Liberalism Debate

everything in this reply espouses ideas and positions that are literal antitheses of a liberal society.

What is this that you refer to exactly? The deep non uniformity of our current society and politics, globally, indicates that there is, at the very least least, a lot of room to maneuver and improve. Liberalism, for example, likes to push the narrative of the least bad option, but often it does so to reject ideas that have a clear precedent of working better than the ongoing decline of equality and flight of alienated workers towards reactionary politics we have now.

It's absolutely true that liberalism has changed shape dramatically. It's almost unrecognizable in it's current form.I wouldn't expect that most people would object to something like this (wikipedia):Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.[1][2][3] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support free markets, free trade, l

Western Liberalism is a self correcting, evolving system of ideas and rigorous analysis of what is considered knowledge. So yes, per the people that were considered "the people" during those times, this belief was very strongly held indeed.

Ah, but legal positivism is the norm in liberal societies, and not by accident. This follows directly from the demands of liberalism which privatizes discussion of the objective real and relegates it to individual sentiment. One of the paradoxes of liberalism is that the maximization of individual liberty necessarily demotes authority and elevates power, leading to tyranny.So any appeals to the contrary are rooted in appeals to beliefs held in parallel with the liberal doctrines of the state.

This might be shocking, but Western Enlightened Liberalism isn't exactly a universal philosophy...

This is just called rejecting liberalism, which is happening across the left-right political spectrum. It's exhausting to see how common medieval arguments about the way society should be run have become.That isn't to say that Enlightenment liberalism is unquestionably correct, but the conversation has shifted such that the hoi polloi have started to reject liberalism without having even done the basic work to consider the pitfalls and the counter-arguments to those pitfalls (you wi

Racial discrimination aside, it gives me hope to see liberal/libertarian ideals holding against the ever expanding state in almost every country on Earth. Liberty and self determination are dying virtues, and people don't know what it is they're giving up so willingly.

It's not a pendulum. To imagine such a thing is a very indulgent way of thinking. The liberties experienced in the United States are quite exceptional as human societies go. In the history of human civilization, the tendency is towards the feudalistic, the imperial, the totalitarian. So the natural course is for liberties to erode. It took bloodshed and great will to carve out freedoms enjoyed by the United States.It's less the dynamic of a pendulum and more the dynamic of oxidation

When I think of liberal, I think of people like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. I realize my US-bias is showing, but when the country was founded the idea of a country where liberty was to be maximized was inconceivable. Currently, the people called conservatives are trying to conserve the liberal ideas of the late 18th century.According to Wikipedia,"Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule