ALL THE lEFT/rIGHT HATRED OF LIBERALISM THEY CAN MUSTER...:

I am sure a contrarian finance bro will insist, if you look at the right geospatial data, from a certain angle, adjusting for media bias, that the invasion of Ukraine is going well. For now, though, it seems the Kremlin has put too much store in western decadence. Neither the resistance on the ground nor the staying power of its sponsors in the democratic world were bargained for. By way of consolation, Russia has plentiful historical company. Terrorist clerics, godless Marxists and other enemies of the west, or "Occidentalists", share few beliefs. One is that free societies have an innate flakiness: a sort of will to impotence. Even as those enemies have failed to survive, the trope does.

I don't pretend that the average westerner has read their Hume and Spinoza. I don't even pretend they deal in such abstractions as "the west". But there is a way of life -- to do with personal autonomy -- for which people have consistently endured hardship, up to and including a blood price. Believing otherwise is not just bad analysis. It leads to more conflict than might otherwise exist. [...]

The eternal error, I think, is to confuse the substance of liberalism (which is compromise-minded) with people's attachment to it (which is far from compromising). Liberalism is sparse in content. It has no account of the good life, but rather allows competing ones to go at it within a framework of rules. If I say "socialist architecture", for instance, you picture something concrete and rectilinear. What is liberal architecture? There are Islamic rules about sex and diet: a liberal can be celibate or wanton, a vegan or a regular at St Johns.

Occidentalists can't believe that a creed that makes so few truth claims would inspire devotion. But here we still are, and here so many of them aren't.

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