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mejcinta · 3 years

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John Waker antis.

These are the kind of John Walker anti posts I just need to respond to:

“I didn’t even know there could be people actively defending that piece of shit but just for argument’s sake: he did get a slap on the hand?

Walker literally killed an innocent man in cold blood on foreign soil and mind you he didn’t do it in self defence or even during a fight, no he ran after the first guy he saw, took him down and decapitated him in front of a crowd and then left like nothing happened. May I remind you of the hateful treatment we (and by we I mean predominantly white countries) reserve to any person of colour who even dares to think something even remotely “submersive”? Yeah.

So yes, that white garbage fire got away with a slap on his hand because instead of being put on trial for slaughtering a man, he’s just sent home with dishonor or whatever cuz he’s the epitome of entitlement and privilege. Call that justice will you.”

Duuuuuuuuuude!!! Here’s just a little something I’ve obsereved about these types of individuals and their fake SJW Playbook.

1. They’ll identify with morally questionable characters a.k.a criminals who mess up their own circumstances in heated situations, then blame it entirely on a party *outside* of themselves and their poor choices. Nico, mind you, wasn't entirely innocent. He was an accomplice to Lemar's murder. And he can't say he didn't sign up for war when he chose to fight beside Karli. John was high on the serum and took the wrong stance, to be fair. But to pretend that Nico was a saint who had no idea what he was messing up with is something else entirely. And clearly, he admitted he had messed up when crazed up John was standing over him.

2. They’ll remind people, especially black people, how 'privileged' as white people they are, and how them coming down to 'advocate' for black people makes them 'better' white people. This is what I hate most about such so-called fans. They treat black people as objects to gain golden societal points from, as they ironically state over and over again, how ‘privileged’ they are to be born a certain skin color. With all due respect, I find any 'fan' or person that talks such shit to me, as if I ever asked for their help or ever saw myself as a 'helpless, poor little black person in need of a savior' the BIGGEST racist ever!!!

3. These fans think they earn points by calling people of their skin color, 'white garbage fire'. Dude, have you no respect for yourself at the least?? It's not virtuous to insult someone for the color of their skin, it's actually deranged and evil. And many of these John antis are in fact very deranged and small-brained. They can’t see beyond their unhealthy hatred for how someone looks or talks.

4. Making everything about race... Gee, where do I even start. The Falcon & The Winter Soldier has served heavy facts about how the government uses people to pass their sinister agendas. They experimented on Isaiah. Another shadow government organization kidnapped, tortured and brainwashed Bucky. John Walker and Lemar Hoskins were programmed to believe they were serving their nation abroad when all that brought was death and destruction to foreign countries. Biggest takeaway from here is that the government WILL use you fools.

And what's the latest method Western governments are using to pass outrageous, tyrannical laws?? The excuse of 'racism'. Mass disarmament of nation's because 'racism'. Mass censorship of freethinkers and people that question government/try to hold it accountable because 'racism'. Black people must be inoculated first with an experimental vaccine because 'racism'. Open borders, mass child trafficking, sexual exploitation, pedophilia and dangerous notorious gangs getting in because it would be 'racist' to strengthen border protection. Oh, and black people shouldn't pass in Math because how could they when Math is 'racist' and black people can't and shouldn't compete equally with others in a subject that even African students ( Math is compulsory here in Africa) are really good at and consequentially pursue meaningful and empowering careers that take them as far as actress Lupita Nyong’o, writer Wole Soyinka , actor Eddie Gathegi or American surgeon Ben Carson????

It's ironic, and beyond me, that these SJW John antis don't see they are the ones that are government/establishment props.

Now the question is: is John Walker, a character that’s a war veteran, programmed/conditioned into the role of Captain America and had a (black) best friend and has a beautiful, loving (black) wife a 'racist' simply because Sam wasn't ready to take up the Shield and voluntarily gave it up to the Establishment????? (Thankfully, he’s come around now).

John Walker is now liberated from government control and wants to do things his way, and he's bad for that?? He's literally what all of you 'SJW' fans aim to be right? A rebel breaking free from government control and exacting justice the way they see fit?

This is the big irony with John antis. Tell me you're petty without telling me you're petty, I guess.

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cultml · 4 years

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Breaking of Now

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

That’s what I should have said to my sister when she asked genuinely what my problem with wearing a mask was. On this occasion I had gotten trapped and was pretty pissed about the whole situation. The week before one of the big retailer announced a mandate masks. Virtue signalling group think as far as I was concerned and assumed, wrongly that if i bought a little more I would have time to finally workaround them. The day the mandate took effect and the day i talked to her, I stopped by one of the more expensive less convenient workaround places to find a mask mandate. An couple hours latter i find out my main grocery store and the others options where going to mandate as well. Online is feeding a different beast and sending someone in my place is out sourcing my acquiescence. Trapped. In the end I just told her no one knows what they are doing (the failure to still count the deaths correctly), it's ridiculous (contradictory studies and disparate rules), that i suddenly didn't have a choice and it was going to take me a few days to adjust.

What was really going through my head was about USSR. “ It wasn’t the just the necessary lies it was the absurd little pointless ones that broke the spirit of the people” to paraphrase badly from a place I don’t remember. That is clearer statement of Voltaire and a simple explanation of why we shouldn’t lie. It’s not the childish notion that we should not because the truth is easier. Most see mask wearing a virtuous, for me it’s an affirmation of a lie, of several, of the ones closer to the roots. It’s not a herculean feat to see for me it’s just stupid hard wired reflexive contrarian angst , not hell no so much as why the hell . It leads you to question anti-vax, reduced fat, publish or die, replication crisis, Russell conjugation, virtues signalling, Overton window, attacks on moral relativism destroying gradation of sin and virtue, cognitive biases , government building as nation building, gas lighting, the church defending itself and the existence of God but not the moral order(not that it knew the difference), the irreconcilability of socialist thought and Jihadists with the west, big government as government playing god, half the people are dumper than the other, death of the common, the long list of what’s called the regressive left we focus so much on (more of a symptom than a cause),cultural relativism, common human behavior dressing up common human behavior as conspiracy, fragility of high civilization, economics standing in for moral order, monogamy, “perfect as your are” drowning the phoenix, nuclear family, woke rewrites hiding more subtle rewrites of western mythos, the prison of two ideas, deep silos of knowledge standing in for wider wisdom, and....

At some point you find yourself outside and not in some sort of edgy artsy way, not quite smart enough to figure out why no one else is there. I am sliding back into the hope I have gone insane. You deal with the whirling nightmare as little as possible, you don’t call it out at every turn, you don’t cheer it on, you don’t help it, and YOU DO NOT FUCKING LIE ABOUT IT.

So sitting in the parking lot,deciding if one of the innocent creatures that lives with me, approaching month four of the six the vet said she had left, gets the food she prefers at the moment... She had other food that was better for her anyway.., not that it matters now. I have a duty of care especially now. She won’t understand the problem or the cost to my honor, for lack of a better word. She will just miss the thing she is used to. In reality avoiding the mask is likely impracticality anyway. On the verge of throwing up, crying, punching the dashboard or screaming fuck over an over... a car pulls into the spot across from me and a woman starts unpacking a kid out or the back seat... none of the above. A few deep breaths and fuck it, the easy way it is. Never thought about actually punching a stranger or really anyone but the assigned finger wager at the door.... “I am a virtuous little citizen and those who know better know better” and not “we aren’t all writhing around in the liquefying corps of a great civilization” On queue they where still out of or ran out of again of the food I was after.

I didn’t feel anything brake that day. Thinking about it since something is missing. Maybe things are just numb and will come back in time. As of now thinking about what may have to be done in defense of a civilization worth defending against those that can not be reconciled with it, elicits little. The little emotional triggers that made question if I could if i had to, are gone.... I am pretty weak willed and was happy to stand on the side lines. Muse at what might untangle this mess. I am not a hard man by any imagining, but you made me lie exactly in the way that end civilizations. Not that mask work. Not that I was virtuous for doing so. Not that “we are all in this together”. Not that those in charge know. Not that anyone is in charge. Not that some version of normal coming. Not that this version of the west isn’t dead. It’s the lie that there isn’t a massive upheaval coming.

The mass of rubble , ideological and real that will have to be cleared. Unfortunately a fair amount of blood that is likely to be spilled. Driving now the phrase “ the ugliness of modern architecture” rings in my ears. Affordable little canvases of our own that last only a life time is not the worst thing, but churches in strip malls? Regardless if this is just contrivance of my head or not I have been pushed a few degrees off of where i was. For now, a reprieve as there is still the innocence creatures in my care. It sadly is not open ended.

This kinda of thing might not have pushed as hard as it did if the ground wasn’t already soft. Before all that a few thing had pushed me to wrap up what i was thinking and walk from my online musings. So. Brit Hume has been one of the perennial “ this is the most important election of our lives... til the next one” He and Thomas Sowell, calling it a point of no return have both come to the conclusion that it actually is. If Biden wins the next election wouldn't matter and any other road blocks would be gone.

Charlie Hurt calling it a make it stop election and latter Victor David Hanson questioning if a silent major exists leads one to believe that reason may have been locked out. That this is a who ever can convince enough people they can save them election. It really fell like the argument don’t matter at all. My suspicion is that if you had really solid polling and knew the outcome of a handful of thing you could easily predict this election now, nothing the candidate did would mean anything. I have kind of gotten used to the idea that thing are going to get well... bloody when the left takes power and finally nails the door shut behind its self.

I was under the illusion that there are a number people that “know” where that leads and would as a last resort raise the black flag. Someone “on the inter webs” I thought was one (for no good reason on my part) when asked opted for the benedictine option. “The monasteries survived”. The monasteries where not an existential threat to the king. Little literacy. little printing and no internet. The parallels to the Maoist and the jihadists to our current insurgents? rebels? look pretty clear. What makes anyone thing they going to be left alone by this “madness”. I got very worried. Those you think might keep Trump in power surrender to the mob.... and those who would fight might decide to hide..... A number of things start looking pretty frivolous.

Author Brooks among a legion of others, well meaning I am sure, prescribe kindness and reason and be patient. I short you don’t hug the guy with the suicide vest.... clear? For the jihadists anything said buy outsiders is meaningless, faith isn’t easily to question on the best of days. For the utopians, you can’t understands till it finally works and usually the censors and secret police help. To our little friends if your the oppressor you have no room to speak even if you think you understand how evil you are or your so oppressed that your don’t know what your taking about. It all insulated ideology, and all of it gets people killed. They haven't officially taken power so i guess you could try it one a time, cult deprogramming. However the cult isn’t living in the middle of nowhere, we are all living in it.

Jordan Peterson comes at it from a reasoned position focused more on the broader problems of the West. “Orientate your self properly,aye”. You raise yourself up and it raises those around you. Don’t think saving the West was at the top of his list when it all started Again a one at a time, bottom up approach. At the time I was sure it was far to slow and he never seemed to have a handle on American politics though he knows how badly societies can go wrong. He and many other I don’t think quite understood how bad intentioned the left really was, or how much the compromises made with them where always seeding ground. It seems like a great many people are still living there.

The other problem is the lack of a common. “if there is no common understanding there is no common sense” Mark Steyn if memory serves. My past understanding of the malignant “God is dead” quote was just that and it was a good thing. In part from Peterson, my understanding now is “the common belief in a common God / moral order is dead”. A strong civil society might be able to hold things together and let people do generally what they want....... as long as the reap the consequences of their choices. The problem comes when all choices become valid because there are no consequence . A strong moral order would have put the brakes on.

This is the general problem with the various libertarian imaginings. Over time it will always be a problem. Any significantly democratic organization will trend left or as to hear the left tell it “the long arch of history tend toward justice”... social justice.... popular judgement..... mob rule. Entropy. We all want to be nice and liked so we let the margins slide, leave a little wiggle room in the rules. Eventually it ticks over. Instead of allowing it’s restricting. I doesn’t matter now whatever the case. There is no way now to go any where near letting people reap their own consequences, what would the bureaucrats do with themselves.

So come at it from the other side? The moment the Enlightenment or the industrial revolution started the church was in existential peril. The less the average person need God to explain their day to day the less the ethereal wonder holds. The explosion of knowledge even if they didn’t understand all of it, become a surer path. Defense of the moral order was what was called for. The church defended itself and eventually the existence of God. I would like one of these fill in the blank “nationalist”, common good conservatives, new theocrat types explain to me how governmental policy is going to fix it? They seem to see it as a problem caused by the left. The left is just taking advantage. If it wasn’t them now it would be something else in a generation or four. Not only are they misidentifying the problem their solution is making it harder to solve. Setting government policy to favor what worked is not a guarantee it works going forward. There are plenty of good studies and sound arguments and some policies may work well. The problem, it introduces rigidity. It will help stave off the known worse, meanwhile staving off the unknown both for the worse and for the better. It slows the development of better.

There is this notion that the “left and the “right” should just get a divorce. The “left” will never be satisfied with that. There is as well the notion that we are to diverse to coexist. This is another result of the lack of a common. If a civilization or a country in this case, are bound together even loosely by a civil order an a moral order diversity isn’t a fatal issue. To say it isn’t possible is to reject the American experiment out right.

Those who have accepted a civil war is inevitable talk as if the fight will be to restore something? The war is between who? One side is usually the government. Not sure what is gained by pickling fight with Antifa et al.

I had thought after Ferguson leadership would have leaned it’s lesson. APCs for riot control, yes. For no knock warrant, not so much. It’s become abundantly clear I assume far to many things. We went from throw a water bottle at a cop, jail and the protest is over to everything is acceptable up until your try to burn people alive in a public building. As far as I am concerned those mayors and governors who allow this signed there own resignation letters.

It is has become clear Trump or likely any president can’t fix this. Trump specifically doesn’t have the tack to talk us off this ledge. Suspend the campaign for a week and talk about the consequences, the nature of and solution for the problem.... and never mention himself? I don’t know that and president would have the resources to declare an insurrection, deploy enough federal agents and national guard (assuming the governors allow it) and hold on til the local government went back to arresting the first bottle thrower. I doesn’t look like the decades long hold the “left” has had on these city is going to be broken by this, so no major change in policy that will stop this short term is coming. Those who decide to leave are likely to bring the same ideas that lead to the policies that lead to the chaos where ever they go. It’s not going to stay contained.

It sounded like there where the start of some defensive militia and there are always community deescalation groups. This is driven by policy fuel by ideology that can not be question (though they used to act as if it could). All solutions look to be outside our normal acceptable practice. Comment by Mark Steyn about Islam are instructive. Surrender, destroy, or reform. As with Islam this is a self fulfilling ideology. So? a form of colonization inside our country, an insurrection? Remove the mayors, city counsel and the prosecutors, none of which are doing their jobs. If the rule is that the feds don’t declare insurrections, and it is not declared as such then it is not. What about the governors? Then what..? What policies changes the culture? What are the markers for holding the next election? It is outside our norm, not so much for history in general.

If Trump wins whatever the left does including secession will be responded to by the federal government, our little city experiment aside. That at best will just reimpose the status quo. It is very unlikely to force the “left” ideology into retreat. If Biden gets elected? Play the city experiment out writ large . The constitution almost by definition can’t survive. So... just reprint the thing and put a new start date on it? What does that solve? Maybe I am not digging in the parts of the internet where these this are being hashed out. If they are I not sure it’s by the type of people I want running things.

A list of systemic grievances going into all this would be useful both as a guild for what comes after and as set of red lines. I am sure most libertarians could give you a library full of outrages. It is not the day to day bureaucratic nonsense that’s the problem or police outrages. It’s things like deferential impact, judicial realism, popular election of senators, and the supposed precondition in which regulation is allowed just to start. The last line may be when the left has easily won two or three elections in a row while everyone is being forced to do things they don’t want and never hear a word in the press about it. It may be to late by then. I believed that would be the result if Hilary got elected and it looks to be a certainty if Biden gets in.

Whatever the case maybe the violence has started and to what degree it escalate who knows. The idea that violence is never the answer was always a myth, one we are coming face to face with now. The fact is violence on very rare occasions is the only answer unless you are prepared to surrender everything, to live on your knees in agony. That is why the idea that the constitution is not a suicide pact never made any sense. We seeing it now to with the virus. “we must sacrifice everything even if it save one life”. What childishness. If you won’t die or worse live in pain for your principles they only hold until someone or thing threatens you with just that. If others know it your principles don’t mean much. Further more at societal level if leadership isn’t prepared to risk the live of civilian to protect those principles they aren’t going to last long either

All that in the end still solves nothing. You have beaten back the enemy for what? If violence comes or not we have to have something to go to, to strive for as a civilization. We are a fractured mess of half thoughts and endless “problems” to solve. We have no common understanding of what the moral order or any order is or should be. As is we are done.

“We are very unlikely to come up with entirely new definition or invention. We are very unlikely to invent new Gods, very unlikely to come up with new religion, ...very unlikely to be able to go anything this good again.” Douglas Murray.

A similar sentiment two plus years ago sent me in this direction.

“ Where the road we’re traveling takes us. Where do the above events and that one trend leave us? Not in a good place. Unless there’s a black swan somewhere down the line, we are heading inevitably towards a socialist America. “ “ I’m praying for a Black Swan. My prayers aren’t usually answered, though. That’s why I’m assuming that the American future will be totalitarian — either Marxist or Islamic — and that it might happen within my lifetime and will definitely happen within my children’s. “ - Bookworm

So what we are looking for is a Black swan, a new god, a new religion. In an ocean of ignorance with an occasional mist of wisdom let me see if I can puzzle this out a bit. First there is no puppet master just us. Though they took full advantage ,even the “left” isn’t the problem. We began to gain knowledge abundantly, with certainty if not ease. It distracted, if not overwhelmed the the ethereal of the church and rendered the judgement of the wise mute. So what do we need? We need to temper knowledge. We need not just the facts or the working of the parts we see. We need to pursue the truth, not exactly the truth. Not the truth of the tangible world or that of the ethereal. It is the truth of the moment. Our best understanding of the working of the two combined. And an understanding that some day it will change. And that is what we should pursue. The honest truth of what we know and a drive to find more. To try, succeed and fail, to find what is actually better. It is an extension of the road humanity was on before this diversion.

How to paint the picture? A discovered / revealed God/ devil/ saint/ mythic hero, a torch bearer along the path humanity has always been traveling. The path of our increasing understanding, the path that raised our civilization. A light that only shines on the path behind us, to illuminate the things we missed and on our figure calling us forward. One who demands that those who obscure the past repent. One who demands that those who misrepresent the path their on to get others to follow repent. One that asks us to forgive those who do and use the shape of their misdeeds to search for our own misunderstandings and mistakes.

In practice, a secular church that is neither. A voluntary body with neither the force of law or a claim to the moral order. A nondemocratic organization because the long arc of history tending toward social justice. An organization the is trusted to ask better questions. A group of people that will put themselves in the experiments in order and be brutally honest about the results.

So for instance the question about transmission of wisdom from one generation to the next is about how we raise children and that is about family and marriage. What is best? what do we really know? Follow the path all the way back. Romantic marriage is new, so why not practical or arranged marriage? We see the obvious problems with polygamy, with polyamory? Maybe some combination? maybe not one big romantic marriage but three,may be four people, one marriage is practical, one arrange, and one romantic. I have no idea. We can’t just default to the wisdom of religion or assume the recklessness of the “left”. Let Go. If it works or not we are better for knowing. We will have surer footing on the path ahead at least in the understanding of this moment.

If don’t like that formulation good. You build a black swan. If there’s a flock of them maybe one survives. Maybe we avoid generations of brutality. Maybe something of what we have done survives.

All I can do now is try to find a way not to live on my knees before anyone, anything, any ideology or idea. Try. That is all I can do.

Credit to those i stole ideas from that i can no longer remember if they're mine or not. I am going to put away my crayons down, shut my mouth give my mind a rest, deal with only what i must, and hopefully find a way to wonder at the world again.

or try to

#black swan #god gap #reversion is not reformation #CultML

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indoubtedly · 6 years

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I think a lot of people don’t really understand why I’m a progressive. I think it is because my experience is intersectional, and well theirs isn’t or hasn’t been. That isn’t anybody’s fault, breaking out of a set culture is hard and reaching out to people you think are completely different feels almost impossible at times. These are my memories around interactions I’ve had or seen.

(These are in no particular order)

1. It was about a month before the presidential elections and I was talking about how terrifying it would be if trump won, for me, my family, and the communities I’m a part of. A white guy who was my acquaintance at the time said “I don’t know, I just love the way he says what he’s thinking!”. He had the ability to hear what I said. He decided to not listen to my fears in favor of this “truth by force” candidate . I assume this type of sentiment was a reason Trump won.

2. This was during my freshman year, I was outside my dorm with a group of friends. One of them commented on the ACA by saying “it’s fine and all, but the premiums are so high! Idk how my family will be able to pay for them” As he flew a $5000 dollar drone his parents had bought him. I had just been enrolled into a health plan thanks to the ACA.

3. My sister married a pakistaní and now has two beautiful children with him. She converted to islam and seems to be happy. While I could write about how much anti-muslim stuff I hear from just turning the news on, my catholic family was the issue here. It took them so long to accept this as a reality and it hurt me to see how uneasy people become over something like religious change.

4. When talking about voting a friend said “I don’t think everyone should vote, it shouldn’t be that easy to vote.” They went on to say most of the electorate is idiots. This is the type of elitism I don’t have a stomach for anymore, there are no idiots only ignorant people. This position is dangerous because it lets in apathy and defends certain types of voter suppression. My parents don’t read as much news because it is mainly in english, they aren’t idiots.

5. A lot of people around me laugh at the folks in the rust belt as if we were better than them, I have as well. This “I’m virtuous for my politics” stance is toxic to discussion, and alienating to new comers. While we laughed, teachers in the south fight for better wages and education for their students. It was wrong of me to laugh instead of stand with those fighting

6. This halloween my dashboard had a Uconn student dressed as an Ice agent “arresting” another student in a poncho. Disgusting but not surprising. White people are the ones who are still surprised at racism and hate, the rest of us just have to deal with it on the daily.

7. So many white women I know have said this or a version of this. “I’m just not attracted to black/brown/Indian/latino men”. Stop that shit, your preferences are your preferences, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t racist and should be said at every non white dude who comes your way.

8. While I taking an education class I remembered a discussion between a white guy and two women. The white dude was defending his racist friend for writing “go home” over the “identi-tree” of a non-white student. Waving it off as if it was a joke and not an attack on a persons being.

9. All throughout my K-12 education I had multiple peers tell me “if you don’t like the US why don’t you go back to your country?”. I’ve been here since I was a year old, this is my country too. Looking back I understand this was just an echo of what they heard at home and on the news. It doesn’t excuse it.

I’m not looking for apologies or anything of the like. I’m asking to be heard, I’m asking for an understanding I don’t really see around me very often. Your experiences aren’t the only ones that matter, and they aren’t the only ones that need to be heard.

Please vote for all those who can’t and remember there is a whole humanity around you.

#liberal #socialism #writers #latino #mestizo #bisexual #lgbtq #conservative #left wing #anti facist #voting #elections #experience #intersectionality

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Trump’s taunts are stirring a level of nationalism Mexico hasn’t seen in years

By Nick Miroff, Washington Post, February 25, 2017

MEXICO CITY--Confrontation with the United States is so central to Mexican history there’s an institution dedicated to the trauma. It’s called the Museum of Interventions.

Remember the Alamo? They do here--as the prelude to a string of defeats, invasions and territorial losses that left Mexico wounded and diminished, its national identity forged by grievance.

The museum is housed in a former convent where Mexican troops were overrun by U.S. soldiers in the 1847 Battle of Churubusco. And for most of the three decades since the museum opened, its faded battle flags seemed like the stuff of buried history, an anachronism in an age of galloping North American Free Trade Agreement integration.

But President Trump’s wall-building, great-again nationalism is reviving the old Mexican version, too. His characterization of tougher border enforcement and immigration raids as “a military operation” hit the nerve that runs through this legacy, undermining his aides’ trip to Mexico City this week and the message that relations with the United States remain strong.

Instead, the public outrage at Trump has sunk those relations to their lowest point in decades. It has inspired a campaign to boycott U.S. chains such as Starbucks and buy “Made in Mexico” products. Protesters marched in a dozen cities this month, carrying grotesque effigies of the American president. And Trump’s taunts have buoyed the poll numbers of 2018 presidential contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing populist Mexicans see as the figure most likely to fight back.

For Mexicans, the problem is not merely the wall. They know their country is poorer, more violent and less law-abiding than the United States. If Trump had announced plans for tougher border security, many Mexicans would have understood, even as they criticized him.

But when they hear Trump boasting he will make Mexico pay for the wall, and the wild cheering in response, they recognize an unmistakable attempt to humiliate them. It is American nationalism at Mexico’s expense, and it stings in a deep, atavistic way, like a childhood bully coming back to beat you up again.

“I’m proud of Mexico, and I love my country,” said Sergio Pacheco, 56, a mechanic who works for American Airlines. “He can have his wall if he’ll give us our territory back.”

Pacheco was touring the Museum of Interventions for the first time. There were giant 1840s maps showing Mexico’s borders reaching into the Pacific Northwest.

President James K. Polk wanted that land. Mexico wasn’t selling, and fighting broke out. The United States declared war in 1846.

U.S. troops sailed down from New Orleans a year later, then marched up the old conquistadors’ trail and brought Mexico to its knees. They stayed a year, forcing the country to sign away half its territory.

Later came the occupation of Veracruz by the U.S. Navy in 1914, and the 1916 invasion by thousands of U.S. soldiers chasing Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the prototypical “bad hombre,” who had raided the border town of Columbus, N.M.

The result of these encounters, according to Mexican historian Lorenzo Meyer, is that the two countries developed vastly different forms of nationalism. Mexico’s is a “defensive” one, he said, steeped in a sense of injustice and indignity, unlike the more belligerent northern version, of American exceptionalism and militarized Manifest Destiny.

Pacheco never thought about this history much. But the diplomatic clashes of the past few weeks have left him “shocked.” He is a fan of American music and movies and the Super Bowl. For most of his lifetime, the two countries have been steadily growing closer.

“We’ve always looked up to the United States,” he said. “Now, after all this time, we’re realizing that you don’t really like us.”

President Enrique Peña Nieto has mostly tried to accommodate the new reality, challenging Trump’s proposals in restrained, diplomatic language. He has offered a more forceful response only when he felt he had no choice, such as when he canceled a trip to Washington after Trump tweeted that the Mexican leader should stay home if he wouldn’t pay for the wall.

Mexicans, too, are divided about what to do. This month, protesters held two marches in the capital. Both were anti-Trump, but one was also a demonstration against the deeply unpopular Peña Nieto, whom organizers view as a Trump-enabler. Others, including tycoon Carlos Slim, are calling on Mexicans to close ranks behind their president, because the whole country is under attack.

An irony of the spat with Peña Nieto is that he has already paid a steep political cost for enacting controversial energy changes favored by American companies. He has opened Mexican oil and gas development to greater foreign investment, but that has only led to higher prices for angry Mexican consumers and lower poll numbers for him.

The last time the country was so open to U.S. investment, during the Gilded Age dictatorship of Gen. Porfirio Diaz, Mexican resentment of the government boiled over into revolution. The country eventually adopted steep tariffs that limited trade for decades.

Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the holdings of Standard Oil and other foreign companies in 1938, infuriating the firms but delighting Mexicans.

“I grew up in a country where you were taught in obligatory history textbooks that the United States was the enemy, the country that stole half our land and the country of the ‘Ugly American,’” said Denise Dresser, a prominent Mexican political scientist whose father was a U.S. citizen.

She helped organize the march this month that was also against Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000 and cast itself as the heroic defender of Mexican dignity.

Mexico was a relatively closed, insular society for most of those years, but as more and more Mexicans came into contact with the world through television and mass migration to the United States, nationalism was transformed.

Mexican workers returning home also broke down the old divisions. “They brought back a view of the United States as a tolerant, upwardly mobile place, and began to demand rights back home that they saw in the United States,” Dresser said.

“That created a virtuous cycle, and a new sense of identity constructed not in opposition to the U.S., but in favor of North America,” she said.

But in Trump’s taunts many Mexicans hear confirmation of their deep-seated suspicion that Americans still don’t value and respect them.

Trump’s comments are forcing a re-examination of Mexico’s relationship with the United States, from its intricate commercial and industrial ties to deepening cooperation with U.S. law enforcement. New legislation in Mexico’s senate would halt imports of American corn, which have grown from $390 million to $2.4 billion annually since the advent of NAFTA, in 1994.

NAFTA is not the natural, default setting of U.S.-Mexico relations. It is an attempt to transcend the mistrust and bitterness of the past.

The agreement took an aspirational view of U.S.-Mexico ties. It recognized the two countries were significantly different. But it treated Mexico essentially as an equal partner, along with Canada, in creating a prosperous, democratic and collaborative place called “North America,” quieting the skeptics who insisted Mexico didn’t belong there.

Since NAFTA took effect, annual U.S.-Mexico commerce has increased from $80 billion to $550 billion. And as trade barriers fell, Mexico’s defensive nationalism did, too.

But as American factory jobs moved south, NAFTA dealt a blow to the latent notions of U.S. nationalism built on postwar-era industrial pride.

Trump’s “America First” worldview restores the idea of industrial products as vessels of patriotism. But it has left Mexicans baffled by the claim their country is taking advantage of the United States through NAFTA. Mexican workers earn a small fraction of what their American counterparts make, and the trade partnership is overwhelmingly driven by U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies. Mexican cities have filled with U.S. chain stores and restaurants, not the other way around.

In the chants of “Build the Wall!,” Antonio Garza, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, sees the return of the “animal spirits” that once soured relations between the two countries. But Garza, who served from 2002 to 2009 under President George W. Bush and now works as an attorney in Mexico City, said he’s seen something different in the resurgent nationalism on Mexico’s streets.

This time, it has a singular focus. “It’s directed at Trump,” he said, “not the United States.”

#Mexico #Mexican nationalism #Trump and Mexico

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cabiba · 7 years

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Three years ago, the New York Times asked whether “the libertarian moment” had finally arrived. Since then, we have seen no libertarian revolution in politics or policy, leading many to ask whether the libertarian moment had indeed come… and gone.

Perhaps, the thinking goes, the libertarians had their political American Idol audition, delivered a pitchy performance, and were sent home: end of story.

In a sense, to even frame things in this way is silly. It would only make sense if libertarians were a curious sect with quirky ideas that somehow gained outsize national attention, giving us a one-time chance to seize the reins of power: like how the South Korean presidency was won by a member of the Church of Eternal Life cult. Since that president was recently forced from office, surely the Church of Eternal Life’s “moment” has come and gone.

A Branding Problem

Poor branding is partly to blame: specifically, the use of the label “libertarian” instead of the philosophy's original name, “liberalism.” In defense of those who made that name change, they didn’t have much of a choice. By the time “libertarianism” was adopted, “liberalism” had already been long lost: hopelessly hitched to a decidedly illiberal ideology.

But the new label has created the false impression that the liberty tradition is much younger and more idiosyncratic than it really is: as if it’s a new-fangled left/right hybrid cooked up in the 1970s. Yet the truth is quite the opposite. As I will discuss below, what we now call “liberalism” and what we now call “conservatism” are both themselves hybrid descendants of what we now call “libertarianism.”

Abandoning “liberalism” has detached the philosophy from its long and glorious history and heritage. Liberalism/libertarianism is actually a centuries-old tradition with millennia-old roots. It is the founding philosophy of America, the catalyst of the rise of the West, and the source of almost all things sweet and splendid about the modern world around us.

The Struggle against Absolutism

Where did it begin? The liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer, writing in the 1880s, traced its origins to England's Restoration period (1660-1688), when the monarchy had been restored after having been abolished in the English Civil War.

The great political divide of the time was between Tories and Whigs. As Spencer wrote, “Whiggism began with resistance to Charles II and his cabal, in their efforts to re-establish unchecked monarchical power.”

The Tories were the king’s cabal and the defenders of his prerogatives over the lives, liberties, and property of his subjects.

At first, the anti-absolutist movement led by the Whigs had no coherent ideology. But Spencer identified a trend in their causes, which could be seen from the effects of their policy victories against the Crown: like, for example, the Habaeus Corpus Act of 1679. As Spencer wrote, “The principle of compulsory co-operation throughout social life was weakened by them, and the principle of voluntary co-operation strengthened.”

Whig anti-absolutism culminated in the so-called “Glorious Revolution” which overthrew Charles’s successor James II. Charles’s niece Mary and her husband William, a Dutch prince, were placed on the throne. Shortly after this transfer of power, the English Bill of Rights (precursor to our own) was enacted. England had become a constitutional monarchy.

The Idea of Liberty Takes Shape

When Mary sailed from the Netherlands to England to claim her crown, her entourage included a Whig-affiliated philosopher named John Locke, who had been cooling his heels in Holland since he fell under suspicion of plotting to assassinate Charles.

But Locke’s real threat to absolute monarchy lay in his prowess with the literary, not the lethal, arts. His great work on political philosophy was so subversive that he published it anonymously.

In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke proclaimed and philosophically defended the universal rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property. He also relegated government to a limited, servile role: to doing little (if anything) more than securing those rights. This contrasted starkly with the Tory glorification of the monarch as the “Delegate of Heaven” wielding the divine right to rule.

In this hugely influential work, Locke, now regarded as “the Father of Liberalism,” provided the theoretical coherence and grounding that the proto-liberalism of the Whigs had hitherto lacked.

Whigs Ascendant

After the death of Queen Anne (1714), successor to William and Mary, the Whig Party came to dominate Parliament, where they rapidly liberalized England. As historian John Richard Green (quoted by Spencer) wrote of this period:

“Before the fifty years of their rule had passed, Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for differences of religion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament.”

These reforms stimulated great advances in trade and industry, science and technology, literature and the arts. It was truly an Age of Enlightenment. As early as the 1720s, England’s liberal, tolerant culture moved Voltaire to eloquent admiration. “English laws,” he wrote, “are on the side of humanity…”

The trials and triumphs of the Whigs in their fight for English liberty against the Tories were deeply inspiring to America’s founding generation. Thomas Jefferson went so far as to classify all of humanity as either dispositional Whigs or Tories. In one letter, he wrote:

"The parties of Whig and Tory are those of nature. They exist in all countries, whether called by these names or by those of Aristocrats and Democrats, Cote Droite and Cote Gauche, Ultras and Radicals, Serviles and Liberals. The sickly, weakly, timid man fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold cherishes them, and is formed a Whig by nature.”

And in another letter, Jefferson elaborated:

"The division into Whig and Tory is founded in the nature of man; the weakly and nerveless, the rich and the corrupt, seeing more safety and accessibility in a strong executive; the healthy, firm, and virtuous, feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources, and willing to part with only so much power as is necessary for their good government; and, therefore, to retain the rest in the hands of the many, the division will substantially be into Whig and Tory.”

Whig liberalism was the founding ideology of America. The political philosophy of Locke deeply informed the Declaration of Independence. Whig resistance against the crown inspired the American Revolution. Whig constitutionalism influenced the American Constitution. And the Whig-won English Bill of Rights was a model for the America's.

(Ironically, the later American Whig Party would distinguish itself as one of the most stridently illiberal parties in US history.)

Locke-Smith

In the same year that the Declaration of Independence was issued, a very different kind of document was also published which would do much to define the liberalism of the 19th century.

In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith asked why unprecedented opulence had blessed Britain in recent decades. Using the new science of economics, Smith explained how the credit was due to Britain’s “liberal principles,” including free trade (“the liberal system of free exportation and free importation”) and liberty in general (“allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”).

Economist Daniel Klein recently used Google’s digitized book trove and its big data technology to trace the widespread adoption of the word “liberalism” in its political sense to the enormous popularity of Smith’s book and its use of the word “liberal.”

Smith and the classical economists who followed in his footsteps convinced much of literate Britain that the doctrine of liberty and limited government, previously developed by Locke, was not only just and right, but unleashed humanity’s productive powers to the enrichment of all.

Whig proto-liberalism had fostered the Enlightenment, which gave birth to the science of economics, which in turn filled in the intellectual groundwork for liberalism proper: a more deliberate, self-conscious, and principled movement for universal individual freedom.

The Age of Liberalism

After an anti-liberty interlude during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the Whigs and their allies (which, around mid-century, came to include a new Liberal Party) inaugurated in Britain what Ludwig von Mises called “the Age of Liberalism.”

The freedoms of speech, the press, and religion were further advanced, women were emancipated, labor was further deregulated, and capital was further secured. Slavery was abolished, as was the East India Company’s trade monopoly.

The “Manchester Liberals,” led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, used popular writing and speeches to turn the British public against protectionism and war.

Influential liberal movements sprang up in France and other European countries as well. The continent was soon blessed with an era of free trade and relative peace.

These liberal policies intensified and spread the Industrial Revolution, creating seemingly miraculous levels of widespread prosperity never before seen on the earth. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in the 1962 preface to his classic book Liberalism:

“The greatness of the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the first World War consisted precisely in the fact that the social ideal after the realization of which the most eminent men were striving was free trade in a peaceful world of free nations. It was an age of unprecedented improvement in the standard of living for a rapidly increasing population. It was the age of liberalism.”

Moreover, as Mises wrote in his greatest treatise, Human Action:

“It is a purposeful distortion of facts to blame the age of liberalism for an alleged materialism. The nineteenth century was not only a century of unprecedented improvement in technical methods of production and in the material well-being of the masses. It did much more than extend the average length of human life. Its scientific and artistic accomplishments are imperishable. It was an age of immortal musicians, writers, poets, painters, and sculptors; it revolutionized philosophy, economics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. And, for the first time in history, it made the great works and the great thoughts accessible to the common man.”

The modern world of ever improving living standards, marvelous technology, and astounding opportunity that we enjoy today is a product of the Age of Liberalism.

Tory Liberals

But even in the middle of this triumph, the corruption of liberalism had already begun. By the 1880s, Spencer was already lamenting that the self-styled Liberals of his day were all about hyperactively legislating against liberty, quite as fervently as the absolutist Tories [at that time renamed Conservatives] ever did. In his essay “The New Toryism,” Spencer argued that, “Most of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type.”

From 1860 onward, as Spencer meticulously detailed, Parliament under the Liberal Party became a non-stop geyser of “social” legislation: fixing prices, regulating working hours, mandating all kinds of inspections, financing public works, restricting “vices,” corralling children into public schools, putting trades under license requirements (including a “Pedlars Act, inflicting penalties for hawking without a certificate”), establishing a state monopoly in telegraphy, and even enacting a “Sea-birds Preservation Act” that ended up harming the fishing industry by causing a “greater mortality of fish.”

And, as Spencer noted, the Liberals funded all of this with endless increases in taxation.

And yet, some of the more “advanced” Liberals of Spencer’s day pooh-poohed even these policies as so much “tinkering.” One Liberal cabinet minister insisted that full coercion should be, “exercised over owners of small houses, over land-owners, and over ratepayers.” Another Liberal politician,

“…addressing his constituents, speaks slightingly of the doings of philanthropic societies and religious bodies to help the poor, and says that ‘the whole of the people of this country ought to look upon this work as being their own work’”

Already in the 1880s, British Liberals were promoting what Americans today call Social Security. We learn from Spencer that:

“…plausible proposals are made that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, by which men during their early lives shall be forced to provide for the time when they will be incapacitated.”

After recounting this legislative litany, an exasperated Spencer concludes:

“Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name of Liberal; and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of extended freedom!”

The betrayal of liberalism would only get worse following Spencer’s death in 1903. After a brief period out of power, the Liberals won a landslide election in 1906 and immediately passed a series of welfare laws that established the modern British welfare state. A few years later, the Liberal government led Britain into the calamitous World War I, which put a bloody end to the Age of Liberalism and inaugurated a new age of total war, totalitarianism, and managerial statism.

The rot spread to America as well. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1962:

“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In continental Europe it is remembered only by a few. In England the term “liberal” is mostly used to signify a program that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations. The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by the authorities, i.e., socialism.”

Spencer’s Autopsy

How did this happen? How did the meaning of "liberalism" become so confused to the point of being completely reversed? According to Spencer, “Liberalism has lost itself” because Liberals gave unduly narrow emphasis on the fruits of liberalism (widespread public welfare) at the expense of the very principles of liberalism (the individual's right to life, liberty, and property) that bore those fruits.

As Spencer put it, “the welfare of the many came to be conceived alike by Liberal statesmen and Liberal voters as the aim of Liberalism.” (Emphasis added.)

And this welfare came to be seen, “not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations of restraints, but as the end to be directly gained. And seeking to gain it directly, they have used methods intrinsically opposed to those originally used.”

(Those methods, of course, were government controls and impositions.)

In other words, the cause of Liberalism slipped from "liberty from the state for the welfare of the people" to simply "the welfare of the people" and ultimately to "a total welfare state for the people."

What is fascinating about this is that widespread prosperity (“the welfare of the many”) was not even a political issue before true liberalism showed that it was even possible. For most of history, it was considered an immutable fact of the stinginess of nature that only a tiny ruling elite could live large, while the masses were condemned to a grueling life of hard labor and grim poverty. It was only after liberalism unleashed humanity’s productive potential that the notion of regular people enjoying ever increasing welfare became a real-world possibility.

The dreams of welfare state “liberalism” were only even conceivable (if not realizable) thanks to the actual accomplishments of original liberalism.

The Deeper Cause

The fatal slipping of focus that Spencer identified in the Liberal platform may have been inevitable, however. The first liberal movement may have been doomed from the start, afflicted as it was by a terminal disease contracted at birth. The congenital defect of which I speak is politics.

As chronicled above, liberalism was born out of Whiggism. And Whiggism was an inherently political movement. Like all political factions, Whigs had their constituents and their enemies. And it just so happened that their constituents were disempowered and oppressed political underdogs (first the middle, and later the lower, classes), while their enemies were empowered and oppressing top dogs (the king and his dependents).

Given this, it is only natural that their policies would have the liberal tendency that Spencer identified: the lifting of oppressions and the mitigation of the power to oppress. Again, it was only later that intellectuals provided universalist philosophical ammunition that could be used for what was, from the beginning, a particularist political project.

But the Whigs were not only out to liberate their constituents, but to politically empower them: first through strengthening Parliament, and later by extending voting rights.

As Parliament gained the upper hand, it was at first mostly used to further liberate commoners from royal oppression. But it didn’t stop there. It went beyond liberation to aggrandizement: and naturally so, since political factions are essentially all about member interests, and not moral principles. Given this fundamental orientation, it is only natural that, as voting rights expanded to encompass ever more commoners, Whig/Liberal Britain devolved into a welfare state.

The Divine Right of Parliaments

As Spencer related, the Parliamentary Liberals of his time tried to excuse their resort to the Tory means of state power by pointing out that, while the Tories used state power under a divine mandate for the interests of a few, the new Liberals did so under a popular mandate for the good of the many.

Spencer thoroughly demolished this as an irrelevant distinction, but to no avail, since his contemporaries had become fanatical devotees of a new civic religion. As Spencer wrote in another essay, “The Great Political Superstition”:

“The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also and to their decrees.”

This superstition too may have been inevitable, given that “popular sovereignty” was a key plank in the anti-monarchical platform of the Whigs/Liberals from the beginning. This plank would inevitably evolve into "tyranny of the majority" democracy.

Locke’s concept of the State as an "Agent of the People” may have seemed like an improvement upon the Tory portrait of the king as “Delegate of Heaven.” But “the People” is an incoherent, collectivist abstraction, and as such is just as mute as “Heaven.” So when officials feign to speak on "the People's" behalf, the situation can be just as dangerously irresponsible as when kings and courtiers issued proclamations in the name of God: perhaps even more dangerous, since the resistance of the subjects is weakened by the myth that they are participating in “self-government.”

Liberal Tories

In a quite prophetic addendum to his great essay, Spencer highlighted one more fascinating political phenomenon. The statist Liberals had become so overbearing that they were driving the original statists, the Tories/Conservatives, toward liberty, simply out of self-defense.

“…the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that the “Liberty and Property Defense League,” largely consisting of Conservatives, has taken for its motto “Individualism versus Socialism.” So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot.”

And indeed, that is exactly what happened. It was the Tories, as led by Margaret Thatcher from 1975 to 1990, who reintroduced the rhetoric of liberty and property into British politics after a long dark night of semi-socialism and hyperactive statism.

And Thatcherism helped pave the way for Reaganism in America. Reagan conservatism also had native roots extending back to the resistance movement against the hyperactive, “liberal” New Deal: a hodgepodge coalition that Murray Rothbard dubbed “the Old Right.”

Like Whiggism long before it, the new “conservative movement” seized upon the universal principles of true liberalism as intellectual ammo (as found in the works of Locke, Smith, Mises, F.A. Hayek, etc) to cynically deploy in its political battles. This is shown to be cynical by the tendency of conservatives to jettison liberal principles, like the Whigs and Liberals did before them, whenever they think it serves the narrow interests of their constituents.

Conservatives are particularly wont to violate the rights of non-constituents in the name of preemptively securing the rights of their constituents. "Drug users must be preemptively incarcerated to keep the streets safe." "Muslim countries must be preemptively bombed lest their rulers possibly acquire, and maybe someday use, weapons of mass destruction against my people."

Misbegotten Children

Now we see why it is so egregious to trivialize liberalism/libertarianism as a curious right/left hybrid: “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” and such tripe. In fact, modern liberalism and modern conservatism are both corrupt offspring of the classical liberal tradition that transformed the world. Modern liberalism emerged as a confused perversion of the original liberalism. And modern conservatism emerged as a quasi-liberal reaction to modern liberalism.

Moreover, it is modern conservatism and modern liberalism that are the hybrids. As explained above, modern liberals pursue liberal ends (the welfare of the many) with conservative means (state power). And modern conservatives pursue conservative ends (the welfare of the few) with liberal means (free markets, gun rights, religious liberty, etc). And the above is only true when the modern liberals and conservatives in question are not total hypocrites or sell-outs.

As Spencer explained, modern liberalism tries to use the state to directly provide benefits to its constituents: benefits that authentic liberalism indirectly provides to all by simply setting people free to provide for themselves.

And with the “preemptive violence” analysis above, we can complement Spencer’s analysis with the following insight. Modern conservatism tries to use the state to indirectly secure rights (life, liberty, and property) to its constituents: rights that liberalism directly provides to all as a matter of principle.

It is worth noting that the efforts of both factions fail miserably. The welfare/nanny state measures of modern liberals only leave their constituents poorer. And the warfare/police state measures of modern conservatives only leave their constituents less safe.

With the left, you're left with nothing in the name of providing for you.

With the right, your rights are nullified in the name of protecting them.

Liberalism Today

For generations, modern liberalism and conservatism have been vying with each other to wreck the wondrous modern civilization that the original liberalism built: weighing it down with their hyperactive wars and interventions, and hampering the heroic accomplishments that individuals in their private capacities still manage to achieve in spite of it all.

This two-pronged barbarian attack has continued unabated, because, since the corruption and downfall of original liberalism, the left and the right have held a statist duopoly on the ideological imagination of the world. That duopoly needs to be broken. Our civilization desperately needs to remember the long-forgotten liberal tradition that lifted it up and first gave humanity a glimpse of what we're truly capable of. That is the task of the liberalism of today.

But that project will only be sustainable if we avoid the fatal errors of the liberalism of yesterday. As Ambrose Bierce said, politics is, “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.” Any moral movement that entangles itself in the machinery of politics will inevitably be captured by unprincipled, factional interests, just as the original liberalism was. We can already see the early stages of this as right-leaning libertarians dabble in culture wars and flirt with nationalism while left-leaning libertarians dabble in identity politics and flirt with paternalistic globalism, all for the sake of winning points with political allies and scoring points against political enemies.

The cause of liberty must be championed in the realm of ideas and individual ethics if its future triumphs are to be lasting ones.

#liberalism #fee.org

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