Watched the first few minutes. Hearty eye rolls. This belongs in the politics section. The most arrogant section of society is centrists who constantly equivocate right and left. 'Ooh aren't pronouns hard'. No, they're pretty damn easy, actually.
As a counterpoint:
The battle over liberalism is also the battle over the word “liberalism.” In recent years, this semantic and substantive debate has set two main camps in opposition. The first, championed by the post-liberal Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, sees liberalism as a never-ending search for individual autonomy. On this view, liberals, by continually maximizing individual choices, dismember the structure of civil society and erode the bonds from which we derive our sense of identity. Hiding behind the mask of tolerance, liberalism attacks faith, nationhood, citizenship, culture, and custom—until nothing remains to obstruct its culmination in license. In desperate need of higher callings, atomized individuals succumb to nihilism as modern societies head toward collapse. Such is the post-liberal story.
On the other side, defenders like Francis Fukuyama portray liberalism as a moderate, if often frustrating, means of remedying human ills. Balancing communal harmony with individual sovereignty, liberal societies enable citizens to choose their own path. Liberalism might not itself provide meaning or purpose, but it does guarantee a basic set of rights, liberties, and protections from state power. As the twentieth century grimly taught us, the preservation of human freedom requires the rejection of utopianism. Critics of liberalism build castles in the sky; liberals themselves accept the fallen nature of man, the necessary imperfections of politics, and the need for prudence in statesmanship. Liberalism, this view holds, cannot promise happiness or heroism, but it can deliver peace and prosperity. This picture might seem unglamorous, particularly for young minds in search of excitement or deeper meaning, but it’s the best for which we moderns can hope.
In Liberalism Against Itself, Samuel Moyn, an intellectual historian and professor at Yale Law School, challenges the terms of this divide. If critics of liberalism misrepresent its content, so do liberalism’s supposed defenders. Once upon a time, liberals spoke the language of self-creation. They did not seek mere neutrality toward ways of life; nor did they want to reduce politics to the provision of basic rights and liberties. The architects of the Enlightenment wrote boldly, envisioning the triumph of reason over superstition, of progress over stagnation, of individual expression over collective censorship. They did not desire simply to live next to their fellow man in peace. Theirs was a promethean call to empower human creativity, vanquish prejudices, and shield the most vulnerable from all tyrannies, public or private. How did this initial vision get lost in the history of the liberal idea? How did another vision, less ambitious, even cautious, come to replace it? Why has liberalism undermined itself from within? To answer these questions, Moyn turns to a period (the Cold War) and to certain thinkers from that time who personify the brand of liberalism that he blames for our current ills.
From:
https://www.city-journal.org/article...by-samuel-moyn
A review of the book 'liberalism against itself', which seeks to identify the pressures on liberalism and how it's changed.
