David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister of First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at “liberalisms” and I’m calling it “The Holes in Liberalism”. And then I added an “s” because we’ve been discovering that there are lots and lots of different kinds of liberalisms that goes all the way from an ultra-rightism to an ultra-leftism and all points in between. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that there is no one form of liberalism and the fractures, the different kinds of liberalism occur, well, when we think about what it means to have liberty, which is what liberalism is all about, and at least in its classic form. Classic liberalism is freedom “from”, we discussed this is Isaiah Berlin, a famous 20th century philosopher who said the basic liberalism is about freedom from regulation, government interference, etc. Contemporary liberalism tends to be a freedom “to”. This is not entirely a U.S. invention, but it tends to be more so here in the United States. So if you begin to look at other definitions of liberalism from Europe and around the world, you’re going to see very different takes on this. And then I mentioned that there is a theological liberalism that can be a little bit confusing because it is based in classic liberalism all the way back to the Enlightenment Era of the 16- and 1700s. But it’s now moving toward a contemporary liberalism as time passes. Well, one of the ideas here and one of the difficulties is sussing out exactly what liberal means and where it fits on a larger chart of different political and social systems, because we are talking about both political and social, and then we’re adding back in the religious or theological.

One way of doing this is putting authoritarianism at the top, libertarianism at the bottom, and saying that we’re going to go from the most despotic and controlling down to complete anarchism and all points in between. When we do this, what you’re going to notice is that, yes, we have Social Democratic Authoritarianism, Marxism, Leninism, Fascism. Over here, Social Democracy, which is much this is a much more at a European type of type of politics. Liberalism, then, falls somewhere half in half and then we have conservatism. So where does the U.S. fall into this? Because then you see, this is above the line is the democratic, both left and right, and then socialism, and as this diagram calls it, the vast sea of libertarianism. So where does your particular political views fall on this continuum? And where is the U.S. electorate in this in this kind of diagram? It’s a very good question. As I discussed yesterday, one of the confounding factors of all this is, again, liberal theology. Where is that going? And recently, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the the idea that New Age shamanism has now become a right wing QAnon idea. So how has New Age, especially ideas, permeated American culture? We used to think of that as a kind of a very educated, well-off person who was able to make some distinctions due to education and money and just the ease of their privileged lives.

But nowadays, that’s not exactly what’s going on with New Age belief systems, and they are spreading into a wider culture. So where are the political factions in the United States? What is liberal about liberalism? And one of the things we have to look at is consequentialism and deontology. These are ethical, moral systems. And I note here that nothing is personal.