Liberalism According to The Economist | Hacker News Reader

Liberalism According to The Economist

newyorker.com

22 points1sembiyan34 comments

This article is a highbrow variety of the two minute hate, in which an ideological enemy is identified (in this case a newspaper), and 179 years of history are cherry-picked in order to present a simple, satisfying narrative that this enemy has been wrong at every turn, and moreover that they are bad, privileged people.

The examples given are too brief and editorialized to actually learn anything from (according to this article the Irish Potato Famine was "largely caused by free trade") except that these white, entitled, racist Oxford snobs have been ruining the world for 179 years.

Sometimes it takes a spade to call a spade. For me, a “bright boy” raised in a household with a subscription, I was seduced by the seeming certainty of its language and the comprehensiveness of coverage. “The world’s news at my fingertips, and with a suave guide!” is probably what young me thought, grasping for intellectual superiority and moral certainty. I probably imported many of its attitudes uncritically.

The survey of the magazine’s history and the insight into its editorial missteps and outright treachery was enlightening and probably necessary. I don’t mind admitting my own ignorance when it comes to this stuff, I needed this history to properly contextualize it. Also, the quip about being a “handbook for arrogant, dull, outdated men,” was genuinely hilarious.

I wouldn’t take it too personally. For you and me, it’s really just a magazine and perhaps the point is that we ought to treat it as such.

Intellectual superiority and moral certainty are precisely what this article is selling.

Like I said in my very first sentence, sometimes it takes a spade to call a spade. I’m okay with arrogance punching itselves in the face.

Well said.. I was excited to see HN link something that potentially checks a common bias here (TE), but this article was long and shallow.. not a good combo.

>..these white, entitled, racist Oxford snobs have been ruining the world for 179 years.

Can you expand on what you mean by this?

The Economist was founded in 1843, and the article goes to great lengths to paint the writers and editors of the magazine throughout its history as not merely wrong on matters of policy, but personally privileged and bigoted.

It doesn't seem odd to you to bring race into it? It reads like something from Stormfront, with races swapped.

I didn't bring race into it, the article did:

> The staff, predominantly white, is recruited overwhelmingly from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and a disproportionate number of the most important editors have come from just one Oxford college, Magdalen.

Your quote:

"except that these white, entitled, racist Oxford snobs have been ruining the world for 179 years."

...reads a bit different.

It's worth noting that this is a book review (though like all NYer book reviews, it obscures that info): Alexander Zevin, Liberalism at Large (Verso, 2019).[1] It's a deeply researched work of academic history. The examples given briefly in the review are detailed, sourced, and analyzed at length in the book. Perhaps the critics here will still be unconvinced; perhaps they (or others) will learn something new.

[1]: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3090-liberalism-at-large

Just what the world needs, punditry about punditry

> Centrists claim that liberals’ obsession with political correctness and minority rights drove white voters to Donald Trump

Not exactly. Centrists claim that Democrats' apparent abandonment of the working class and rural communities drove these voters to Trump. Rather than introspecting, Democrats compounded their error by imputing racism and sexism.

In my experience it was and is both. The “you made them do it” narrative was very, very popular right after the election in 2016, as if the people who pulled the lever somehow didn’t have their own agency or couldn’t possibly hold complex motives. It was kind of a weird half blame game, half rationalization thing.

If it's criticism like mine, it's more to the tune of "You never showed up". I don't remember seeing a single campaign or rally; instead Beto was looked at to lead Texas and nothing else. The message was pretty clear locally, the Democratic party wasn't coming.

There were already image problems in Texas. When George Bush took office, many liberal publications took to the tactic of repeatedly airing his stuttering in speeches. It led to this perception that people thought he was stupid, and many conservatives started pushing their audiences to AM radio - which was the first step in sewing distrust in "mainstream media".

This is all from my recollection, a good bit of it as a child, and I've never seen anyone acknowledge how these events are linked. I'm sure economics, healthcare, education, etc are also all tied up in this mix of this too.

The narrative about the Democratic party not coming is particularly amusing in regards to Texas. They tried to come there in 2020 and they were run out of town to the great enjoyment of the local police.

I don't think that negates not showing up in 2016 (or prior). If anything, if you have zero presence and investment over a long period of time you can expect things to get worse.

The Democrats lost an opportunity by addressing only the strawmen. By focusing on deplorables and Russians, they allowed themselves freedom from addressing substantive problems of working class and rural neglect. Which gave Trump an opening he otherwise would not have had.

> By focusing on deplorables and Russians, they allowed themselves freedom from addressing substantive problems of working class and rural neglect. Which gave Trump an opening he otherwise would not have had.

Amusingly, Clinton's infamous "deplorables" comment was aimed exactly at reversing this. "Yes, something like 1/3 of them are irredeemably shit, but most of them are absolutely reachable and we should be trying to reach out to them" was the point of it—and, from background in these things, I'm guessing her 1/3 wasn't an ass-pull but was based on certain polling data and is a pretty accurate assessment of the fraction of Republican voters that really... well, did belong in "a basket of deplorables". Terrible, terrible messaging strategy, though. All-time hall-of-fame worst. That was candid, internal campaign talk coming out in a public speech.

I’ve heard people say variations of “Trump won because people say latinx” hundreds of times from centrists.

I've heard all kinds of nonsense from all sorts of people of all political stripes. Unserious people give unserious arguments credence, taking the opportunity to hold them up as typical of those with whom they disagree. Meanwhile, actual substantive problems, issues and claims remain unaddressed.

For instance, Trump won because of deep, abiding economic problems. Attributing Trump's victory to "latinx" or "racism" or other silly, unserious behavior enable Democrats to continue to neglect these problems.

Not that the New Yorker and The Economist play in the same league.

This article does the opposite for me. If you like the Economist, I also suggest the Spectator[1]. British in every sense of the word and also as old as the Economist.

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/

(2019)

If you thought The Economist is losing touch with reality these days, The New Yorker has long moved into fantasy land. Yet another symptom of the times, can’t wait until both these old time bastions are dismantled, and new perspectives come flooding in.

The New Yorker is in lockstep with their owner ideologues, Advance Publications. If you look at the media assets they own, they push the same types of ideas and messages in each, but catered to different audiences. This degree of media control is problematic for everyone that isn't of the Newhouse class.

Same company that owns Teen Vogue, the shining star of how far off a cliff modern media is willing to go.

A genuine question: why should one think "The Economist" is losing touch with reality these days, it will be helpful if you can elaborate.

Losing touch with reality in this sense means that they neither foresaw nor can adequately explain the huge geopolitical shifts that took place in the last decade.

Instead, they keep putting out the same neoliberal/globalist spiel, unwilling to even question some of its pillars. Reality may not conform to one's expectations and if that's the case, one better starts making radical changes to the models one uses to interface with reality. If that doesn't take place, one is in for a painful lesson.

What do you recommend instead?

I never read the new yorker before so I don't know if it was better before, but the few articles I've read seem almost like satire. It's like they're not real people, or at least they've never had the problems real people have had.

I like the economist though. Finance and economics are unpredictable. The things that caused recessions in past might not even register in the future. They at least have a coherent and workable worldview.

Do you want to know what navel gazing is?

This.

This is navel gazing.

> Barack Obama included Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018) in his annual list of recommended books; meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has gleefully pronounced liberalism “obsolete.” The right accuses liberals of promoting selfish individualism and crass materialism at the expense of social cohesion and cultural identity. Centrists claim that liberals’ obsession with political correctness and minority rights drove white voters to Donald Trump. For the newly resurgent left, the rise of demagoguery looks like payback for the small-government doctrines of technocratic neoliberalism—tax cuts, privatization, financial deregulation, antilabor legislation, cuts in Social Security—which have shaped policy in Europe and America since the eighties.

Liberalism according to the New Yorker doesn’t seem too preoccupied by disambiguating wildly different concepts assigned the same term. Of these, probably the most overlapping are the Obama, Putin and supposedly “resurgent left”—but as a leftist I generally encounter criticism much closer to those attributed to either the right or centrists.

I’m not sure there’s much value continuing to read the article, it’s already so incoherent.

So I’ll just observe what’s coherent: liberalism, as identified by Obama and Putin and (to an extent) the “left” is a governing organizational principle. Its hallmarks are basically the intersection of republican and libertarian (the state is not autocratic, its purpose is to wield only so much power as necessary to ensure it continues to wield only that much power, no more and no less). Obama and Putin rightly observe that that model of government is failing. The “left” insofar as it’s the progressive end of the mainstream is understandably fixated on the inevitable laissez faire aspect of this principle and its capture.

The incoherent parts: characterization of the center and right are accurate portrayals of their reaction… to some other concept of liberalism that more closely reflects internal politics where “liberal” means something like “center-right” on a cultural spectrum, and has almost nothing to do with the concept of liberalism the Economist is historically concerned with. Not to “whatabout” this incoherency, but the actual left is almost entirely firmly on the other side of this cultural divide, much moreso than it concerns itself with historical liberalism. (To our detriment, I’ll add.)

Edit to add: we’re on the correct side of the divide, the detriment is our lack of concern for historical liberalism. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect we’ll soon find ourselves on the wrong end of illiberalism while being on the right moral side of history.

> I’m not sure there’s much value continuing to read the article, it’s already so incoherent.

It goes on to address exactly the problems you noticed, at length (I'm not finished with the whole thing yet, but I'm far enough to be well past what through you off). I've seen similar "bounced off" reports and complaints of "obvious" problems with, for example, Graeber's writing, which problems, if one keeps reading, he calls out and addresses—it's a certain writing style that starts with assertions that implicitly invite the reader to notice issues with them, then goes on to outline and address those same issues. If you don't keep reading it does look like the author's just an idiot, I guess.

In this case, I think they're doing it in service of a readership that may not be familiar with the tangled intellectual history and often, in fact, contradictory tradition of what goes under the umbrella term of "liberalism".

To be fair, I haven't finished the whole thing, and it's possible it has grave problems farther in, but that's not one of them.

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