Thank you for the post, which was an interesting read.
But these atrocities were largely driven by fanatical anti-communism (especially on the US side) that divided the world into an existential struggle between good and evil… They represent failures of liberal democracies to live up to their own principles, not evidence that those principles caused the violence.
If liberalism simply has temporary failings—is this not something of a no true Scotsman? Marxists might (and often do) say similarly that the examples you cite were the result of the leaders not living up to communist principles in practice. It would seem to undermine the idea that these are ‘time-tested bulwarks’ if the principles do, and have, failed periodically.
Similarly, the Nazis may have been anti-enlightenment, but they rose to power in a fairly liberal society, including by exploiting the classically liberal value of free speech to spread propaganda. So it seems a bit difficult definitionally to judge this only by what the Nazis did when in power, rather than the (liberal) conditions that enabled this to happen in the first place.
I recognise I’m oversimplifying things quite a bit here, but I think speaks to the difficulty of drawing neat lines around whether some ideologies are inherently more stable than others—or at least in assuming that the values typically counted within the classical liberal bucket (and it’s a wide bucket) are all inherently anti-fanatical, rather than some being more likely than others to be a source of instabliity over time. (See for example leftist critiques of individual economic liberty to this end.)
Thank you for the post, which was an interesting read.
If liberalism simply has temporary failings—is this not something of a no true Scotsman? Marxists might (and often do) say similarly that the examples you cite were the result of the leaders not living up to communist principles in practice. It would seem to undermine the idea that these are ‘time-tested bulwarks’ if the principles do, and have, failed periodically.
Similarly, the Nazis may have been anti-enlightenment, but they rose to power in a fairly liberal society, including by exploiting the classically liberal value of free speech to spread propaganda. So it seems a bit difficult definitionally to judge this only by what the Nazis did when in power, rather than the (liberal) conditions that enabled this to happen in the first place.
I recognise I’m oversimplifying things quite a bit here, but I think speaks to the difficulty of drawing neat lines around whether some ideologies are inherently more stable than others—or at least in assuming that the values typically counted within the classical liberal bucket (and it’s a wide bucket) are all inherently anti-fanatical, rather than some being more likely than others to be a source of instabliity over time. (See for example leftist critiques of individual economic liberty to this end.)