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> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights

> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual worlds (eg one a future where your favored ideology is not dominant and is in need of the protections you are currently burning down). The average person is nowhere near smart enough to be able to put these pieces together into a coherent worldview, let alone one that they find more convincing than "they're the enemy, crush them". The periods where liberalism has been resurgent are not ones where the masses are suddenly enlightened, but ones in which they either have little power or are pacified by unrelated conditions. This is not unlike the conditions in which dictatorships are stable, as the common thread is simply "the masses can't or don't care in detail about the fundamentals of the way they're governed". It's not a coincidence that the global illiberalism surge coincides with the rise of universal connectivity: On top of the social and economic upheaval that it induced, suddenly large amounts of people can coordinate epistemically, through hashtags and reshares, without making their way through distribution chokepoints controlled by elites. [1] I couldn't think of a concise way to phrase this, but I'm referring to the tendency to claim that a big chunk of your beliefs/preferences are incontrovertible and fundamental tenets of society while others' are simply their beliefs and preferences.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be taken for granted. Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945)
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Yea, I hear you, that's certainly possible. But I'm not reasoning top-down from liberalism's unpopularity, but rather bottom-up from the inability most people have to grasp the components I mentioned. Some of them are much simpler concepts than liberalism, and are applicable in many cases that people have more direct stakes in. And yet, in my experience, vanishingly few people are capable of grasping them to any reasonable degree. > Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945) We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still being extremely illiberal. That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those that disagree with our holy belief system?". To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture dungeon.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be taken for granted. Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945)

wutbrodo 5y ago
Yea, I hear you, that's certainly possible. But I'm not reasoning top-down from liberalism's unpopularity, but rather bottom-up from the inability most people have to grasp the components I mentioned. Some of them are much simpler concepts than liberalism, and are applicable in many cases that people have more direct stakes in. And yet, in my experience, vanishingly few people are capable of grasping them to any reasonable degree. > Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945) We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still being extremely illiberal. That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those that disagree with our holy belief system?". To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture dungeon.