Another anon and i were having a good discussion this afternoon about the actual political economy differences between China, Russia, and the US and how political economy is implicated in various revolutions and wars. As we discussed what kind of political economy the US should be going for in its competition with China, we had an interesting disagreement that i might characterize as liberal vs postliberal.

The post liberal position is that liberalism doesnt really exist anymore and what we actually have is various unaccountable regimes, which are defined basically by their class basis (eg oligarchs vs bureaucrats vs siloviki vs bourgeois), and a conflict with china means basically adopting a nationalist-developmentalist-populist dictatorship of some kind. This is held back by effectively china-aligned financiers and corrupt politicians (eg Feinstein).

The liberal position is that to attempt a symmetric conflict with china in this way is a losing proposition. The asymmetric attack by having a freer more dynamic meritocratic system will brain drain them and ultimately result in a more powerful free world economic bloc capable of resisting them. The liberal regime concept is more defined as a customary balance of powers maintaining a relatively healthy dynamic ecosystem under itself relatively free of arbitrary force. The smarter liberal position acknowledges that while this rhetoric has been deployed a lot to loot the country, there has not been any powerful coalition that actually believed in this and was willing to enforce it against the left for a long time. The liberals have all been spineless cowards and traitors happy to look the other way on left wing attacks on meritocracy for example. I thought the OP article is related to this, hence why i post them together.

My objection to the liberal position is that i haven't heard a good account of how liberalism would respond to standard moldbuggian observations like that the cathedral is obviously a coordinated repressive postliberal regime that cannot be dislodged by any normal liberal principled rule-following. Rather it seems that to get back to liberalism you would need some kind of muscular political machine of a more postliberal type, and then there’s no theory about how a liberal regime could be maintained, liberalism having seemingly abandoned the idea of regimes. What is a liberal regime and how do we get there from here? This feels like lost social technology.

My other objection is that colorblind meritocracy is great when you have a unified ruling class to implement it, but as soon as you do, you start getting upstart ethnics busting your ruling class consensus and agitating for special treatment and narcissistic ethnic-benefit politics. Thus meritocracy can only be stably done in a slow limited way subject to some norms of ethnic civility. This does not appear to have been successfully done in the US. Meritocracy rapidly became affirmative action and overt deconstruction of the historical culture. Thus the genesis of our own corruption. Lots of naive liberalism is like this where there’s these principles that are taken to be good but are actually self annihilating as they end up being attacks in the actual customary regime. Where is non-naive liberalism?

I think this question matters because despite historical naivety, spinelessness, and now lack of existence of strong liberalism, they might actually be right about what is the strongest and more desirable direction for America and for our own political priorities. I’m curious to hear more wisdom on how to do a real liberalism.