What is the Objection to Liberalism, Exactly?

 At the outset of his 1993 book The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, the political theorist Stephen Holmes observes that he is "not worried about the practical consequences" of the anti-liberal theories he explores in the book. At the time he was writing, he says; "[t]hey benefit from historical circumstances that make them politically harmless," he observes. 

I have no doubt that this was largely true in the democratic West in 1993. It was certainly something I myself believed the first time I encountered the ideas Holmes describes. As even these illiberal thinkers appear to believe, liberalism seemed so much in the ascendant that it could not seriously be endangered—and therefore its critics could only serve, if anything, as a healthy corrective to its myopia. 

Licensed Killers

 In his excellent study of the tropes of anti-liberal thought, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), Stephen Holmes includes at one point a paraphrase from Joseph de Maistre's notorious discussion of the role of the executioner in society. 

"Imagine a philosophical visitor from a foreign planet," Holmes summarizes Maistre's argument, "who has been informed that, on earth, there are two licensed killers. He knows that one, the soldier, kills the innocent, while the other, the executioner, kills the guilty. [...] The extraterrestrial observer is then asked to guess: which one of the two is the most highly honored by human society?"

Existential Risk

 The national news media have been in the throes all week of an epic freakout about the specter of "AI existential risk." Like a lot of people, I find myself unsure how seriously to take this. 

We have to start with a recognition—first off—that the people now estimating the risk of human extinction from AI superintelligence at a one-in-ten chance would have given you roughly the same odds five or ten or twenty years ago. 

Squash, Anyone?

 The Trump administration earned a richly-deserved defeat yesterday in an important First Amendment case. In the wake of ICE's extrajudicial killings of two people in Minnesota earlier this year, a private citizen had sharply criticized the director of the agency in an email and said his conscience would haunt him.

DHS responded by warning the man of potential criminal prosecution, and sent agents to his door to harass and intimidate him. 

Alas, Poor Theology!

 I was walking through Times Square yesterday and had to dodge a woman with a sign that read: "Jesus is King. Don't Go to Hell!"

I had to sigh that in two thousand years they still haven't come up with a better argument than appeals to spiritual terrorism. 

What the Scholars Couldn't Find

 In his book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh recounts at one point the testimony Donald Rumsfeld gave to Congress after photos came to light of the extreme abuse of prisoners at a U.S. military facility in Iraq. Rumsfeld says he was as appalled as anyone. The torture and humiliation displayed in the photos were "fundamentally un-American." They showed "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." 

Fast forward to yesterday's news, when a government inspector general published photos of 18-square-foot large wire cages in which people were apparently confined in the Florida heat at the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz" detention site. The administration, at first, made a bunch of claims about the "enclosures" that were hard to credit. People asked to go inside the boxes, they say. Huh? There were no locks on the doors. The Inspector General found locks on the doors. 

Bush's Wars: Liberal and Cosmopolitan?

 In his contributions over the past week to the 9/11 25th anniversary discourse, Matt Yglesias has offered a fine synthesis of the chief strands of the emerging liberal nostalgia for Bush. Yglesias wants us to remember that, however many mistakes the U.S. made in its response to 9/11 (and he agrees there were many), the motive force behind the "War on Terror" was a genuine commitment to universal values. 

Bush really meant it, in other words, when he said that stuff about advancing "freedom" and "democracy" around the world. Many neoconservative and even liberal and left intellectuals (Christopher Hitchens, e.g.) went along with it because they believed it too. The post-9/11 response, then, really was part of a larger commitment to "liberal cosmopolitanism" in that era, as Yglesias puts it.