GenZedong

I think at some point, most of us have been liberals. From a young age, most in the west (or at least the US) have grown up with a liberal view of the world instilled into them: people have power by voting; therefore, society is good because good people will vote for good people, and good people will do good things to make society better. A relatively well-off liberal will spend the first decade or so in ignorant bliss, not aware of the world around them. It is not until the liberal begins to realize that the world is not so perfect after all that they come to doubt things.

If voting will lead to good people in power and lead to a world where politicians do good things... why isn't the world good?

The liberal stands at a crossroads.

There is a single, very simple option--that things actually are good. Liberals who believe this are often the ones that turn into ghoulish social darwinist hacks, arguing that inequality, oppression and such don't really matter, and it's all a matter of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, that some are just naturally lazy, etc.... it's a very naive way of looking at things, and the people who subscribe to this tendency tend to be quite naive and privileged as well.

However, especially in today's world, such ignorant bliss is becoming increasingly less viable. So, which way, liberal?

There is of course the option to reject liberalism's framework entirely. It's an ideology of weakness, of women in videogames... that path doesn't lead to more liberalism and it's been discussed thoroughly, so I won't go into it.

The liberals who no longer buy into the success of their ideology must come to a new conclusion: that liberalism has been betrayed, stabbed in the back, even. The most important part of a liberal's political development comes from who exactly they believe betrayed liberalism.

A quite simple, establishment friendly answer is: foreign actors. Russians, Chinese, the communists, whatever... they're influencing our elections, they're buying out our politicians. The advantage of this approach is a form of clean-wehrmacht maneuver, where they can acknowledge the failure of liberalism while at the same time absolving themselves of all moral responsibility: it's the dirty racist/homophobic/authoritarian foreigners responsible for everything wrong, if it weren't for them we'd be living in a democratic utopia! This kind of western exceptionalism, as you might imagine, often backslides into eurolib-style liberal fascism when things really hit the fan.

Other liberals, who examine the world a bit more closely, may conclude that capitalism is the problem. With all the problems in the world today, it's hard not to. They see how much influence the rich have over political processes, and conclude that they are causing bad things. However, while this form of liberalism seems more aligned with leftism, it does contain one crucial flaw: it does not recognize that liberal democracy upholds capitalism by nature, but rather views western political structures as inherently apolitical and natural. This may be why they cling to reformism, as they naively believe that capitalist institutions can be peacefully reformed away from destructive capitalism, just as a gambler believes with skillful maneuvering they may be able to strike it rich gambling.

That's the end of my writeup about liberals, I was gonna write more but I got bored and didn't know what to write thanks for reading everyone