Moyn (2023) has demonstrated the post-WWII roots of liberal ennervation. Liberals were assigned the norms of (sometimes regretful) accommodation to conservative restoration.
Having had opportunity to closely observe an academic union for over a decade, I have some further specifications:
Liberals see competency as a strictly diplomatic stance toward powerbrokers, organized elite-connected conservatives such as Zionists–but not toward Trump’s non-elite electoral clients, nor toward socialists. Liberals see “non-powerbrokers” who commit a diplomatic break as categorically incompetent and the proper object of reputation attacks, surveillance, management, policing, and carceralism. In the deferential, diplomatic process, liberals come to define powerbrokers not by their objective force majeur, but by their willingness to engage liberals and advocate for conservative positions in sustained fashion, with some more-or-less-credible threat of elite retribution.
This is not only the liberal political party framework, it is liberal academic and liberal union executives’ framework of operation.
The problem with liberalism is that in over-valuing the role of diplomacy and deference in institutional management and governance, liberalism ignores or discounts the fundamental bases of democratic institutional reproduction. Liberals engaged in diplomacy with conservatives will undervalue and even attack voices recalling democratic institution fundamentals. Attached to diplomacy, liberals do not recognize as legitimate any strategy of counter-organizing against conservatives to preserve institutions originally founded in democratic organizing. Conservatives thus manipulate the elitist liberal diplomacy fetish to ratchet away democratic institutions and dispositions.
So for example, a Prairie Canada academic union executive facilitates Zionist silencing politics in prioritizing diplomacy. The union executive thereby generally deprioritizes the union’s own conditions and fundamental principles of academic freedom and free expression, while accommodating genocide with deferential silence or as the union executive brands it, “neutrality”.
An exception is that, encouraged by a trusted mentor citing the university president’s quiet stance protecting the university from destructive Zionist demands, the outgoing union president defended freedom of expression in the media once when a wealthy Zionist donor to the medical school demanded apology and retribution for a valedictorian speech naming Israel’s war atrocities, which are inter alia extremely relevant to medical practitioners. (Whereas the craven, unctuous health sciences president deferred to the donor and publicly, patronizingly denounced the valedictorian for failing to speak within a confined diplomatic lane dictated by imperial priorities; the public university administration deferred to imperial political-economic elites and failed abjectly to defend academic freedom and free expression in a time of genocide.)
While liberals regard such diplomatic distinction as effective strategy, they generally minimize protecting the fundamentals of democratic institution reproduction. This is because liberals assume liberal diplomacy is what reproduces democracy. So while liberals present a blurred target to organized Zionists and thus may preserve themselves as individual liberal leaders, Zionists like other conservatives are hardly confused. An international political organization, Zionists still identify the academic union as an enemy institution categorically. The liberal-led union as an institution must accommodate ongoing, targeted assaults to academic freedom and free speech– when core union principles should oppose state-directed, imperial genocide and particularly the democratic repression imperial genocides require.
The diplomacy bias is the means by which liberals support imperial genocides along with conservatization (neoliberalization).
Where socialists’ strengths are their analyses of exploitation and expropriation, and their capacity for working-class organizing, excessive concern for uncompromised symbolic capital is the socialist Achilles heel, particularly as socialists’ reputation is always under attack. This may be a spillover from the Trilling approach to democracy: intellectual, antidemocratic realism tinged with ineffectual, romantic regret (Moyn 2023). A brittleness in the face of reputational challenge is the legacy of apologetic Cold War post-socialism, as well as the superior value both new 21st century adherents–youth– and Baby Boom adherents place on symbolic capital above organizing. The socialist lack of resolve contrasts markedly with conservatives’ easy immunity to reputational challenge, an immunity that is bolstered by the cold hard cash conservatives are fed by economic elites. In addition to lack of conflict-smoothing funding, socialists are also vulnerable to undercover police penetration and monkeywrenching. After decades in which socialist organizing skills were decimated (McAlevey 2016), socialists’ non-robustness to normal political challenges to reputation is exacerbated by the rise of social media as a mechanism of punitive social discipline.
References
McAlevey, Jane F. 2016. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Oxford.
Moyn, Samuel. 2023. Liberalism against Itself. Yale.
Robin, Corey. 2016. “Antonin Scalia.” Crooked Timber. February 14.
Note: Possibly with the exception of McAlevey, the above authors have identified as liberal, arguing on behalf of a line of liberalism, inclusive of socialism, that was broken in the Cold War. I agree that Cold War military, policing, and political organizing reoriented liberalism to an inegalitarian Antienlightenment telos. Reviewing Moyn’s presentation of the Cold War liberal intellectual innovators, as they were incentivized by a new imperial Zionist subcontract, and Robin’s analysis of the rightward-listing relation between Antienlightenment jurist Antonin Scalia and his enabling liberal colleague Sandra Day O’Connor, as well as in my own observations, I rather think there is a distinctive, characteristic instability to liberalism in the imperial capitalist context, and it is the deferential, diplomatic reflex toward elite inegalitarian networks.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 