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liberalism, liberals

Monday 24th of August 2026

2024 Presidential election But you know, the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill  Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill  Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out. J. D. Vance, September 16, 2024 [Thomas Matthew Crooks, the first attempted assassin was a registered Republican; Ryan Wesley Routh, the second, was a registered independent who voted for Trump in 2016 but was “disappointed” by him by 2020] © 2024 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism While liberal countries tend to be liberal in much the same way, there are flavours of autocracy, and they pair badly. The ethnic chauvinist hates the universal Marxist. The cleric hates the colonel. Two theocracies of different denominations hate each other. “Axis” was a kind word for a group of second world war belligerents — Germany, Italy and Japan — that rarely viewed each other as racial or civilisational equals. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 24, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
By the numbers On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua.  Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Change I sometimes marvel that liberalism manages to hold its own in this, or really any, country. Its insistence upon openness to change and new ways of thinking is, let’s admit it, a pretty large boulder to be carrying right out of the chute. Your average person is suspicious of change and perfectly content with the old ways of thinking.  As much as liberals might wish otherwise, the desire to conserve runs far deeper  in the human soul than the desire to reform. Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, June 2, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Cities For all the emphasis we place on our multicutural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality. In the U.S., the more liberal a city's politics, the higher the rate of inequality. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk say Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I'm  the super genius of all time. The super genius of all time.  Donald Trump © 2023 Kwiple.com
Conservatives No one had come along to suggest that power should be unlimited. But now someone has, and we have learned something very interesting about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals — the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once and a while they have allowed a piece of the cat's anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books, August 16, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus It turns out that liberalism does not by definition breed egoism and irresolution. A lot of the easy calumnies against it (“We could never fight a war now”) appear less certain. And if the “horizontal” bond among citizens is a bit stronger than assumed, so is their “vertical” cord with government. Anti-elitism – the spirit of the age, we thought – is broad but it can also be shallow, or at least selective. The speed with which people deferred to the medical and bureaucratic establishment was telling. The crisis has found nothing more wanting than our cynicism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, May 13, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly. Ann Coulter © 2015 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors. Ann Coulter, who later clarified the remark, saying, “What I meant to say was, ‘We should burn John Walker Lindh alive and televise it on prime-time network TV.’ My apologies for any misunderstanding that might have occurred.” © 2015 Kwiple.com
Gun lobbyists say Liberals want to take away your guns © 2018 Kwiple.com
History When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn't die. It eats liberalism. Jill Lepore, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Identity politics The point on which liberals must therefore insist is that identity is not an “either/or” but an “as-well-as-and.” Timothy Garten Ash, Prospect magazine, January/February 2021 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Immigration In a sense you might distill the challenge facing liberals to a choice: Take more responsibility for restricting immigration, or get used to right-wing populists doing it for you. Ross Douthat, New York Times, September 23, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary bleeding hearts (blēd'ing härts), n. What those who don't care about others call those who do. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Liberalism By the 1980s, you could be a liberal in good standing without holding a particularly liberal position on economics. Joshua Green, in Rebels © 2024 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalised niceness. You can only build a society on the first of these things. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 5, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Liberalism [T]he future of power-sharing liberalism depends on a project of democracy renovation that would reverse the dynamics of capture of our political system by small elites (wealth elites, radicalized MAGA acolytes, and hyperpolarized party bases). Democracy renovation requires a set of critical reforms to rebalance and spread the allocation of power in our political system. Danielle Allen, The New Republic, July/August 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Liberalism In theory, one might argue that liberal, open societies should have open borders. In practice, tbat would rapidly spell the end of liberalism in most such societies, especially those with a high standard of living. Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe © 2023 Kwiple.com
Liberalism In which half of the West is liberalism more vulnerable: the US or Europe? Well, the raw individual clout of Trump unites and fuels America’s hard right. What serves the equivalent role in Europe  is a sense of demographic and cultural siege. The difference is that Trump will one day be gone. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 28, 2023 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism isn’t tenable without hard power. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 25, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. Vladimir Putin © 2019 Kwiple.com
Liberalism [A] major handicap for liberalism today is that for centuries it came to most of the world in the form of imperialism. Recall that John Stuart Mill's day job was in the East India Company and he thought that colonised peoples in their “nonage” were not ready for his refined liberties. Western universalism was, in practice, anything but universal. Some of the worst horrors that human beings have inflicted on other human beings – violent conquest, torture, genocide, slavery –  were justified by reference to the highest ideals of liberty, civilisation and enlightenment. … The road to hell can be paved with liberal intentions. Timothy Garten Ash, Prospect magazine, January/February 2021 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The messy truth is that in the real world, the only hope for preserving liberalism at home and abroad is the maintenance of a world order conducive to liberalism. … The purpose of NATO and other alliances is to defend not against direct threats to U.S. interests but against a breakdown of the order that best serves those interests. Robert Kagan, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The poorer strata everywhere are more liberal or leftist on economic issues; they favor more welfare state measures, higher wages, graduated income taxes, support of trade unions, and so forth. But when liberalism is defined in non-economic terms — as support of civil liberties, internationalism, etc. — the correlation is reversed. The more well-to-do are more liberal, the poorer are more intolerant. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man © 2021 Kwiple.com
Liberalism There was also a near supermajority decision in Florida to restore voting rights to people with some past felony convictions. Similarly, robust majority coalitions resting on cross-  ideological alliances have protected reproductive freedom in states like Kansas and Ohio. Each of these decisions is about affirming not material well-being but core freedoms (personal and political) and inclusion in the political community.  This is liberalism. Twenty-first century liberalism. Power-sharing liberalism. … The commentariat perhaps fails to see this grassroots rebirth of liberalism because the rebirth is so much about political, personal, and civil rights and not economic rights. Danielle Allen, The New Republic, July/August 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The woke left is a threat to liberalism. So is the post-truth right. But each is now well understood. The extent to which liberals themselves are a problem isn't. Because their creed puts such stress on reason, it attracts those who are hopeless at conflict: at the recognition of its frequent necessity, and at the actual waging of it. … Sometimes, at least, set a brute to catch a brute. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 16, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Liberals Get the hell out of the United States of America. Allen West, Tea Party Republican, to liberals  © 2015 Kwiple.com
Liberals A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. Robert Frost © 2020 Kwiple.com
Liberals say They that wasted us required of us mirth Psalms 137:3 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Liberals say Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbours: and our enemies laugh among themselves. Psalms 80:6 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Nation-states American conservatives take pride in their nation but mistrust their nation's state. American liberals value the state, but feel discomfort with the concept of “nation.” Yet it is the power of the state that makes of the nation something more than a phrase of speech; it is the idea of the nation that legitimates the power of the state. David Frum, Trumpocalypse  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Nationalism The relevant polarity is not really between nationalists and liberals, but between nationalists and cosmopolitans. When Trump's supporters blame America's ills on liberals, they are generally talking about cosmopolitans. John Judis, The Nationalist Revival © 2020 Kwiple.com
Political correctness My father and mother told me about civil rights. I knew what the right thing was. The difference is that liberals protect people, and P.C. people protect feelings. They don't do  anything. They're pointing at other people who are somehow falling short of their standards, which could have changed three weeks ago. They're constantly moving the goalposts so they can go, “Gotcha!” Bill Maher, New York Times Magazine, Sept. 30, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a 2003 memorandum  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Populism This is the liberal nightmare: not that populists abolish democracy to remain in power, but that they perform well enough not to have to. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 23, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populists This, far more than Mr Trump, is the liberal nightmare: a populist agenda in the hands of insiders. As long as it was wild cards and eccentrics who espoused these views – Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, was a droll example – they were more or less containable. Lacking the guile to navigate Washing- ton's checks and balances, populists would be, as Mr Trump now seems, in office but not in power. The trouble starts when those with institutional knowledge embrace the same programme. Janan Ganesh, Financial Time, July 8, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He leaves behind no treatise and few epigrams, much less in translated Sanskrit. But he knew a liberal must learn to walk with, if not the devil, then the brute. Harry Truman portrayed by Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 25, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
State of the union This country is in quite a pickle. Conservatives govern without shame and liberals shame without governing. Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, June 8, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
State of the union The truth of the first decades of the 21st century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency, but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we aren't entering a 1930-style crisis for Western liberalism or hurtling forward toward transhumanism or extinction. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens. Ross Douthat © 2020 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court [T]he instances in which conservative and  liberal Supreme Court justices diverge from their preferred methods of statuary inter- pretation to reach results more consistent with their ideological leanings are so numerous as to cast in doubt their claims of adherence to such methods [as texturalism or originalism]. … … a cynic might suggest that the Supreme Court are unanimous in viewing principles of statuary interpretation as matters of convenience. Jed S. Rakoff, New York Review of Books, September 19, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court [T]he main reason the Supreme Court has been for most of its history, the most conservative of the three branches is that conservatives have traditionally paid much more attenton than liberals to placing their allies on the Court,  because it is their best hope for preserving the values they seek to preserve against popular reforms. Jed S. Rakoff, New York Review of Books, September 19, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court to leftists, liberals, progressives Abandon all hope, ye who enter here Dante, The Inferno,  Canto III © 2018 Kwiple.com
Thinking The team [that tested and confirmed the hypothesis that low-effort, automatic thinking promotes political conservativism] also found they could push people to the right by distracting them, putting them under time pressure or simply telling them not to think too hard. Participants who were asked to deliberate more deeply, in contrast, shifted their political thinking to the left. New Scientist, December 16, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Thinking When researchers in the US loitered outside a bar in New England and asked customers about their political views, they found that the drunker the punter, the more right-wing their leanings. That wasn't because right- wing people drink more or get pissed more easily. Wherever people stood on the political spectrum when sober, alcohol shifted their views to the right. Why might that be? The researchers … pointed out that alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of mind. And that is why they were chatting to drunks: they were using drunkenness to test the hy- pothesis that low-effort, automatic thought promotes political conservatism. New Scientist, December 16, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Trumpism However much resurgent liberals detest America's 45th president, they can thank him for sweeping away the mindset of systemic caution that has mesmerized Democratic leaders for a generation. … Mr Trump now has Republican lawmakers eating out of his hand. Those who still believed it would be possible to work across the aisle – and who pined for the days of Rockefeller Republicans – were robbed of any remaining force. Trump has done a service for the American left. Edward Luce, Financial Times, Jan. 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Trumpism Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself. Robert Kagan, Washington Post, September 23, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say And then they remind me that there's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea. Cindy Hyde-Smith, 2018 Republican candidate  for Senator from Mississippi, home to many historically black colleges, speaking in Starkville, Mississippi, home to Mississippi State University © 2018 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say A liberal Catholic is oxymoronic. C. John McCloskey, Opus Dei priest who converted Sam Brownback, Newt Gingrich and other prominent Republicans before being accused of sexual misconduct by an adult woman © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
Tweeting When Trump tweeted, he demonstrated that the faith of a generation of liberal theorists – as well as their digital descendents – are misplaced: decentralization does not necessarily increase democracy, in the public sphere or in the state. Fred Turner © 2019 Kwiple.com