped the war effort, though it might help with stomping out the few remaining neo-nazi nutjobs out there.

No, I'm talking about the way they use the concept "understanding your enemy" today.

To most people this now means apologizing for their behavior.

"He was a criminal because he had a bad childhood."

"They hijacked the planes because they feel oppressed."

So, in WW II, that would have translated as:

"He wants to stuff Jews in ovens because he had a hard time economically in his youth in proximity to a Jewish neighborhood."

I could care less, you know. In each case, these people are making a moral choice - a choice they could just as easily take the other way - and I do not believe for a moment that they have "no choice".
i don't entirely agree. i see the statements you listed as statements of (possibly) fact, not necessarily excuses. liberals are certainly more likely to say, "he became a criminal because of childhood abuse," but that doesn't mean they are saying, "his criminal actions should be excused because of the abuse he endured." seeking to define the root causes of actions doesn't have to mean that you excuse the actions on those grounds. i think it is smart to try to figure out why somebody did something awful, because then you stand a better chance of reducing the likelihood that another person will do that thing...that doesn't mean you let the first chap off the hook, but it does mean that you put a priority on closing the barn door before the horse has run out.

It wouldnt have mattered so much in a real war like ww2 but in more contemporary times, where the danger of large scale conventional war and conquest is nonexistant for developed countries, prevention of conflicts and attacks becomes a matter of addressing their causes.

I should hope that you understand it is impossible to prevent terrorism by building walls or invading countries, it will only ever stop when people stop having enemies which they would die to hurt.
So what do you do when your adversary defines his enemies by:

A Their unwillingness to convert to a violent and repressive form of Islam and
B Their unwillingness to live as second class citizens under the control of a repressive and violent form of Islam?

The problem is that I can't even tie those sorts of statements strictly to "liberals".

Anyone who has heard Rush Limbaugh say that someone was an idiot because they were a Democrat has heard the same sort of arrant nonsense.

If a person's perception of his own childhood was a major factor in any criminal act, then almost everyone would be a criminal.

The 9-11 hijackers were, to a man, not poor, indigent, or previous victims of political oppression (never arrested for political thought). They were all educated, upper middle class men with prospects.

Not everyone is a criminal. Not every poor Muslim is a terrorist. People need to wake up and realize that in this world, there is a finite set of "bad people who make bad choices".

Liberals used to stand for equal rights for women and minorities. They used to stand for a strict separation of church and state. They were the guardians of human rights. Now look at us. Many liberals have become appologists for Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and other horrid regimes.

I think the root of this is postmodernism. Many postmodernists like to say that one cannot judge anything to be objectively better than another. By logical extension one cannot judge an open and free western society to be better than a repressive theocracy. Some liberals have even suggested that poverty and lack of education caused the 9/11 attacks, even though the hijackers, and their leaders are wealthy or at least middle class and well educated.

I have two questions for the people on this forum.

1 Do you agree that liberalism has abandoned it's goal of spreading equality and freedom?

2 What do you think is to blame for this?

For one thing, I find it very funny that you are grouping all liberals in one chunk and saying that we all act like american liberals.

For another, I find it funny that you seem to think that equal rights for women is a good thing, yet in the title of the thread, seem to imply that being emasculated is a bad thing, thus being masculine is good and being feminine is bad...

For one thing, I find it very funny that you are grouping all liberals in one chunk and saying that we all act like american liberals.

For another, I find it funny that you seem to think that equal rights for women is a good thing, yet in the title of the thread, seem to imply that being emasculated is a bad thing, thus being masculine is good and being feminine is bad...
I find it funny that you are nitpicking at my choice of words rather than addressing the issue I raised.

Frankly, I blame vocal hard-liners onthe left, who rather than explain their own goals and ideas simply attack the right, and using "then enemy of the enemy is my freind" as philosophy side with anyone else the right doesn't like.
The NDP stand for things and don't just attack the conservatives... what are you talking about?

Unless you're referring to people too far left for the ndp?

Liberals are also more inclined to see things from other people's perspectives. I would rather understand my "enemy" than fear and loathe him. Even though I wouldn't advocate his actions, I understand that he is also oppressed by the situation that America has put him in. In many ways, muslim revolutionaries advocate more of the same things we do than Republicans. They just happen to be in a worse situation right now.

This I have to strongly disagree with.

My personal life philosophy places great value on both attacking my own beliefs (though not publically) and temporarily adopting other peoples believes and attacking those. By doing this I can find which are more resilient and reasonably while at the same time understanding more fully how others think. To this day I have met only one Liberal who has done anything even remotely similar to this, and too this day I have a massive amount of respect for her.

Take for instance religion, most Atheistic Liberals are without any doubt woefully ignorant of religious teachings. They simply aren't versed and have no desire to become versed in it. This however has never stopped them from blindly taking swings at it with a dogmatic fervor far stronger then I have ever seen from a Conservative. Liberals are by far more passionate people. While there is certainly nothing wrong with being a passionate person (I would pity someone that doesn't feel passionate about their beliefs), it does have a tendency to overpower clear reasonably thought (those familiar with the quote "Law is reason, free from passion" will understand what I am saying.) Liberals are more likely to make a knee-jerk reaction to something like Gun Control, immediately following something like a school shooting when they are still enraged, or otherwise enveloped in strong emotion.

Balance is as always the best course to take, unfortunately a well balanced Liberal is a dying breed these days.

While these are certainly generalizations, they ARE the general trend among vocal leftist. Well, at least the ones I have had contact with.

For one thing, I find it very funny that you are grouping all liberals in one chunk and saying that we all act like american liberals.

For another, I find it funny that you seem to think that equal rights for women is a good thing, yet in the title of the thread, seem to imply that being emasculated is a bad thing, thus being masculine is good and being feminine is bad...
haha, both fun points :). particularly since the one is an example of a totally outrageous generalization (American liberals bearing little resemblence to the concept of "liberalism" elsewhere in the world), and the second is such a conspicuous contradiction. chuckles all around.

yet i also would like to know what your opinion is on the topic.

Oh, and yes, it is silly to say that fundamentalists who hijack planes and kill civillians are in the right simply because they have a different belief system. They are no more correct in their behaviour than fundamental christians who beat people to death for beign gay or shoot abortion doctors.

And as far as I can tell, the democrats in the states do still stand for separation of church and state and civil rights. Especially when you compare them to the republicans under the current administration.

However, I'm not terribly up on american politics, I can't vote there so I don't memorize the party platforms, all I know is that the democrats seem slightly to the right of the liberal party here and the republicans under the current administration are downright scarily right wing.

1 Do you agree that liberalism has abandoned it's goal of spreading equality and freedom?

Yes, liberalism has grown into a collection of causes instead of a central movement. It is filled with people who really only work towards one cause or another and this has lead to a certain amount of compromise and accepting of all causes even if they don't really reflect the values of classic liberalism.

2 What do you think is to blame for this?

Self-interest, elitism, pseudo-intellectualism

For one thing, I find it very funny that you are grouping all liberals in one chunk and saying that we all act like american liberals.

When most americans say liberal, replace with social democrat.

Liberals used to stand for equal rights for women and minorities. They used to stand for a strict separation of church and state. They were the guardians of human rights. Now look at us. Many liberals have become appologists for Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and other horrid regimes.

I think the root of this is postmodernism. Many postmodernists like to say that one cannot judge anything to be objectively better than another. By logical extension one cannot judge an open and free western society to be better than a repressive theocracy. Some liberals have even suggested that poverty and lack of education caused the 9/11 attacks, even though the hijackers, and their leaders are wealthy or at least middle class and well educated.

I have two questions for the people on this forum.

1 Do you agree that liberalism has abandoned it's goal of spreading equality and freedom?

2 What do you think is to blame for this?

The short answer to the first question is that while liberalism as a doctrine hasn't abandoned its goals, many self-identified liberals have, or at least, they've abandoned any kind of ethos that could solidly ground support for those goals. The short answer to the second is an overarching egoistic outlook on life.

Basically, I'd say that the problem with American society today isn't so much post-modernism as it is egoism. The problem with post-modernism is that is just one more way to become an egoist, although with its floweryness and talk of "inclusivity", post-modernists in many ways make worse egoists because they usually aren't aware that they are egoists. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Basically, I think the problem started when many baby boomers started to move through college en masse and were heavily influenced by some of the dumber theories available in their day. The first of these "theories" was Derrida's argument for how to analyze literature. His basic argument was that there were explicit and implicit themes in any work of literature, and which get drawn out of the text by the reader have as much to do with how the reader thinks as does the actual intent of the author. To some extent, this is perfectly true: no one ever read an Oedipal conflict into Hamlet, for instance, before Freud used it as an example of just that in his writings; certainly that wasn't what Shakespeare was explicitly trying to convey. Now, you have to work fairly hard to come up with an alternative way of explaining it, given how influenced by Frued our society is. But I still don't think I would word it as strongly as Derrida did, because there are some cases where author's intent is more important than others: it doesn't matter how versed you may be in Freud's psychoanalysis; you'll still not understand Marx if you try to read an Oedipal conflict into Das Kapital.

The second theory wasn't so much a theory as it was a personality: Noam Chomsky. Now, having read some of Chomsky's early philosophical work, I can say that the man is a certified f-ing genius; I have considerably more respect for Chomsky as a thinker than I ever had or will have for Derrida or any other post-modernist. Basically, his early arguments were that the only way to explain early language development in children was that they had some linguistic structure built into their consciousness from birth. Now, this might not seem all that revolutionary now, but given how heavily into behaviorism (which presupposed that all observable behaviors come from other observable behaviors in strict causal order, and innate ideas aren't observable) everyone was in the early 60's, this was almost as big a blow to scientific orthodoxy as Einstein's special relativity. What he really became famous for, however, was his political views and fight against the Vietnam war in favor of "anarcho-syndicalism", a theory which sounds at once rebellious and communal, which was just what the doobie-addled hippies of the time were looking for. In reality, anarcho-syndicalism is a fairly easily attacked theory, and you can attack it on the same grounds that Marx attacked Bakunin: anarchism wastes effort destroying the superstructure of the state when what should be focused on is the economic base. Rather than destroying the state, it should be seized and used as a weapon against the bourgouis. If that is not done, than all that happens is that the state declines in power, leading to further erosion of any kind of control the proletariat has over the bourguois. Based on the fact that the last 25 years has seen nothing but an acceleration of the divide between the haves and have-nots of the world, I'd say that this is exactly what happened.

The third "theory", if theory you can call it, was Ayn Rand's objectivism. A bit of a late-comer to the "philosophy for people who are completely clueless to what philosophy is" school of thought, Ayn Rand's most redeeming characteristic is her honesty: she is a bald-faced egoist, and genuinely thinks that if everyone else followed in her footsteps, the world would be a better place. The problem of course, is that to anyone who actually bothers to read history, philosophy, and/or economics, it's very hard to figure out which one Rand has a poorer grasp of. As for her history, she has a very interesting take on how to describe events like the Holocaust or Stalinism in Russia: they were caused by those damned, dirty altruists. This resulted in quite a few alternately sad or hysterical passages wherein she decried the altruist-collectivist ethics and "welfare states" of places like the ancient Roman Empire. In reality, she seems to first omit any mention of the fact that there might really be a divide between propaganda in an autocracy and actual practice: sure Stalin claimed to be on the side of the working man, but how much was he in reality (Answer: not very). Secondly, and playing into the first, a much better way of answering the question of why things like the Holocaust happened is because people like Hitler and Stalin used the state to dupe people into doing what was good for Hitler and Stalin under the assumption that they were really doing what was good for themselves as a people. Of course, that would mean that places like Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were ultimate expressions of egoism, not altruism.

Philosophically, the whole argument for egoism was presented a long time ago before Ayn Rand. Specifically, it was mentioned most notably by a person named Thrasymachus in a book called The Republic by Plato. The first two books of that work consist in Socrates reducing Thrasymachus to tears by systematically tearing that idea of an ideal society embracing egoism over altruism to shreds. Most everyone else since, with a few exceptions like Machiavelli, Sun-Tzu, and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume have agreed. Economically, the only way to argue that bald-faced egoism makes everyone better is to ignore that last hundred years of industrial development: people practiced egoism to a T in the Gilded Age, and yet they still earned wages that were barely bordering on the survival wage. The masses only started earning a true living wage when they embraced en masse such "altruistic" ideas as collective bargaining and unionization.

Now, what do all three of these theories have in common? They all argue that the self is the be all and end all of philosophical enquiry. Once you take Derrida out of where he has at least minimal relevance and apply him to real life, it's natural to assume that you can't know the worldview of any other person besides yourself. In such a circumstance, what can you do except what is in your own interest? So post-modernist thought tends, in my view, to lead to egoism. Chomsky's anarcho-syndicalism follows Bakunin's basic tenet that people are by nature rational and rebellious, and if so, how do you organize social compacts dedicated towards anything but individual good? Ayn Rand admits that she's egoistic to the core.

As such, both sides of the political spectrum were force-fed intellectual poison. Why? Well, primarily because the baby-boomers who were lapping this stuff up were the most sheltered generation in history. They never grew up in an era where they had to worry about anything other than themselves, they never knew hardship, they never knew suffering, they got all the benefits of the generations that came before them without knowing anything about the struggle. As such, I don't see it as surprising that they turned out to be so self-absorbed, and each of these three systems of thought played right into their thinking, when other, even better schools of thought that came out in the same period, like John Rawls' contractarian system, largely withered on the vine. As a result, we have the frivolous and consumer-obsessed society we have today.