Daily Archives: April 2, 2022

Liberalism is in peril. The fundamentals of liberal societies are tolerance of difference, respect for individual rights, and the rule of law, and all are under threat as the world suffers what can be called a democratic recession or even a depression. According to Freedom House, political rights and civil liberties around the world have fallen each year for the last 16 years. Liberalisms decline is evident in the growing strength of autocracies such as China and Russia, the erosion of liberalor nominally liberalinstitutions in countries such as Hungary and Turkey, and the backsliding of liberal democracies such as India and the United States.

In each of these cases, nationalism has powered the rise of illiberalism. Illiberal leaders, their parties, and their allies have harnessed nationalist rhetoric in seeking greater control of their societies. They denounce their opponents as out-of-touch elites, effete cosmopolitans, and globalists. They claim to be the authentic representatives of their country and its true guardians. Sometimes, illiberal politicians merely caricature their liberal counterparts as ineffectual and removed from the lives of the people they presume to represent. Often, however, they describe their liberal rivals not simply as political adversaries but as something more sinister: enemies of the people.

The very nature of liberalism makes it susceptible to this line of attack. The most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance: the state does not prescribe beliefs, identities, or any other kind of dogma. Ever since its tentative emergence in the seventeenth century as an organizing principle for politics, liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics to aim not at the good life as defined by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition but at the preservation of life itself under conditions in which populations cannot agree on what the good life is. This agnostic nature creates a spiritual vacuum, as individuals go their own ways and experience only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values, such as tolerance, compromise, and deliberation, but these do not foster the strong emotional bonds found in tightly knit religious and ethnonationalist communities. Indeed, liberal societies have often encouraged the aimless pursuit of material self-gratification.

Liberalisms most important selling point remains the pragmatic one that has existed for centuries: its ability to manage diversity in pluralistic societies. Yet there is a limit to the kinds of diversity that liberal societies can handle. If enough people reject liberal principles themselves and seek to restrict the fundamental rights of others, or if citizens resort to violence to get their way, then liberalism alone cannot maintain political order. And if diverse societies move away from liberal principles and try to base their national identities on race, ethnicity, religion, or some other, different substantive vision of the good life, they invite a return to potentially bloody conflict. A world full of such countries will invariably be more fractious, more tumultuous, and more violent.

That is why it is all the more important for liberals not to give up on the idea of the nation. They should recognize that in truth, nothing makes the universalism of liberalism incompatible with a world of nation-states. National identity is malleable, and it can be shaped to reflect liberal aspirations and to instill a sense of community and purpose among a broad public.

For proof of the abiding importance of national identity, look no further than the trouble Russia has run into in attacking Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine did not have an identity separate from that of Russia and that the country would collapse immediately once his invasion began. Instead, Ukraine has resisted Russia tenaciously precisely because its citizens are loyal to the idea of an independent, liberal democratic Ukraine and do not want to live in a corrupt dictatorship imposed from without. With their bravery, they have made clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideals are embedded in a country they can call their own.

Liberal societies struggle to present a positive vision of national identity to their citizens. The theory behind liberalism has great difficulties drawing clear boundaries around communities and explaining what is owed to people inside and outside those boundaries. This is because the theory is built on top of a claim of universalism. As asserted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; further, Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Liberals are theoretically concerned with violations of human rights no matter where in the world they occur. Many liberals dislike the particularistic attachments of nationalists and imagine themselves to be citizens of the world.

The claim of universalism can be hard to reconcile with the division of the world into nation-states. There is no clear liberal theory, for instance, on how to draw national boundaries, a deficit that has led to intraliberal conflicts over the separatism of regions such as Catalonia, Quebec, and Scotland and disagreements over the proper treatment of immigrants and refugees. Populists, such as former U.S. President Donald Trump, have channeled that tension between the universalist aspirations of liberalism and the narrower claims of nationalism to powerful effect.

Nationalists complain that liberalism has dissolved the bonds of national community and replaced them with a global cosmopolitanism that cares about people in distant countries as much as it cares for fellow citizens. Nineteenth-century nationalists based national identity on biology and believed that national communities were rooted in common ancestry. This continues to be a theme for certain contemporary nationalists, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has defined Hungarian national identity as being based on Magyar ethnicity. Other nationalists, such as the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony, have sought to revise twentieth-century ethnonationalism by arguing that nations constitute coherent cultural units that allow their members to share thick traditions of food, holidays, language, and the like. The American conservative thinker Patrick Deneen has asserted that liberalism constitutes a form of anticulture that has dissolved all forms of preliberal culture, using the power of the state to insert itself into and control every aspect of private life.

Significantly, Deneen and other conservatives have broken with economic neoliberals and have been vocal in blaming market capitalism for eroding the values of family, community, and tradition. As a result, the twentieth-century categories that defined the political left and right in terms of economic ideology do not fit the present reality neatly, with right-wing groups being willing to countenance the use of state power to regulate both social life and the economy.

There is considerable overlap between nationalists and religious conservatives. Among the traditions that contemporary nationalists want to preserve are religious ones; thus, the Law and Justice party in Poland has been closely aligned with the Polish Catholic Church and has taken on many of the latters cultural complaints about liberal Europes support for abortion and same-sex marriage. Similarly, religious conservatives often regard themselves as patriots; this is certainly true for the American evangelicals who formed the core of Trumps Make America Great Again movement.

The substantive conservative critique of liberalismthat liberal societies provide no strong common moral core around which community can be builtis true enough. This is indeed a feature of liberalism, not a bug. The question for conservatives is whether there is a realistic way to turn back the clock and reimpose a thicker moral order. Some U.S. conservatives hope to return to an imagined time when virtually everyone in the United States was Christian. But modern societies are far more diverse religiously today than at the time of Europes religious wars in the sixteenth century. The idea of restoring a shared moral tradition defined by religious belief is a nonstarter. Leaders who hope to effect this kind of restoration, such as Narendra Modi, Indias Hindu nationalist prime minister, are inviting oppression and communal violence. Modi knows this all too well: he was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat when it was racked by communal riots in 2002 that left thousands dead, mostly Muslims. Since 2014, when Modi became prime minister, he and his allies have sought to tie Indian national identity to the masts of Hinduism and the Hindi language, a sea change from the secular pluralism of Indias liberal founders.

Illiberal forces around the world will continue to use appeals to nationalism as a powerful electoral weapon. Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this rhetoric as jingoistic and crude. But they should not cede the nation to their opponents.

Liberalism, with its universalist pretensions, may sit uneasily alongside seemingly parochial nationalism, but the two can be reconciled. The goals of liberalism are entirely compatible with a world divided into nation-states. All societies need to make use of force, both to preserve internal order and to protect themselves from external enemies. A liberal society does this by creating a powerful state but then constraining the states power under the rule of law. The states power is based on a social contract among autonomous individuals who agree to give up some of their rights to do as they please in return for the states protection. It is legitimized by both the common acceptance of the law and, if it is a liberal democracy, popular elections.

Liberal rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced by a state, which, according to the German sociologist Max Webers famous definition, is a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory. The territorial jurisdiction of a state necessarily corresponds to the area occupied by the group of individuals who signed on to the social contract. People living outside that jurisdiction must have their rights respected, but not necessarily enforced, by that state.

States with a delimited territorial jurisdiction therefore remain critical political actors, because they are the only ones able to exercise a legitimate use of force. In todays globalized world, power is employed by a wide variety of bodies, from multinational corporations to nonprofit groups to terrorist organizations to supranational bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations. The need for international cooperation in addressing issues such as global warming and pandemics has never been more evident. But it remains the case that one particular form of power, the ability to enforce rules through the threat or the actual use of force, remains under the control of nation-states. Neither the European Union nor the International Air Transport Association deploys its own police or army to enforce the rules it sets. Such organizations still depend on the coercive capacity of the countries that empowered them. To be sure, there is today a large body of international law that in many domains displaces national-level law; think, for example, of the European Unions acquis communautaire, which serves as a kind of common law to regulate commerce and settle disputes. But in the end, international law continues to rely on national-level enforcement. When EU member states disagree on important matters of policy, as they did during the euro crisis of 2010 and the migrant crisis of 2015, the outcome is decided not by European law but by the relative power of the member states. Ultimate power, in other words, continues to be the province of nation-states, which means that the control of power at this level remains critical.

Catalan separatists rally in Barcelona, Spain, September 2019

There is thus no necessary contradiction between liberal universalism and the need for nation-states. Although the normative value of human rights may be universal, enforcement power is not; it is a scarce resource that is necessarily applied in a territorially delimited way. A liberal state is perfectly justified in granting different levels of rights to citizens and noncitizens, because it does not have the resources or the writ to protect rights universally. All people within the states territory are due the equal protection of the law, but only citizens are full participants in the social contract, with special rights and duties, in particular the right to vote.

The fact that states remain the locus of coercive power should inspire caution about proposals to create new supranational bodies and to delegate such power to them. Liberal societies have had several hundred years of experience learning how to constrain power at a national level through rule-of-law and legislative institutions and how to balance power so that its use reflects general interests. They have no idea how to create such institutions at a global level, where, for example, a global court or legislature would be able to constrain the arbitrary decisions of a global executive. The European Union is the product of the most serious effort to do this at a regional level; the result is an awkward system characterized by excessive weakness in some domains (fiscal policy, foreign affairs) and excessive power in others (economic regulation). Europe at least has a certain common history and cultural identity that do not exist at the global level. International institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court continue to rely on states to enforce their writs.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant imagined a condition of perpetual peace in which a world populated by liberal states would regulate international relations through law rather than by resorting to violence. Putins invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, unfortunately, that the world has not yet reached this post-historical moment and that raw military power remains the ultimate guarantor of peace for liberal countries. The nation-state is therefore unlikely to disappear as the crucial actor in global politics.

The conservative critique of liberalism contains, at its core, a reasonable skepticism of the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy. Liberal societies assume an equality of human dignity, a dignity that is rooted in an individuals ability to make choices. For that reason, they are dedicated to protecting that autonomy as a matter of basic rights. But although autonomy is a fundamental liberal value, it is not the sole human good that automatically trumps all other visions of the good life.

The realm of what is accepted as autonomy has steadily expanded over time, broadening from the choice to obey rules within an existing moral framework to making up those rules for oneself. But respect for autonomy was meant to manage and moderate the competition of deeply held beliefs, not to displace those beliefs in their entirety. Not every human being thinks that maximizing his or her personal autonomy is the most important goal of life or that disrupting every existing form of authority is necessarily a good thing. Many people are happy to limit their freedom of choice by accepting religious and moral frameworks that connect them with other people or by living within inherited cultural traditions. The U.S. Constitutions First Amendment was meant to protect the free exercise of religion, not to protect citizens from religion.

Successful liberal societies have their own culture and their own understanding of the good life, even if that vision may be thinner than those offered by societies bound by a single doctrine. They cannot be neutral with regard to the values that are necessary to sustain themselves as liberal societies. They need to prioritize public-spiritedness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and active engagement in public affairs if they are to cohere. They need to prize innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking if they are to prosper economically. A society of inward-looking individuals interested only in maximizing their personal consumption will not be a society at all.

States are important not just because they are the locus of legitimate power and the instruments for controlling violence. They are also a singular source of community. Liberal universalism on one level flies in the face of the nature of human sociability. People feel the strongest bonds of affection for those closest to them, such as friends and family; as the circle of acquaintance widens, their sense of obligation inevitably attenuates. As human societies have grown larger and more complex over the centuries, the boundaries of solidarity have expanded dramatically from families and villages and tribes to entire countries. But few people love humanity as a whole. For most people around the world, the country remains the largest unit of solidarity to which they feel an instinctive loyalty. Indeed, that loyalty becomes a critical underpinning of the states legitimacy and thus its ability to govern. In certain societies, a weak national identity can have disastrous consequences, as is evident in some struggling developing countries, such as Myanmar and Nigeria, and in some failed states, such as Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.

This argument may seem similar to ones made by Hazony, the conservative Israeli scholar, in his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, in which he advocates a global order based on the sovereignty of nation-states. He makes an important point in warning against the tendency of liberal countries, such as the United States, to go too far in seeking to remake the rest of the world in their own image. But he is wrong in assuming that the existing countries are clearly demarcated cultural units and that a peaceful global order can be built by accepting them as they are. Todays countries are social constructions that are the byproducts of historical struggles that often involved conquest, violence, forced assimilation, and the deliberate manipulation of cultural symbols. There are better and worse forms of national identity, and societies can exercise agency in choosing among them.

In particular, if national identity is based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or religious heritage, then it becomes a potentially exclusionary category that violates the liberal principle of equal dignity. Although there is no necessary contradiction between the need for national identity and liberal universalism, there is nonetheless a powerful potential point of tension between the two principles. When based on fixed characteristics, national identity can turn into aggressive and exclusive nationalism, as it did in Europe during the first part of the twentieth century.

For this reason, liberal societies should not formally recognize groups based on fixed identities such as race, ethnicity, or religious heritage. There are times, of course, when this becomes inevitable, and liberal principles fail to apply. In many parts of the world, ethnic or religious groups have occupied the same territory for generations and have their own thick cultural and linguistic traditions. In the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, ethnic or religious identity is de facto an essential characteristic for most people, and assimilating them into a broader national culture is highly unrealistic. It is possible to organize a form of liberal politics around several cultural units; India, for example, recognizes multiple national languages and has in the past permitted its states to set their own policies with regard to education and legal systems. Federalism and the concomitant devolution of powers to subnational units are often necessary in such diverse countries. Power can be formally allocated to different groups defined by their cultural identity in a structure that political scientists call consociationalism. Although this has worked reasonably well in the Netherlands, the practice has been disastrous in places such as Bosnia, Iraq, and Lebanon, where identity groups see themselves locked in a zero-sum struggle. In societies in which cultural groups have not yet hardened into self-regarding units, it is therefore much better to deal with citizens as individuals rather than as members of identity groups.

On the other hand, there are other aspects of national identity that can be adopted voluntarily and therefore shared more broadly, such as literary traditions, historical narratives, and language, food, and sports. Catalonia, Quebec, and Scotland are all regions with distinct historical and cultural traditions, and they all include nationalist partisans seeking complete separation from the country to which they are linked. There is little doubt that these regions would continue to be liberal societies respecting individual rights were they to separate, just as the Czech Republic and Slovakia did after they became separate countries in 1993.

National identity represents obvious dangers but also an opportunity. It is a social construct, and it can be shaped to support, rather than undermine, liberal values. Many countries have historically been molded out of diverse populations that feel a strong sense of community based on political principles or ideals rather than deterministic group categories. Australia, Canada, France, India, and the United States are all countries that in recent decades have sought to construct national identities based on political principles rather than race, ethnicity, or religion. The United States has gone through a long and painful process of redefining what it means to be an American, progressively removing barriers to citizenship based on class, race, and genderalthough this process is still incomplete and has experienced many setbacks. In France, the construction of a national identity began with the French Revolutions Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which established an ideal of citizenship based on a common language and culture. In the mid-twentieth century, Australia and Canada were countries with dominant white-majority populations and restrictive laws regarding immigration and citizenship, such as the notorious White Australia policy, which kept out immigrants from Asia. Both, however, reconstructed their national identities on nonracial lines after the 1960s and opened themselves up to massive immigration. Today, both countries have larger foreign-born populations than does the United States, with little of the United States polarization and white backlash.

Donald Trump, then a U.S. presidential candidate, in Derry, New Hampshire, August 2015

Nonetheless, the difficulty of forging a common identity in sharply divided democracies should not be underestimated. Most contemporary liberal societies were built on top of historical nations whose understandings of national identity had been forged through illiberal methods. France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea were all nations before they became liberal democracies; the United States, as many have noted, was a state before it became a nation. The process of defining the American nation in liberal political terms has been long, arduous, and periodically violent, and even today that process is being challenged by people on both the left and the right with sharply competing narratives about the countrys origins.

Liberalism would be in trouble if people saw it as nothing more than a mechanism for peacefully managing diversity, without a broader sense of national purpose. People who have experienced violence, war, and dictatorship generally long to live in a liberal society, as Europeans did in the period after 1945. But as people get used to a peaceful life under a liberal regime, they tend to take that peace and order for granted and start longing for a politics that will direct them to higher ends. In 1914, Europe had been largely free of devastating conflict for nearly a century, and masses of people were happy to march off to war despite the enormous material progress that had occurred in the interim.

The world has perhaps arrived at a similar point in human history: it has been free from large-scale interstate war for three-quarters of a century and has, in the meantime, seen a massive increase in global prosperity that has produced equally massive social change. The European Union was created as an antidote to the nationalism that had led to the world wars and in that respect has been successful beyond all hopes. But Russias invasion of Ukraine augurs more disarray and violence ahead.

At this juncture, two very different futures present themselves. If Putin is successful in undermining Ukrainian independence and democracy, the world will return to an era of aggressive and intolerant nationalism reminiscent of the early twentieth century. The United States will not be immune from this trend, as populists such as Trump aspire to replicate Putins authoritarian ways. On the other hand, if Putin leads Russia into a debacle of military and economic failure, the chance remains to relearn the liberal lesson that power unconstrained by law leads to national disaster and to revive the ideals of a free and democratic world

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A Country of Their Own: Liberalism Needs the Nation - Foreign Affairs Magazine

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Emissions targets ignore what is happening in the world

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The Liberals are either governing in a fantasy universe or they are being deliberately reckless. How else do you explain that, in the same week our European allies were preparing to ration energy, being held hostage as they are by a murderous tyrant wreaking havoc in Ukraine, our government announced a dramatic acceleration of its plan to hobble the oil and gas industry?

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Germany was foolish to phase out nuclear power and coal, especially as quickly as it had planned, leaving it at the mercy of unreliable wind energy and natural gas imports from Russia. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault refuse to learn any lessons from recent events. Theyve ignored the reality that our allies phasing out fossil fuels has done little to move their economies to green energy, and instead, Europe has helped fuel Russian President Vladimir Putins monstrous invasion of Ukraine. Given this self-imposed dependence, enacting a full oil and gas embargo on Russia is close to impossible.

No matter, our leaders evidently believe that is Europes problem. On Tuesday, Trudeau outlined targets to lower carbon emissions to between 40 and 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. More specifically, the government is demanding, without saying how, the energy sector cut emissions by 42 per cent below 2019 levels.

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It is a goal Trudeau laid out while dismissing Canadas largest industry and pretending as if oil and gas companies dont already pay taxes and dont already face a slough of anti-energy policies.

With record profits, this is the moment for the oil and gas sector to invest in the sustainable future that will be good for business, good for communities and good for our future, the prime minister said.

Never mind that politicians have no business telling companies what to do with their profits. Increased corporate revenues also mean increased tax revenues. If the federal government wants to use the extra revenue it gains from the oil and gas sector during a boom period, then it is free to do so. Whats more, the federal governments carbon tax increased to $50 per tonne on Friday and will eventually reach $170.

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Its not enough for the Liberals to collect ever-increasing tax revenues, though they want to tell companies how to spend whats left.

Raising the carbon tax will do little more than make life more expensive for Canadians and divert oil and gas investment to less-regulated jurisdictions. If the carbon tax were truly as effective at curbing emissions as the government claims, why did it feel the need to outline a whole host of other regulatory measures to achieve the same goals? By creating the impression that Canadas regulatory regime and tax structure are constantly in flux, the government is missing the opportunity to balance emissions reduction with economic growth.

Focusing more on developing lower-emitting natural gas and preparing for a warmer future are better uses of government resources. Besides, the energy industry has long been improving its efficiency, suggesting existing provincial and federal incentives are working as intended. Between 2011 and 2018, for example, oil sands emissions per barrel declined by 22 per cent.

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Trying to dictate where companies invest, as the Trudeau Liberals want to do, shows this is less about capping emissions, and more about control. The fact that the government is mandating that new vehicles sold in Canada either be hybrids or fully electric by 2035 gives away the plot.

Trudeau also said Tuesday that, big oil lobbyists have had their time on the field, implying that greedy energy companies have got their way and the government is finally sticking up for the little guy. This, of course, doesnt square with policies brought in by the prime minister himself.

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This is the government that cancelled Northern Gateway and introduced cumbersome regulations that encouraged the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline. It is the government that made the approval process for any energy project one of endless consultation and politicization. And, of course, it is this government that brought in the carbon tax.

No big oil lobbyists think this has been a success. But having a capitalist bogeymen to blame is a good way to justify doing what you were already planning to do.

Trudeau went on: Now, its over to the workers and engineers who will build solutions. The only logical reaction is to ask: really? Would those be the same workers and engineers who will struggle to find meaningful work as oil and gas investment is driven further and further away? Those workers?

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It hardly needs to be said that the plan disproportionately singles out the West, and especially Alberta. Good jobs for regular people working with their hands and extracting wealth from Canadas bounty of natural resources has long been an embarrassment to the well-to-do Central-Canadian elite.

Ontario carmakers, on the other hand, will be fine, as they will be able to produce government-mandated electric vehicles. It wont matter whether they are economical to produce or to buy and maintain. Canadian consumers wont have a choice.

Energy prices have indeed been much higher lately, after several years of below-normal prices. It isnt reassuring that the federal government refuses to acknowledge why that is. If Canada, the United States and Europe hadnt been so committed to forcing their economies off of fossil fuels, there would be less global reliance on Russian energy. Unfortunately, that is a world that the Liberal government is obviously comfortable to live in.

National Post

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NP View: The Liberal plan to smother the energy industry - National Post

On April 1, Pike Liberal Arts School and Lurleen B. Wallace Community College teamed up for a welding and building expo.

Students ranging from ninth grade to 11th grade were able to get a taste of welding and building activities during the expo. The expo included virtual reality welding, hands-on welding exercises, a variety of class and trade booths, and even a Jenga tower that students could practice building skills on.

LBW President Dr. Brock Kelly was in attendance for the expo as he wanted to make sure that the welding was not the only spark the kids had during their time at the expo.

Maybe it sparks an interest for someone who may not know there are jobs out there in the construction and welding industries, Kelly said.

Dr. Christina Griffin, who is the associate dean of instructional effectiveness and quality at the Luverne Center for LBW, was also in attendance at the event and was excited for the kids to experience the expo.

We just wanted to come out and make sure that the kids knew what we have going on and give them an opportunity to dig in and see everything, Griffin said. LBW is a small school with a big heart. If you are not sure what you want to do or you desire classes that are smaller and student centered, I definitely think LBW is the place for you.

Pike Lib and LBW will team up once again this coming fall to provide dual enrollment courses for high school students. LBW is a public community college with campuses located in Andalusia, Greenville, Opp and Luverne.

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Pike Liberal Arts and LBW host welding expo - The Troy Messenger - Troy Messenger

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Chances are Australia is about to enter one of its most annoying elections in living memory.

Fresh off a Budget which made little effort to pretend it wasnt entirely about desperately buying votes, and staring down a policy-free Opposition campaign hyper-focused on Scott Morrison being a personally shitty guy, you could be forgiven for tuning out entirely.

But there really is an incredible drama playing out that has flown under the publics radar outside of the political pages. Its the fact that, days before the election campaign is likely to start, the NSW Liberal Party has still not selected candidates for some of its absolute must-win seats in the state seats that in a normal election would have been locked-in a year ago.

And just like many things in politics, society and the Australian psyche more generally, it is in no small part Tony Abbotts fault.

Heres the rundown.

Back in 2018, Abbott and a coterie of gargoyles in the right-wing faction of the NSW Liberal Party successfully pushed for new rules that would give the grassroots of the party more say in pre-selecting candidates for local, state and federal elections. The so-called Warringah rules named for Abbotts old seat, now held by independent Zali Steggall would give local branches the right to hold plebiscites selecting candidates rather than having them be handpicked by party elites.

Abbott and friends werent necessarily doing this because they are passionate believers in direct democracy.

They did it to shift the balance of power.

It was their (basically correct) belief that the average Liberal Party member was much more conservative than the partys governing bodies, which are dominated by moderates. By giving those members a bigger say in preselections, the party could become more conservative overall.

These rules passed, with some checks on the untrammelled populism of the original proposal. The State Executive and State Council of the Liberal Party would still get 25 percent of the vote, giving them reasonably significant sway over preselections.

The 2022 federal election is the first to run subject to these rules, and its fair to say it has all gone to absolute piss: Five potentially winnable seats still have no candidates in an election where every seat will count.

The federal executive of the party, led by Scott Morrison and backed by NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, has intervened, forcing through the preselections of sitting members like North Sydney moderate Trent Zimmerman. Theyre throwing everything at the wall to overrule the process and impose their own preferred candidates on the remaining seats, including an appeal to the High Court that was unceremoniously knocked back on Thursday afternoon. An IT millionaire - and Liberal Party member - has been running his own legal campaign to return power to members. Local branches are in uproar. Immigration minister and Morrison ally Alex Hawke, the factional goon who is in large part responsible for attempts to evade the new process, was booed at a meeting of party members on the weekend. Concetta Ferrivanti-Wells, the ultraconservative NSW Senator who has been relegated to an unwinnable spot on the partys ticket, launched a late-night spray calling the prime minister an autocrat and a bully hated by rank-and-file Liberals for his attempts to intervene.

In short: chaos reigns.

So, whats gone wrong?

Running the internal affairs of a political party in democratic fashion is a great idea on paper. After all, isnt that what politics in a liberal democracy is all about the will of the people? Surely having candidates who reflect the desires of the grassroots base is what we should aimfor as a general rule.

Well, yes.

But when youre trying to win an election, it can get more complicated than that.

Part of the problem is that the Liberal Partyis still made up of a mess of competing political ideologies and power structures.

Since Federation, Australian politics has ultimately been about a number of politically diverse right-wingers teaming up to defeat Labor. Part of the function of the Liberal Party and the Coalition more generally is to keep all those people in one tent being relatively civil to one another despite major disagreements on just about everything - economics, marriage equality, climate change, immigration, vaccines, you name it.

In a perfect world, Liberal Party elites at both the state and federal level would love to carve up and allocate preselections in a way that maintains balance between liberals and conservatives and keeps all factions happy with their lot which is what they tried to do with the empty seats. Of course, powerful players also want to see their friends and allies elevated too. Members in local branches dont really give a toss about enforcing factional peace at the top. They just want their preferred guy to get up.

Another issue is that Liberal Party branch members are not necessarily reflective of the population at large. Most people really do not give a shit about institutional politics on that level. They show up and vote on Election Day, and might have strident opinions about exactly why the country is going to the bloody dogs, but they are probably not getting involved in political parties at the grassroots level.

Team Abbott was basically right. Your average Liberal Party branch member is likely to be much more conservative and, much crazier than the average voter. In an election where Labor is currently dominating the polls, the Liberals dont really want to be left with risky candidates in seats they need to win.

Take Warringah, Abbotts old seat. In the new preselection process, the last guy standing to take on Zali Steggall was Lincoln Parker, an anti-China hawk who writes for far-right Falun Gong rag The Epoch Times and has hit out at climate extremists. Probably not the guy to take back the electorate which booted Tony in favour of one of those very same extremists. The Liberals consider that seat winnable, and want to install a more palatable, competitive candidate to maximise their chances.

Before you start thinking that all of this is simply the rational machinations of a cohesive party that wants wants to win in May, we cant forget that so much of this is also probably the result of completely inscrutable blood feuds between some of the weirdest, least likeable people in the country. Theres a lot of internecine hatred here that isnt necessarily politically legible. Morrison and Hawke have been trying to rewrite the DNA of the NSW Liberal Party along factional lines for their mates for many years at this point, so its important to remember that so much of this is motivated by enmity, spite and if I may be blunt total sicko shit.

On the other side of the aisle, Labor is facing its own tensions over preselection, with concerns raised about party executives parachuting high-profile white candidates like former Kevin Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton or shadow home affairs minister Kristina Keneally into diverse, multicultural electorates. But these pale in comparison to the complicated mess playing out within the Liberals.

So thats the basic story. Labor is ahead in the polls, and if they pull off a win in May it might have the NSW Liberal Partys complete inability to get its shit together to thank for it.

And, as always, the machinations of one Anthony John Abbott. Sunrise, sunset.

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How Tony Abbott Went Rogue and Helped Blow Up NSWs Liberal Party - VICE

For a prophet of doom, vindication requires catastrophe, which tends to take the fun out of I told you so. Thus, for Christian conservatives the disaster of the sexual revolution is cause for sorrow, not schadenfreude.

That the sexual revolution has failed to deliver on its promises is increasingly obvious, even to those who loathe Christian sexual ethics. For example, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times has returned to the problem, this time with a review of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Washington Post columnist Christine Emba. Although Goldberg dislikes the books Christian influences, she concedes that modern heterosexual dating culture appears to be an emotional meat grinder whose miseries and degradations cant be solved by ever more elaborate rituals of consent.

Despite this admission, Goldberg isnt ready to abandon the sexual revolution, but instead wants to save it. She concludes that the problem is that many women are still embarrassed by their own desires, particularly when they are emotional, rather than physical.

This, she argues, is why Embas book is full of examples of people suppressing their longings. She interviews many women who seem to feel entitled to one-night stands, but not to kindness. Its what you get when you liberate sex without liberating women. If only women were more assertive about what they want and dont want, all would be well.

This unrealistic analysis reveals the impoverishment and impotence of modern liberalisms moral vocabulary. All that this sort of liberalism can offer women who have been immiserated by our sexual culture is the suggestion that they negotiate for more romance and less sexual degradation from porn-addled men.

But liberals remain insistent that these preferences are purely subjective, and are not normative in any way. Thus, liberalism can only suggest a more inclusive settlement between warring desires, with emotional needs now balanced with sexual fetishes.

It would, of course, be good if more women told men to take their internet-induced perversions and shove them. It would also be good if women demanded more emotional commitment from men, rather than settling for hookups. But liberal culture cripples womens ability to take such stands by vitiating the necessary moral and cultural support for them.

Morally, liberal ideology deprives a woman of anything stronger than setting her own I want against the I want of a man. This refusal to judge between desires leaves modern liberals such as Goldberg stuck, able to recognize the disaster of the current relational marketplace, but unwilling to accept any moral judgments that would give womens desires more than subjective value. After all, without a normative understanding of what is good in a relationship (including sex), why should a womans desire for romance, or even simple kindness, matter more than a mans porn-induced kinks?

Furthermore, liberalisms theoretical neutrality between competing desires in practice favors desires that are simple and intense over those that are more complex and diffuse. Thus, in a liberal culture, emotional needs and relational longings will naturally take second place to immediate sexual gratification. To be uncomfortable with unbounded indulgence is to mark oneself as an enemy of liberalism. This is why liberalisms supposed neutrality about the nature of the good and the good life actually denigrates self-control and commitment while promoting selfish indulgence. Our culture is filled with celebrations of the liberation of desire, including the sexual desires and relational habits that are proving so harmful to women.

Changing this exploitative environment requires more than subjective assertiveness. Minor tweaks to the sexual revolution will not fix it. What is needed is a normative challenge to sexual liberalisms ideology, morality, and culture a sexual counter-revolution.

A sexual counter-revolution in favor of loving commitment may seem unlikely, but it has happened before. There have been, of course, the original sexual revolutions as Christianity converted pagan cultures, but there have also been revivals of Christian sexual teaching, such as the Victorian reaction against the excesses of regency England. Today, such a sexual counter-revolution would be motivated by the misery the sexual revolution has inflicted misery for which sexual liberalism seems to have no remedy.

Thus, Christians should not grow weary or afraid of proclaiming gospel truths about human sexuality and family life. Though they are unpopular and unfashionable, and the powers that be will rage against us, our culture needs Christian truths, including in bed.

Of course, cautions may be appended to this. We should always strive to speak with wisdom, to be gentle when needed, and to humbly recall our individual and corporate sins. The excesses of evangelical purity culture a couple of decades ago are an example of how bad teaching can harm believers and discredit our witness.

But we should not allow our sins and the inevitable difficulties of life to keep us from sharing the Christian moral insights that our culture needs. We know that the sexual revolution has failed to deliver on its promises of happiness because the liberation of desire means slavery to desire. If we do not master our desires they will master us, or, alternatively, we will be mastered by someone elses tyrannical passions.

The liberation of desire has led not to satisfaction and peace, but to conflict and domination. It is no wonder that many, especially women, are looking for an alternative. Christians should be proclaiming and, more importantly, modeling a better way to live and love.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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How Liberalism Ruined Sex And Degraded Women - The Federalist

WASHINGTON (Project Syndicate) The solidarity on display at the recentNATO,U.S.-EU, andG-7summits has revealed a rejuvenated West. While Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to wage war on Ukraine, the Atlantic democracies are responding with impressiveand somewhat unexpectedunity as they arm Ukraine, reinforce NATOs eastern flank, and sanction the Russian economy.

Instead of turning away migrants, European Union member states are opening their doors to millions of Ukrainian refugees. The U.S. Congress seems to have rediscovered the bipartisan comity that has long been missing in Washington.

Prolonged economic insecurity and yawning inequality have depopulated the political center.

The political theoristFrancis Fukuyamaevenforeseesa new birth of freedom that will get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy, adding hopefully that the spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.

Not so fast. The political ills plaguing the Atlantic democracies may be out of the headlines, but they have not gone away. While Russias invasion is certainly a wake-up call for the West, the prospect of a new cold war will not by itself cure the United States and Europe of illiberalism and political dysfunction.

In fact, the war in Ukraine will likely have economic spillover effects that foster political blowback. Accordingly, both America and Europe need to keep focusing on getting their own houses in order even while ensuring that the tragedy in Ukraine receives the resources and attention it deserves.

In Cold War America, the political discipline engendered by the Soviet threat did help mute partisan conflict over foreign policy. Similarly, the prospect today of a new era of militarized rivalry with Russia isreviving bipartisan centrismon matters of statecraft.

Although the neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party in Congress may be relatively quiet for now, it enjoys strong support among the party base and is likely to reassert itself as Western-led sanctions against Russia hurt U.S. consumers.

The left wing of the Democratic Party is no longer clamoring for cuts to the defense budget and a fast and deep pullback from fossil fuels. Both the hawkish and the neo-isolationist wings of the Republican Party have toned down their criticism of President Joe Biden and generally rallied behind his response to the Russian invasion.

But this return to bipartisanship is likely to be short-lived.

The bipartisanship of the Cold War era rested not just on the Soviet threat, but also on the ideological centrism sustained by widely shared prosperity within America. Yet prolonged economic insecurity and yawning inequality have since depopulated the political center, and ideological moderation has given way to bitter polarization.

This erosion of the political center explains the rapid evaporation of the surge in bipartisanship that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And it explains why, just before the war in Ukraine captured the countrys attention, public intellectuals in the U. S weredebatingthe prospects for civil war. According to a poll conducted late last year,64% of Americansfear that U. S democracy is in crisis and at risk of failing.

Thehighest U.S. inflation rate in 40 yearsis currently heightening the risk of a return to the illiberal politics of grievance. The rising cost of energy and food is one of the main reasons why Bidensapproval ratingshave remained low despite his strong handling of the war in Ukraine.

As the November midterm elections near, scant Republican support for Biden will translate into renewed partisan rivalry. And although the neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party in Congress may be relatively quiet for now, it enjoys strong support among the party base and is likely to reassert itself as Western-led sanctions against Russia hurt U.S. consumers.

Given the potential for illiberal populism to make a comeback in the U.S., the Biden administration urgently needs to continue advancing its domestic agenda. Investing in infrastructure, education, technology, health care, and other domestic programs offers the best way to alleviate the electorates discontent andrevivethe countrys ailing political center. Thebudgetthat Biden proposed this week is a step in the right direction.

Europe, too, should keep a close eye on its home front as it focuses on its response to Ukraine war. While Europes political center has remained stronger than Americas, and the EU has shown impressive unity in the face of Russian aggression, strains to European cohesion lurk just beneath the surface.

Europes magnanimous welcome to Ukrainian refugees may triggerdomestic backlashesas costs mount and the prospect of permanent resettlement looms. Weaning the EU off Russian fossil fuels will require considerable investment and could lead to even higher energy prices, potentially hampering Europes economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

And while Poland and Hungary are now front line states that deserve allied support, both are still ruled by illiberal governments that threaten core European values; they should not be let off the hook.

Europeans, like Americans, need to continue working hard on domestic renewal. Economic restructuring and investment, reform of immigration policy and border control, and more pooling of sovereignty on foreign and defense policy can all help consolidate the EUs solidarity and democratic legitimacy.

Putins brutal attack on Ukraine has helped revive the West. But the homegrown threats to liberal democracy that were front and center before the war still require urgent attention, even amid the strenuous effort to defeat Russias attempt to subjugate its neighbor.

It would be tragically ironic if the West succeeds in turning Putins gamble in Ukraine into a resounding defeat, only to see liberal democracies then succumb to the enemy within.

This commentary was published with permission of Project Syndicate Western Unity Starts at Home

Charles A. Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and the author ofIsolationism: A History of Americas Efforts to Shield Itself from the World(Oxford University Press, 2020).

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Putins brutal attack on Ukraine has helped revive the West, but the homegrown threats to liberal democracy fester under a veneer of solidarity -...

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Vassars 2022 Exploring Transfer Program (ET), hosted every summer on Vassars campus, gives community college students the chance to experience residential and academic life at a liberal arts college in preparation for potentially transfering to more selective schools. During the five-week program, about 30 students take two full-credit courses designed and taught by both Vassar and community college professors. For this upcoming summer, it will take place from June 17 through July 22.

Plans for the program began in 1983 when LaGuardia Community College reached out to Vassar with an interest in establishing greater connection between community colleges and selective liberal arts colleges. This program, then known as the Vassar Summer Program for Community College Students, was launched in the summer of 1985. Since then, the program has expanded to include sixteen community colleges across the country.

The program has created notable alumni, including Nolvia Delgado, for whom Exploring Transfer served as an opportunity for complete immersion in academics and as preparation for her transfer to Smith College. She first heard of the program via email while studying at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). The program sounded like an amazing opportunity and I decided to apply, she said. At BMCC there were advisors dedicated to helping students through the application process, which was extremely helpful.

Delgado now serves as the leader of Kaplan Educational Foundation, another program that helps community college students transfer to selective colleges. At Kaplan Educational Foundation, Delgado helps other community college students explore the possibility of transferring to selective colleges. She credits Vassars Exploring Transfer program with exposing her to the importance of a community college experience. Exploring Transfer taught me the importance of pre-transfer academic experiences in addition to the learning already taking place at community colleges, she said.

Since the program is designed to have students focus on two full-credit classes over the course of five weeks instead of a semester, students have the opportunity to devote themselves entirely to their academics. For many community college students, who excel at juggling multiple commitments such as classes, commuting and work, this distraction-free educational structure presents a unique opportunity to concentrate on school. Delgado reflected on this academically intensive environment, stating, I focused on my studies, took advantage of the resources available on campus, and got to know my peers in a way that I could not as a commuter student.

The courses that students pursue during their time in the program are often multidisciplinary and cover various parts of the classic liberal arts curriculum, in departments such as English, Political Science, Economics and Environmental Science. Given the intensity of the program, Director of the Exploring Transfer program Kariane Calta and the programs staff have set up structures to support students who may face a wide range of difficulties. Each class has a Teaching Assistant who holds office hours on weeknights and Sunday afternoons, Calta said. According to Calta, four residential fellows also live in the dorms with the students and serve as sources of emotional and social support.

When not studying, students can also explore the greater Hudson Valley region, taking Saturday trips together to museums such as Dia Beacon and Storm King, and natural landmarks such as Lake Minnewaska.

The connections that students make through these social experiences are a key part of the program. Calta attributes the sense of community to the students wide-ranging backgrounds. Whats unique and also wonderful about ET is the diversity of the student body. Some of our students are eighteen or nineteen and living away from home for the first time, while others have been working and raising families for many years, she said. Students build friendships with each other, their TAs and [residential fellows], and their instructors that last well after the program ends. Most of our alumniand our facultywould tell you that although the program is intensely challenging, it is a life-changing experience.

According to Calta, the trust and experience shared between Exploring Transfer students often encourages them to go on to pursue a Bachelors degree at a selective college. After their time at the program, many students transfer to liberal arts colleges such as Vassar, Swarthmore, Amherst and SUNY New Paltz, among others.

For those interested, Delgado advises students to take the chance to engulf themselves in the academic and residential experience provided by the program. She said, Remain on campus for the duration of the program, get to know your professors, familiarize yourself with the campus, and learn from your peers.

The Exploring Transfer program can not only give students the experience of living and learning at a selective college, but help them see their own academic potential. As Delgado put it, Completing the Exploring Transfer program has served as a motivator because it is a reminder that if I work hard and plan accordingly there is nothing that I cannot achieve.

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Students explore liberal arts with Exploring Transfer Program The Miscellany News - Miscellany News