“Liberal” PhDs are just as deluded as QAnon’ers

I really liked a recent interview with Samuel Moyn by Doug Henwood in 04.01.2024 (Behind the News), so when I saw his name again, I figured It’d check out the video below. It was reasonably interesting, but not really worth noting, except that I noticed that it exhibited some core fallacies evident in the so-called liberal project.

'What Happened to Liberalism?' Samuel Moyn in conversation with Becca Rothfeld by The Philosopher (YouTube)

At 34:00, Becca Rothfeld says “Biden is pretty leftist in some ways.” In which ways? I’m honestly interested to know because I can’t think of anything that wasn’t just something he said once or twice, or things that he might have “enacted” but without real teeth to it, so that kind-of the opposite things continue to happen, or start happening.

I get the distinct impression that both Rothfeld and Moyn are arguing as members of a tribe—the liberals—who are at-once admitting their tribe has failed to follow through on its espoused ideology in nearly every way, and also completely failing to see that this makes their tribe no different from the tribe that doesn’t espouse that ideology—that, in fact, espouses a very opposite ideology that lines up with its actions and policies and which also lines up very well with the enacted policies and ramifications of so-called liberal policy.

They—especially Becca—don’t seem to be able to step outside of the tribe to notice that, if you’re not in either tribe—and you turn down the volume to simply watch what the tribes do rather than listen to what they say—they look exactly the same.

I can’t imagine using the word “leftist” and “Biden” in the same sentence without the word “not” between them. But, hey, I’m not the one with a PhD in philosophy or whatever, name-dropping Rawls and other so-called liberal philosophers all the time. I’m sure, though, that she would be just the kind of person who thinks that she definitely gets to vote because she’s so well-informed on the issues and candidates, but could easily end up voting for Biden because he’s “pretty leftist in some ways.” If that’s the story you have to tell yourself, then OK. If you want to vote for a real leftist, then check the box for Cornel West.

At 50:00 Samuel says that,

“[…] liberals have a lot to learn if they’re going to make liberalism credible. […] the last years since Trump have been kind of disappointing in that regard. The kind-of cold-war-liberal approach of saying ‘no, the enemies of liberalism need to be extinguished to make it credible.’ Well, that’s not what Charles Mills taught. It’s that liberals need to clean their own house, if they’re going to be a credible ideological source in our time.”

Amen, Samuel. Amen.