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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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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