In which I explain how the recent de-liberalisation of the Right might represent a unique opportunity for Classical Liberals to raise the salience of their points
If you want to make embryo selection acceptable, the best way to do it is to show liberals and progressives just how much conservatives/Rightoids hate it. Show them every Mary Harrington article and RapeGroyper9000 tweet about the matter.
You can also make anti-third world immigration acceptable showing to libs all Nick Fuentes/RawEgg nationalist posts about how muslims and chinese are "based and trad"
Truly brilliant (and hilarious). I like your (completely factual) idea that we are ruled by vibes. I’ve felt recently that classical liberals are virtually the only principled political thinkers. Most people who think about politics are complete ignoramuses when it comes to social science and policy analysis. It’s nearly 100% vibe-based and fact-free.
I appreciate your end goal a lot, but as someone who also identifies as a classical liberal as described in Nate's post, I can't help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with that framing and strategy (caveat: the rest of this comment might be a lot of shouting into the well, which may indeed contribute to classical liberalism's marginalized position today. But I reserve the right to be idealist ;) )
While I acknowledge that some end goals are worth certain sacrifices, I feel that this strategy would ultimately entail elevating ad hominem arguments to a prime mechanism in public discourse, and I think this is potentially dangerous and may have unintended consequences. Promoting civil discourse with the honest intention of truth-seeking is one of the most important foundations of modernism and classical liberalism. Piggy-backing on the left's current power to promote certain liberal goals may yield a tactical win in the short-term, but it will only strengthen the power of the left which, by and large, has not been very friendly to open discourse as of late, and leveraging the reasoning of "look, outgroup is opposed to it, so it must be good" is certainly not doing anything to change it - it more seems like a "bullet" as referred to in one of my favorite SSC posts, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ . Plus, it may put a lot of reasonable but right-coded (and hard to reframe) policies even further out of reach.
Another interesting aspect: you refer to both Matthew Yglesias and Noah Smith as "left of center". I like both quite a bit, but they don't strike me as particularly "left" in any way (maybe Matt, due to his pro-bike/urbanism/more housing stance), but rather classical liberals. Of course, given how much the right has shifted to the extreme since Trump took office (the left certainly also has shifted, but the right is more obviously unhinged as of late), this may be an accurate description when projecting onto the left/right axis - but as you say yourself, this projection in itself is a problem (not the least for the cause of liberalism itself). I think classical liberalism needs to demonstrate its value by separating itself more clearly from both the left and the right outside of this axis, rather than reframing its goals and values as left-coded. This is, of course, many times more tedious, slower, and comes with a lower probability of success. But isn't this insistence on moderated, long-term thinking the way by which liberalism makes a positive impact?
I think public political discourse has always been driven by vibes and people following their intuitions as opposed to some logical principles. Even among liberals, we start from the vibe that freedom is good.
I do not think we need to forego any principles: we are not going to start lying about the benefits of these policies or the benefits of liberalism. But we need to recognise that masses of people are driven in and out of movements by "aesthetic" concerns: within the boundaries of realities it's good to frame your movement as aesthetically good. This is simply an iron law of how people act in politics, no amount of wishful thinking will change this. Liberalism suffers from the fact that it's not intrinsically as inspiring as other more extreme ideologies so it only appears good by comparison to how bad the other stuff is (see Cordelia analogy). I say let's take advantage of this.
And as I point out this is happening: centre left pundits (yes NOah and Matt classify as that- their vibes are more leftish than rightish but yes they are also liberal; most people are a combo) have become more obvsly pro America than they would have been otherwise. 5 years ago being pro America would have been seen as right wing coded and now it is not
Yeah, it would be foolish to ignore the vibes aspect, no doubt. I don't really disagree with anything you say at the effect level, I think. I just wonder if liberalism is doomed to be that un-inspiring? I don't know the Cordelia story first-hand, but from your retelling the actual key to her eventual power was her honesty, and it's important to not lose sight of that.
I don't want to magically make people being driven to "aesthetic" things go away as a phenomenon, this is just a fact and as such is neither particularly bad nor particularly good, but just "is". But aesthetics are not immutable, and I want a truly, decidedly liberal aesthetic, not a "probably aesthetic because it looks somewhat left-ish, at least definitely not right-ish". I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge of the situation, but from afar it seems to be that Milei is a politician who ran on decidedly liberal (not left, not right) vibes, and that resonated. Milei might not be palatable to western societies for a variety of reasons (but people said the same about Trump), but I don't think the more or less complete absence of charismatic liberal politicians who know how to appeal to people's aesthetics taste is a necessity. I might be wrong, though. To your point of "good by comparison", Latin America is generally very socialist, while - notwithstanding the left's rise of power in society, especially academia - western countries are still pretty far from being actually socialist. So maybe there isn't enough really bad left stuff going on for liberalism to score points by distancing itself from the left, as opposed to what's been happening on the right (which is your point I guess).
Lastly, I myself feel some pleasure about being able to reference writers like Noah and Matt who are both decidedly pro-American and at the same time under no suspicion of being right-leaning. But I realize that in thinking this, I am subjecting myself to at least one half of the simplistic "left = good, right = bad" dichotomy, which again makes me a bit unhappy. And the pendulum can quickly swing the other way with just a few "wrong" opinions expressed: my impression is that a lot of the moderate left do actually consider Nate Silver as right-leaning, due to his comments on Biden's age and Lab Leak (I say moderate left because the extreme left again hates Biden anyway because of Palestine), which I don't think is fair.
yeah I think it's important to have a decidedly pro-liberal aesthetic and to raise the salience of freedom on its own. Not sure exactly how to do that and if it's possible without pointing to the authoritarian contrast
The beauty of liberalism is that it is a big tent with lots of room to consider ideas that may be “left” or “right” -coded. It has and would continue to be a mistake for classical liberals to insist on the supremacy of “free markets” for example. Free markets are a myth and the debate should really be about the optimum regulation of them in service of the goals for which there is some sort of societal consensus. An important requirement for liberalism going forward is for it show people that it can deliver the goods, not in some far off abstract future, but on timescales that improve the lot of people today. If liberals don’t deliver than illiberals will be happy to fill the gap.
I doubt he's ever thought about it, so the initial framing he hears could swing it either way. Imagine in his voice the statement: "The government, which of course will tax even the money it hadn't managed to take during your life when you try to leave it to your children, now doesn't want you to be able to receive reimbursement for helping someone out with an extra kidney. What do they want -- centralized lists of who gets an organ when they need one? Do you think you'll be on that list?"
If I force myself to be explicit about it, my contention is that Tucker Carlson isn't really a 'principled conservative' in as meaningful a sense as we'd expect.
Things that contradict the Dialectical Faith — Critical Theory and all its offshoots being its current manifestation — have increasing difficulty getting up among progressives as the Faith institutionally spreads (hello DEI) and continues to dominate the status-coding of ideas. Also, What Clever Folk Believe narratives need is for people to disagree — so accepting the narrative provides status — while claiming that there is no legitimate reason to disagree.
What works best for that is dumb/false ideas that Very Serious People can rationalise. A person with a penis is a woman if their {gender soul} tells them that being a prime example. The Dialectical Faith itself is the longest running (secular) version of that.
Hence, we have this succession of false or other very dubious narratives that Clever Folk Believe — once you embrace the notion that you are a Moral Master of the Universe, folk become remarkably easy to manipulate. Russiagate was QAnon for the college educated, for instance. Hunter Biden’s laptop was a semi-amusing case, the Lab Leak issue was much less so. (Gain of function research is SUCH a stupid thing to do.) The myth that police were killing lots of unarmed African-Americans led directly to a huge surge in homicides as police withdrew from policing such localities. The current tragedy of US politics is Trump is bad and his opponents are worse.
You may have a point about folk such as Noah Smith and Yascha Mounk. I was rather hoping it was a more direct awareness of the growing madness but I can see how the weakening of the right-coding of US boosting may have given them more space. They may succeed where Mark Lilla failed, but I am not all that confident.
For the Brad DeLong effect, where nothing is acceptable that implies any agreement with anyone right-coded about anything — indeed, one must regularly signal one’s rejection of all such sin — shows little other sign of abating. Which, of course, means no effective opposition to the Dialectical Faith. But strong enough right-coding of things that the Dialectical Faith does not (yet) care about may have the effect you seek.
Also, not sure that Tucker looks anti-American to his audience. Anti elites, yes. But populism is all about the “true” Americans/French/Swedes …. And the basic claim — that our elites despise most of the citizenry, particularly the working class citizenry — has lots of evidence to support it. See current border brouhaha. Or the recent Rasmussen survey. https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Them-vs-Us_CTUP-Rasmussen-Study-FINAL.pdf
Of course, your point is how it looks to centre-left folk, which is fair.
No he's not and only a stupid person would think so. What he is doing is providing some balance against the established narratives, which is long overdue.
It’s more that white conservatives have started to identify with illiberal lost causes and foreign regimes more strongly. This is because they’re becoming increasingly aware that conservatism as it exists in liberal societies is objectively a loser’s movement that makes a lot of noise but always kowtows to liberalism in the end, especially on social/moral issues. It’s also based on them realizing that economic liberalization and cultural traditionalism are ultimately incompatible. It may seem silly, but this last but has very much to do with the business community (one of conservatism’s ostensible or historical allies) increasingly signalling that it stands with the left on social issues
In the US at least, university education and elitism are left coded. So getting the left to adopt anything has a certain kind of power, especially in places where educated people are dominant and get to make the decisions. But 2/3 of the US electorate does not have a university degree, and voting in the US is increasingly polarized by educational attainment. So getting the left to adopt anything runs a serious risk of getting the country as a whole to reject it. And it would be tough going to convince the university educated to accept freedom as a bedrock principle anyway. The university educated (in the US at least) are incredibly invested in state power because their livelihood depends on it, whether that be directly working for a government bureaucracy, or working in a business or non-profit ensuring compliance with laws and regulations and avoiding lawsuits, or working in a profession where the law forbids practice of that profession to people without the requisite university education.
Isn’t Tucker’s video vignettes on Russia not so much love letters to Russia but rebukes of the democrat policies that have made our cities shit holes? Your interpretation of his pieces seems to be nothing but willful misinterpretation.
> Despite its name, national conservatism could not be more different from the ideas of Reagan and Thatcher. Rather than being sceptical of big government, national conservatives think ordinary people are beset by impersonal global forces and that the state is their saviour.
Um, you do realize that Reagan and Thatcher were perfectly willing to use government power to protect the people from the biggest global threat of they're day, namely the Soviet Union and global Communism.
Nearly all of the anti-Woke fight is about stopping the use of government power to promote wokeness.
I don't think you understand right wingers at all.
Your argument comes down to They Have Cooties, don't get them on YOU.
The world is big and complex and when you introduce something, you lose something else. It's fair and necessary to have a faction that examines what we're losing and what that may mean - you don't have to take Groyper69's word for it just like I don't take Tankie17 as the last word on economic distribution.
"Do the opposite of conservatives" got us two years of COVID lockdowns. I mean it literally was a 180 degree reversal of the liberal position in Jan/Feb 2020 when they were saying to hug people in Chinatown, reversed solely to own the cons.
Most conservatives are pretty normal people with common sense. If "do the opposite of that" is the playbook you're going to end up on the opposite side of common sense too often.
P.S. Tucker's basically right about Ukraine. Never should have been involved, should have pursued peace. Ukraines going to go down in flames. Liberals jumped on another neocon war just to own the cons.
"This means that a large majority of young educated people now lie somewhere on the Socialism - Liberalism axis, with a disturbing (for me) trend of more of them approaching the Socialist side (and with increasing disregard for Liberal principles). " I think it's much more serious than that, if Liberal is used in its classical meaning of have something to do with liberty. Surveys show that a clear pattern of hostility to free speech among college students. For example, a 2017 survey showed that 62% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans thought it was appropriate to shout down speakers who were 'offensive' and 'hurtful'. 19% thought it would be acceptable to use *violence* to prevent such as speaker from talking.
In the US, at least, the term 'liberal' is generally used at present to refer to a cluster of Left attitudes, and don't carry any implication of support for free speech and certainly not for free markets.
If you want to make embryo selection acceptable, the best way to do it is to show liberals and progressives just how much conservatives/Rightoids hate it. Show them every Mary Harrington article and RapeGroyper9000 tweet about the matter.
You can also make anti-third world immigration acceptable showing to libs all Nick Fuentes/RawEgg nationalist posts about how muslims and chinese are "based and trad"
Truly brilliant (and hilarious). I like your (completely factual) idea that we are ruled by vibes. I’ve felt recently that classical liberals are virtually the only principled political thinkers. Most people who think about politics are complete ignoramuses when it comes to social science and policy analysis. It’s nearly 100% vibe-based and fact-free.
Thank you very much :)
I appreciate your end goal a lot, but as someone who also identifies as a classical liberal as described in Nate's post, I can't help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with that framing and strategy (caveat: the rest of this comment might be a lot of shouting into the well, which may indeed contribute to classical liberalism's marginalized position today. But I reserve the right to be idealist ;) )
While I acknowledge that some end goals are worth certain sacrifices, I feel that this strategy would ultimately entail elevating ad hominem arguments to a prime mechanism in public discourse, and I think this is potentially dangerous and may have unintended consequences. Promoting civil discourse with the honest intention of truth-seeking is one of the most important foundations of modernism and classical liberalism. Piggy-backing on the left's current power to promote certain liberal goals may yield a tactical win in the short-term, but it will only strengthen the power of the left which, by and large, has not been very friendly to open discourse as of late, and leveraging the reasoning of "look, outgroup is opposed to it, so it must be good" is certainly not doing anything to change it - it more seems like a "bullet" as referred to in one of my favorite SSC posts, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ . Plus, it may put a lot of reasonable but right-coded (and hard to reframe) policies even further out of reach.
Another interesting aspect: you refer to both Matthew Yglesias and Noah Smith as "left of center". I like both quite a bit, but they don't strike me as particularly "left" in any way (maybe Matt, due to his pro-bike/urbanism/more housing stance), but rather classical liberals. Of course, given how much the right has shifted to the extreme since Trump took office (the left certainly also has shifted, but the right is more obviously unhinged as of late), this may be an accurate description when projecting onto the left/right axis - but as you say yourself, this projection in itself is a problem (not the least for the cause of liberalism itself). I think classical liberalism needs to demonstrate its value by separating itself more clearly from both the left and the right outside of this axis, rather than reframing its goals and values as left-coded. This is, of course, many times more tedious, slower, and comes with a lower probability of success. But isn't this insistence on moderated, long-term thinking the way by which liberalism makes a positive impact?
I think public political discourse has always been driven by vibes and people following their intuitions as opposed to some logical principles. Even among liberals, we start from the vibe that freedom is good.
I do not think we need to forego any principles: we are not going to start lying about the benefits of these policies or the benefits of liberalism. But we need to recognise that masses of people are driven in and out of movements by "aesthetic" concerns: within the boundaries of realities it's good to frame your movement as aesthetically good. This is simply an iron law of how people act in politics, no amount of wishful thinking will change this. Liberalism suffers from the fact that it's not intrinsically as inspiring as other more extreme ideologies so it only appears good by comparison to how bad the other stuff is (see Cordelia analogy). I say let's take advantage of this.
And as I point out this is happening: centre left pundits (yes NOah and Matt classify as that- their vibes are more leftish than rightish but yes they are also liberal; most people are a combo) have become more obvsly pro America than they would have been otherwise. 5 years ago being pro America would have been seen as right wing coded and now it is not
Yeah, it would be foolish to ignore the vibes aspect, no doubt. I don't really disagree with anything you say at the effect level, I think. I just wonder if liberalism is doomed to be that un-inspiring? I don't know the Cordelia story first-hand, but from your retelling the actual key to her eventual power was her honesty, and it's important to not lose sight of that.
I don't want to magically make people being driven to "aesthetic" things go away as a phenomenon, this is just a fact and as such is neither particularly bad nor particularly good, but just "is". But aesthetics are not immutable, and I want a truly, decidedly liberal aesthetic, not a "probably aesthetic because it looks somewhat left-ish, at least definitely not right-ish". I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge of the situation, but from afar it seems to be that Milei is a politician who ran on decidedly liberal (not left, not right) vibes, and that resonated. Milei might not be palatable to western societies for a variety of reasons (but people said the same about Trump), but I don't think the more or less complete absence of charismatic liberal politicians who know how to appeal to people's aesthetics taste is a necessity. I might be wrong, though. To your point of "good by comparison", Latin America is generally very socialist, while - notwithstanding the left's rise of power in society, especially academia - western countries are still pretty far from being actually socialist. So maybe there isn't enough really bad left stuff going on for liberalism to score points by distancing itself from the left, as opposed to what's been happening on the right (which is your point I guess).
Lastly, I myself feel some pleasure about being able to reference writers like Noah and Matt who are both decidedly pro-American and at the same time under no suspicion of being right-leaning. But I realize that in thinking this, I am subjecting myself to at least one half of the simplistic "left = good, right = bad" dichotomy, which again makes me a bit unhappy. And the pendulum can quickly swing the other way with just a few "wrong" opinions expressed: my impression is that a lot of the moderate left do actually consider Nate Silver as right-leaning, due to his comments on Biden's age and Lab Leak (I say moderate left because the extreme left again hates Biden anyway because of Palestine), which I don't think is fair.
yeah I think it's important to have a decidedly pro-liberal aesthetic and to raise the salience of freedom on its own. Not sure exactly how to do that and if it's possible without pointing to the authoritarian contrast
The beauty of liberalism is that it is a big tent with lots of room to consider ideas that may be “left” or “right” -coded. It has and would continue to be a mistake for classical liberals to insist on the supremacy of “free markets” for example. Free markets are a myth and the debate should really be about the optimum regulation of them in service of the goals for which there is some sort of societal consensus. An important requirement for liberalism going forward is for it show people that it can deliver the goods, not in some far off abstract future, but on timescales that improve the lot of people today. If liberals don’t deliver than illiberals will be happy to fill the gap.
Might be better to hope the topic escapes Tucker's notice, as he'd probably like it and convince his viewers. Seems a gamble.
Why do you think he’d like it ?
I doubt he's ever thought about it, so the initial framing he hears could swing it either way. Imagine in his voice the statement: "The government, which of course will tax even the money it hadn't managed to take during your life when you try to leave it to your children, now doesn't want you to be able to receive reimbursement for helping someone out with an extra kidney. What do they want -- centralized lists of who gets an organ when they need one? Do you think you'll be on that list?"
I feel like in practice conservatives have largely been against stuff that involved both commercial and biology
If I force myself to be explicit about it, my contention is that Tucker Carlson isn't really a 'principled conservative' in as meaningful a sense as we'd expect.
Things that contradict the Dialectical Faith — Critical Theory and all its offshoots being its current manifestation — have increasing difficulty getting up among progressives as the Faith institutionally spreads (hello DEI) and continues to dominate the status-coding of ideas. Also, What Clever Folk Believe narratives need is for people to disagree — so accepting the narrative provides status — while claiming that there is no legitimate reason to disagree.
What works best for that is dumb/false ideas that Very Serious People can rationalise. A person with a penis is a woman if their {gender soul} tells them that being a prime example. The Dialectical Faith itself is the longest running (secular) version of that.
Hence, we have this succession of false or other very dubious narratives that Clever Folk Believe — once you embrace the notion that you are a Moral Master of the Universe, folk become remarkably easy to manipulate. Russiagate was QAnon for the college educated, for instance. Hunter Biden’s laptop was a semi-amusing case, the Lab Leak issue was much less so. (Gain of function research is SUCH a stupid thing to do.) The myth that police were killing lots of unarmed African-Americans led directly to a huge surge in homicides as police withdrew from policing such localities. The current tragedy of US politics is Trump is bad and his opponents are worse.
You may have a point about folk such as Noah Smith and Yascha Mounk. I was rather hoping it was a more direct awareness of the growing madness but I can see how the weakening of the right-coding of US boosting may have given them more space. They may succeed where Mark Lilla failed, but I am not all that confident.
For the Brad DeLong effect, where nothing is acceptable that implies any agreement with anyone right-coded about anything — indeed, one must regularly signal one’s rejection of all such sin — shows little other sign of abating. Which, of course, means no effective opposition to the Dialectical Faith. But strong enough right-coding of things that the Dialectical Faith does not (yet) care about may have the effect you seek.
Also, not sure that Tucker looks anti-American to his audience. Anti elites, yes. But populism is all about the “true” Americans/French/Swedes …. And the basic claim — that our elites despise most of the citizenry, particularly the working class citizenry — has lots of evidence to support it. See current border brouhaha. Or the recent Rasmussen survey. https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Them-vs-Us_CTUP-Rasmussen-Study-FINAL.pdf
Of course, your point is how it looks to centre-left folk, which is fair.
"He is openly declaring his love for a regime..."
No he's not and only a stupid person would think so. What he is doing is providing some balance against the established narratives, which is long overdue.
It’s more that white conservatives have started to identify with illiberal lost causes and foreign regimes more strongly. This is because they’re becoming increasingly aware that conservatism as it exists in liberal societies is objectively a loser’s movement that makes a lot of noise but always kowtows to liberalism in the end, especially on social/moral issues. It’s also based on them realizing that economic liberalization and cultural traditionalism are ultimately incompatible. It may seem silly, but this last but has very much to do with the business community (one of conservatism’s ostensible or historical allies) increasingly signalling that it stands with the left on social issues
Your Liberalism--Socialism--Conservatism triangle maps somewhat to Liberté,Eégalité, Fraternité
In the US at least, university education and elitism are left coded. So getting the left to adopt anything has a certain kind of power, especially in places where educated people are dominant and get to make the decisions. But 2/3 of the US electorate does not have a university degree, and voting in the US is increasingly polarized by educational attainment. So getting the left to adopt anything runs a serious risk of getting the country as a whole to reject it. And it would be tough going to convince the university educated to accept freedom as a bedrock principle anyway. The university educated (in the US at least) are incredibly invested in state power because their livelihood depends on it, whether that be directly working for a government bureaucracy, or working in a business or non-profit ensuring compliance with laws and regulations and avoiding lawsuits, or working in a profession where the law forbids practice of that profession to people without the requisite university education.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1aqhxrv/tucker_carlson_moscow_so_much_nicer_than_any_city/
A quick look at Reddit isn't too promising. "Tucker is right, of course Moscow is better, It's socialist!"
Not too many Liberalism enjoyers from what I see.
Isn’t Tucker’s video vignettes on Russia not so much love letters to Russia but rebukes of the democrat policies that have made our cities shit holes? Your interpretation of his pieces seems to be nothing but willful misinterpretation.
> Despite its name, national conservatism could not be more different from the ideas of Reagan and Thatcher. Rather than being sceptical of big government, national conservatives think ordinary people are beset by impersonal global forces and that the state is their saviour.
Um, you do realize that Reagan and Thatcher were perfectly willing to use government power to protect the people from the biggest global threat of they're day, namely the Soviet Union and global Communism.
Nearly all of the anti-Woke fight is about stopping the use of government power to promote wokeness.
And this is why liberals keep losing.
Seriously, are you even capable of thinking through the most basic consequences of the policies you support?
I don't think you understand right wingers at all.
Your argument comes down to They Have Cooties, don't get them on YOU.
The world is big and complex and when you introduce something, you lose something else. It's fair and necessary to have a faction that examines what we're losing and what that may mean - you don't have to take Groyper69's word for it just like I don't take Tankie17 as the last word on economic distribution.
"Do the opposite of conservatives" got us two years of COVID lockdowns. I mean it literally was a 180 degree reversal of the liberal position in Jan/Feb 2020 when they were saying to hug people in Chinatown, reversed solely to own the cons.
Most conservatives are pretty normal people with common sense. If "do the opposite of that" is the playbook you're going to end up on the opposite side of common sense too often.
P.S. Tucker's basically right about Ukraine. Never should have been involved, should have pursued peace. Ukraines going to go down in flames. Liberals jumped on another neocon war just to own the cons.
"This means that a large majority of young educated people now lie somewhere on the Socialism - Liberalism axis, with a disturbing (for me) trend of more of them approaching the Socialist side (and with increasing disregard for Liberal principles). " I think it's much more serious than that, if Liberal is used in its classical meaning of have something to do with liberty. Surveys show that a clear pattern of hostility to free speech among college students. For example, a 2017 survey showed that 62% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans thought it was appropriate to shout down speakers who were 'offensive' and 'hurtful'. 19% thought it would be acceptable to use *violence* to prevent such as speaker from talking.
https://www.lenconnect.com/story/opinion/columns/2017/09/21/catherine-rampell-growing-hostility-to/18759425007/
In the US, at least, the term 'liberal' is generally used at present to refer to a cluster of Left attitudes, and don't carry any implication of support for free speech and certainly not for free markets.