Doom comments on Also, "you shouldn't bother voting"

[–] Doom@discuss.online 4 points 1 month ago (6 children)

You're talking about the ends of Liberalism but never from the basis of the philosophers and minds who came up with the concept. This is the same disconnect people have with socialism. They view how it was played out, not what the core philosophies are.

I wouldn't say it is wrong, but it is definitely a perspective of how one can view a political theory, through theory or in practice. Do you view all governing philosophies with this lens?

I'd also argue a lot of what you said has more to do with religion but it is pretty hard to separate religion and governing styles when they intentionally intertwine themselves with beliefs like "god given rights" and what not.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago (5 children)

No, I'm not. I explicitly started with the beginnings of Liberalism, not its ends. Liberalsim is not defined as "all the good stuff". It's a distinct real historical process and private property is its foundation, not an accident.

Yes, I view all political philosophies through a historical concrete lens and not through an abstract idealist one.

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[–] Doom@discuss.online 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

The foundation of liberalism is natural rights, the rule of law and personal autonomy. The US was the first country founded on those principles and a lot of what you said came from how the US managed to do that, with the financial backing of rich southern slave-owning states and the concept of manifest destiny which is directly tied to religion and the concept of owning land to embrace liberalism.

But liberal concepts first played out in Europe in opposition of monarchies, not really on the basis of land owning but more private property in the face of a king which you could argue are the same but a lot of private property wasn't specifically just land. Which is what I mean, you're talking about the American liberalism evolution, not the like two hundred years before that where it existed as a political theory used to wrestle power from the ultra rich of that time.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

No, I am talking the 200 years prior. You don't get to separate the USA from the French, Dutch, English, and Spanish. You don't get to separate the emergence of mercantilism as a mechanism of wealth accumulation from the struggle against monarchy. Peasants were not inventing abstract concepts of natural rights in letter writing campaigns to each other. Liberalism was not a grassroots movement. It was a position developed, as you said, to fight the monarchy, but the people looking to fight the monarchy were the non-noble wealthy merchants. That's it's history.

The USA was not the first country to imagine what manifest destiny was all about. The concept of divine right of expansion and dominion emerged from European monarchists and monarchists relied on the merchant class to go forth and spread that dominion. The Pope decreed to all the Europeans that they could rape, enslave, and murder to save the souls of non-Europeans.

The fact that the European colonists who broke away from the crown chose Liberalism and were also wealthy merchants is not an accident.

The fact that liberalism in the US led to mass poverty doesn't discount all the subsequent liberal revolutions that also led to mass poverty.

And the reason this is obvious is because private property being an abstract human right is so obviously contradictory that no one focused on universal human rights would be able to reconcile. It was Liberalism that said the state should not have any obligations to the laborers, it was liberalism that said private property should allow a single man (and only a European man) to deprive literally the entire society and indeed the entire world from the benefits of that land and that it was the state's job to use violent force on enforcing that deprivation.

The foundation of Liberalism, like every political philosophy, is a theory of power on the basis of some beliefs about outcomes. The abstract idea of moral good is a post hoc rationalization.

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