For Fancy Racists, Classical Liberalism Offers Respect, Intrigue

Space_Time · Aug 20, 2018

Is this a good description of classical liberalism? Does government involvement to try to make things better only make things worse? Is everyone who isn't a member of the progressive Left a racist?

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...lassic-rock-fraud_us_5b6b232ee4b0fd5c73dff019

For Fancy Racists, Classical Liberalism Offers Respect, Intrigue
A new, old idea is bubbling up at the nation’s cocktail parties.
By Zach Carter
The world would not be quite so riven with death and destruction if America’s political elite had better taste in music. Classic rock, for instance, is a fraud. It never existed. Jimmy Page never turned to Robert Plant and said, “Hey, let’s start a classic rock band.” Led Zeppelin did not imagine itself to be part of a sonic movement that included Billy Joel ― that idea came from corporate radio gurus in the 1980s, and they called their marketing concoction “classic rock.”

The same is true for “classical liberalism,” a moniker currently en vogue among a particular right-wing set that would very much like to be described as intellectuals, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and YouTuber Dave Rubin.

“Classical liberalism is the idea that individual freedom and limited government are the best way for humans to form a free society,” Rubin said in a recent video, citing “great thinkers” such as Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill.

Alas, the term “classical liberal” would have been novel to Smith, Locke or Mill. Mill called himself a socialist, Locke called for a state ban on Catholicism, and Smith favored all manner of encroachments against the free market. The corporate radio gurus of political theory ― Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman ― popularized the notion that these thinkers represent a coherent, libertarian-esque school of thought in the 20th century.

Over the years, these men debated a handful of different names for the intellectual movement they organized ― “classical liberalism,” “neoliberalism” (now a slur in Democratic Party circles) and “libertarianism” (now a particularly aggressive strain of the classical liberal bug), among others. They traced their lineage back to Smith et al., but their political vision was contemporary and unique, insisting that unfettered markets offered a better path to social deliverance than the unpredictable currents of political democracy.

Just as you should avert your ears from any band in the 21st century calling itself “classic rock,” so too should you be alarmed by today’s purveyors of “classical liberalism.” Whatever classical liberals say about their ideas, in practice they have always functioned as a respectable intellectual veneer for authoritarian politics.

In his 1927 book Liberalism (reissued with the subtitle “In The Classical Tradition” in 1962), Mises applauded Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party and “similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships” across Europe, saying they had, “for the moment, saved European civilization,” a “merit” that would “live on eternally in history.” In the 1970s, Hayek defended his decision to advise Chilean butcher Augusto Pinochet by saying he would “prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism” ― in the classical sense, mind you.
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Spooky · Aug 20, 2018

Classic liberalism, like the Blue Dog Democrats, are dead.

At least as movements they are.

They have all been run out of the democratic party in their turn to far left socialism.

They have been purged in the vein of Stalin.

garyd · Aug 20, 2018

Space_Time said: ↑

Is this a good description of classical liberalism? Does government involvement to try to make things better only make things worse? Is everyone who isn't a member of the progressive Left a racist?
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Typical left leaning screed, the notion that you have to be perfect to be taken seriously invalidates everyone in every time including this one.

Basically the author of the piece in the OP went looking for some way, any way at all to justify his own position on the matter. And of course if you look for feet of clay you'll always find them, none of us are perfect and given the prerequisites for perfection none of us ever will be.

Wildjoker5 · Aug 20, 2018

The author is attacking the libertarians fallacious appeal to authority argument. And yes, I do agree, we who prefer limited government shouldn't look to people of the past for our inspirations on wanting a free society. We should however look to the past FAILURES of cultures and economies of whom some people still try to push on our current societies and make our arguments from them. We see how devalued a fiat currency can become when you don't back it with anything tangible. We know how deadly socialism turns out to be in the long run. The government will always get more and more oppressive to the citizens the more power its given.

I am sure after her hit piece of Libertarianism, she moved right along in her objectively concise piece on progressivism and communism.

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For Fancy Racists, Classical Liberalism Offers Respect, Intrigue

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