A Manifesto for Renewing Liberalism

"open markets, limited government"

I feel like the latter is used a lot to destroy the former.

Great article. The problem is that "liberal elites" aren't really liberal anymore. They're just powerful, and their allegiance to liberalism seems to really be about convenience and profitability and not about values. Unfortunately the anti-establishment types don't seem to have those values either. And neither does the electorate for that matter. It's hard for me to even see what could happen that would change the way things are headed, and it's pretty sad.

Can we have a section of HN dedicated to Rust, FPGAs, the JVM, SSDs, programming language verification, business models, tales of milliseconds at the 99.9th percentile, JITting, RISC-V, GPUs, neural network architectures, causality in machine learning, CRISPR, Bitcoin, databases, libraries, cloud computing?

You know, technical stuff.

Some of my favorite clips:

> True liberals contend that societies can change gradually for the better and from the bottom up. They differ from revolutionaries because they reject the idea that individuals should be coerced into accepting someone else’s beliefs. They differ from conservatives because they assert that aristocracy and hierarchy, indeed all concentrations of power, tend to become sources of oppression.

> Liberalism thus began as a restless, agitating world view. Yet over the past few decades liberals have become too comfortable with power. As a result, they have lost their hunger for reform. The ruling liberal elite tell themselves that they preside over a healthy meritocracy and that they have earned their privileges. The reality is not so clear-cut.

> Yet ruling liberals have often sheltered themselves from the gales of creative destruction. Cushy professions such as law are protected by fatuous regulations. University professors enjoy tenure even as they preach the virtues of the open society. Financiers were spared the worst of the financial crisis when their employers were bailed out with taxpayers’ money. Globalisation was meant to create enough gains to help the losers, but too few of them have seen the pay-off.

> It is the moment for a liberal reinvention. Liberals need to spend less time dismissing their critics as fools and bigots and more fixing what is wrong. The true spirit of liberalism is not self-preserving, but radical and disruptive.

> They must rediscover their belief in individual dignity and self-reliance—by curbing their own privileges. They must stop sneering at nationalism, but claim it for themselves and fill it with their own brand of inclusive civic pride. Rather than lodging power in centralised ministries and unaccountable technocracies, they should devolve it to regions and municipalities.