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.
External critiques (e.g., on omissions around Gaza
the conspiracy theorists win either way: either it validates that Harris was uniquely evil because of Gaza, or it doesn’t say anything and proves the DNC was trying to cover up Harris’ unique evil re: Gaza.
and, yes, a DNC report is going to be partisan. for all the resources we’re giving you, Grok, you should do better.
Maybe we should require all partisans to carry a partisan as a marker.
OK, a ten foot polearm is a bit inconvenient, in particular inside buildings (how to get that into an elevator?), but still more so than a live polecat (those include skunks). But they are vying for pole position, so…
Very useful to point out the flaws of the opponents btw.
Decloaking. Nobody I have ever read claimed Harris was uniquely evil— yes, it is customary to erect straw men when discussing political opponents but if anyone is actually interested in what far left types say about Democrats and Gaza, here is a link from February.
https://theintercept.com/2026/02/25/democrats-gaza-genocide-accountability/
For myself, I would try prosecuting Trump and associates first based in their various crimes, just to see if it is possible to have something resembling the rule of law for powerful people. If so, then go after Biden officials too or else do them all at once.
Failing that, ( who really believes the rule of law functions at those levels?) at the very least, as my namesake in the article says, the Biden officials most responsible ( Blinken, Sullivan, and I think McGrath, but I’m not sure) should be kept out of any future Administration or prominent think tank.
As for the report, it sounds like a farce even aside from the Gaza omission. Was Gaza omitted at some point by deliberate choice? Seems extremely likely to me.
If the DNC report had tackled Gaza more directly, it would end up being a bit of a duck/rabbit depending on who is reading the report. The establishment Dems would see Gaza as an area where the activist radicals demanded too much of Harris, who would be opening herself up to accusations of antisemitism if she took a stronger stance or allowed the Palestine supporters any camera time, so demanding more of her would be unreasonable and would have led to an even greater defeat. The Palestine supporters will see a missed opportunity to confront the way that Israel supporters stifle legitimate and morally necessary criticism with accusations of antisemitism.
They are both right. It was a bind. She was damned no matter which way she handled that. And either side would believe that they were in the morally superior position when they apportioned the fault.
Side note – I really think Harris should have run for CA governor and left the potential for another presidential run further down the road. She would have done better than any of the Dem candidates in the primaries and it would have given her a way to reset her political narrative and get out from under the shadow of being Biden’s second. I don’t know that she’s going to get anything like a reset if she runs again without some change in her resume.
You don’t even try to get it into an elevator; that’s why God invented staircases. Sure, it’s tiring carrying it up and down stairs. But if you want to be a partisan, you should be prepared to suffer for your cause. Even if you are a Congressman or a Supreme Court Justice.
I don’t care what the autopsy report says because it focused on the wrong stuff; providing fodder for blame games. My guess is the that autopsy report was held up to avoid the pointless circular firing squad behavior Dems are so prone to. There’s too many people who focus their energy on trying to find fault with other Dems and any report will have data pts to cherry-pick out for that purpose.
I am interested in leadership from the party on how to exploit social media effectively, how to build grassroots support on campuses and high schools, how to work around the lazy and partisan msm, how to build outreach to Latino communities, and other practical and tactical matters.
cool.
and here’s a link from Nov 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8estgJgFpw
Aug 2024:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/19/why-i-am-not-voting-for-kamala-harris
Oct 2024:
https://rabble.ca/politics/us-politics/kamala-harris-told-me-not-to-vote-for-her-so-im-not-going-to-and-why-that-isnt-just-a-protest-vote/
it’s trivially easy to find many more of them. and it’s not like we all don’t remember it happening.
the conspiracy always wins.
sorry to be so argumentative, all.
my life is shit.
Cleek—
I didn’t watch the YouTube video but read the other two. They didn’t say Harris was uniquely evil, which is the sort of parody I typically expect to see at blogs like LGM. They said they wouldn’t vote for her unless she changed policy on Gaza, because Biden’s policy was genocidal. I wasn’t denying people like that existed— I was objecting to parodies of people who didn’t want to support a candidate complicit in genocide.
I voted for Harris and would have voted for Biden if he had stayed in, because I genuinely do believe in lesser evil voting. What I see many online Democrats doing is denying the evil, generally by trivializing the issue that has people upset and making it seem like none of them are serious or have good reasons for being outraged, by stereotyping all of them as purity ponies, driven by psychological factors. Probably some are. But their online critics are too, in many cases. An adult looking at something like Gaza and the election would take the issue seriously and then try good faith arguments, which would include acknowledging the legitimacy of the outrage. I would say it was right to pressure her to move left but on Election Day I would vote lesser evil because that is the system we have.
Suppose somehow we had someone like Piker as the Democratic nominee in 2024 and he advocated given billions of dollars of weapons to the freedom fighters of Hamas. Would we be surprised if some people absolutely refused to vote for him, even if he was a fairly typical liberal on other issues? ( I don’t follow Piker and don’t know or much care what stances he actually takes.) I am pretty sure people would be understanding of this and rather than focus exclusively on the purity ponies who objected to arming Hamas, would probably pressure Imaginary Piker to modify his policy towards seriously pushing for a ceasefire rather than supplying weapons to war criminals. Would we demonize people who absolutely refused to vote for someone who favored arming Hamas? Probably not.
I used to value the internet and still do, for giving a voice to people whose opinions were kept out of the mainstream press. But I can see where the internet does polarize people in stupid ways and this issue is one of them. Oddly enough, I think many mainstream commentators with a wider reach,like the Pod Save America guys and someone like Michelle Goldberg at the NYT, are a lot more reasonable than the online Democratic partisans or the purity types. What I have seen of him makes me think highly of Vietor, for example.
And people like Blinken, Sullivan, etc… should not be allowed anywhere near the next Presidential campaign, unless Democrats want to make it clear that they have learned nothing.
Anyway, back to lurking.
Donald, I cannot say enough how welcome I find your voice here, and I am 100% certain I am not alone.
cleek, you’re not the only argumentative commenter/bastard here, and I certainly include myself among them. Peace and love, as we used to say in the 60s.
Oh, I forgot the conspiracy line.
I have seen a few people in the msm saying that the paper didn’t mention Israel or Gaza and this was odd, because it was odd.
Sometimes people using the phrase “ conspiracy theory” in a pejorative way are the ones being irrational because they use the term to describe some completely normal action. Maybe when people avoid talking about something politically touchy it is a deep dark conspiracy, like when I avoid touching a hot stove because I am conspiring to avoid pain.
More like when all of us refrain from touching it. Clearly it’s a conspiracy. (Probably a pretty widespread one.)
And let me second GftNC, good to hear your voice.
wjca: “when all of us refrain from touching it. Clearly it’s a conspiracy.”
https://xkcd.com/2241/
“They didn’t say Harris was uniquely evil, which is the sort of parody I typically expect to see at blogs like LGM.”
Oh, FFS. The debate about whether or not Biden should stay in the race vs. dropping out was intense at LGM. Once Biden dropped out, they were all in for Harris (as was I). Your characterization is simply beyond fanciful. How did Harris do? Well, she did fairly well given a couple basic headwinds. This is from that paroday site, LGM. Read it and ponder.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/05/the-non-strategists-fallacy-autopsy
“my life is shit”
Sorry to hear that. Best wishes for a turnaround in your situation. I would suggest fulminating against the 200,000 or so real actual fire breathing marxist activists in this country (out of a population of some 342,000,000) might ease your stress a bit. On the other hand, I have read polls that seem to indicate a growing affinity for “socialist” ideas, especially among the gen Z cohort. Ah, the young.
…she did fairly well given a couple basic headwinds…
She did terribly given that her opponent was the worst candidate ever.
There are people, I’m not one of them, who think, “Trump is a despicable, disgusting person. Thank God Harris didn’t win.” I didn’t vote for either of them.
Well, no. Her opponent was the worst person ever. But not, unfortunately, the worst candidate.
Too many people here made the mistake of equating the two.
Say what you will about Harris’s campaign, but she improved the party’s chances substantially over what they were facing with Biden, and she did it without having the chance to campaign in the primaries on a platform of her own choosing.
Ultimately, though, the Dem loss is on Biden’s hubris and a power structure that is top-heavy and out of touch with the bases.
I will grant that the consequences of her loss were terrible.
I will also grant what BJ claims all the time – black women were the backbone of Dem success. Too bad for us all that they aren’t a large enough group to get us all to a plurality of votes on their own.
…not, unfortunately, the worst candidate…
He was so bad that a long list of Republicans, going as far as Dick Cheney, endorsed Harris. Given that, given all the swing voters who rather not vote for a bullying felon who assaults women and was already known to be a bad president, the Ds should have outperformed the model prediction by a lot more than they did.
Harris wasn’t particularly to blame, but the Ds should recognise that they did very badly.
we’re not talking about hypothetical “adults”. we’re talking about actual voters, and what actually happened. more than enough of them eagerly swallowed Trump’s nonsense and attracted a lot of attention by literally campaigning for and voting for Trump instead of Harris because they somehow thought Trump would be a better ally to Palestinians.
oops. super oops.
these clowns deserve all the scorn i can muster. but i’ll stop short of wishing for their deportation.
since they’re so fond of “sending messages” maybe they can figure out how to receive the messages Republicans are screaming at them. maybe.
a perennial headline.
never seems to work out, does it? when these amazing policies meet the actual electorate, not people who answer abstract questions in polls, socialism never seems to pull the numbers we’re told it must.
by the number of times i’ve read “socialist polices are popular!” we should be awash in them. and yet…
there haven’t been any other campaigns in history that came to be the way Harris’ did. she didn’t get a year and a half to run, the way a normal candidate would. she got a few months.
how does the model account for such a thing?
i think this is exactly right.
it’s an impossible position to be in. there’s no way to please both sides. but it’s one Trump (and his misguided supporters / her misguided detractors) were more than happy to put her in.
Trump was able to escape the trap by virtue of not being in office in 2023. but there should have been no doubt about what he would have done if he was.
All of these were said before he was elected in 2016:
and to get back to “unique” and to end this spree for the day…
Harris, who wasn’t and had never been President, made some qualified statements about the 2023 events, trying to find a way to handle the situation nous described. and because she was VP (a position that doesn’t have any say about military aid), Harris was accused of being party to genocide.
on the other hand Trump had a long history of being squarely, firmly, proudly, loudly, explicitly, unmistakably on the Israel side of the issues – before, during and after his first term.
and which of the two was the problem in the eyes of “The Left” ? Harris, uniquely.
bobbyp – On the other hand, I have read polls that seem to indicate a growing affinity for “socialist” ideas, especially among the gen Z cohort. Ah, the young.
cleek – never seems to work out, does it? when these amazing policies meet the actual electorate, not people who answer abstract questions in polls, socialism never seems to pull the numbers we’re told it must.
by the number of times i’ve read “socialist polices are popular!” we should be awash in them. and yet…
I think there is a growing affinity for socialist ideas among Gen Z, with a strong chunk of millennials and some of the more disaffected Gen Xers in there as well, although I think it would be more accurate to call the ideas ‘anti-capitalist’ moreso than ‘pro-socialist.’ They aren’t revolutionary socialist ideas, more standard Social Democrat ideas.
And we are seeing a lot more elected officials winning on a counter-capitalist-excess platform (AOC, Mamdani). It’s happening mostly in securely blue areas, but it is happening. I will note here that most of the Gen X libertarian dudes I know are starting to pick up and support Democratic Socialist policies and rhetoric, so I think it’s starting to spill over into the disaffected swingers as well.
Why are we not awash in more socialist policies? Well, there’s GOP voter suppression that mostly affects the youngest and oldest voters who have the most logistical challenges to voting and are easiest to obstruct. There’s all that gerrymandering to create safe RW districts and dilute LW districts. There’s all that Silicon Valley money being thrown into elections across the US to oppose anti-corporate, anti-oligarch policies, and there’s all the pressure from the political donors that are running the PACs. That’s a lot of obstacles to overcome.
But don’t mistake a lack of electoral success with a lack of popular support, or a lack of cultural influence.
Why are we not awash in more socialist policies? Well, there’s [list]
Also, in recognition of Tulsi Gabbard’s defenstration, I’d also add that encouraging the anti-science, ‘I do my own research’ vibe has the effect of peeling off people. The left has the problem of having to create societal movement when individual factions feel that their faction is more important than all the others. If someone decides that say PETA is the be-all, end-all of liberal efforts, it becomes easy to complain about efforts for other goals.
The list time someone said ‘I do my own research’ within my hearing, I popped up, all smiles, and said, “Great! Can you explain the statistics to me?”
Those policies have, to the best of my recollection, been popular with 15-30 year oldss throughout my lifetime. Many (not all, but many) of them become less popular as people move further into adulthood and into more contact with day to day economic reality. That may have nothing to do with the ideas underlying the policies. But it happens pretty regularly.
Enthusiasts for those policies might want to think about why that might be so. Maybe even something beyond “They are all brainwashed by [insert boogyman of choice]!” Possibly even an approach that hasn’t already been tried and failed for reducing the disenchantment that apparently occurs.
wj – Those policies have, to the best of my recollection, been popular with 15-30 year oldss throughout my lifetime. Many (not all, but many) of them become less popular as people move further into adulthood and into more contact with day to day economic reality.
You call it being in more contact with day to day economic reality, I’d call it starting to make enough progress to buy their own home, have some kids, and have some power to shape the world in accordance with their priorities.
That’s happening less and less. Wages have stagnated. Student debt has ballooned. Colleges have done nothing to try to hold down student debt. Boomers are long lived and are holding on to the wealth. Some of that wealth will transfer when they pass, but a big ass chunk of it will be swallowed up by the cost of senior health care, and whatever is left over will have another big chunk go to the banks to pay off that mountain of student debt thats been compounding.
Structurally, it’s a very different financial world for Millennials and Zoomers.
And they are also looking at a future that will be heavily constrained by decades of putting off climate action in the name of economic growth.
Which is why, I believe, we are building towards more anti-capitalist sentiment among the 40-and-under crowd.
The economic reality has changed and is not set to return.
“Great! Can you explain the statistics to me?”
and “I always have problems finding the kurtosis…”