Helen, I thank you SO much for finally giving me the answer to something that has literally kept me awake nights and robbed me of health and personal security. It IS actually possible for me to be both conservative AND liberal, regardless of how others perceive both of these terms.
Dunno about the UK, but in the US I've always been pro neoliberalism. More most of my adult life I've tolerated the socialist and identitarian left because the right has stood only for tax cuts and evangelical Christians. I suspect they might be starting to waver on the tax cuts but there may be one more round of that.
Obama and Clinton were neoliberal. Biden was an FDR liberal who did some of the identitarian stuff to keep them on side. Now I hope Democrats have learned that the identitarian stuff was mostly an online phenomenon, and that going full FDR didn't help Biden in the slightest.
I will still vote Democrat until Trumpism is completely repudiated, but I hope we get someone like Jared Polis as our presidential candidate. AOC is good at garnering attention, but I do not want her running policy.
Jared Polis is all set to codify into law the insane bill ready to pass in the Colorado legislature re "trans" ideology. "Misgendering" your kid could get you to lose custody.
Many people on Substack have raised the alarm about this. We are strong lifelong liberals and sick of having to defend biological reality and common effing sense and being vilified for it.
You have an incredible talent Helen, for offering a perfect filing system for the chaos of ideas and thoughts in my busy brain. It's beyond helpfu (and reasuring) to know we share the same vision and to see it broken down and explained far better than I could ever do. I've tried to express this to myself a d others aloud only to tie myself in knots. I've always seen myself as a liberal, although unlike you, I've always landed somewhere more central than on financial issues but have always been Left, until recently, socially. Well, I still am. Just not on the illiberal left.
My political (UK) allegiences therefore waver, as I look for their adherence to Liberalism more than any R or L label. Your article offers a sanctuary to liberals like myself, along with a clear path forward, and a well needed dose of hope in increasingly volatile times. Thank you. 🙏
I assume you are addressing a primarily US audience because here in the UK we have a number if well established groups across the political spectrum working on women's sex based rights as well as LGB rights (LGBALLIANCE).
Women's Rights Network (national and local branches across UK) concentrates on women's sports and MVAWG and other local campaigns. Sex Matters is primarily legal/legislative/position papers. Both have members across the political spectrum. Party specific organisations like Labour Women's Declaration also work with gender critical groups in other parties. There is a great deal of cross fertilisation across all these groups with well established links to sympathetic journalists etc. Still difficult to get good coverage across MSM. BBC and Guardian particularly problematic. All of this not to say there isn't a huge amount of work to be done because of the remaining influence of the authoritarian left in trade unions and TRAs across institutions, NHS, industry etc.
I can't see what you're responding to, Margaret. In my notifications, it looks like you're responding directly to my piece about liberal lefties supporting liberal conservatives. It could be that somebody made a comment about women's sex-based rights and lack of organisations supporting them and you replied to that but then they deleted it.
Thank you, Helen, for expressing so clearly what I have been muddling toward in my much lesser brain! To stop the pendulum swinging precipitously, a non-reactive ‘centre’ must form and hold — but around what should we coalesce? You’ve charted a mature course through the current cultural and political chaos. Let’s hope enough of us have the gumption and sense to actualise it.
My favourite feedback, Michele! Thank you! I am always so happy when someone tells me I've helped give verbal shape to what they were already thinking. I do think we are finally seeing a readiness to coalesce around those core foundations of liberal democracies and conserve them. I hope so, anyway.
I’m puzzled. Who are these liberal lefties who are so het up about individual liberties? I take it we’re not talking about libertarian socialists, aka anarchists, who en masse drank the fifty genders kool aid and started attacking women’s meetings? Presumably we’re not talking about us social democrats either, who insist that individuals cannot be untangled from the societies they live in (which is why my publication is called _There Is Such A Thing As Society_). Are the liberal lefties then disaffected members or supporters of Labour, Greens or the Lib Dem’s? Are they liberal only in terms of free speech and not in terms of governance or the economy?
Who are the main political figures they would align with?
They are those who remain on the left and oppose authoritarianism just as liberal conservatives are those on the right who oppose authoritarianism. But I cover this in the piece. I'm sure you don't think we are all woke?
OK, I’m on the left and I oppose authoritarianism, so by this definition I’m a liberal. In traditional British nomenclature social democrats are not liberals, so I’ll take this as an education in American politics.
No, not necessarily although I am a British social democrat and also a liberal socially. Other factions on the left who are anti-authoritarian may not consider themselves liberals because they are thinking in terms of axes like materialism or radical feminism and refer to liberalism on its economic axis as pfro-capitalism and liberal feminism as something individualistic rather than focused on women as a sex class. If they uphold the principles of individual liberty against authoritarianism though, they are people who aso oppose both the woke and right-wing populists and can be worked with.
I have got into these distinctions many times before, but I don't have room for it all in this piece which is already 4000 words and is speaking much more broadly.
If you want to look at the back catalogue of writing that forms the background of this piece and the purpose of this substack more generally, the community and the context of an ongoing conversation will become clear. Here:
"Liberalism" can be used in many other contexts quite accurately, of course. When somebody is speaking in a context in which 'liberalism' is being discussed on another axis as in the contrast between orthodox Christianity and liberal Christianity, radical feminism and liberal feminism, socialist and capitalist economic views, we can't refer to the former groups as liberals just because they are anti-authoritarian because "liberal" is contrasting with something else in a different context. We have to call them anti-authoritarian orthodox Christians, radical feminists, socialists etc. I am speaking in the context of an ongoing conversation based on the tenets covered in the piece just linked.
In this context I read 'liberal' to mean supportive of states run along broadly Rawlsian lines with a lot of scope for disagreement on the public/private divide and economic organisation.
Fantastic article. Truly. In Canada, we call liberal conservatives Red Tories. They've done a log of good here. An example is the formation of Ontario Hydro by a Conservative government in 1906. It was the Crown jewel of the province until the 1970s. Prior to a government owned operation, powered by private dams built by private landowners. It was impossible to form a grid. Sadly Ontario Hydro was privatized by an Conservative govnt.
The American philosopher/essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay called "The Conservative," argued that progressive reform has an intrinsic conservatism to it because it is always in response to something and calls forth some ideal past state or way of being. He believed historical change was inevitable but that change shoukd be measured or mediated by a conservstive disposition. Caution and skepticism are in short supply atm. On both sides.
"Lectures on the Times," read at the masonic Temple in Boston, Dec. 9, 1841.
Looks like we all now need to discuss the question of the individual as a social institution.
As a meta-anarchist I find it interesting that libertarians (even anarcho-capitalist propertarians) get more column inches than sovereign citizens, who are the true outlier example, a sort of solipsistic narcissism or vice-versa. Dogmatically doubled-down or tripled-down-ing on the social institution of the individual into a mythic-singularity, they all behave like shorn sheep standing on their own moon of Jupiter. Little princes stuck like a beetle on a pin of their identities, a tortoise on a post of their own reading of the constitution.
I'm riffing on the ideas of "individual" and "social institutions". After recently reading anthropologist Joseph Henrich's example of WEIRD societies as very individualistic. The riff is that having created a notion of the individual as originary to society (noble savages in social contracts) that this sense of the individual then/now might as well be regarded as a social institution, especially, or with the hindsight, where the notion of society as an institution or set of institutions is utterly denied (Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families:)
In trad-sociology 'institutions' are seen as impinging on the individual so for many in WEIRD societies this "individual as social institution" phrase of mine, itself might be a difficult metaphor to entertain as it will likely re-frame one's perspective.
This is an important difference from societies with very individualistic individuals (like hunter-gatherer examples) but have not turned that into a social institution per se.
"Doubling-down" on a notion is the tendency to over-order one's individual preferences, as a neo-Pyrrhonist adjacent practitioner, one will likely regard the outcomes of such thought unwise if dogmatic, if not ridiculous, like a tortoise on a post of their own invention.
"doubling-down" on an aspect of one's life gives one identitarian impulses... libertarians in the USA often focus on their property (their extended self) as constitutional to society, and government as a parasite on that. They are propertarian libertarians. Or propertarian anarchists, or anarcho-capitalists as we used to say in the 80s. Sovereign citizens are a whole new idiocy.
Over-ordering is a term from complexity and chaos theory, the usual example is of heart attacks, a chaotic episode, which is pre-figured by an overly-ordered heartbeat as the heart restricts its movement to the absolute necessary and thus is unable to be flexible. To be unwavering is to be dead.
Those who spin a wheel in the mind (to re-mix Max Stirner in translation) and double-down on the individual as a type of social institution, so that, like marriage as a foundational institution to society, into something grander. Like, say, the way sovereign citizens celebrate their individual-ness while being unable to intellectually engage with the interplay of that very society which has gifted them that sense of their individual-ness
Who try to quote the USA constitution at Tasmanian police officers who stop them while 'travelling" in a vehicle without registration or insurance, these sovcits generate metaphysical chaos among us, (much like the way LLMs trained on their own output suffer model collapse, or semantic collapse) (I am reminded of Brian Aldiss' novel 'Barefoot in the head'.
_____________ (which can then irrupt into the real world -- meme-coins rug pulls and tariffs could even be an example of this ---)
We need to talk about our social institutions, not just as ideologies, or worldviews, or habitus's, or thought styles, or self-fulfilling paranoia gnostic tribalisms... and their meme coin rug pulls --- grifters gonna grift i guess...
I am currently feeling we need more anthropology in our political conversations about liberalism. Tolerance only got us so far.
__________________________________
So then, because I have not studied anthropology (or sociology) I call myself a meta-anarchist to indicate I am not the young anarchist street poet I never was. A version of social ecology with large inputs from complexity and chaos theory might be a better descriptor of my framework. On my autism a good scare comparison can be seen at
Helen, I thank you SO much for finally giving me the answer to something that has literally kept me awake nights and robbed me of health and personal security. It IS actually possible for me to be both conservative AND liberal, regardless of how others perceive both of these terms.
Dunno about the UK, but in the US I've always been pro neoliberalism. More most of my adult life I've tolerated the socialist and identitarian left because the right has stood only for tax cuts and evangelical Christians. I suspect they might be starting to waver on the tax cuts but there may be one more round of that.
Obama and Clinton were neoliberal. Biden was an FDR liberal who did some of the identitarian stuff to keep them on side. Now I hope Democrats have learned that the identitarian stuff was mostly an online phenomenon, and that going full FDR didn't help Biden in the slightest.
I will still vote Democrat until Trumpism is completely repudiated, but I hope we get someone like Jared Polis as our presidential candidate. AOC is good at garnering attention, but I do not want her running policy.
Jared Polis is all set to codify into law the insane bill ready to pass in the Colorado legislature re "trans" ideology. "Misgendering" your kid could get you to lose custody.
Many people on Substack have raised the alarm about this. We are strong lifelong liberals and sick of having to defend biological reality and common effing sense and being vilified for it.
https://lgbcouragecoalition.substack.com/p/action-alert-prevent-criminalizing
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/in-colorado-misgendering-your-kid
Don't care I still like him.
In any case I don't think he will run for president. He doesn't have the charisma.
We’re trying to claw our party back to common sense:
DIAG - Democrats for An Informed Approach to Gender
https://www.di-ag.org
Brilliant, Ms. Pluckrose!
Thank you, as always, Helen, for your good will, logic, and common sense.
Here's one lifelong lefty who appreciates it.
You have an incredible talent Helen, for offering a perfect filing system for the chaos of ideas and thoughts in my busy brain. It's beyond helpfu (and reasuring) to know we share the same vision and to see it broken down and explained far better than I could ever do. I've tried to express this to myself a d others aloud only to tie myself in knots. I've always seen myself as a liberal, although unlike you, I've always landed somewhere more central than on financial issues but have always been Left, until recently, socially. Well, I still am. Just not on the illiberal left.
My political (UK) allegiences therefore waver, as I look for their adherence to Liberalism more than any R or L label. Your article offers a sanctuary to liberals like myself, along with a clear path forward, and a well needed dose of hope in increasingly volatile times. Thank you. 🙏
I assume you are addressing a primarily US audience because here in the UK we have a number if well established groups across the political spectrum working on women's sex based rights as well as LGB rights (LGBALLIANCE).
Women's Rights Network (national and local branches across UK) concentrates on women's sports and MVAWG and other local campaigns. Sex Matters is primarily legal/legislative/position papers. Both have members across the political spectrum. Party specific organisations like Labour Women's Declaration also work with gender critical groups in other parties. There is a great deal of cross fertilisation across all these groups with well established links to sympathetic journalists etc. Still difficult to get good coverage across MSM. BBC and Guardian particularly problematic. All of this not to say there isn't a huge amount of work to be done because of the remaining influence of the authoritarian left in trade unions and TRAs across institutions, NHS, industry etc.
I can't see what you're responding to, Margaret. In my notifications, it looks like you're responding directly to my piece about liberal lefties supporting liberal conservatives. It could be that somebody made a comment about women's sex-based rights and lack of organisations supporting them and you replied to that but then they deleted it.
Thank you, Helen, for expressing so clearly what I have been muddling toward in my much lesser brain! To stop the pendulum swinging precipitously, a non-reactive ‘centre’ must form and hold — but around what should we coalesce? You’ve charted a mature course through the current cultural and political chaos. Let’s hope enough of us have the gumption and sense to actualise it.
My favourite feedback, Michele! Thank you! I am always so happy when someone tells me I've helped give verbal shape to what they were already thinking. I do think we are finally seeing a readiness to coalesce around those core foundations of liberal democracies and conserve them. I hope so, anyway.
My thanks as well, Helen.
To me, that foundation includes (surely among other things) commitments to:
- Evidence-based policies (rationality)
- Honest communication with the electorate
- Integrity & accountability
- Institutions which serve the public interest at large
- An independent but accountable judiciary
At least as a start …
The crazier things get, the more imperative it becomes to find a way! Thanks for your work, Helen.
I’m puzzled. Who are these liberal lefties who are so het up about individual liberties? I take it we’re not talking about libertarian socialists, aka anarchists, who en masse drank the fifty genders kool aid and started attacking women’s meetings? Presumably we’re not talking about us social democrats either, who insist that individuals cannot be untangled from the societies they live in (which is why my publication is called _There Is Such A Thing As Society_). Are the liberal lefties then disaffected members or supporters of Labour, Greens or the Lib Dem’s? Are they liberal only in terms of free speech and not in terms of governance or the economy?
Who are the main political figures they would align with?
They are those who remain on the left and oppose authoritarianism just as liberal conservatives are those on the right who oppose authoritarianism. But I cover this in the piece. I'm sure you don't think we are all woke?
OK, I’m on the left and I oppose authoritarianism, so by this definition I’m a liberal. In traditional British nomenclature social democrats are not liberals, so I’ll take this as an education in American politics.
No, not necessarily although I am a British social democrat and also a liberal socially. Other factions on the left who are anti-authoritarian may not consider themselves liberals because they are thinking in terms of axes like materialism or radical feminism and refer to liberalism on its economic axis as pfro-capitalism and liberal feminism as something individualistic rather than focused on women as a sex class. If they uphold the principles of individual liberty against authoritarianism though, they are people who aso oppose both the woke and right-wing populists and can be worked with.
I have got into these distinctions many times before, but I don't have room for it all in this piece which is already 4000 words and is speaking much more broadly.
If you want to look at the back catalogue of writing that forms the background of this piece and the purpose of this substack more generally, the community and the context of an ongoing conversation will become clear. Here:
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/relaunching-the-overflowings-of-a
"Liberalism" can be used in many other contexts quite accurately, of course. When somebody is speaking in a context in which 'liberalism' is being discussed on another axis as in the contrast between orthodox Christianity and liberal Christianity, radical feminism and liberal feminism, socialist and capitalist economic views, we can't refer to the former groups as liberals just because they are anti-authoritarian because "liberal" is contrasting with something else in a different context. We have to call them anti-authoritarian orthodox Christians, radical feminists, socialists etc. I am speaking in the context of an ongoing conversation based on the tenets covered in the piece just linked.
In this context I read 'liberal' to mean supportive of states run along broadly Rawlsian lines with a lot of scope for disagreement on the public/private divide and economic organisation.
Fantastic article. Truly. In Canada, we call liberal conservatives Red Tories. They've done a log of good here. An example is the formation of Ontario Hydro by a Conservative government in 1906. It was the Crown jewel of the province until the 1970s. Prior to a government owned operation, powered by private dams built by private landowners. It was impossible to form a grid. Sadly Ontario Hydro was privatized by an Conservative govnt.
"Violent shoving" says it all. 😂
The American philosopher/essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay called "The Conservative," argued that progressive reform has an intrinsic conservatism to it because it is always in response to something and calls forth some ideal past state or way of being. He believed historical change was inevitable but that change shoukd be measured or mediated by a conservstive disposition. Caution and skepticism are in short supply atm. On both sides.
"Lectures on the Times," read at the masonic Temple in Boston, Dec. 9, 1841.
Looks like we all now need to discuss the question of the individual as a social institution.
As a meta-anarchist I find it interesting that libertarians (even anarcho-capitalist propertarians) get more column inches than sovereign citizens, who are the true outlier example, a sort of solipsistic narcissism or vice-versa. Dogmatically doubled-down or tripled-down-ing on the social institution of the individual into a mythic-singularity, they all behave like shorn sheep standing on their own moon of Jupiter. Little princes stuck like a beetle on a pin of their identities, a tortoise on a post of their own reading of the constitution.
Maybe I'll map a matrix this weekend.
see also for "institutional" chatter or framework for this POV: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-joseph-henrich-three-ish
I'm afraid I didn't understand any of that.
I'm riffing on the ideas of "individual" and "social institutions". After recently reading anthropologist Joseph Henrich's example of WEIRD societies as very individualistic. The riff is that having created a notion of the individual as originary to society (noble savages in social contracts) that this sense of the individual then/now might as well be regarded as a social institution, especially, or with the hindsight, where the notion of society as an institution or set of institutions is utterly denied (Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families:)
In trad-sociology 'institutions' are seen as impinging on the individual so for many in WEIRD societies this "individual as social institution" phrase of mine, itself might be a difficult metaphor to entertain as it will likely re-frame one's perspective.
https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/qa-weird
This is an important difference from societies with very individualistic individuals (like hunter-gatherer examples) but have not turned that into a social institution per se.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution
_________________________________________________________
"Doubling-down" on a notion is the tendency to over-order one's individual preferences, as a neo-Pyrrhonist adjacent practitioner, one will likely regard the outcomes of such thought unwise if dogmatic, if not ridiculous, like a tortoise on a post of their own invention.
https://kagi.com/images?q=tortoise+on+a+post+meme
"doubling-down" on an aspect of one's life gives one identitarian impulses... libertarians in the USA often focus on their property (their extended self) as constitutional to society, and government as a parasite on that. They are propertarian libertarians. Or propertarian anarchists, or anarcho-capitalists as we used to say in the 80s. Sovereign citizens are a whole new idiocy.
Over-ordering is a term from complexity and chaos theory, the usual example is of heart attacks, a chaotic episode, which is pre-figured by an overly-ordered heartbeat as the heart restricts its movement to the absolute necessary and thus is unable to be flexible. To be unwavering is to be dead.
Those who spin a wheel in the mind (to re-mix Max Stirner in translation) and double-down on the individual as a type of social institution, so that, like marriage as a foundational institution to society, into something grander. Like, say, the way sovereign citizens celebrate their individual-ness while being unable to intellectually engage with the interplay of that very society which has gifted them that sense of their individual-ness
Who try to quote the USA constitution at Tasmanian police officers who stop them while 'travelling" in a vehicle without registration or insurance, these sovcits generate metaphysical chaos among us, (much like the way LLMs trained on their own output suffer model collapse, or semantic collapse) (I am reminded of Brian Aldiss' novel 'Barefoot in the head'.
_____________ (which can then irrupt into the real world -- meme-coins rug pulls and tariffs could even be an example of this ---)
see https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/machine-learning-maps-social-learning
or ee also Hoel's https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/welcome-to-the-semantic-apocalypse
We need to talk about our social institutions, not just as ideologies, or worldviews, or habitus's, or thought styles, or self-fulfilling paranoia gnostic tribalisms... and their meme coin rug pulls --- grifters gonna grift i guess...
I am currently feeling we need more anthropology in our political conversations about liberalism. Tolerance only got us so far.
__________________________________
So then, because I have not studied anthropology (or sociology) I call myself a meta-anarchist to indicate I am not the young anarchist street poet I never was. A version of social ecology with large inputs from complexity and chaos theory might be a better descriptor of my framework. On my autism a good scare comparison can be seen at
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-sky-pool
but then I would have to explain by what is called the… —gap … —
I keep a parallel self-hosted site so if you want to check out my references one can begin at https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/topics-and-projects/
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/it-is-overneath-9-years-ago
hm, think I meant this link but anyways https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/reading-joseph-henrich-two/