The other thing I did this weekend was listen to @mikeduncan's series on the 1848 revolutions.
They're very good. Two salient lessons:
1. A lot of our "freedoms" fell out of an extremely illiberal past, and understanding the political utility of those freedoms . . .
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Still mulling this stuff over. What's remarkable about 1848 is how intelligible the politics are. Like--maybe it was the first time today's Western political factions erupted in conflict. Radicals, liberals, conservatives.
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Some thoughts on those factions. It seems like the conservatives have had the worst of it since 1848. Chalk it up to WWI, and the fact that conservatives were--I guess just quasi-medieval. Their right-authoritarian successors haven't ever managed to recapture . . .
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the same nigh-impregnable political heights of the old kings and aristos, and my tentative hunch is to classify people like Mussolini and Hitler with the radicals. ("National socialism" is a good summary of the demands of 1848 radicals, in fact!)
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Conservatives in places like the United States are basically just especially order-focused liberals. Which is unsurprising, because it sure looks like liberalism ate the world. The bourgeois didn't complete their takeover of the political world in 1848 but the trend . . .
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has been toward a near-total victory in the West. Liberals wanted, basically, constitutional government; civil order; and strong protections for personal property. These are the norms everywhere in the West, and frequently abroad. The norms are so strong . . .
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that even governments and societies that ignore them feel obliged to at least adopt the appearance. For example, consider the following: NORTH KOREA HAS A CONSTITUTION AND CALLS ITSELF A REPUBLIC North Korea is obviously a hereditary authoritarian dictatorship, and . . .
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it's not even Western! But it still keeps up with the formal, universally-accepted way of establishing *legitimacy*, which today is having a constitution and being a republic.
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This is directly analogous to (in days past) fabricating a pedigree for your "king" stretching back to Troy, or perhaps direct descent from Adam or from the Gods themselves.
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Anyway, the liberal victory is complete, and the old conservatism is probably utterly spent as a political force. What of the radicals? Being a radical in 1848 probably meant you wanted some combination of (i) national self-determination, (ii) economic redistribution, and
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(iii) big-D Democracy, as in: universal male suffrage, or something like it. (i) was mostly achieved (badly) during the World Wars, although it still perhaps animates radical left ideas about Colonialism and radical right ideas about cultural purity maybe
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(iii) is the norm everywhere that has a de facto republican government. So, maybe a good narrative is this: The 1848 liberals won broadly. Conservatism was ultimately crushed. What we have today are ongoing skirmishes between liberals and radicals, the latter . . .
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being split left and right, where the left cares about the 1848 radical preoccupation with economic redistribution, and the right cares about 1848 radical preoccupation with nationalism. Hmmmm. (?????) Anyway back to work, thanks for reading my incipient model.
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It surprises me that in analyzing contemporary issues so few people remember how real and eternal the soviet union was five years before it was completely gone. I think contemplating such examples would make many more people less anxious.
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or in my case, more

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Life finds a way
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