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Your arguments rest on a very selective and thus misleading account of history, and it's worth enumerate some of the key things you leave out.

First of all, national identities are not actually organic, natural, or inevitable. In fact they are generally made up, typically by people who explicitly want to bind heterogeneous masses into cohesive nations and rationalize the oppression of those local residents who don't fit the national narrative. So empowering nationalism is not only illiberal, it is neither decentralist nor pluralist.

Second, you ignore the numerous historical examples of centralizing relatively-liberal authorities freeing people from forms of local tyranny that go well beyond just social shunning. The British abolition of suttee is a classic one here, but consider also the Austrians' freeing of Eastern European peasants from local feudal obligations as they expanded imperial domination-- Pieter Judson's history _The Habsburg Empire_ has a lot of good material on this, and on why Austrian liberals tended to be pro-imperial and anti-nationalist given their history.

Third, while you correctly identify what I would call the imperial character of the American liberal establishment's Quaker-Puritan secularized Protestantism, you ignore the central motivation for that, namely the centuries-long struggle against the extraordinarily illiberal and destructive Borderer-Cavalier coalition. JD Vance himself acknowledged this struggle -- he called it "Northern Yankees vs Southern Bourbons"-- and openly declared his preference for the evil Southern side. Read Albion’s Seed and you will see the essential accuracy of the famous Republican propaganda map from the 1880s: https://nightingaledvs.com/the-gilded-age-map-that-shines-a-light-on-americas-past-and-present/. The "pluralist" decision to accommodate rather than crushing Cavalier hegemony in the South and its diaspora after 1877 has proved to be a disaster for America ever since, and its continuing negative impact is demonstrated most recently by the blood libels against Haitian immigrants.

To be fair, far from all opposition to Quaker-Puritan ideological hegemony springs from Southern racism. Catholic post-liberalism does not, for example; but neither are the Deneen type post-liberals, as you imply, simply a persecuted religious minority pleading for tolerance. Their Church has eagerly and ruthlessly used state power to impose its doctrines on nonbelievers whenever it could-- Savita Halappanavar is only one of their latest victims-- and the post-liberals' writings make plain their desire to do the same. They should get greater tolerance anyway (the Little Sisters of the Poor shouldn't have to pay for employees' contraception and so on) but they are rank hypocrites for demanding it.

In sum, imperial rationalist liberalism is not imperial out of mere arrogance, but out of zealous determination to defeat a genuine, vast, and monstrous set of evils. It is fair to criticize how often its tactics in that struggle are counterproductive, or how often its zeal blinds it to its own institutions’ many flaws. But a “deflated” philosophy that seeks to cease the struggle, and tolerate the sworn enemies of toleration itself, is a suicide pact, and is no liberalism worthy of the name.

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“Jordan Peterson’s attribution of woke politics to ‘Postmodern Marxist’ college professors is thus mistaken. Wokism is as American as apple-pie, reflecting a Protestant form of Christian Nationalism that's secular but no less sectarian.”

I find this piece fascinating and likely “directionally” correct (I put the word in quotes because I dislike the recent overuse of this word, but admittedly I likely hate it more because of its use by those on the left as rationale not to denounce the radical immorality on the far left because they feel it “directionally correct”).

But as much as I *love* your point that the SJW woke seeking to impose their views on society are simply Secular Sectarians, it’s at minimum an overstatement to claim that Peterson is mistaken with his claim.

The oppressor-oppressed zero-sum identity-based power game ideology at the core of wokeism does indeed come from the academic radicals Peterson cites, and is indeed fueled by, and gets its veneer of respectability from, universities indoctrinating this in the college-miseducated over the last decade.

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Oppressor-oppressed ideology is hypotrophied Christianity imo. There's a Marxist version of it but that’s not why it has intuitive appeal to young people. There were 4th century Christian communities that shaved their heads to try to transcend gender. Can't blame that on Judith Butler

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Then explain why so many 18-24 year olds “virtuously” chose “Back Hamas” in the wake of Oct 7th.

You claim it is something other than DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”? [in this case the Israelis are the white Jewish oppressors, and the Palestinians the BiPoC oppressed, of course]

https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf

https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf

Or is it mostly the word “Marxist” you are objecting to? If your point is that the current woke are less pure economic Marxists than they are cultural Marxists, then we are only disagreeing a little.

And remember that to the extent I understand your argument, I said that the claim that Peterson is “mistaken” is an overstatement, even if you are “crediting” Christian sectarianism gone secular, as Peterson would very much concur / is very much concurring with the Secular Sectarianism portion of your claim when he says what he says - and imo that is the bigger point to him.

Unless you are literally denying that the academics and their ideology have any directional causation to speak of with the current popularity of DEI oppressor-oppressed ideology among the SJW crowd.

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P.S. I don’t understand your use of the term “deflationary”. Well, I guess “directionally” I do, but you *seem* to mean deflated or pared-back, and not what the word means as used by others.

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Deflationary in the sense of avoiding extra metaphysical baggage, realist / naturalist

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I still remember first visiting your office in Niskanen and seeing you reading the Selfish gene- lots of love for that book since I was a biology major, but I get the feeling that you take the bottom-up view too far. The sense I get from your writing is that bottom-up = natural/good whereas top-down = unnatural/unfit, but I don't think this has the biological grounding you think it does

To get to your specific points, you say that you like bottom-up liberalism because a) it fits with your classical liberal take on Hegel b) it's faithful to the history of liberalism and c) it offers neutrality in lieu of taking sides, but I'm not sure that these hold up:

-I don't think Hegel is saying that there's bottom-up social norms that we should identify and stick with. It seems like a more Hegelian take is that in the process of trying to identify the existing norms we find in them an inner movement or a series of contradictions/undercurrents that lead from the existing norms to their next iteration, so in other words in trying to figure out the logic of bottom-up tradition you end up unfolding the fully organic need for top-down corrections too (or in other words classical liberalism lends itself to a more left-leaning liberalism over time)

-if you read Foucault's lectures on biopolitics you can see how liberalism didn't just evolve bottom-up in opposition to the state but has a subtle relationship with the top-down state esp. in light of the holy roman empire losing status and the language of theology getting translated into the new economics of nation-building. Foucault would not be surprised to hear that today's libertarians are taking state capacity seriously

-it follows that your bottom-up liberalism isn't value neutral since it's taking one sided stances on how liberalism works and how it evolved. This is why you keep getting pushback for trying to seem like you're value-neutral or not taking sides when you keep leaning away from the left

The fundamental issue (judging from your last several articles) seems to be that biologically speaking, you're not factoring in mismatch theory. This is the flip side of evolutionary theory showing that sometimes bottom-up = unfit/natural and top-down = fit/natural. If you want to stick with deflationary liberalism, you'll need to show why bottom-up liberalism isn't mismatched or unfit in light of Taylor's 1000-years of Reform and Trumpism etc., so I hope you'll take this on in one of your future writings

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The causes and resulting effects of the Wars of Religion are a great point to bring up, this is because they were in many cases at least just as much about, but I think even more so, political freedoms and the desire for decentralizing political and economic authorities from the intense centralization they had long since arrived at, as they were about sectarianism. This was exemplified in the Treaty of Westphalia and eventually their results, along with other things, led to the birth of what we call liberalism. However, liberals seem to, at least since the 1970s, seek to concentrate governmental and political authority more and more while always denying any ability for meaningful policy variability, especially in the economic spheres. There's an amazing book that I highly recommend titled The Wars of Religion (Adolphus Ward et al., Cambridge University Press, 1904). I'll share here some pertinent passages from it that I think are eloquently written:

"The inevitable reaction against that glorification of the civil State and of the monarch as its embodiment, which was the essence of a great deal of Protestantism, took the form of the resounding though not novel reassertions of the supremacy of natural law, and the contractual, and therefore limited, character of government. When men were familiarized with the idea of a natural law, which could make promises binding, and of the Original Contract resting upon it, some check might be placed on the uncontrolled action of political authority..."

"...But it is not to be denied that the fundamental principle of ecclesiastical protagonists, the recognition of other societies beyond the State, so far from being an unwarrantable encroachment on civil rights, is the best preservative against the practical dangers which may, and sometimes do, follow from an acceptance of the undiluted conception of legal sovereignty. If the true test of liberty be the recognition of the claims of minorities, it must be conceded that Puritan Dissenters and Quakers in England, the Episcopal Church in Scotland, and the Roman Catholics in Ireland have all alike performed the service of showing that there are bonds of association which do not spring from the fiat of positive law, and may not, save in minor matters, be controlled by considerations of political expediency, justified by an abstract theory of sovereignty. For the true conception of the State, it is needed first to realize the idea of sovereignty, and afterwards to realize its practical limitations. Religious liberty arose, not because the sects believed in it, but out of their passionate determination not to be extinguished, either by political or religious persecution..."

"...It is finally to be observed that religious liberty is rightly described as the parent of political. The forces in favor of monarchy were so strong that, apart from a motive appealing to conscience, making it a duty (even though a mistaken one in any individual case) to resist the government, there would have been no sufficient force to withstand the tyranny of centralization which succeeded the anarchy of feudalism."

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Interesting article.

If liberal neutrality is really an outcome of institutional bargaining between groups to preserve social cooperation, then what is to prevent new groups and ideologies that completely reject liberal neutrality from constantly pushing those institutions in their direction at the expense of the rest of society? We have, for example, ideological movement like the Woke who reject liberal neutrality as well as immigrants who have very different culture assumptions.

Doesn’t liberalism just gradually dissolve itself as it compromises with groups who will never accept an institutional compromise?

And if Western liberalism is the outcome of institutional compromises from the late medieval period in Europe, does it not make the theory unsuited for the rest of the world?

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While I suppose it’s *possible* that the Danish model “will no doubt continue to evolve overtime [sic]”, it doesn’t seem inevitable to me.

Now re: the NHL, it’s probably true…😏

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Because it's a product of collective bargaining it will continue to evolve as the economy evolves and there are new negotiations, rather than being static like a regulation or statute

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You missed my joke, despite the “[sic]” and the NHL reference. Not a hockey fan, I guess.

I was referring to your typo with “overtime” clearly missing a space; no more, no less 😀

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oh lol thanks, went over my head

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