by liberal japonicus
I’d start off by noting that depending on the way you read the title, you can fit any perspective.
The jumping off point for this is Ezra Klein’s podcast with Helena Rosenblatt, the author of The Lost History of Liberalism. (transcript here)The book is quite interesting and is a general audience book drawn from her academic works, including Thinking with Rousseau : From Machiavelli to Schmitt (co-authored with Paul Schweigert), Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to The Social Contract and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion. She helps redirect the discussion of liberalism from an Anglocentric view to one related more to Europe. This New York Review of Books piece by David Bell is nice if you don’t have time to read the original, in that he juxtaposes 3 books which echo the same theme. (And I’m finding this site to be helpful getting around paywalls)
So I’m all in, I’m a Europhile and get a bit sick of the Anglo-American centric nature of a lot of political discussion (on one podcast, someone observed how US conservatives go to Europe and marvel at the infrastructure and order and wonder why this sort of order doesn’t happen in the states, oblivious to the fact that the people actually pay for that shit in the form of taxes)
And I’ll try to not make this bash Ezra episode #infinity, but reading Rosenblatt, it’s pretty clear that she is a historian, but towards the end, Klein directly challenges the moral track record of liberalism and suggests that its core philosophy has been deeply intertwined with some of society’s historic and modern problems.
That’s a very glittering answer, but I think a critic of liberalism would say: What good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its founding constitution? Or in the European case: What good is your liberalism if it is so interwoven with colonialism? There were many people who certainly believed in many liberal ideas we’re talking about here, who made space for both of those practices within their liberalism.
How typical of Klein to haul a historian on to his podcast and have her answer for the things she is trying to describe. ‘In your book about Genghis Khan, why didn’t you denounce him more strongly? Don’t you think he was evil incarnate?’ Christ on a crutch.
In another section, Klein opines:
Another crisis is that individualism has gone very far. And I think the internet and social media and algorithmic media and the fracturing of what we know — and our bonds from each other — and the weakening of civic institutions and religions and labor unions… There is a crisis of individualism that has become, partially, a crisis of meaning. … [Liberalism] also has left it with very little language in which to talk about something that is not just individualism.
Yes, liberalism, totally separate from our capitalist culture and consumerism, neoliberalism and commodification, is all to blame. If liberalism were all that people said it was, why does it let that shit happen?
Rosenblatt doesn’t seem to be prepared for this, but my answer would be that liberalism, like the scientific method, has built in to it a mechanism to question itself. Liberalism arose in a time of slavery and colonialism, patriarchalism and nationalism, yet it has provided. and continues to provide us with the tools to attack those problems. Like the scientific method, the people who are against it simply ape it (yes, I did my own research) to try and generate a conclusion that satisfies their own prejudices.
Steel man that, Klein.
The two parties make it difficult for third parties to gain ballot access.
lj – The Duverger’s Law links are interesting, but isn’t it a bit overdetermined? The US is the key example of a 2 party state (which is rather rare) and so it must be first past the post that decides it? That doesn’t really get at how the system tends to reinforce itself.
From the Duverger’s Law article I linked to:
CharlesWT is correct to note that the two parties make it hard for other parties to gain access to the ballot. Systems of closed primaries and restrictive rules on how to get placed on the ballot in the first place tend to keep third parties from gaining any momentum. It’s the same uphill battle every election cycle, and the small parties have a lot less infrastructure and a lot fewer people to do the important organizing work.
So there is the “mechanical effect” of Duverger’s Law (represented in the victory conditions of the voting rules that are baked into the constitution), and the “psychological effect” of seeing what happens when a third party manages to cause enough disruption to their next closest aligned party that the only net effect is to boost the party that is least aligned.
The Democratic Socialists are getting a bit of momentum by employing “fusion candidacies” whereby they endorse Democrats in areas where they have insufficient support or less effective candidates, and running Democratic Socialist candidates as Democratic contenders in Democratic primaries where they do have support.
The acrimony towards Sanders is partly because this strategy is working for the Democratic Socialists, and the Democrats are fighting to make it harder for outsiders to gain access to their infrastructure.
The GOP is where they are because first the Right to Lifers, then the Tea Party, then the MAGAs did this to the GOP without ever declaring themselves third parties. Theirs was an internal coup, and the donors went along willingly so long as it served their economic interests.
Most of the discussions of the actual historical dynamics around Duverger’s in the US are grounded in the 1912 and 1992 presidential elections. Some time on Google Scholar with those dates and Duverger’s Law as keywords might net you some more granular and nuanced analyses of the combined mechanisms involved.