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.
cleek:
So I’d guess that the “some people” was meant to refer to MAGAs or Reform UK supporters etc. who are anti-immigrant.
that’s probably true.
maybe he’s just being dry and sardonic (i read, didn’t listen), but the way Harari frames it as an issue with liberalism lets those “some people” off the hook to a degree. and it’s not like they were keeping things brief, so they could have spared a sentence or two to be clear about what they are talking about – if they cared to make that point.
it’s not liberals‘ fault that conservatives corrupted fraternity with jingoism and xenophobia and hyper-partisanship. conservatives did that.
but maybe i’m parsing a dialog too closely.
Eh, both float back and forth between the usual sense of the word and the Four Things sense without signaling the shift. That sudden shift in precision or context seems to be a Klein tic.
I’m really hoping that someone who has been an open and consistent opponent of Netanyahu would be credible enough for “the benefit of the doubt”, at least among informed and unprejudiced people.
It depends on how you read ‘benefit of the doubt’. I took Harari as trying to diagnose the problems with liberalism and perhaps it is just me, but I’m thinking ‘physician, heal thyself”. I mean, he makes this big defense of nationalism as if the bad parts can be clearly delineated. He’s got to make that defense cause he’s got to create a situation where liberals could support a national enterprise such as Israel. But if that national enterprise include apartheid, I’m not really sure how you say ‘I’m a liberal, but those folks over there don’t count.’ And if you start off with a rousing defense of nationalism, you’ve kind of lost me.
It reminds me of all the plaudits rained on Thomas Massie and having someone send me this
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59543735
for a great example of how Republicans have ruined fraternity, see how Trump has turned the US’s 250th birthday from what could have been a rare way for Americans to come together and celebrate into a crass, partisan, self-aggrandizing, schlock-fest.
what a disaster Republicanism has become.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-fair-250-anniversary-great-american-musicians-66bae27bc720c6882d8e73ce4a81efe6
why would anyone who isn’t already a Trump cultist want to have anything to do with that?
They haven’t just ruined it, the present bunch have literally no conception of what fraternity even means. This is David Frum (an example of an almost extinct type of Republican) in the Atlantic on the “celebration”:
Trump’s 250th Celebration Is a Fiasco
The president has turned a solemn occasion into a Day of Trump.
By David Frum
May 31, 2026, 11:09 AM ET
“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”
That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.
He couldn’t do it.
As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:
One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia.
Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor.
Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C.
Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform:
We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!
On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.
The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbarous way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion such as this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There’s no room, however, to elevate the presidency created by the revolution of 1776 into a gaudy cult of personality. Trump’s drive to transform July 4, 2026, into a colossal national Day of Trump instead has triggered a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”
The Americans alive in 1776 shared and read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” That pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of Trump’s version of America 250: Government by kings, Paine wrote, “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.”
Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to deliver the victories that the arch might have memorialized—and as the war in Iran has stalemated, so the plans for the arch have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site where the East Wing used to stand. Trump shook down government favor-seekers for enough money to begin work on a presidential ballroom complex, but he did not shake enough to finish it. Now the taxpayer is being asked to pay the balance. A federal judge has ordered work paused pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has whittled down his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most conspicuous feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.
The greatest of all Fourth of July orations was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of that speech, Douglass observed ominously: “The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times.” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming Civil War and lamented the nation’s flaws, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by the glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what yet might be for America at 300.
We as individuals may or may not live to see it, but we can believe in it all the same. We can believe in it all the more fervently for this experience of living through a chapter of American history that so flagrantly betrays the Founders’ hopes and so arduously tests the Founders’ legacy.
AIUI, the performances were to be spread out over multiple days. Will Trump come to the Mall and do his four-hour set each day? Or will he hold himself back to be the big blow-off at the end?
My husband I are planning to move to Canada. We qualify under the Canadian great grandparents immigration law. The process of tracing down proof has been frustrating and has glitches; his grandmother’s birth certificate has gone AWOL but her sister’s exists as does a census record of the family, for example.
I feel guilty about not feeling guilty about leaving. I am very, very committed and have my heart set on it, but I wonder if I should feel a sense that I am betraying all the people who have struggled over the years to make America a better place. My parents are those people. I grew up being politically active and have always been involved in campaigns. Always. The family heroes were people like MLK, Adlai Stevenson, Ann Richards, Cesar Chavez. I mean to the extent that my parents had heroes. They were pretty realistic about no one being perfect and they didn’t worship anyone They just admired those who went out and did the work, and they got us kids involved at a young age. I was raised to believe that citizenship meant being actively well informed and actively involved. I have never at any point in my life not been involved in some campaign or activist group.
I am resigning from doing the work. I don’t feel guilty. I want to leave so badly that I know I will be crushed if Canada rejects the application.
Oh Canada! I want that maple leaf flag.
i’d do the Canada thing, if i could. my half-brother can, and is considering it. he was also considering doing the Canadian business visa, but they discontinued that program at the end of last year.
alas.
Best of luck, `wonkie. I lack the relatives, my entire family tree seems to have spread west along the Ohio River, then into Iowa, then Nebraska, and now me here in Colorado. I’m too old to qualify on points, and not rich enough to simply buy my way in. My remaining family is pretty firmly tied down, so I’d have to leave them behind as well. And of course, my French is — as my graduate school housemate who was a Romance language linguist said — “limited”.
To annoy me, though, he would stop behind me when I was sitting at the kitchen table in the afternoon struggling with a math proof and ask me something in Spanish or French, like whether I wanted to go to the seven o’clock or nine o’clock showing of the the new movie. And I would tell him, “Seven, I’m supposed to get up early tomorrow.” (In English.) Then he’d switch to the other language I didn’t know and say that was fine, he’d have dinner ready at 5:30. And I’d look at my wristwatch and tell him that was cool, I should be done with the math by then. About that point I’d suddenly realize he’d done it to me again.
hi wonkie, a suggestion, ask AI (I prefer Gemini, I find ChatGPT too obsequious) for information about the process. Needless to say, don’t give out any personal data such as SS# and the like, but giving the details of your family history and asking what needs to be done can be really helpful. Because all of the information is usually on public websites, the LLM has scraped them and can assemble the requirements.
I look forward to your Canadian perspective, wonkie. Best of luck on the move.
Check this out, wonkie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_10_Canadian_Films_of_All_Time
I only know “The Sweet Hereafter”, “Stories We Tell”, which I love, and “Dead Ringers”. Cronenberg is a bit too icky for me, but I can see the appeal. I always wanted to see “The Decline of the American Empire” but never got around to it, the same goes for Xavier Dolan.
I would also add:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney%27s_Version_(film)
which is in many respects a Candian film and hilarious.
I look forward to your Canadian perspective, wonkie. Best of luck on the move.
Seconded. I’m only sorry that this is something that people like you and cleek, and michael cain, are even having to consider.
My wife and I have a Canadian friend who has been worried about us since Jan. 6, and has advocated for us to move. We had looked into a work program for teachers, but alas, we left it too late and I am now three years too old to qualify. Sad, because I’d make a great Canuck. I already love hockey and poutine and maple syrup, and my trace of a Wisconsin accent already has me sounding vaguely Canadian, eh?
We’re still hoping to retire to Cascadia, so we could hopefully fill any hole left by Wonkie in the Cascadian Resistance.
Vive la resistance Cascadienne!
…and michael cain…
I haven’t seriously considered running for Canada since I was a senior in high school, the draft hadn’t been closed down, and my lottery number was 25.
I’m old. I have a wife in memory care here. I have granddaughters. I’m staying here and fighting. My tongue is mostly in cheek when I say that taking part in an armed insurrection was not part of my retirement planning.
Nous, this is totally unrequested info, but I was curious about the Canadian teacher program and asked Gemini about it. I won’t cut and paste, but because the replacement programs now seem to be run provincially, it seems like there are specific pathways.
I’m also thinking that when I worked in a Japanese board of education, we had a relationship with a BoE in BC and they had these hybrid HS/community college entities and from what you’ve discussed about your teaching, and more dancing with AI, I see stuff about Collegiate Institutes and HS/community college partnerships. I may be projecting, I teach at a university, but I think I would be much happier in my teaching (but probably not my wage or schedule) in teaching at a high school. It may be a case of assumed greener grass, but teaching kids on that cusp between high school and uni might be attractive.
Though nothing wrong with joining the Cascadian resistance…
To be clear, the window of opportunity I missed was one for applicant age, not a deadline.
Too close to retirement for them to give me preferential treatment in a jobs program.
I’ll just have to blunt the waves of white power incels from south of the border.
Watching the results come in from the CA primary, but I’m mostly thinking about Maine. Well, not so much about Maine, but about how the Democratic Party faithful in every other state are hoping for Platner to implode so that they can stop worrying that the media narrative will be that the Democratic Socialist campaign style is breaking through and the mainstream Democrat campaign style is moribund.
I’m seeing the Dem faithful trying to put the progressives on the defensive by eliding Platner’s personal life with his political platform and his populist strategy. If anyone in their vicinity says that they hope Platner holds on to beat Collins, they start to rant about his tattoo and his sexist, edgelord behavior in the past (which, to be clear, eww), and act as if all of the people who have praised his campaign were praising him as a candidate, and were too gullible to see that he was another Fetterman-style Manchurian Candidate who would turn around and break Democratic hearts.
Nope. Sorry. He’s always been a hot mess. And I’d be surprised if the busloads of people who were showing up to his town halls didn’t know that he was a hot mess. But they kept showing up… not because of who he was, but because he was saying the things that were on their minds and pledging to fight for the things that they cared about with force and conviction.
It was the message and the vibe, not the man, that was winning.
And for some reason that terrifies the Democratic Party faithful. So when they see the man in trouble, they flip on him and try to take him down and flip the primary for the Democrats who were running terrible campaigns and could not beat a hot mess, let alone Collins.
In the process, they are dismissing every one of those people who went to Platner’s town halls and treating them like they treat Trump voters, rather than as the antidote to MAGA.
I became a Democrat because I thought that there was a better chance to tilt the party more labor and environment friendly than to try to build an alternative party and erode the Democratic hold on the US center left. I though coalitions and solidarity could shift the culture away from neoliberalism. But I’ve lost faith in receiving any solidarity back from the party faithful, and I’m beginning to think that they are just as rooted in their folly as the MAGA are.
I wonder if the path for you might be to try to build a new centerist party. Not because you agree with their positions, because obviously you don’t. But because such a party could perhaps lure away those you regard as “party faithful” — thus leaving the Democratic party to your preferred views. And also, critically, not only attract voters who see themselves as centerists (or independents, or whatever label you prefer to apply), but also those who hate what Trump has done to the Republican Party, but could never vote for someone labeled “Democrat.”
It doesn’t really matter what you think of those who fall into the last two categories. Because your goal is to achieve a viable party on the left while simultaneously doing as much damage as possible to the far right. Ideally (if I may risk putting words in your mouth) to get to the point where the current “establishment Democrats” and progressives are the only two major parties, with the now reactionary GOP reduced in importance to something like the Libertarians or the Greens.
I’m pretty sure you can’t get there by creating a new progressive party. But you might be able to create a centerist party that would leave Democrats to the progressives you favor.
lj, you vacuous pervert! (Sorry. I couldn’t resist the selective edit.)
I guess that blows any chance I had of running as a left of center democrat on a progressive ticket…
alternately: But I’ve lost faith in receiving any solidarity back from the progressives
party faithful, and I’m beginning to think that they are just as rooted in their folly as the MAGA are.(i don’t actually feel this way, but it’s not hard to pretend i do)
everybody wants to rule the world. there’s no way that can happen, however.
you can either have +75% of what you want or -75% of what you want.
To cleek’s and wj’s points, the reason why I see this as specifically a Democratic Party problem, and don’t see another centrist party as being a likely help, is because of Duverger’s
LawTendency. Our political system has single member districts with winner-takes-all results. The mechanics of that favor the formation of two parties around a normative political center. Right now in the US, that center is well to the right of where issue polling says that it should be. On most of the substantive issues, what Americans say they want corresponds most closely with the Nordic nations, and both liberals and conservatives would be happier with the government if we marched that political center back leftward a fair bit.But the Democratic Party faithful are still faithful to the political paradigms of the Clinton and Obama eras and that neoliberal view of the world, and the growing number of people in the US who declare themselves to be independents are largely (but not exclusively) people who have seen their prospects shrunk by the market logics of neoliberalism. The Democratic Socialists are making headway because they are attracting the disaffected, and there is a new normative center coming into view that is significantly to the left of the old one. It would be great if the Democratic leadership recognized this and could start to pull in that direction, but they are dug into the same ground where they planted their anchor in 2010, and are afraid that any movement is going to scare off the swing voters, so they attack anyone who tries to pull away from that center, and sabotage their own path back to engagement with those independents.
i know very little about Platner.
but i do know about “his tattoo and his sexist, edgelord behavior in the past (which, to be clear, eww)”
and that’s enough for me, no matter what he has to say about anything else.
but i’m not in ME, so it ain’t my call.
and yes, Fetterman.
and then we have unabashedly progressive Maureen Galindo:
i’m not in TX, so also not my call.
and i’m not in NYC, but:
but it would be nice if progressives and Sanders especially would be a little more discriminating (in the good way) about who they champion. calling for more social justice etc is great. but do you have to overlook so many faults in the people who preach it?
i think i have a comment in jail. i was going to add to it…
[list of ‘progressive’ candidates who also have racist, sexist or just gross histories (or presents)]
i actually don’t blame progressives for these candidates. because a lot of their support probably comes from their populism (which definitely has a dark side) not necessarily from their progressivism. but when progressives stick with these people… well, yuck. and that’s not the evil establishment talking. that’s just Yuck.
i think i have a comment in jail. i was going to add to it…
Triggered the “six or more links goes to moderation” limit.
cleek – I don’t necessarily disagree. I do note, however, that most of the people whose behavior I am critiquing here are also people who have in the past defended more moderate Democrats with problematic histories or stances when those candidates were leading in the polls, and have done the whole “Vote Blue no matter who” thing for those candidates if the campaign was too far along for a pivot to work. They take pleasure in watching Platner taking fire in a way that they do not when it’s, say, Swallwell.
I voted for Steyer in the CA governor primary. I’m not entirely sold on him any more than I am sold of Becerra. I’d like to see the issues that Steyer made central to his campaign become more central in all Democrat campaigns, which is what shaped my decision more than any faith in him. Ultimately, though, I figured that Becerra would make it into the top two here in CA under whatever circumstances, and I wanted to give Steyer a better chance both to spread his message and to chip away at Hilton and push Bianco entirely out of contention.
If Steyer had broken far enough from the pack to make his election feel inevitable, then I might not have voted for Becerra, but if Steyer were leading, but just barely, and Becerra were within striking distance of Hilton’s numbers, I might have voted for Becerra to block Hilton from the general.
But if it comes to the general election and only one of the two has made it, and the choice is either them or Hilton, I don’t care what happens with their ethics or reputations. They have my vote. We can recall them once they are in office and put in a better Dem. If Swallwell had risen enough above every other candidate to clear the Dem field and then run into his trouble when every other Dem was out of the picture, I’d work to get Swallwell elected, and then make friends with having the Lt. Governor take over and replace him once he was forced out.
Either way, though, the fact that Steyer is so close in the polls to Becerra given how much more experience Becerra has should tip people off that either Becerra or his campaign was short on mojo, and Democrats should be looking to capture some of Steyer’s populist mojo and inject it into their other campaigns rather than working to box him out at the party convention.
It’s the inside baseball that’s killing both major parties at the moment. Those growing ranks of independents should be telling enough.
There is no move to Canada in my future because (a) I’m too old and they don’t want me, (b) moving is a PITA under any circumstances, (c) I’m too rooted where I am and don’t feel like starting over someplace new, even if it’s a friendly place like Canada.
And (d) it’s too freaking cold.
Re: Maine – I would have preferred Mills or Costello, Platner is an obvious hot mess and it’s a distraction. But he’s connecting with people there, and it ain’t my call. If he gets in, I’ll be mostly fine with it. It really depends on whether he’ll be able to actually get stuff done, or if he just ends up being a weirdo ranting over in the corner.
I’m registered as non-enrolled, which is the MA designation for somebody who isn’t registered in any party. I vote for (D)’s because they are generally closer to my own values than (R)’s are. I will not vote for any (R), ever, full stop, as long as the MAGA thing is going on.
There is no party at this point that really reflects my own values. (D)’s seem to be all in on the neo-liberal thing, (R)’s are just revanchists at this point. Maybe the Democratic Farmer-Labor folks in Minnesota come close. Or something like distributivism, only without the Catholic overlay and with greater consideration for public goods.
Basically, I should probably be living in Denmark or similar, but that has the same issues as emigration to Canada. Someplace with a Mediterranean climate would be perfect.
But basically I’m not going anywhere. We have things too dialed in, and we’re too old to think seriously about trying to reconstruct all of that from scratch.
Our government absolutely sucks right now, but there are other ways to make things better. Some things, anyway.