The social and economic issues inherent to liberalism are acknowledged as a constant factor throughout the history of liberalism, but there is no vision to resolve them aside from the application of Strong and Stable Leadership.
she also brings up an educative dimension though. The liberal fascination with heroes is completely pathetic, but the failure to form liberal citizens is a legit macro-problem and I find it really hard to believe that the over-prioritization of technical, professional education doesn’t have at least something to do with it. So I think she’s right about that much.
She’s also right about liberals failing to offer a compelling moral vision (I think we agree on this?). If you’re right, and liberals do actually offer a moral vision, I think it’d reduce to: empathy with the dispossessed and indigent. And I think where liberals fail in communicating this is in explaining why exactly empathy is owed to such people and how to identify them (and obv, what this empathy will amount to in material terms, but I think liberals do talk about this frequently). And I think those failures have been shown up by reactionary judo flipping of the terms of moral discussion by redefining desert and moral worth to redirect things like entitlements, state largesse, and party patronage towards hegemonic groups.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Liberalism as a moral vision, at least under one construal, might just be inherently unstable, and at a pretty fundamental level. It starts from the twin assumptions of a free and equal citizenry and pluralism, or, everyone’s right to the pursuit of their own good (consistent with a set of everyone else’s right). It aims to defend both and how it manages to get off the ground is by placing the Right over the Good. Questions over what it would be good for everyone to do (sometimes called perfectionist theories) can’t be resolved by state coercion; that’s held as much by lockean propertarians on the right as it is by Rawlsian/Dworkinian market socialists on the left. What can be the object of legitimate violence is the policing of what’s owed to people as members of a free and equal citizenry. So the boundaries liberals draw for themselves wrt moral discussion are narrower than other groups who are ok with ditching pluralism. One example that I think articulates the implicit logic in a lot of liberal thinking is Shklars liberalism of fear. But this kind of defense of liberalism as the least worst option is obv not an inspiring moral vision. No one would die for it. While we’ve seen plenty of people kill for their particular illiberal visions.
