No.410652
Wrote more words than I thought I would. I think liberalism has an advantage because it reflects the hegemony through the media. Liberals think they're smarter and more serious than everyone else. There's a perceived wisdom that liberalism is automatically legitimate (or at least "the worst system except for all the others") so people are reluctant to criticize it. But liberals have gotten lazy and now justify liberalism tautologically: liberalism is legitimate *because* it's liberal. This is where the "red-brown fascist tankie" thing comes from because liberals see everything that's illiberal as the same and automatically illegitimate. Liberalism is legitimate just 'cuz.
But Trump revealed that the "emperor has no clothes." I think the problem for the right though is that they mirror liberalism in a negative way. So, if a liberal thinks X is good, the right will think X is bad. If liberals are concerned with being poised, then the right will act really obnoxiously. Liberals say globalization is good, so the right says globalization is bad. But I think this is too binary and it's like black/white thinking. There are different kinds of globalization, economic and political. I think economic globalization is probably inevitable, the question is who benefits and who doesn't, but then there's political globalization (i.e. "globalism") which determines who benefits and who doesn't. Liberals believe economic globalization leads to political liberalization, but I don't think that's true anymore. That's a big problem for liberalism.
But… liberals might not be necessarily wrong about everything. (I can hear someone shouting: "Yes they are!") What I mean is, overall I think liberalism is very bad and stupid at this point. But there is probably both good and bad like any system in human history. And not everything that seems "liberal" or is believed by liberals to be "liberal" necessarily has to carry a liberal stamp. The right in its extreme form otoh retreats into Ted Kaczynski fantasies because they think the whole modern world is bad, but that cannot solve the problem. Are they really going to give up video games and movies and so on? Probably not.
The system itself might not even be that important compared to whether *any* system can continue to improve itself and adapt the development of the productive forces to the competition. From this point of view, that was one problem with the Soviet Union compared to the United States during the Cold War. The U.S. became more innovative especially later on, the USSR more conservative. What you can say about the USSR for the West though is that it forced Western elites to share profits to support the middle and lower classes, securing domestic stability. But after the Cold War, these capitalist elites have returned to their old ways of maximizing profits. So, it's probably better to think of "neoliberalism" as just normal capitalism in the absence of a threat.
And maybe, even if people don't think the USSR was a "good" system, they'll agree with that.
And if you look at liberal capitalist systems today, do they seem innovative? Are the liberals really as smart as they present themselves to be? Liberal ideology is also based on a "social contract" theory of governance where the masses defer to an "enlightened" ruling class of political elites to "represent" them in their interest. But if that ruling class openly advances their own interests at the expense of the general welfare of society, by its own logic liberalism cannot survive. The system itself as a built-in defect.
So I'm thinking to be like these guys in video. Look at the intro with the hammer and sickle. They're not libs. But it's also like "we understand their system better than they do." Or almost using liberalism as a "teacher by negative example." Then maybe some people will look at us and go "oh, these tankies are right about a lot of stuff."
The description:
>In the last year of the epidemic, Western media targeted Wuhan, saying that this was China’s "Chernobyl" moment. Over the past year, reality has whipped their faces time and time again. This is actually the "Chernobyl" moment of the Western liberal democracy! The disintegration of the Soviet Union taught all the Chinese people a lesson. The Soviet Union gave up the leadership of the party, the media was trapped by capital, and the Soviet Union finally died … at 7 o'clock tomorrow evening, Teacher Zhang will talk about how we can regain the definition of democracy!
Also different audiences or forums and so forth will have different cultures. How you talk to people on a doomer-zoomer Reddit sub is probably different than liberals on Twitter. How you run a YouTube channel is probably going to be different. I don't think it's possible to avoid conflict or antagonism, though. It's sort of inevitable.