Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

we live in the world liberalism capitalism made.

ftfy

ums and table otm, all I have to add here is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bivsP_h6l0s

OK so here is an attempt to be clearer:

broadly speaking, i'm sorry, but a culture that tolerates differences of belief (a liberal one) is better, which is why people are perturbed by the collectivist shaming that characterizes cancel culture. ("read the room!") like, it might seem fine now that the left-wing side has the social power to get people like David Shor fired, but it's not unthinkable that the shoe could someday be on the other foot. historically it usually was.

liberalism certainly is a convenient cloak that power hides behind. but i think any ideology can and has been used that way. narrowing the range of acceptable opinion is something that worries me a lot. i don't think it's the way to protect the rights of minority groups of any kind. because honestly if individual speech is devalued than who gets to speak for the groups? how is that legislated?

i have some reservations about posting this. i recognize rushomancy's general point, that cis people shouldn't speak to the trans experience. doing so can be presumptuous, invalidating and even cruel. and this is a really important starting point. but how to prevent it--what alternative norms can be enforced, ones that can have a universal character to them--that is harder.

the biggest problem with western liberal democracy is that it's placed too many people outside the realm of the human

it's exactly the opposite imo: western liberal democracy's 'humanistic' vision is a totalitarian one that amounts to imagining there's a cis white man inside everyone just waiting get out and type on the internet under their name if the host body can just be patient, good subjects for long enough and not get too pesky with demanding their rights

^and here he is

we live in the world capitalism (not liberalism) made.

liberalism is the dominant political ideology that emerged in the capitalist centuries. it has good and bad components to it. as with capitalism, the goal of the left should be to transcend liberalism, not just pretend we can do without norms like free speech and individual rights. again, these things were not realized in practice, but liberalism gave us a vocabulary to talk about them. and it's not the only one, but it is the one that most people in our society can understand.

Isn't liberalism more about who we are rather than what we do? Why Trump is anathema because of his character more so than anything specific he does. To a liberal his badness is in his character...similarly with the white fragility workshops, our badness is contained within us employees, not the company. We should seek to change ourselves, rather than anything external. the external will take care of itself once we are all good

treeship, I'd argue you can't disentangle liberalism from capitalism as you (I think--apologies if I'm wrong) are implying, particularly the specific rights included under "individual rights"

anyway, I mostly just wanted to recommend a book to the table is the table: Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents

banaka to thread

you can't disentangle liberalism from capitalism. you also can't disentangle yourself from liberalism and capitalism, at least not easily. we are subjects of a modern capitalist society and that conditions what we think of as "good" and "bad." i think criticism of liberalism needs to start from the point that we are inside it--this is what Marx said about capitalism, it created the social conditions that made communism not just realizable but thinkable

Rob, thanks for the recommendation. Think that might be in my big PDF folder of theory stuff to read.

Tracer, I think that we actually agree, because I believe that western humanism's imposition as you write of it is part of what I refer to as placing others outside the realm of the human-- that is, imposition of hegemonic values and qualities onto an Other doesn't bring those grouped as the Other into humanity, but instead insists that only one version of humanity exists, and to be coarse, fuck that.

US left-liberals now prefer "progressive" so ppl don't confuse them with the barrenness of Chuck Schumer.

(or any other Clintonians)

Prog rock is better than lib rock anyway.

"The thing that scares me about Intersectionalism, going back to that 1-2-3 post of j.'s and the 3 bit in particular. Is what is going to happen to the 'different' people who just fall between the cracks, the socially inept, the nerds and weirdos, the benevolent eccentrics who do not have identity groups to advocate for their needs. Who currently are permitted, ultimately -if perhaps not easily or painlessly- to go their own way without persecution, when we are no longer "individuals". When the demands for solidarity, for... what did the Harper's letter call it? "Ideological conformity"? have eclipsed our individuality. The freedom to not belong.

And I am hoping to be reassured that this concern is illegitimate.

― Deflatormouse"

Well, starting at the end, that's not what I do. I don't tell other people what concerns of theirs are "legitimate" or "illegitimate". I don't tell people what they are or are not allowed to _feel_.

Neither can I give you any assurances. Yes, I'm deeply afraid, I'm deeply worried, and whether or not you have the right to freedom from fear, I sure as hell haven't got the ability to deliver on that.

All I can tell you is about myself, who I am, what I want, what I _mean_ when I talk about intersectionalism. I'm not trying to establish a New Order of the Ages. Personally? I'm a freak. I'm a weirdo. I don't really fit in a lot of places. Certainly - _certainly_ not at the center of all things.

What happens to you? What happens to me? I don't know. Alone, I am very vulnerable, I have only that which those who rule now _permit_ me. And even if they are beneficent, I worry, because more and more the things they promise are not things they can deliver.

So I work with other people. And I work with other people who are more like me - my feeling is that they're also more like you, but that's really for you to judge, not me - than the people who claim to be the protectors of my freedoms.

What we give to each other, what we ask of each other, is not conformity. My commitment, my intersectional commitment, is to its opposite - to valuing diversity, to honoring difference, to creating a place for everyone. And yes, it's not a solitary place. It's not a place based on _individual_ freedom. It's a place based on community, on solidarity, and to someone whose highest belief is the atomic, isolated individual, that can look like conformity. I'm not a very good conformist. I'm not very good at compromise either - but I'm working on it, I'm learning, and I've found it to be a skill worth learning.

the less polite, tl;dr version:

"broadly speaking, i'm sorry, but a culture that tolerates differences of belief (a liberal one) is better

― treeship."

fuck "toleration", fuck this "necessary evil" shit, diversity is a positive fucking good and calling people like me "conformist" is some happy fucking horseshit.

here's my latest screed, be back later, i got meetings all day and i'm gonna try and get some actual work done

It is always a shock to me to be reminded of how sensitive I am to certain hurts, how fragile I am. Whether it is done by accident or intentionally, being misgendered feels like a dagger to the core of my being. This is unfortunate because it is, really, a normal and common mistake for someone who knew me pre-transition to make, particularly early on. Certain behaviors, certain habits, take time and practice to overcome.

The curious thing to me about it is how some people handle it when they make that mistake. There's a certain way some people have of apologizing to me sometimes. They go way over the top. They abase themselves, they fawn. They seem terrified of me. I mean, it's obvious to me, even if it may not be obvious to them, that they're not doing those things in order to make _me_ feel better. Misgendering me seems to have provoked some sort of existential crisis in them.

The main impression I get is that it is very important for them to assure me, in no uncertain terms, that they are a Good Person. I get the impression that their conception of themselves as virtuous is nearly as central to their identity as my gender is to my identity.

This poses certain challenges for me. Having to immediately set aside my own feelings, my hurt, and attend to their needs even though they were the ones who hurt me, in practice, denies me the opportunity to process and acknowledge the impact of what has happened to me. I get the feeling that they are _very_ interested in "restorative justice", and that restorative justice, to them, means restoring themselves to their rightful role at the moral center of the community, the pole around whom all Others revolve.

And for liberals, the written proof of this virtue, the imprimatur under which they operate, are the laws. Laws, to them, are not guidelines under which we may learn to become more just, but justice itself, flawless ideals which we can only strive to imitate more perfectly. They are, foundationally, People of the Book.

I'm talking about myself here, my former self. The way I was raised, what I used to believe. I believed that we - the United States of America, and liberal democracies in general - were a nation of laws, not merely a nation of men (in the archaic, non-gendered sense. I loved that sort of language; it seemed elevated, elegant.) It was not enough for me to trust in mere people. Inconsistent, superstitious, violent - the prospect of not having recourse to the law horrified me.

Today I do not trust in the law. Today I believe that "the law" is whatever you can get away with. I do not believe the law protects me. I do not believe the law was created to protect me. I believe it was created to protect people like the person I once thought I was. When I was that person, I believed everybody else was just like I was, that those laws applied equally to everybody else just like they applied to me, and I was so fucking wrong about that.

The _only_ thing I trust to protect me now is the very thing that used to horrify me - other people. I am safe where I am because I am surrounded by people who care about me, who value me, who will act to protect me, and they have made laws to make that easier for them, yes, but it is not the laws who protect me. Laws can be reinterpreted, selectively enforced, can _change_ a lot more easily, I've found, than people do.

When I say that the law was created to protect people like me, I mean a few different things. To the liberal mind, a law is the terminal fulfillment of their responsibility to the Other. I see so many people of my parents' generation talk about the 1960s as though they solved racism forever, solved it with the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Did "progressives" in Theodore Roosevelt's day, I wonder, say the same thing about the Fifteenth Amendment?

I've seen so many liberals, so many, get upset when one brings up to them the spectre of continuing injustice. They do so much explaining, so much! They construct very intelligent, civil arguments. They tell us how much they care about us, how good they are. They ask us if we want to be like those Other People who suffer under the yoke of less enlightened governments, whose rulers aren't as _good_, aren't as _caring_, aren't as _compassionate_, as they are.

Why are they telling me these things, over and over and over again? I never said they weren't. I never said they were bad people. Why are they acting so, well, so _ashamed_?

Ah, now shame. That I can recognize very well. Shame is, in my experience, in my life, the shadow of pride. Before coming out, I of course knew the language in the LGBTQ community around pride, but it wasn't something I could really make any sense out of, really tried to make any sense out of. They were proud, and they had the right to that pride. It was another of the many, many abstract ideals I lived by.

When I came out, it was suddenly different, I suddenly saw things in a new way. I saw all the ways I had been taught to be ashamed of myself, saw the trauma that heteronormative/cisnormative society inflicted on me, over and over again, saw deeply that had grown within me, how wounded and damaged I was. Pride isn't an abstract ideal for me now - it's how I am learning to heal from that trauma.

It's not a sound basis for universal governance. And yet there it is, not even hidden, really, just unacknowledged, glossed over. Liberals rule out of shame, unable to lay down their self-imposed "burden". Conservatives rule out of pride, rule to nakedly display their deeply rooted belief in their own superiority. Flipsides of the same coin, and at the center always the need for reconciliation, to encapsulate abuser and abused in one body. I would have done with both.

Speaking of Derrida and tolerance, he had this to say about the latter in his dialogues with Habermas:

. . . the word "tolerance" . . . ran up against its limit: we accept the foreigner, the other, the foreign body up to a certain point, and so not without restrictions. Tolerance is a conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality.

. . .a limited tolerance is clearly preferred to an absolute intolerance. But tolerance remains a scrutinized hospitality, always under surveillance, parsimonious and protective of its sovereignty. In the best of cases, it's what I would call a conditional hospitality, the one that is most commonly practiced by individuals, families, cities, or states. We offer hospitality only on the condition that others follow our rules, our way of life, even our language, our culture, our political system, and so on.

"absolute hospitality" would mean relinquishing everything to the Other. in which case, you'd have nothing left to give, and could no longer practice hospitality, according to derrida.

at the end of his life, he remained a liberal albeit one haunted by "specters of Marx." i think that's probably the situation of most of us here on ilx.

Indeed, and one might add that he was also haunted by 'spectres of Levinas', with whom he (dis)agreed early on (see 'Violence and Metaphysics').

apologizing is an act of making oneself vulnerable and often one’s own personal anxieties are exposed when apologizing. it can be weird and awkward but what can you do?

I should add that if you feel an apology is insufficient, you’re within your rights to not accept it

What I took from Kate's post is not that she doesn't want to apologize but that it feels to her like when people apologize for misgendering her they're actually asking for some sort of absolution from something much bigger, they're asking her to pronounce them Good Persons. From that pov I don't think it really is about what anyone can DO, it's about questioning what lies behind these overreactions.

The dynamic she described certainly felt painful familiar to me, not in regards to misgendering per se but regarding several performative outbursts I've had towards people in different groups in the past.

(doesn't want PEOPLE to apologize, sorry)

a trans friend once told me that they still misgender *themselves* every once in a while in writing/conversation. since I heard that I still apologize when I misgender but I try to keep it as casual as possible

in the sense that the mortification that I used to feel when mistakes were made no longer seemed relevant or useful or whatever

I thought this was good in delineating the difference between twitter users/overusers and the rest of the world: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/illiberalism-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html

simon your posts are otm. apologize and move on, there’s always next time, etc. the mortification is a waste of time and energy, mainly that of trans and nb ppl

nod, that's sensible

Having to immediately set aside my own feelings, my hurt, and attend to their needs even though they were the ones who hurt me, in practice, denies me the opportunity to process and acknowledge the impact of what has happened to me. I get the feeling that they are _very_ interested in "restorative justice", and that restorative justice, to them, means restoring themselves to their rightful role at the moral center of the community, the pole around whom all Others revolve.

They're probably just really afraid of being (or being seen to be) bad people! I suffer from it too; it's natural. It's why I sometimes fly off the handle when my insecurities are provoked in just the right way. You don't owe them anything except arguably continuing friendship, and you shouldn't regard their apologies as overly demanding anything of you, unless of course they go on and on and on way beyond you saying something simple like 'it's fine, don't do it again'. They're not trying to hurt you - at least, you have to have faith that this is the case.

The way you elide straight from this to them restoring themselves to their rightful role at the moral centre of the community feels like something of an (understandable) paranoid projection (and an unhelpful pun on the phrase 'restorative justice'). They are not trying to Other you, or at least, you cannot be friends with anyone who would do that (and a few breaths later you claim indeed that your friends are your sole safeguard from the world's evils)! Obviously I've not met them so I don't know which of them if any regard themselves as moral centres but it strikes me as likelier that, like me, they have developed a distaste for being found guilty of Being Bad; wanting to be Not Bad is not the same as believing oneself to be Always Good or Right; in fact, it rather contradicts it, as were the latter the case it would surely preclude the possibility of the former.

And for liberals, the written proof of this virtue, the imprimatur under which they operate, are the laws. Laws, to them, are not guidelines under which we may learn to become more just, but justice itself, flawless ideals which we can only strive to imitate more perfectly. They are, foundationally, People of the Book.

I'm talking about myself here, my former self. The way I was raised, what I used to believe. I believed that we - the United States of America, and liberal democracies in general - were a nation of laws, not merely a nation of men (in the archaic, non-gendered sense. I loved that sort of language; it seemed elevated, elegant.) It was not enough for me to trust in mere people. Inconsistent, superstitious, violent - the prospect of not having recourse to the law horrified me.

Today I do not trust in the law. Today I believe that "the law" is whatever you can get away with. I do not believe the law protects me. I do not believe the law was created to protect me. I believe it was created to protect people like the person I once thought I was. When I was that person, I believed everybody else was just like I was, that those laws applied equally to everybody else just like they applied to me, and I was so fucking wrong about that.

Laws are imperfect rules enforced imperfectly by often malign or disingenuous forces and I am suspicious of American law enforcement in general (UK is not perfect either; most countries probably have significant problems in this field), but you appear to align liberal thought with law most precisely. I would strongly dispute whether this theory is borne out by the history of liberal thought and praxis; it feels to me that, while liberalism is by definition a process that lags behind the cultural avant-garde by a few steps as it synthesises new information (hence why full trans acceptance is lamentably not quite yet the mainstream liberal position - and I said yet), it is nonetheless a process that seeks to remedy inequalities and imperfect freedoms through a combination of legal or political evolution and cultural exchange. To claim that liberal dogma creates a 'terminal fulfilment' and then ignores the issue thereafter is to completely ignore the last two hundred years of post-Enlightenment liberal progress and development.

I think a fundamental problem in this is still that I mean something slightly different by 'liberal' than many of you. I am not a Clinton; I am not an NPR reactionary or a free-marketeer. I'm a leftist who is also a liberal in the sense that I think working towards individual freedom creates more acceptable conditions for living than any alternative I've heard. I suppose I am reclaiming the term to an extent; I certainly don't think it deserves to be trashed as comprehensively as it is on ILX.

Speaking of which, what are your alternatives, my fine anti-liberal friends? I never do hear how we're going to bring about full communism, or what price there is to pay. Will your life and the lives of those you care about be made better by liberals like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, or by an armed struggle in which you'll probably die?

Maybe this is obvious but the use of "liberal" to mean "people like Nancy Pelosi as opposed to people like Bernie Sanders or AOC, who are not liberals" is pretty restricted to left-centric online spaces. In general US political discourse, Nancy Pelosi is liberal and Bernie Sanders is more liberal.

They're probably just really afraid of being (or being seen to be) bad people!

That’s .,, the point she’s making

Wondering what Jeremy Corbyn's reaction would if you called him a liberal to his face.

But then that elides straight to "they want to make themselves the moral centres of the universe" xp

He'd be polite, of course.

Corbyn is a social democrat, yes? Social democracy is a venerable part of the liberal tradition, no?

Jeremy Corbyn is a Socialist, not a liberal.

Tony Blair is a liberal.

What exactly *is* a 'socialist'? That term is no less capacious than 'liberal'.

Of course 'creepy liberalism' surely does exist as well, especially at the libertarian/expansionist end of the liberal spectrum (hi there, Tony Blair!), but it can be differentiated from other forms of liberalism without sacrificing too many leftist points, surely?

Would you not say Corbyn is a social liberal? He believes in, for example, LGBT rights a lot more than most politicians - it's one of the reasons I like him so much.

having a mare here, certain user

Boris Johnson is a 'social liberal', so what?

xp said other user without contributing anything to the discussion

Who isn't a social liberal apart from some Sir Bufton Tuftons on the Tory backbenches and Tim Farron?

Shall we look up Johnson's voting record on issues of freedom, such as for immigrants, LGBT people or the poor? Somehow I feel his liberal credentials will shrivel a little

The poor don't count for 'social liberals'

No, they don't count for creepy libertarians (who always turn out to be reactionaries of some stripe anyway). I won't allow the entire liberal tradition to be done over like this.

any def of liberalism that excludes mainstream social democrats like corbyn and bernie is way more narrow than what i was talking about

Would you not say Corbyn is a social liberal? He believes in, for example, LGBT rights a lot more than most politicians - it's one of the reasons I like him so much.

― imago, Monday, July 13, 2020 11:02 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

being in favour of lgbt rights is not an invention of "liberalism".

?

I think this has been linked to on ilx before, but this article is pretty convincing imo - arguing that Corbyn is a better liberal than the supposed 'liberal' centrists he is sometimes unfavorably compared to

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/jeremy-corbyn-defender-of-liberalism