The more I reflect on my political attitudes the more I realize my liberalism is not very extreme. My liberalism has been extreme, but I’ve tempered it a great deal since it reached its peak intensity around 2004-2005.

Where have my attitudes changed?

I am less and less optimistic about a world where everyone wins. At best, we will have a world where the majority of people get a chance — if they manage to escape real but surmountable obstacles, which will be steeper, higher and slipperier for some than others. We should work to minimize unfairness, but traces of unfairness will continue to exist. 

I believe that -centricities of some form or another will always exist. Conceptual, behavioral and moral norms will — and ought to — be imposed. The unlimited increase of sensitivity toward infinitesimally subtle injustices creates incurable irritability (or maybe feeds preexisting irritability), and the desire to remove such injustice from the world is at best silly and at worst justification for far worse irritability-impelled injustices. 

I believe that marriage, parenting and education are coercive processes. If they are not, they stop producing human beings who are more than mere individuals. The extremes of liberalism produce antisocial human beings who fear or avoid all bonds of responsibility, and who cannot form enduring and substantial individual or institutional relationships. Mere individuals are not fully-developed human beings.

I believe that a small degree of illiberalism is necessary and desirable in a society, partly for the sake of the majority of people, who need a sense of stability and continuity and solidity to feel sane.

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As I examine my beliefs and attempt to be as fair as possible in situating them, I realize that I am growing incredibly impatient toward what I see as the two greatest liberal absurdities, the left-liberal version, and the right-liberal libertarian version:

• The right-liberal libertarian absurdity is best illustrated by the Nolan Chart that converted me and so many of my friends to adopt a passively libertarian attitude toward politics in the late-80s. The absurdity lies in the facile notion that civil liberties and economic liberties can both be maximized both simply by not legislating or regulating in these areas. The very real fact that an unregulated private sector can and will produce private inequalities every bit as oppressive as those imposed by governments is ignored, at least in the popular (and politically impactful) version of this conceptualization of politics. I actually agree with left-liberals that the right-liberal absurdity is a recipe for a slide into oligarchic tyranny, and I’m even paranoid enough to believe that Ayn Rand longed for precisely this illiberal outcome (what I’ve been calling her “economic rape fantasies”).
• The left-liberal absurdity is the conceit that once equality is imposed (assuming that there even is an objective definition of equality, which there is not) and then achieved (assuming this is possible, which it is not), that the imposition can be removed or that it will simply disappear (which it most definitely will not do). I believe what right-liberals (real ones, like Hayek) say about the left-liberal absurdity — that a communist state is intrinsically and permanently illiberal.

Of course, on both these points I am just stating opinions, and doing nothing to support my opinion. But what I am really trying to do here (at least right now) is simply to articulate a position within a political landscape, and to contrast it with other positions with which it might be compared or confused.

And where I stand is in the upper region of the intersection of liberalism, where it intersects with the liberal goals of social democracy and conservative republicanism, solidly inside the boundaries of practicability: a region I have labeled “Liberal pluralism”. I believe it is legitimate to be more liberal than I am, and less liberal, more accepting of inequality and less tolerant of equality. If you are north of the line that divides liberalism and illiberalism, as far as I am concerned, you are not a political enemy, but an opponent worthy of respectful opposition. (Mouffe’s “agonistic” relationship.)