New York Times Columnist: Liberalism Is Dead

All hail its replacement, identity politics techocratic fascism.

That Instapundit has excerpts and related thoughts. Here's the original at the NYT.

Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within.

Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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In an age of declamation and shouting, of polarization and vilification, of politics-for-sale and the insidious submersion of politics in fact-lite entertainment, the emergence of Trump is as unsurprising as it is menacing...

Note the failure to name the chief culprit in the murder of liberalism: Liberals themselves.

We've long suspected that liberals were insincere when they mouthed their pieties-- they were simply interested in having power over others, and theory of liberal politics gave them as good a pretext any to assert it.

Now the masks are falling, and it's frightening. Fewer people than ever believe that the individual has rights; almost entire left conceives as "rights" belonging to broad corporate groups, whether a race, a sex, a political lobby, a particularly exotic brace of gender-identifiers.

The individual grows smaller as the mob armies grow larger and larger.

posted by Ace at 06:52 PM

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