Jonah Goldberg’s new book isn’t out until tomorrow, so

Is that what Goldberg in on about? I doubt he can make it work, but someone better could. A C. S. Lewis perhaps, someone willing to not just say smart-sounding but very nonsensical things but actually believe them.

Consider, when you believe in a God that provides detailed prescriptions of what is forbidden, anything not on the list must, therefore, be okay to do without any guilt at all. Fatty foods? Not forbidden anywhere in the Bible! Snarf that cheeseburger without any guilt at all! Drink too much? Not forbidden anywhere in the Bible! (Okay, it is forbidden in the Bible, but not in any part I have to pay attention too, at least not in too clear a language.) Not wanting brown people in your neighborhood? Bible doesn’t say anything about that.

And for Muslims, there’s even a verse in the Quran (66:1) berating them for not enjoying all the stuff that isn’t forbidden!

I prefer not to believe in Jonah Goldberg.

I figure he’s got to be a liberal creation anyways.

Liberals can’t enjoy themselves because they have to share? Nonsense! Liberals demand sharing.

It may be true that conservatives can’t enjoy themselves when they have to share; I couldn’t say.

As far as I understand Zizek at all, his shtick seems to be “let’s take a bunch of rightwing strawmen* at face value”, which is OK for a snarky blog post but hardly the stuff of Great Thoughts. The strawman-philosophy in the quote seems to me to be just the notion of an other-regarding action over again, that liberty is bounded by the obligation not to infringe the liberties of others, and that’s just reheated Mill (and indeed reheated social contract generally).

*Political Correctness. Really.

You often see communities defining themselves by what they are not (the Other). Members of the community reassure each other that they are, indeed, members in good standing by ritually denoucing the other.

For the Open Source community, the Other might be Microsoft, SCO etc.

For this community, the Other appears to be Lacan-influenced postmodernism in general, and Zizek in particular. There’s possibly something a little ironic in this, in that (e.g.) Microsoft is primarily trying to make money, and only accidently becomes an Other for the Open Source community, while Lacan takes the Other as an object of enquiry, and so is (presumably) doing it deliberately. In another context, someone who does it deliberately might be called a troll.

[Pedantic sidenote: Although the “Other” is a Lacanian term, here I’m possibly not using it in quite the same way that Lacan does. ]

=========

I think there are some interesting things in the Zizek piece.

I think if it was me, I’d have pushed the psychoanalytic angle a little futher.

Marxism as apocalyptic religion? Sure, that idea’s old hat.

Most people want to be good? Well, sort of, it seems. Although there are a significant number of psychopaths, of course. And, among non-psychopaths, is it really a desire to be good or to believe in yourself as good (possible in spite of the evidence), and have others believe in your goodness? Something between reputation managment and Festinger’s cognitive dissonance. If you really wanted to provoke, you could position religion as a psychotic belief that allows you to maintain the belief in your own goodness while doing the things you wanted to do anyway. And, in case the athesists start to agree with you (and you wouldn’t want people agreeing with you…) point out that revolutionary Marxism was kind of the same thing. It wasn’t the God in Christianity that made it “religion”, it was the psychotic belief—and an alternative psychosis would be just as effective.

I’m a particular fan of “harassing” in scare-quotes. News Flash – Harassment A Made Up Thing!

11,12: From a beginner and amateur, I think Lacanian practice would be “other” with a small “O”. “autre”/”Autre”. Goldberg and Zizek are “others”

Wikipedia

Form “Other” Wiki

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas were instrumental in coining contemporary usage of “the Other,” as radically other. Lacan articulated the Other with the symbolic order and language. Levinas connected it with the scriptural and traditional God, in The Infinite Other.

13: Very sad.

US Intellect History has a post about liberalism, post-liberalism with a link to a piece by Bill McClay and Chris Shannon

But this much is for sure: they both have new books coming out tomorrow.

As Special Agent Dale Cooper said: Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.

I heard Julian Assange recently moderated a ‘debate’ between Zizek and David Horowitz.

Which brings to mind Disraeli’s crack about how a benign Providence had ensured that Gladstone married Mrs Gladstone, thus causing only two unhappy people in the world rather than four.

And what it means is that liberals suck up to their right from a submissive and supplicatory position.

Prof. Quiggin would like to live in a world where ideas are valued for their relevance, insight and explanatory power. In the actual world, Goldberg-type ideas are influential. How ought one respond to this fact?

#7- “I’d say that if there is no God, then, most likely, there is no free will either, and therefore ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ have no meaning.”

Exodus 7:
1And the Lord said to Moses …
3And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. 4But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.

Which brings to mind Disraeli’s crack

It was Samuel Butler (the Victorian one) on Mr and Mrs Carlyle, but is not that kind of pedantry the kind of pedantry one identifies with liberals?

Zizek does a thing, in my view, where he runs too quickly through “pleasure” in Lacan, blending together a few senses of the word that would be better held distinct. So I want to take a few minutes to parse out the consequences of this elision. While I’m mindful that defenses of this sort of thing are liable to fall on deaf ears (Barry @21 are the particular pair of deaf ears I’m imagining) in this venue, I actually and genuinely believe that there is something in this line of inquiry that could be extremely productive for a lot of the kinds of folks who hang around here.

“Pleasure” and “enjoyment” are terms of art in Lacanian psychoanalysis. As always in psychoanalysis, these have an interesting and complicated relationship to economic utility — e.g., Freud says in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” that the subject in the thrall of the pleasure principle is akin to the rational, calculating homo economicus, in that he’s willing to put off enjoyment for greater returns. But Lacan’s twist is in consideration of pleasure as a kind of Hegelian tendency that generates its own resistance — indeed generates subjectivity as this resistance. Illustratively, ‘jouissance’ first appears in the Lacanian corpus in the mid-50s in a discussion of the master-slave dialectic. The point, in that discussion, is that pleasure — which is to say, achieved pleasure, utility — is experienced as a kind of loss of subjective reality, akin to what happens to the master half-way through the master-slave dialectic. Pleasure is evanescent, like a subatomic particle produced in an accelerator. The productive position is that of the slave, for whom ‘jouissance’ is the famous self-impeding enjoyment that approaches but never really quite reaches pleasure, and in which the subject recognizes itself. This is Lacan’s take on the world of dissatisfaction and unhappiness in which we all actually live.

Now, by the seventies, there is a new formulation, “surplus enjoyment,” and opinions differ about how this should be understood. Does the new formulation register a new wrinkle in Lacan’s thought on the relationship of pleasure to utility, or is it just a clarification of the old jouissance, which already meets utility obliquely? It seems to me that jouissance is to be understood as enjoyment that misses pleasure, as it were, by perpetually falling short; while surplus enjoyment is “useless” pleasure, which misses satisfaction by simply being irrelevant to need. Cigarettes are jouissance: the smoker *needs* them, and yet the satisfaction that each smoke offers is fleeting — indeed, by indulging the addiction, it engenders the (artificial) need for the next. And indeed, we smoke (well, I don’t), at great cost to ourselves, in order to have small, frequent needs that we can actually mostly meet. In contrast, the paradigmatic example of surplus enjoyment is Coca-Cola — a wholly vacuous pleasure, which in the satisfaction of which, we recognize something in alterity that we desire. In a word, consumerism. You do something, and then you realize that you wanted it.

(I should clarify: we’re talking about subjective attitudes, not the commodities themselves. The point isn’t what smoking or Coca-Cola are *really* like; the point is that both are easier than solving any of our actual problems.)

Of course, Zizek knows all this — hell, I learned much of what I know of this stuff from his _Sublime Object of Ideology_. But sometimes, as in the linked piece on hedonism, I find he tries to have it both ways: to insist on the complexity of the psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment when it suits him, and fall back on a naïve utilitarian concept when it doesn’t. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed him do this, usually in popular pieces where he is staying away from jargon. So, when we read that hedonists “dedicate their lives to the pursuit of pleasures…”, we need to ask Zizek to slow down and explain exactly what he means (which he likely does in the book) because on that question hinges the issue of the relationship of pleasure to super-ego, and super-ego to ethics.

I think this confusion is a product of the constraints imposed on Zizek by Lacan. At the end of the day, he wants to make an argument that squares with Lacan’s take on the ethical, but that’s a tricky thing to pull off. Getting off the wheel, going “beyond the pleasure principle,” for Lacan, does two things: it corresponds to a different sort of ego loss (as the subject moves from the world of desires to the world of the drives), and it is also the transcendental ground for the ethical act. Those keeping score at home will thus note that Lacanian ethics has nothing to do with super-ego or calculation. Rather — and here I’m speaking in Alain Badiou’s language — the ethical act, like a revolutionary act, cannot be fully comprehended within the preexisting situation. It’s always tinged with the irrational. What this highlights is how *dangerous* ethics is. It’s not for nothing that Lacan’s ethics is a reading of Antigone. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s “religious suspension of the ethical” is roughly congruent to Lacan’s “ethics.”

In this light, let’s take a look at another passage from the article.

Religious ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things. From today’s experience, however, one should rather stick to Steven Weinberg’s claim: while, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.

I think there’s a Lacanian argument to be made there, but I’m not at all sure that it is the one Zizek is making, at least in the short form.
The argument I would make instead is that just when it looks to us like we’re assuming control over our own ethical choices, just when we’ve killed God or whatever, we are blind to the way we’ve simply substituted poorly-examined conventional wisdom, institutional and individual self-interest and precritical morality for true ethical action.*  True ethical action is, after all, terror: too unstable to really hang around.

*I think that’s what Zizek is doing with his reference to political correctness, but I’m straining the bounds of a charitable reading here.

26: indeed, this is central to my point.

Zizek:
“So why are we witnessing the rise of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence today?” (emphasis added)

Would Zizek ever bestir himself to investigate whether there is, in fact, more or less “religiously (or ethnically) justified violence” in the world now than there was, say, 15 or 20 or 60 years ago? The notion that there is more ethnically or religiously justified violence in the so-called “post-ideological” age may not bear much scrutiny, esp. if one considers the “post-ideological age” to have begun around 1989-1991. To take just one example, there was a fair amount of Hindu-Muslim conflict/violence in the Indian subcontinent before the “post-ideological” age began. And it may be worth recalling that al-Qaeda’s founding date is 1988 (iirc), before the “post-ideological” age began. (Accepting for the sake of argument the idea of a “post-ideological” age, which is itself debatable.)

OK, OK, I get it, Zizek is a charlatan who reduces us all with his insensible witterings designed to con the dim of intellect. Certainly the kind of guy to lump in with Goldberg.

If the whole point of this discussion is that liberalism wants to go on the rampage in defence of its honour (i.e. get condescending and a bit snitty), hasn’t John Gray written anything recently? Or is he too difficult to dismiss because he’s a bit too Anglo and doesn’t like jokes?

Speaking of which, the last thing many of us want brought to mind is Disraeli’s crack, and that probably also goes for Mrs Disraeli. You’re welcome.

Also, too (to a commenter upstream): naturalism does not mean that there is no free will.

Rrrright. I knew someone would have to say that.

As far as I understand Zizek at all, his shtick seems to be “let’s take a bunch of rightwing strawmen* at face value”

Perhaps it’s best, then, to not weigh in until you understand him more.

Josh G. at 39

Who is this “we” obruni?

If ajay misattributed a quote, it would be a misfortune. But if someone corrected him, that would be a calamity pedantry of liberalism.

Zizek is an also-ran, used mainly as an excuse for some CTers to indulge the odd belief that Jonah Goldberg’s nonsense is worth discussing.

+1

But on the other hand, sometimes the worst posts give rise to the best comments threads. Nvalvo @28, for example, is probably the clearest explanation of what Lacan was on about I’ve seen.

Shorter Zizek seems to be: There are no externally imposed rules so people turn to GASP! socially enforced moral norms of various constraining types.

STOP THE PRESSES.

the odd belief that Jonah Goldberg’s nonsense is worth discussing.

SOMEONE’s gotta shoot the zombies.

It’s a real curse being in the wrong timezone sometimes. I had just read the Butler quote on Carlyle, so I was all set to correct ajay when I read #26, but of course it was 1am here and lots of people beat me to it. Sad as a barrel of monkeys being a pedant, sad as a barrel of orangutans being a provincial pedant.

Right, so I’ll dissent from (what seems to be) the general consensus here. Yes, Zizek’s style can be tiresome, he can say ridiculous things, he’s not a very original thinker, etc. But it seems crazy to me to put him in the same category as Jonah fucking Goldberg!.

Here, (almost) at random, a recent article of Zizek’s from the LRB. Again, I don’t with very much in it, least of all the (implicit) Leninism at the end. But the mirror-image of Liberal Fascism? Seriously?

We had exactly the same discussion in the last Zizek thread, js. Talk about yer eternal return.

Thanks nvalvo for adding value! Do you have a reference for the Freud bit? I see a few mentions of “the economic point of view” in _Pleasure Principle_ e.g.

“These theories endeavour to conjecture the motives of children’s play, though without placing any special stress on the ‘economic’ point of view, i. e. consideration of the attainment of pleasure.”

(Useful e-text at http://www.bartleby.com/276/)

I wonder whether part of the problem is uncritically absorbing the idea that there is a single, essential “utility” or satisfaction that *explains* all consumer demand (something econ really doesn’t argue). Psychological elaboration then gets piled atop this one alleged fundamental kind of satisfaction.

I agree that Zizek is pretty good in his theoretical writings in maintaining analytic distinctions. One place they break down is his discussions of consumption, which seem to me to lapse into pretty standard pop-psych, however entertaining.

I think “post-ideological” just means simply “after Communism ceased being a live option,” and that seems pretty clear.

So it’s don’t get caught with a live Keynesian or a dead Communist now?

Watson @61

I’ve tried to write a coherent reply to your comment, but I’ve decided it’s hard to write a coherent reply to gibberish, which is what your first sentence, at least, seems to be.

Kant replaced God with universal reason?

both have a love of arguing that the worst case for liberalism is secretly the best case, by liberalism’s own lights. Some unintended thing (actual or merely potential) is the only thing that is truly intended.

I’m not sure I get this. Is the point something like this: for JG, liberalism “truly intends” fascism; for Zizek, liberalism truly intends, umm, I guess I don’t know, but some kind of authoritarianism? I don’t think that’s that obvious about Zizek, but whatever.

Really, part of my problem here is that I’m probably less on board with American liberalism than several others here. Not that I don’t like its policy proposals. Great policy proposals—when they’re, you know, actually liberal (by which I mean, broadly social-democratic). But then, lots of utilitarians have had great policy proposals, Mill not least among them. Though that never made utilitarianism a coherent doctrine.

After 1945, American liberalism had to contend with the aftermath of the Second World War. Good intentions aside, the temptation to turn the Arsenal of Democracy into the world’s de facto police force was probably inevitable, and by the mid-Sixties it had, in fact, become irresistible. Liberals weren’t entirely to blame for this, but neither did they offer it much in the way of serious resistance.

When I look at the history of those twenty years, I’m reminded of those funeral baked meats that coldly furnished forth the marriage table. The bureaucratic infrastructure of the New Deal was adapted to the service of empire so swiftly, and so smoothly, that scarcely anyone seemed to notice, except perhaps President Eisenhower.

This led to an ungodly confusion in every American’s thinking, and turned most of us into its victims one way or another. President Johnson was perhaps the most tragic of these victims among the famously liberal, but he wasn’t by any means the only one. Sadly, we’re still as confused as we were in 1968. Conservatives hate the nanny state, leftists hate the imperial state, and neither seems to realize that they’re the same thing — an unholy amalgam of two incompatible, if largely honest American impulses turned to spectacular evil.

We can’t separate them if we don’t acknowledge how they came to be fused together in the first place. If we do, we might yet be able to find a beneficial use for all the infernal machinery we’ve inherited. If we don’t, we might well spend the next generation cursing each other in the dark while the gods decide whether it’ll be bang or whimper, fire or ice that’s next up on the agenda.

Well, Zizek, I guess he’s getting old/writing too much in public, because you can just see him just running out of shtick.

True ethical action is, after all, terror: too unstable to really hang around.

I do not understand this at all. What are you saying?

@ Chris 73

Yes, silly non-meat eaters! But at least their not communists.

both have a love of arguing that the worst case for liberalism is secretly the best case, by liberalism’s own lights.

Which is admittedly a problem with “post-ideological”: post-ideological anti-liberals think (probably sincerely) that the worst case for liberalism is the best, truest case, and also think (probably sincerely) that it isn’t possible to object to a best, truest case–at least without being ideological.

Now, if Jonah Goldberg would just accept that he’s a “neoliberal” everything would be easier.

I haven’t read the more recent comments so maybe someone else has mentioned this.

Here’s what Jonah says he is saying for now:

My only real regret is not pointing out to Piers Morgan that he proved the point I made at the outset of the interview when I explained what my book is about: Liberals lie to themselves and the world when they claim they’re not ideological.

He links to video of himself arguing with Morgan.

“it is hard to argue for the possibility of a society with a plurality of actual ethical judgements”

Are you actually arguing that New York City does not exist? I hope we all agree on the ethics of not murdering along with similar extreme situations, but when it comes to everyday interactions I think a few hours in a NYC family court would reveal dozens of different ethical systems living side-by-side. Mostly harmoniously.

Cranky

The dichotomy here is not ‘God or liberalism’. This is his standard theme: better to be passionate about something, pursue some grand political end (even if unattainable, a “lost cause”), than dedicating your life to the virtue of not offending anybody (or recycling, or something). Not nearly grand enough, pathetic. This is just one angle of that mantra: where there is no real passion, you’ll get caught in the net of a million of arbitrary and meaningless little taboos.

JH @67:

Thanks. Understand now, and pretty much agree. (I continue to be unsure about “liberalism”, but that’s best left for another thread….)

bianca: I don’t agree with Zizek. Liberalism is an incomplete project, not some conspiracy by a new elite to enslave all of us. There is a grand project of becoming a free individual, which Zizek doesn’t see for some reason.

Cranky Observer: There is a distinction I should make between having different individual lives in one framework, and having multiple frameworks for how to live. Precapitalism we lived in the second kind of world: Jews live this way, Arabs this way, Christians this way, each New Guinean tribe in its own way. With capitalism all of that is subsumed by a single framework of exchange for goods and services. Capitalism and liberalism permit individual differences, but these differences pale in comparison to the similarities: all have rights, all exercise them.

Please, Watson. A “grand project of becoming a free individual” would require creating some sort of de Saint-Exupery’s world, where everybody lives on their own little planet. As long as there is another person nearby, you are unfree, and it’s just a matter of how your unfreedom is structured, and to what end. So, Zizek (and, for that matter, most of the unenlightened masses) dislike some basic aspects of the liberal way: technocratic management, destruction of social context, seemingly arbitrary legalism, that sort of thing. And who can blame them.

tags….

Italics fail.

A.L. I don’t think Liberalism has failed, but it got sucked into the cold war’s “existential” battle against communism without understanding the cost of success. The successes born of the merger between liberalism and capitalism has allowed Freedom to defeat Fairness and left our marketplace of ideas without a meaningful competitor to unfettered capitalism. With the commie’s out of the way the capitalists don’t need liberal window dressing and want anything liberal to be seen as both anti-Freedom and unfair (taxes are theft anyone?) Thus “the godlessness of liberalism produces an idiot tick-tock between authoritarianism and relativism.”

what is it exactly before or independently of the cold war

this, maybe? (haven’t read it, just remembered the title)

Colin Danby @54:

Sorry, I must have missed this when I read through before. The Freud citation is indeed _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_, basically in its entirety, as you’d inferred. This may be one of those traditions that has a larger footprint in the secondary literature than in the original; and it should be noted that what Freud refers to as ‘economics’ may be something closer to what we would call utilitarian philosophy. On that score, probably an important additional reference for this literature would be George Bataille’s _The Accursed Share_.

Your point, though, is an intriguing and worthwhile one: the flattening out of utility into a sort of unitary quantity is an interesting problem, although it’s hard to see what the theoretical angle would be, outside of aesthetics. The Lacanian approach — that distinctions are to be made at the level of attitude — might not be the best answer always and everywhere.

@AcademicLurker There seems to have been a particularly dramatic shift in the US, I assume as a consequence of 9/11 in the sense of a determination of the Executive to exercise the powers of a police state and the willingness of the public, including self-described liberals, to accept that. There hasn’t been any comparable shift in Australia, for example, although the Bali attack was comparable in terms of loss of life, taking relative population sizes into account.

A lot of left critiques aren’t very useful in dealing with specific developments like this, since they take it for granted that the state is an instrument of oppression, so that the differences between the state of civil liberties in BushI-Clinton era and in the Bush2-Obama era are viewed as merely the removal of a mask.

And of course, if y’all choose to say that the “white man’s burden” was bs, and it was really about greed and cruelty and racism, then you are the ones to say that Mill and Tocqueville were wearing the masks in their writings about liberalism.

In Zizek’s case, he typically starts gushing about Stalinism and gulags and making Terror the order of the day & etc.

Precisely!

it’s clear that liberalism has failed in a very real way, and we need some genuinely new way of thinking about things and moving forward.

“Liberalism” is kind of a rorschach test isn’t it? To me it means more or less the development of democracy. I think the development of democracy should be viewed as a very long term project. I wouldn’t say that “liberalism has failed” but rather that there are going to be, for the foreseeable future, very powerful forces opposed to democracy. And, even democracy can be taken too far! There is a balance to be struck, and without the consent of the public it’ll never work too well.

Unfortunately the non-liberal left has generally proven to be totally freaking useless, unless indulging in pathetic bloodthirsty fantasies is your idea of a genuine alternative.

I am in 100% agreement. “Leftism” leads to fantasies of violence. It’s a waste of time.

Here you mattski, why fantasize when David Graeber can provide you actual pictures?

Not your fault? That’s the great thing about liberalism, with shared power and rule-based bureaucracies, liberals can always blame some other guy for mistakes and abuses and enjoy watching the subaltern get stomped while still feeling self-righteous.

107: Holbo, consider it to be my current project. That is exactly what I am trying to figure out, whether for instance wars and depressions are intrinsic to liberalism as practice theorized or not. Of course there are a lot of liberalisms and democracies:historical, contingent, theoretical.

Nor should we believe that there is simply a gap between liberal theory and
liberal practice, or that liberal practice, under political pressure, found
itself unable to live up to its theory. …Jennifer Pitts

For the most part, I doubt my definitions would differ greatly than your own. Feel free. The difference would lie in whether the “failures” are systemic or externalities, exogenous or built-in, dialectical or an deterministic reverse-double-movement. It is all very complicated.

From the fact that Obama is responsible for the drone strikes, it doesn’t follow that J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty” advocates drone strikes. (I am sure you agree that reading that classic essay as an explicit call for drone strikes would be tendentious at best.)

Now that is tendentious, and probably an indication of someone arguing in bad faith. However Pitts does discuss how Mills’ belief in and commitment to universal moral and material improvement may have led him to advocate despotism in India, so that the Indians might be turned British-like and capable of self-rule. I suggest you read Obama’s latest speech about Afghanistan, 150 years later, and ponder progress.

But honestly, you have called me literally crazy and are an emigrant to freaking Singapore. We have been watching each other for a decade. You are just playing.

bob mcmanus, to me you seem mostly concerned with outrage, and not so much with practical solutions to problems. Your broadsides against “liberalism” would be more coherent if directed against “civilization” or “human nature.” And what is the point of raging against human nature? Your failure to meet J Holbo’s request for an approximate definition is telling.

Couple of particulars for the sake of specificity: I don’t approve of police mistreating OWS participants. I don’t approve of police mistreating anyone. My sympathies are with OWS. How you can construe police misconduct as an indictment of “liberalism” is really beyond me.

As to drone strikes, again, how is this “liberalism’s” problem? Did “liberals” invent warfare? If a drone strike kills a combatant is that a transgression of the rules of war? (Not defending drone strikes per se, I don’t really know the answer.) History is replete with every horror show you can imagine. Is that the fault of “liberals”? **Take the Melian Dialogue, for example. Democratic Athens perpetrating a gut-wrenching slaughter of innocents. Does that event prove that democracy was a mistake, and we should have never wrested power from kings and aristocrats? That’s not the lesson I take from it.

One other point about liberalism roughly equaling democratic government. The other critical component of progress–in my view–is the free flow of information. Right now there are major propaganda organs like Fox News and right-wing radio which effectively ‘manufacture’ ignorance. That’s a problem and we need to find ways of countering it.

“what do you mean by ‘liberalism’?”

That would depend on whether you mean liberalism as a political philosophy, or as a political movement. But one definition could be the policies of the member parties of the Liberal International. Lots of centrist and centre-right politicians. At the moment they’re pushing austerity and neoliberalism from their positions in the British, German and Dutch governments. Even when liberal parties join left-of-centre governments, like the Social Liberals in Denmark, they are constantly using their clout to force the government to avoid anything that could resemble left-of-centre economic policies.

And while Thomas Friedman gets mocked a lot on Crooked Timber, in many ways he’s a fairly standard European centrist liberal. Add Michael Ignatieff, Alan Dershowitz and Marty Peretz, and North American liberalism doesn’t look so benign either.

“if illiberalism has been effectively stamped out by illiberal means”

Banning burqas? And a many other proposals mostly targeting Muslim immigrants, some of them supported by a not insignificant number of liberals.

“if illiberalism has been effectively stamped out by illiberal means”

Banning burqas?

My first thought was the British ban on suttee. Clearly an arrogant act of imperialism, yet… does anyone really regret it? Should they?

The lizard in us wants to kill the opponent. That is the way of lizards.

And apparently also the way of Bob: “Republican’s fault? Why can’t we just eliminate the assholes, prevent the inauguration of Romney, should he get elected?” sure looks to me like a call to use violence if necessary to prevent the Other from taking power.

I disagree with Romney on a lot of things, hell, nearly everything. But I won’t murder him to keep him out of the Presidency if he wins the election.

128:No one calls out Brad DeLong when he calls for the destruction of the Republican Party. I said what I said, not what you fantasized. Your sick violent fantasies are your own, all liberals wallow in them, like cheap horror movies. “Oh noes, the civil disorders are coming to get us!”

Liberalism: respect for the rule of law. This is pretty important, philosophically.

So…

Quiet sit-down in the park against city regs and police command = illiberalism.

128.last: Then don’t complain when Romney policies kill thousands, or millions if we attach Iran. Seriously. This is what I mean by “liberals never have to say they’re sorry.” The system is set up precisely to create these periods of mass irresponsibility when Democrats can cluck their tongues and say “Not my fault. I followed the rules. Other guys’ bad.” Both sides get these self-righteous freebies.

This is what has been going on: the oligarchs are writing laws and creating a social consensus (hegemony) in order to constrain what is socially or legally possible to do or think for any opposition to their rule. This is almost one basic definition of what politics is. “OWS in the park? We’ll write an ordinance, and chris and stormcrow and mattski will be on our side.” And you are.

(And no, you can bullshit yourselves, but you are not on the side of OWS. OWS is not about the “Buffett rule.” OWS doesn’t have a plan or a program, is not a pragmatism. OWS is about opposing the methods of hegemony. OWS is revolutionary.)

I’m not sure why this would be a great revelation to anybody, but of course “the rule of law” is a mantra of those at the top of the pyramid.

Here, read some Ravachol: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ravachol/1892/forbidden-speech.htm

If I were a satirist I would write a Heart of Darkness parody where some DLC staffer would be tasked with neutralizing some rogue think tank director who has been operating without any restraint or decency and while effective is giving the party at large a bad name. In the process of completing the mission the staffer begins to hate the stench of lies surrounding his enterprise, realizes that the dark, irrational and evil mindset which the director utilized to achieve his goals are a part of every member of the political system, and that the political system itself is the worst example of this mindset.

It would end with the director announcing the horror of what he’s done and the system in which they’re enmeshed to the think tank’s staff before retiring and begging the staffer to relate the truth of what he’s learned to an idealistic colleague, a state senator who was to be the intended political partner of the director and who harbors highly naive and romantic notions of the nature of what the director was doing. The staffer, of course, lies to the state senator and tells him that the director’s last act was to commend the state senator for the work he’d done as his partner.

127:”Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

I love liberals. “Respect for the law, sovereign, and the rights of others? This isn’t like a foundational principle or anything. I can pick and choose, go exactly as far as I want (no broken windows now) and remain a good citizen. Why not?” Cake, having, eating.

That’s great, so long as you are appointed counter-hegemon. But what if someone else gets the job or you fall in battle, Bob?

That is exactly the counter-hegemony, that I don’t get to be in charge after I sign on to revolution. Once the civil disobedience starts, I don’t get to decide which laws are broken and which are obeyed.

Desmoulins: “WTF? Bastille? Did I do that?”

Sorry for the prolixity and typos but, to be yet more prolix, think about Germany in 1848. German Liberals refused to ally themselves with German Radicals and as a result they got 60 odd years of Conservative and Reactionary domination. Or consider Louis 16 had he actually acted as a constitutional monarch, as he agreed to do, instead of fleeing the Revolution might well have looked dramatically different.

Or in other words Holbo might be better off by taking McManus by the hand in the interest of forming a coalition dedicated to the creation a different system instead of insisting that Mcmanus is wrongly wrong.

Okay fine. Contemporary liberals have a critique of market capitalism but it amounts to a very tepid fretting about insufficient fiddling when the inevitable crises arises.

The leap of faith, it seems to me, is that the current system is pretty horrid for the 99%, what with drones, Foxcon and related etc, and what comes next, should the “liberals” and radicals work with as opposed to against one another, might be better. The actually existing alternative is that the current horrid system might be better should “liberals” continue to work with conservatives and reactionaries and, so far – in any event, that hasn’t worked so well.

Or in other words Holbo might be better off by taking McManus by the hand in the interest of forming a coalition dedicated to the creation a different system instead of insisting that Mcmanus is wrongly wrong.

No, I disagree. Moderate lefties should be taking extreme lefties to task. Moderate righties should take extreme righties to task. Taking any moral position to an extreme results in monstrosities and history bears that out in spades.

What we want to do is GROW moderates of the left and the right. That is a path to a more decent society.

What we want to do is GROW moderates of the left and the right. That is a path to a more decent society.

Nowadays “moderate” is basically synonymous with “won’t attempt to disrupt wealth extraction and consolidation, but will enact mass public-sector layoffs and entitlement cuts in the name of austerity” in domestic policy and “won’t attempt to meaningfully scale back war, mass surveillance, or assassination campaigns, regardless of the strength of rationale” in foreign policy.

You’ll have to forgive us extremists for finding that unpalatable and exasperating, and if you want us (or our kids) to grow toward you, you might put some work into defending “That is a path to a more decent society” instead of letting it stand as self-evident. Drone raid attacks and mass surveillance, which really are now the two hallmarks of moderate foreign affairs, are a path to a more decent society how? Selling off public sector property and agency to private companies and transferring funds from entitlement spending to defecit reduction, the two hallmarks of moderate domestic affairs, are a path to a more decent society how?

Moderates have held control of the IMF and the Federal Reserve. Moderates have presided over the now-standard 8% annual funding cut to state university budgets. Moderates have repeatedly attempted to wholesale censor user-submitted content on the Internet, in the name of defending copyright holders from theoretical losses in revenue.

Maybe you could stop worrying about bashing our heads in to buy you a little more growing room (on the May Day thread no less), and start making your case for these moderate policies a little more clearly?

Yeah, the wheels of concentration of power grind slowly, but exceedingly fine. And the reversal – by leaps and bounds. It easy to take one dollar from each of a million people, but try to take a million from one.

Kinda surprised no-one’s brought up Benjamin and divine violence yet. That would also bring things full circle, since Zizek’s views on violence engage a lot with Benjamin’s ideas.

Drone raid attacks and mass surveillance, which really are now the two hallmarks of moderate foreign affairs, are a path to a more decent society how?

Except that I didn’t say or imply that. Please, slow down. Would you be appeased if I said that I’ve frequently been utterly exasperated by Obama? To quote my best mentor, Krugman, “President Pushover.”

Bush did a whole lot of damage. Obama didn’t march in and undo all that damage. Or possibly, even a little. What that has to do with my arguments above I’m not sure.

Good thread. What bothers me about Zizek’s ‘liberalism is authoritarian’ bit is that while he, of course, is trying to insult liberalism, in his own universe it’s not really an insult, because nothing is wrong with authoritarianism. Meta-paradox, yea!

But here, with things like ‘consensus is the king’ and ‘means are the ends’, that amount to ‘no real purpose’, a better insult comes to mind: what liberalism really is, is a sneaky form of nihilism.

Meta-paradox, yea!

Some people, for reasons unknown, devote themselves to creating labyrinths of abstract thought that go nowhere/to some pet prejudice, take your pick.

Yak. Data, I wasn’t taking a crack at you! But rather Zizek and folks who write stuff like this,

“Now non-violence has become the end itself. Liberalism, that used to be utilitarian or consequentialist, now has become deontological, a ressentiment religion of obedience and passivity for pathetic failures. I actually think it is worse.”

Or this,

“There is a lot to unpack there, it is the absolute purposelessness of OWS that gives it power.

This could mean that all instrumentalism deriving its efficacy under an authority of a state and legal process…is violence. That means all moderate reformers. I always wonder about the guys with the nukes and surveillance state and police power at their backs claiming to have the moral authority of non-violence.”