Of course, but it's been a minute since I thought of him. What is he up to these days?

Buying it in the room as long as we can attach Diego Luna as an extra so he can finally touch yabba

What do you think of Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter History?

1st and 2nd Red/Pink/Black Scare repressions could be justified as neccessary to secure liberty on the homefront in times of wars to expand liberty to the world through crushing left movements.

Not to say 'tut-tutting' anti-status-quo is quantitatively equivalent, but it's ideologically consistent.

Certainly not novel or interesting observations, but no less important for being neither.

De Tocqueville could support the expansion of liberty in Jacksonian America (and too in Poor Law England) while defending the razing of entire villages in Algeria.

Liberalism has always contained within it the tendency to 'tut-tut' (more aptly- brutally crush) movements that 'go too far' challenging certain precepts of property and privilege.

It is the philosophy not just of regicide but at the same moment of chattal slavery, colonialism, and work houses.

The overthrow of monarchy was usually a neccessary condition for the classes that support liberalism (the bourgeoisie and their ideological allies in the middle class) to become hegemonic.

Once liberals rule, they are no longer revolutionary and their impeteus is to reproduce their authority.

Or we might think of the predecessors to the Greek crisis, the IMF structural adjustment programs imposed on so many countries around the world from the 1980s onward. I'm sure that to their hosts the young American economists parachuted in for SAPs looked much like Big Balls or whoever does to us.

I think people outside of Utah and public sector unions literally just don't know about it. Thousands of news and labor follows on X and here and I only know about it because I follow you

Not sure if it fits the bill but I know @adamtooze.bsky.social has been writing extensively on this topic for the past few years

when a struggle is impending they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.

The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly,

struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth.