I found this thread really thought-provoking and I’m going to take some time to wrestle with it. I guess I’ve been a “classical liberal” until recently, & now am interested in deeper understanding of the left. There’s so much here to ruminate on. https://twitter.com/mont_jiang/status/1321913050161700867

Ok, this thread and another fantastic thread I’ve been pondering by @NomeDaBarbarian (about StarTrek’s Worf) just cross-fertilized in my brain and led to this: I am not a native “liberal.” I was raised as an anti-modernist Christian fundamentalist.

I was socialized into classical liberalism in Christian college by studying philosophy. The work I studied was overwhelmingly male & European, but at the time, I believed its claims to universality, save its obvious issues re: the existence & experience of female persons.

Of course that seed of dissonance, was like a bit of food in my teeth that I couldn’t stop fiddling with, and searching for insight led to wide and voracious reading, and perspectives that eventually displaced that white male hegemony.

Where the Worf thread comes in is that for several years, I was more of a true believer in the great saving values of “Western Civilization” than anyone since about 1789. I’d seen that the basic intellectual position of American Christian fundamentalism was

a thick coating of magical thinking and epistemological naïveté presented as objectivity, on top of a rationalist, modern framing of the world that utterly collapsed at the slightest challenge.

So, as an ‘outsider’ I bought into the myth of classical liberalism wholeheartedly and applied it to my American politics. The basic foundation of gov’t was sound, based as it was on representative democracy.

We all just needed to agree that the public square should be free from religion and we could all do our own thing privately. The federal/ state government should strike a balance between taking care of people and enabling businesses to function somewhat independently.

The most striking thing now to me was what I DIDN’T think about, which was basically EVERYTHING else.