we have never been liberal

We Have Never Been Liberal: Occidentalist Myths and the Impending Fascist Apocalypse, Lilith Mahmud

• Trump: the injection of racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic language into legitimate discourse threatens to undo strides made toward social equality
• liberalism as a cultural category … lends false precision to a loose and contradictory set of contemporary beliefs and values about individual freedom, rights, government, and private property … lends false precision to a loose and contradictory set of contemporary beliefs and values about individual freedom, rights, government, and private property … the belief in liberalism is a cosmology that structures political subjectivity and belonging for many Euro-American subjects
• the origin story of liberalism peaks in the European Enlightenment … many Enlightenment philosophers were also Freemasons and formulated their political, social, and economic ideas in the secrecy and exclusivity of Masonic lodges … set off on a path of self-cultivation on which they learned to embody the spirit of fraternity, equality, and liberty … trained to become better people: to embrace a secular morality and a nondogmatic faith, to think rationally and display moderation, to appreciate the sciences and liberal arts, and to respect all people regardless of social differences
• “The Masonic experience illustrates two key points about liberalism: first, that being liberal in the Occidentalist sense is an aspiration, not a fact, and it takes a painstaking labor of self-cultivation to naturalize it as a Western trait, and second, that widespread and systematic instances of illiberalism within Euro-American societies are coded as exceptions that only prove the rule”
• “For the intelligentsia who believe in liberalism, the likes of Trump and his European predecessors are a scandalous anomaly. Scandals, however, usually expose what we already know, even as they offer a momentary opportunity to rewrite the script.”
  
• the end of history
• white supremacist capitalist patriarchy

linked mentions for "we have never been liberal":

1. white supremacist capitalist patriarchy
   a term coined by the late feminist critic and social theorist Bell Hooks that describes a system that benefits from inequality and exploitation, and
   
2. the end of history
   Francis Fukuyama 1989 & 2022 the phrase “the end of history” was coined by Hegel (the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social