Sexist Dictators

[lpetrich]

• Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women - Foreign Affairs - by Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks
• https://www.salon.com/2019/09/10/wh...e-world-at-least-in-part-misogyny-and-sexism/ - The worldwide rise of authoritarianism is a direct result of men's profound unwillingness to share power with women - Salon - by Amanda Marcotte
• The anti-liberal moment - Vox

From EC & ZM:

The pantheon of autocratic leaders includes a great many sexists, from Napoléon Bonaparte, who decriminalized the murder of unfaithful wives, to Benito Mussolini, who claimed that women “never created anything.” And while the twentieth century saw improvements in women’s equality in most parts of the world, the twenty-first is demonstrating that misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills. Throughout the last century, women’s movements won the right to vote for women; expanded women’s access to reproductive health care, education, and economic opportunity; and began to enshrine gender equality in domestic and international law—victories that corresponded with unprecedented waves of democratization in the postwar period. Yet in recent years, authoritarian leaders have launched a simultaneous assault on women’s rights and democracy that threatens to roll back decades of progress on both fronts.

The patriarchal backlash has played out across the full spectrum of authoritarian regimes, from totalitarian dictatorships to party-led autocracies to illiberal democracies headed by aspiring strongmen. In China, Xi Jinping has crushed feminist movements, silenced women who have accused powerful men of sexual assault, and excluded women from the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is rolling back reproductive rights and promoting traditional gender roles that limit women’s participation in public life. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un has spurred women to seek refuge abroad at roughly three times the rate of men, and in Egypt, President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recently introduced a bill reasserting men’s paternity rights, their right to practice polygamy, and their right to influence whom their female relatives marry. In Saudi Arabia, women still cannot marry or obtain health care without a man’s approval. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s victory has erased 20 years of progress on women’s access to education and representation in public office and the workforce.

The wave of patriarchal authoritarianism is also pushing some established democracies in an illiberal direction. Countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, have seen the rise of far-right movements that promote traditional gender roles as patriotic while railing against “gender ideology”—a boogeyman term that Human Rights Watch describes as meaning “nothing and everything.” Even the United States has experienced a slowdown in progress toward gender equity and a rollback of reproductive rights, which had been improving since the 1970s. During his presidency, Donald Trump worked with antifeminist stalwarts, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, to halt the expansion of women’s rights around the world. And despite the Biden administration’s commitment to gender equity at the national level, Republican-controlled states are attempting to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, which is now more vulnerable than it has been in decades.

Then noting The Index – GIWPS Georgetown University's Women Peace and Security Index.

Women's advancement has been slowing in recent years: gender-equality laws, women's education, and women's participation in legislatures.

Then noting that relatively new democracies have been becoming more authoritarian, like Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey -- and Russia. Some long-time democracies are having authoritarian tendencies in established political parties: France, Switzerland, the UK, the US.

It is not a coincidence that women’s equality is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise. Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter. Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy. In other words, fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders—and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.

 

[lpetrich]

EC & ZM:

Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both. Established autocrats and right-wing nationalist leaders in contested democracies are united in their use of hierarchical gender relations to shore up nationalist, top-down, male-dominated rule. Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them.

Scholars of democracy have often framed women’s empowerment as an outcome of democratization or even a function of modernization and economic development. Yet women demanded inclusion and fought for their own representation and interests through contentious suffrage movements and rights campaigns that ultimately strengthened democracy in general.

Then noting that feminist activism has had only partial successes and unevenly-distributed successes.

In the past seven decades, women’s demands for political and economic inclusion have helped catalyze democratic transitions, especially when those women were on the frontlines of mass movements.

The authors researched resistance movements since World War II, and they found that *all* the major ones had women in support roles in them, even though they varied in how much women were on the front lines. "Only one nonviolent campaign during this period seems to have excluded women altogether: the civilian uprising that ousted Mahendra Chaudhry from power in Fiji in 2000."

"In the first half of the twentieth century, women played active roles in anticolonial liberation struggles across Africa and in leftist revolutions in Europe and Latin America." They continued doing so in many later struggles: Myanmar, the Philippines, the Palestinian territories, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, Algeria, Chile, and in the US, the civil-rights and Black Lives Matter movements.

It turns out that frontline participation by women is a significant advantage, both in terms of a movement’s immediate success and in terms of securing longer-term democratic change. Mass movements in which women participated extensively on the frontlines have been much more likely to succeed than campaigns that marginalized or excluded women.

They prefer to participate in nonviolent than violent movements, and in much greater numbers in nonviolent ones.

 

[lpetrich]

Correlation != causation, of course, because nonviolent movements may be more accepting of women than violent ones. EC & ZM then consider the question of why that correlation occurs.

Generally, movements seeking to topple autocratic regimes or win national independence are more likely to prevail when they mobilize large numbers of people; shift the loyalties of at least some the regime’s pillars of support; use creative tactics, such as rolling strikes, in addition to street protests; and maintain discipline and resilience in the face of state repression and countermobilization by the regime’s supporters. Large-scale participation by women helps movements achieve all these things.

Then their breakdown of their reasons.

On the first point, power in numbers, the advantage of women’s participation is obvious." -- recruiting from both sexes means potentially twice as many recruits as recruiting from only one sex. Movements that exclude or sideline women reduce their potential pool of participants by at least half. ...

Second, popular movements improve their chances of success when they persuade or coerce their opponents to defect." -- having women in one's movement helps increase its perceived legitimacy. In research on public attitudes toward armed groups, scholars have found that female fighters increase the legitimacy of their movements in the eyes of observers. The same is likely true for nonviolent mass uprisings. ...

A third way women’s participation makes mass movements more effective is by expanding the range of tactics and modes of protest available to them. Everywhere it has been studied, diversity has been found to improve teamwork, innovation, and performance, and mass movements are no exception. ...

Women have also developed other forms of gendered noncooperation that can benefit mass movements. ...

Then explaining the origin of the term "boycott".

Power in numbers, the persuasion of opponents, and tactical innovation all help facilitate a fourth key factor in the success of nonviolent people power movements: discipline.

Like staying nonviolent despite violence or provocations from the movements' opponents.

Then discussing the issue of social hierarchy. "Only sustained cross-class, multiracial, or multiethnic coalitions can overcome these dynamics of privilege and power, which is why such coalitions are crucial for facing down violent authoritarian repression and pushing societies toward egalitarianism and democracy for all. "

 

[lpetrich]

EC & ZM: "Women who participate on the frontlines of mass movements don’t just make those movements more likely to achieve their short-term objectives—for instance, removing an oppressive dictator. They also make those movements more likely to secure lasting democratic change."

But if a movement doesn't succeed,

What happens when inclusive popular mobilizations are defeated and no transitions take place? Incumbent regimes that stamp out inclusive mass movements tend to indulge in a state-sponsored patriarchal backlash. The greater the proportion of women in the defeated movement, the higher the degree of a patriarchal backlash ...

Our research shows that countries with failed popular movements tend to experience major backsliding in both egalitarian democracy and gender equality, making them worse off than before the movements began. In other words, the impressive impact of women’s frontline participation on the probability of democratization is contingent on the movement’s victory; women’s participation leads to democratic change and women’s empowerment only when the broader movement succeeds.

So we need both sexes, instead of having a reverse-deep-sea-anglerfish view of women.

Although such efforts to reassert a gender hierarchy look different in different right-wing settings and cultures, they share a common tactic: to make the subjugation of women look desirable, even aspirational, not only for men but also for conservative women.

One way that autocratic and illiberal leaders make a gender hierarchy palatable to women is by politicizing the “traditional family,” which becomes a euphemism for tying women’s value and worth to childbearing, parenting, and homemaking in a nuclear household—and rolling back their claims to public power. Female bodies become targets of social control for male lawmakers, who invoke the ideal of feminine purity and call on mothers, daughters, and wives to reproduce an idealized version of the nation.

Citing Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Viktor Orban of Hungary.

Across the full range of authoritarian and semiauthoritarian regimes, sexual and gender minorities are often targeted for abuse, as well. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people are seen as undermining the binary gender hierarchy celebrated by many authoritarians.

At least "bottom" men. In some societies, a man may still be respected if he is a "top" man in sexual relations with other men.

 

[lpetrich]

EC & ZM then note an odd paradox.

Despite their flagrant misogyny—and, in some cases, because of it—some authoritarians and would-be authoritarians succeed in enlisting women as key players in their political movements. They display their wives and daughters prominently in the domestic sphere and sometimes in official positions to obscure gender unequal policies. Valorizing traditional motherhood, conservative women often play supporting roles to the masculine stars of the show. There is perhaps no better illustration of this dynamic than the dueling women’s movements that supported and opposed Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign in Brazil. Bolsonaro’s opponents organized one of the largest women-led protests in the country’s history under the banner of Ele Não, or “Not Him.” His female supporters swathed themselves in the Brazilian flag and derided feminism as “sexist.”

In the patriarchal authoritarian’s view, men are not real men unless they have control over the women in their lives.

Then mentioning Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte.

"While women are pigeonholed into traditionally feminized roles, patriarchal authoritarian leaders trumpet their power with gratuitous displays of masculinity." Like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, ... "The counterpart to this violent rhetoric is paternalistic misogyny." like Narenda Modi of India and RTE of Turkey portraying themselves as protectors.

As tolerance for misogyny in general increases, other shifts in the political and legal landscape occur: protections for survivors of rape and domestic violence are rolled back, sentences for such crimes are loosened, evidentiary requirements for charging perpetrators are made more stringent, and women are left with fewer tools with which to defend their bodily and political autonomy. For instance, in 2017, Putin signed a law that decriminalized some forms of domestic abuse, despite concerns that Russia has long faced an epidemic of domestic violence. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump famously minimized a video that surfaced of him bragging about sexual assault, dismissing it as “locker room talk,” despite the fact that numerous women had accused him of sexual assault and misconduct. Once Trump became president, his administration directed the Department of Education to reform Title IX regulations to give more rights to those accused of sexual assault on college campuses.

It's revealing when such people become concerned about civil liberties, something that they often disparage as "criminals' rights". But when they are the ones being targeted, they act like their own stereotype of criminal coddlers.

 

[lpetrich]

EC & ZM:

Finally, many autocrats and would-be autocrats promote a narrative of masculine victimhood designed to gin up popular concern about how men and boys are faring. Invariably, men are portrayed as “losing out” to women and other groups championed by progressives, despite their continued advantages in a male-dominated gender hierarchy.

Noting Russia and US right-wingers like Sen. Josh Hawley and Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

The authors describe what to do, concluding with "Finally, organizers and supporters of mass movements for democratic change need a gender-inclusive agenda in order to attract women to the frontlines and to leadership roles."

Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women linked to The Best Foreign Policy Puts Women at the Center Greater Equality Leads to Greater Wealth and Security for All Rachel Vogelstein, Jamille Bigio, and Rebecca Turkington

 

[lpetrich]

I'll now turn to

What's destroying democracy around the world? At least in part, misogyny and sexism | Salon.com - "The worldwide rise of authoritarianism is a direct result of men's profound unwillingness to share power with women" - Salon - by Amanda Marcotte

noting The anti-liberal moment - Vox - "Critics on the left and right are waging war on liberalism. And liberals don’t seem to have a good defense." - by Zack Beauchamp

He quotes Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who objects to the concept of freedom, because it is "a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice."

This is treated as a gender-neutral statement by both Hawley and Beauchamp (who disagrees with Hawley, to be clear), but any feminist who has been dealing with the religious right knows full well that it is not. Hawley and his ilk do not, in fact, object to men having the freedom of choice or self-creation or the ability to liberate themselves from family and community. Hawley, after all, is a rabid fan of Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both men who felt free to choose adultery and who liberated themselves from their wives for sexy new mistresses. No, when conservatives talk about "people" having too much freedom, what they largely mean is women having too much freedom.

The entire system of communities, churches and especially families of yore, for which conservatives feel so much nostalgia, is at heart patriarchal. It's a system that depends on putting women under the direct control of men — first fathers, then husbands — and extracting unpaid labor from them to keep the system running. It's a system where men's freedom is predicated on women's entrapment, where men can run the world, secure in the knowledge that someone is at home making sure the dishes get done.

Then getting into some history, like "Feminism may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, but even in the heyday of the Enlightenment, it was clear that the emerging concepts of liberalism — freedom, autonomy, equality — were in direct conflict with the traditions of patriarchy." Then stating that "So much of the dissatisfaction driving conservative anger towards democracy these days goes right back to men's rage at women for demanding respect and equality."

Then

The rise of the alt-right is largely the result of young men who are bitter and lonely, because they can't find romantic partners who will accept a subservient role. Rather than encourage those young men to change their expectations, conservative "intellectuals" floated the idea that women's right to freely choose their own romantic partners should be curtailed.

...
To be clear, Beauchamp sees anti-feminism as an important aspect of the far-right's rejection of liberal democracy. But I'd argue it goes further than that, and that the beating heart of authoritarianism is misogyny. All this right-wing chatter about duty and community and family is coded language about a return to patriarchal systems. And the high-minded rhetoric about putting duty ahead of freedom is aimed squarely at women. In this old-school worldview, straight men cannot be asked to curtail their sexual freedoms or career ambitions for the common good. If anything, women's rights are viewed as an impediment to male freedom.

 

[lpetrich]

Now the third one. The anti-liberal moment - Vox - "Critics on the left and right are waging war on liberalism. And liberals don’t seem to have a good defense." - by Zack Beauchamp

One contemporary observer, a legal theorist in his mid-30s named Carl Schmitt, found the seeds of the crisis within the idea of liberalism itself. Liberal institutions like representative democracy, and the liberal ideal that all a nation’s citizens can be treated as political equals, were in his view a sham. Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.

“Even if Bolshevism is suppressed and Fascism held at bay, the crisis of contemporary parliamentarism would not be overcome in the least,” he wrote in 1926. ”It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.”

He himself ended up becoming an enthusiastic Nazi.

On the right, the anti-liberals locate the root of the problem in liberalism’s social doctrines, its emphasis on secularism and individual rights. In their view, these ideas are solvents breaking down America’s communities and, ultimately, dissolving the very social fabric the country needs to prosper.

...
Left anti-liberals, by contrast, pinpoint liberal economic doctrine as the source of our current woes. Liberalism’s vision of the economy as a zone of individual freedom, in their view, has given rise to a deep system of exploitation that makes a mockery of liberal claims to be democratic — an oppressive system referred to as “neoliberalism.”

...
The defenses from America’s liberal intellectual elite have been weak at best. The most prominent defenses of liberalism today are either laundry lists of its past glories or misplaced attacks on “identity politics” and “political correctness,” neither of which are adequate to the challenge presented by liberalism’s newly vital critics on the reactionary right or socialist left.

 

[lpetrich]

ZB then gets into defining liberalism.

In the context of political philosophy, liberalism refers to a school of thought that takes freedom, consent, and autonomy as foundational moral values. Liberals agree that it is generally wrong to coerce people, to seize control of their bodies or force them to act against their will (though they disagree among themselves on many, many whys and hows of the matter).

Given that people will always disagree about politics, liberalism’s core aim is to create a generally acceptable mechanism for settling political disputes without undue coercion — to give everyone a say in government through fair procedures, so that citizens consent to the state’s authority even when they disagree with its decisions.

He then mentions four core principles: "democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, and equality."

Bush-era American conservatism was a right-wing species of liberalism; what Americans call “liberalism” is a relatively modest form of left-liberalism. Germany’s Christian Democrats, India’s Congress, Cape Verde’s PAICV, and Argentina’s Republican Proposal are politically diverse parties, some more conservative by their country’s standards and others more left-leaning, but they’re all broadly liberal.

That first one is what self-styled "classical liberals" often seem to mean by their stated position.

Populists in Power Around the World | Institute for Global Change
Defining populism as

• A country’s ‘true people’ are locked into conflict with outsiders, including establishment elites.
  [*[Nothing should constrain the will of the true people.

and distinguishing

• Cultural populism claims that the true people are the native members of the nation-state, and outsiders can include immigrants, criminals, ethnic and religious minorities, and cosmopolitan elites. Cultural populism tends to emphasise religious traditionalism, law and order, sovereignty, and painting migrants as enemies.
• Socio-economic populism claims that the true people are honest, hard-working members of the working class, and outsiders can include big business, capital owners and actors perceived as propping up an international capitalist system.
• Anti-establishment populism paints the true people as hard-working victims of a state run by special interests and outsiders as political elites. Although all forms of populism rail against political elites, anti-establishment populism distinguishes itself by focusing on establishment elites as the primary enemy of the people and does not sow as many intra-society divisions.

Cultural populism is common in the right wing, while socio-economic populism is common in the left wing.

 

[lpetrich]

Back to ZB in Vox:

By one count, illiberal right-wing populists controlled the governments of least 11 different countries in 2018; in 1990, they controlled none. Trump is the most famous example, but he has peers in countries as influential as Brazil and India. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has openly described his political vision as “illiberal,” essentially dismantled Hungarian liberal democracy; Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is well on the way to doing the same. Combine these outright victories with the rising popularity of far-right parties in many other European countries, and it looks like liberalism is at risk of being overthrown by the voters that it’s supposed to be serving.

The rise of such a challenge to liberalism has highlighted how the liberal status quo has failed to deliver, particularly in the wealthy West. Across the OECD, the top 10 percent makes over nine times per year as much as the bottom 10 percent. Metrics of trust in a range of governmental institutions — legislatures, courts, civil service — are falling across advanced democracies. In the United States specifically, deaths from alcohol abuse, drug overdose, and suicide have reached all-time highs.

Then discussing challenges from the left and the right.

Those on the left argue that liberalism’s failures were eminently predictable, the inevitable product of contradictions within liberalism long identified by critics in the Marxist tradition — that between the liberal commitment to egalitarian democracy and a vision of the market as a zone of individual freedom.

In effect, market liberalism is self-destructive, because some big winners emerge and create de facto feudalism in their realms.

The current crisis of liberalism, according to this narrative, dates to (roughly) the 1970s. Around then, governments across the Western world began deregulating their economies, selling off state-owned industries, and privatizing core government services. This turn towards economic “neoliberalism,” as leftists termed it, was not just a matter of economic policy, but rather a comprehensive ideological and philosophical project.

Under neoliberalism, the logic of the market becomes “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs,” Harvey writes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism. “It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.”

Associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and their opposition-party members Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Their agenda of tax cuts, “welfare reform,” and deregulation created the rapid increase in inequality since the 1970s, giving rise to a political and economic model rigged in favor of the rich.

The critique of neoliberalism is not new, but it has gained currency in the last decade or so. The Great Recession can be blamed on neoliberal financial deregulation, the Eurozone crisis on neoliberal austerity, and the rise of Trump and right-wing extremists as a backlash to neoliberal free trade agreements and neoliberal indifference to rising inequality.

 

[lpetrich]

More ZB:

Liberalism’s core error, in this view, comes from a mistake in its vision of democracy. Liberals support democracy as a matter of principle, believing that individuals have a right to shape decisions that affect their lives in deep and important ways. But liberals curiously excludes parts of economic life from this zone of collective self-determination, seeing the market as a place where people have individual but not collective rights. Liberalism sees nothing wrong with the heads of Amazon and Facebook making decisions that have implications for the entire economy.

So long as capitalists are free from democratic constraint, leftists argue, liberal democracy is on dangerous footing. The super-rich use the power their accumulated wealth provides to influence political life, rearranging policy to protect and expand their fortunes. The rise of neoliberalism is, per the socialist writer Peter Frase, this process in action: proof that capitalism will invariably corrupt liberalism’s promise of freedom and equality.

But left-wing critics of liberalism believe in working in democratic fashion -- they are not hardcore Marxist-Leninists, let alone Stalinists or Maoists. Though Bernie Sanders is almost hopelessly reformist by their standards, they see his program as a step in the right direction.

 

[lpetrich]

ZB turns to the other side:

The right’s attack on liberalism is even more sweeping than the left’s.

Conservative anti-liberals question not only freedom in the economic sphere, but the value of pluralistic democracy itself — arguing that core liberal ideals about tolerance and equality actually produce an insidious form of tyranny that destroys communities and deadens the human spirit.

The key proponents of this view are heavily (though not exclusively) Catholic; many draw from their faith’s long tradition of anti-liberal thought.

Right-wing Catholics have a Good Old Days that they can point to: the Middle Ages. They might point to survivals of its social order into recent centuries, like ancien-regime France. Complete with considering the French Revolution a horrible disaster and very typical of the modern world.

The right’s starting point is the same as the left’s: our society is in dire straits, and liberalism is to blame. Like the left, they see the untrammeled market as part of the problem, a decisive break with the libertarianism or “classical liberalism” favored by traditional American movement conservatives and European right-wingers in the mold of Margaret Thatcher. The economic split has produced more than a little infighting in conservative ranks.

But conservative anti-liberals are not content with rubbishing libertarianism and other liberal economic doctrines. The real error, in their view, goes even further back — all the way down to liberalism’s core ideas about individual freedom and choice.

Senator Josh Hawley:

“For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom,” Hawley writes in an essay published by Christianity Today. “It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice.”

The Age of Pelagius | Christianity Today - "An ancient heresy continues to affect our culture in surprising ways."

He'd love the Middle Ages. That era had exactly that organic philosophy of society, with everybody like some part of a body.

The pursuit of profit erodes social ties, creating incentives for people to pursue their self-interest rather than build families or embed themselves in communities. Young people leave their small towns in search of career and meaning in anonymous big cities, destroying the communal ethos that allowed people to feel happy and secure. Rising inequality chips away at the bonds of social solidarity, hollowing out the middle class and placing deep barriers between citizens.

Liberals use the state to try and address the market’s failures, providing services like welfare payments and health care. But such efforts, conservatives argue, usurp functions that used to belong to community and church — further weakening those key sources of meaning and identity.

"This destruction of community, conservative anti-liberals believe, can be seen in the big-picture numbers." Like decline of religious attendance and participation in social clubs, lowering birthrates, increasing divorce rates. Like Robert D. Putnam's classic paper "Bowling Alone".

In the US, the rate hit a peak in 1980, then slowly declined to the present day. Though the US marriage rate has been slowly declining since 1970. Canada and the UK have similar trends. Large numbers of people in many Western societies are living together without being formally married.

 

[lpetrich]

ZB then notes "But what has really set off reactionary anti-liberals has been the state enforcement of liberal social mores." Like "attempts to force Hobby Lobby’s insurance to cover birth control and Christian bakers to make cakes for gay weddings"

Then two right-wing alternatives to liberalism. First

The localist view, advocated by Deneen and the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, suggests that national politics should not be the focus of anti-liberals’ energy (at the moment, at least). They advocate instead focusing on engaging in small-scale experiments and community building that can restore what liberalism has destroyed, providing islands of stability for traditional Christians amid the secular storm raging nationwide.

That's Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame University.

Then,

The nationalist view, by contrast, argues for recapturing the state and remaking it on avowedly illiberal lines — constructing a state that rebuilds national communities by opposing international capital and secular liberalism alike.

The Orbán government in Hungary is an example of this agenda in action. Hungary’s leader has banned the teaching of “gender ideology” in universities, cracked down on non-European immigration, passed financial incentives aimed at getting Hungarian women to have more babies, and redefined Hungary’s regime as both as a “Christian democracy” and an “illiberal democracy.”

Among Viktor Orban's fans is Fox commentator Tucker Carlson, who recently visited that nation and interviewed him.

 

[lpetrich]

ZB:

An even more radical version, advocated most prominently by Harvard’s Vermeule, is something called “integralism” — an obscure Catholic doctrine that essentially amounts to the abolition of the church/state distinction and the replacement of liberal democracy with an avowedly Catholic regime.

These integralists reject the label of “theocracy” for their ideal government. But they do hope the current system can be transformed from within, the ultimate aim being a state that promotes a religiously defined “Highest Good” rather than liberal autonomy.

That's Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule.

Seems to me like having some church be an integral part of the government. He got what he wanted in the Middle Ages, more or less, though there were plenty of power struggles between the Church and secular rulers.

 

[lpetrich]

Then "The inadequacy of the liberal response (so far)"

Core liberal institutions, like an expansive slate of individual rights and a social democratic mixed economy, are vital to human flourishing.

But despite my deep faith in liberalism, I’ve recently found myself more frustrated by reading fellow liberals than the illiberals attacking us.

Many modern liberals, including some brilliant and well-regarded thinkers, do not seem up to the task of defending liberalism from its newest wave of critics. They lean on old arguments persuasive largely to other liberals, doing little to counteract the narrative of crisis from which the new illiberalism gets its force.

In effect, they ignore a lot of the criticisms.

One view is Steven Pinker's view, to point to a lot of measures of society getting better and better. Globally, that is indeed the case, but much of the improvement is in the developing world, even in authoritarian states like China. "By contrast, conditions in richer liberal democracies are getting worse on a bevy of different metrics."

Even if you buy that liberalism is responsible for improvements for people living in the developing economies, it’s not clear if it can keep this progress going. The damage done by our new demagogues and the looming threat of climate change could end up reversing worldwide progress against untimely death and poverty.

But most fundamentally, liberalism’s defenders need to meet people where they are.

Because Pinkerian arguments often seem like gaslighting to them.

 

[lpetrich]

"The second unsatisfying liberal argument is that liberalism may not be perfect, but it has a long history of repairing itself."

Like what Adam Gopnik argues in his book "A Thousand Small Sanities".

“The liberation of women, the emancipation of slaves and then of the racially oppressed, the recognition of the rights of sexual minorities — these are all the unique achievements of liberal states, engineered by liberal activists, all things that have never happened before in history,” he wrote in it.

"But saying that liberalism can repair itself isn’t the same thing as explaining how it can do so right now." What can it do about our current problems?


"The third and final unsatisfying liberal response, the one that frustrates me the most, is lashing out at the wrong enemies."

One of the most common genres in modern American punditry is the attack on “identity politics” and “political correctness.” Liberalism’s defenders on both the center-left and center-right frequently pinpoint today’s young people and college kids, with their “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” and gender-neutral pronouns, as being a looming threat to free speech and core liberal values — the tip of a spear aimed at the multicultural left.

...
But there is scant persuasive evidence that America’s young left-wing activists are turning against free speech or other core liberal values. The argument also betrays a misunderstanding of the relationship between identity politics and Marxism, as well as an underestimation of the degree to which right-wing anti-liberalism has become a part of the modern Republican Party.

Most importantly, the liberal war on identity politics is a mistake philosophically. It misunderstands the rising energy surrounding identity issues as a threat to liberalism when it’s actually sowing the seeds of liberal renewal.

Then about the Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, the backlash against Trump's travel bans and family separations, climate activists, and activists against restrictive voting laws.

Liberals will not succeed by tut-tutting activists who care about the oppression of their own communities. They succeed by developing a vision of liberalism that harnesses activists’ energy and sense of injustice.

The defense of liberalism begins by recognizing that there is a crisis, that anti-liberals are once again asserting themselves intellectually in ways that should worry liberalism’s defenders. It will triumph by seeing the world for what it is, and changing liberalism to meet it — not by insisting on arguments well past their expiration date.

I like that.

Seems like the US is due for another progressive period. In Arthur Schlesinger's cycles of US history, this nation alternates between liberal and conservative periods, periods of social progress and social stagnation or even regression, of increasing and containing democracy, of public purpose and private interest, of concern with human rights and property rights. The US is currently in a conservative period, the Reagan Era or Gilded Age II, and it has been in that period since roughly 1980. Its previous liberal period was the Sixties Era, and that ran out of steam in the mid-1970's. The Equal Rights Amendment did not quite make it, and abortion became a culture-war issue, and would remain one for over 40 years.

 

[Jayjay]

I think the fact that aging dictators of the world are misogynist men, stems form the fact that it's the default setting for most of the world. Used to be that way in the western world as well just half a century ago.

Not everyne can be as progressive and open-minded as General Drayfox: