Why I am not a liberal

[minionofmidas]

'Kay, before going to the original post let me first say I'm still rocking with suppressed laughter over "a vagina lacking in gorm", and shoot off this little one:

All nationalism means is establishing or protecting your homeland, guys - pretty much indistinguishable from 'patriotism.' It's not inherently chauvinist or whatever unless taken to an extreme.

Not really, though that is indeed what it may look like to a nationalist - it also means taking for granted that there is such a thing as a more or less clearly definable homeland that is not in large part a social construction. It's that fallacy that created all the evil and bloodshed, you see...
And also that there aren't any social layers of similar relevance between the nation/state and the individual. Which ties in with what I'll try to say in my next post, which will be about the original post.

[minionofmidas]

I just abandoned my own post because it got too long and rambling and lost sight of the main point.

It was going to be about the negation (by liberalism, by nationalism, by Marxism though I hadn't gotten to writing anything about that) of rights held by any unit - any collective - larger than the individual and smaller than the state. Which is rather a huge deviation from historic human experience built around such collectives.

[minionofmidas]

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My point is not to say that 'some liberals are elitist, therefore...' but to argue that liberalism is an inherently elitist ideology. I think I will now go further and argue that elitism is a critical element to liberalism and that it is impossible to have a non-elitist form of liberalism.

Yeah, I'd like that bit explained, actually. I can see where you may have been coming from, but...

[minionofmidas]

I just abandoned my own post because it got too long and rambling and lost sight of the main point.

It was going to be about the negation (by liberalism, by nationalism, by Marxism though I hadn't gotten to writing anything about that) of rights held by any unit - any collective - larger than the individual and smaller than the state. Which is rather a huge deviation from historic human experience built around such collectives.

Is nationalism (esp. fascism) really responsible for that or is it merely a response to the innate lack of these social layers in modernity?

19th century Nationalism in countries without a proto-nationstate (Germany, Italy... also India) certainly tried to negate regional, local, corporatist (guilds, fraternities etc. Caste in India) identities quite actively - combat them, you might say. But I wasn't calling any ideology "responsible" for anything - individual ideologues are responsible for their actions, ideologies hardly. I wasn't thinking of fascism at all when I wrote, though yes fascism does indeed exploit that void.

[minionofmidas]

Actually, that's the wrong "gorm". This one means understanding - not that you'd expect that in vaginas, either. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gormless