Of all the posts that I’ve had to write, this one scares me the most. There’s a certain irrational feeling that to write about something makes it

Liberalism is the rebellion now - by Noah Smith

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2024-11-16 12:00:05

Of all the posts that I’ve had to write, this one scares me the most. There’s a certain irrational feeling that to write about something makes it more real, and this is something that I wish was just a bad dream.

When I was growing up in the 1990s, liberalism — the idea that society should be based around the rights, freedoms, and dignity of individual human beings — was ascendant. Here in the U.S. and in other rich democratic nations, there was little question that we were more free, and our rights better protected, than at any point in our history. Every politician talked about freedom as the paramount value, and even if Republicans and Democrats had slightly different ideas about what that entailed, the differences of opinion were not too stark. Whether you were fighting for abortion rights, low taxes, gay marriage, or deregulation, it always helped to couch your arguments in terms of individual freedom.

Liberalism’s ascendance was global. Even though Russia was a chaotic basket case and China had cracked down on its people at Tiananmen Square, both countries were recognizably more liberal than they had been in ages past. International organizations agreed that freedom — freedom of speech, democracy, free enterprise, and so on — was advancing all over the world. And alongside the soft power of liberal ideals stood the hard power of the U.S.A., the world’s most powerful nation, which had won the Cold War and World War 2 in the name of liberal democracy.

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