penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable |4 pointswritten 11 months ago ago
Excerpt (bold added):
Across all of human politics, the Western liberal tradition stands out for its ambitions to circumscribe state power. The people, in this tradition, are held to be the locus of sovereignty, and most Western governments are bound by elaborate constitutions which purport to constrain their jurisdiction over citizens, and which many regard as bearing a nearly religious authority.
This approach to politics has not aged well. Covid was a low point, simply for revealing the steely and actually quite anti-liberal authoritarianism these systems have been nurturing in their innermost chambers for many decades. Western liberal states in the modern era do not behave like limited systems which derive their sovereignty from the people. Every day, they more and more resemble the kinds of unchecked, totalitarian regimes we remember from the Soviet period. If anything, they seem poised to become a good deal worse, for they are able to achieve relatively prosperous economic conditions and to harness popular support far more efficiently, thus evading the harder constraints on the ambitions of the old Warsaw Pact governments.
The problem with liberal checks on power, is that they forced the state to develop novel legal and cultural solutions to overcome them. State politics in liberal systems has thus come to resemble antibiotic-resistent bacteria in hospitals – it has evolved a general resistance to constitutional limitations, in the process becoming an altogether worse and more dangerous animal.
Rights and individual sovereignty have required a rather different, perhaps even more insidious solution. Rather than undermining or qualifying these prerogatives, state ideologues have leaned into them instead...This growing field of unquestionable, sacred entitlements circumscribes popular political expression and undermines those less convenient rights that liberalism started out with.
Nowhere do novel liberal rights metastasise so rabidly as in the discourse surrounding sexual and gender minorities. The ever-growing rainbow coalition, symbolised by a flag that every year gains new colours and a puzzling initialism that is forever acquiring new letters (LGBTQQIP2SA appears to be the latest version), is a cutting edge of state power. Each of the identities subsumed into this juggernaut abounds with utility for the administrative state, and opens all manner of avenues for government bureaucrats to define and regulate the most intimate aspects of human culture, behaviour and sexual expression.
penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable |4 pointswritten 11 months ago ago
Excerpt (bold added):
Across all of human politics, the Western liberal tradition stands out for its ambitions to circumscribe state power. The people, in this tradition, are held to be the locus of sovereignty, and most Western governments are bound by elaborate constitutions which purport to constrain their jurisdiction over citizens, and which many regard as bearing a nearly religious authority.
This approach to politics has not aged well. Covid was a low point, simply for revealing the steely and actually quite anti-liberal authoritarianism these systems have been nurturing in their innermost chambers for many decades. Western liberal states in the modern era do not behave like limited systems which derive their sovereignty from the people. Every day, they more and more resemble the kinds of unchecked, totalitarian regimes we remember from the Soviet period. If anything, they seem poised to become a good deal worse, for they are able to achieve relatively prosperous economic conditions and to harness popular support far more efficiently, thus evading the harder constraints on the ambitions of the old Warsaw Pact governments.
The problem with liberal checks on power, is that they forced the state to develop novel legal and cultural solutions to overcome them. State politics in liberal systems has thus come to resemble antibiotic-resistent bacteria in hospitals – it has evolved a general resistance to constitutional limitations, in the process becoming an altogether worse and more dangerous animal.
Rights and individual sovereignty have required a rather different, perhaps even more insidious solution. Rather than undermining or qualifying these prerogatives, state ideologues have leaned into them instead...This growing field of unquestionable, sacred entitlements circumscribes popular political expression and undermines those less convenient rights that liberalism started out with.
Nowhere do novel liberal rights metastasise so rabidly as in the discourse surrounding sexual and gender minorities. The ever-growing rainbow coalition, symbolised by a flag that every year gains new colours and a puzzling initialism that is forever acquiring new letters (LGBTQQIP2SA appears to be the latest version), is a cutting edge of state power. Each of the identities subsumed into this juggernaut abounds with utility for the administrative state, and opens all manner of avenues for government bureaucrats to define and regulate the most intimate aspects of human culture, behaviour and sexual expression.