"The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange tyrants and tyrannies.”
"...how does a political project committed merely to the values of liberal tolerance and values-neutral proceduralism stand a chance in defending itself without having to resort to some degree of paternalism?"
I don't believe that it can, and you've indicated one important reason why. Value-neutral liberalism isn't capable of expressly accommodating its own tacit values and distinctions of worth.
The shared moral communities, common forms of life, and the values and virtues that take hold in the *polis* are prerequisites for even conceiving of formal/procedural liberalism.
Classical republicanism looks like a better philosophical alternative. It's no accident that the US Constitution deliberately took ancient and renaissance republics as its model.
Citizens have duties to the *polis* (however we can manage that abstraction in today's world, which is no small problem in itself) in addition to the duties of the *polis* to the citizenry in matters of rights and autonomy.
Recognizing this doesn't have to lead to the kind of centralized collectivist paternalism that (IMO rightly) concerns the laissez-faire sort of liberal. Those strands of liberalism which can't distinguish between different sorts of responsibility to the community, or between kinds of collective agents, are a glaring blindspot for those on the right. The left deviates in the other direction, unable to see anything *but* collectives.
Classical liberalism only gets you halfway to what we want, and unfortunately we're seeing how 50% leads to a spectacular crash.
I suspect that as long as we're locked into these narratives, and unable to even imagine alternatives, we're not going to see much change. But then, that's part of the whole postmodernist predicament, isn't it?
I would consider myself a pragmatic free speech absolutist. I see fake news and other disinformation as posing potentially existential threats to civilization, not as more "grist for the mill" in the marketplace for ideas. As such, it would theoretically make sense to try to put a stop to it in the furtherance of the American virtues worth defending (whatever those are. I would use the Bill of Rights as a starting point, but many on the far left would object and many on the right would praise those virtues in principal but disregard them in practice, aside from the 2nd Amendment anyway).
However, there are no longer gatekeepers that I would trust to decide what is and is not fake. I don't trust the mainstream media (or most independent media for that matter). I don't trust academia. I don't trust the government, Republican or Democrat. And I sure as hell don't trust Alphabet, Facebook, and Twitter, or the robots they create.
This puts me in the position of being a free speech absolutist not because I think completely unfettered free speech is conducive to our collective well-being (it's clearly not), but because it is better than a system of censorship administered by ideologues, demagogues, and authoritarian institutions. I don't see how information warfare and fake news can possibly be suppressed in any way that could be accepted as legitimate by a critical mass of society, even if we could by some miracle broadly agree on some basic virtues worth promoting. And trying to impose such a system without widespread legitimacy (which is basically what is happening now) will only further fuel distrust. I wish I could end this with some sort of positive proposal, but I'm at a loss.
"...how does a political project committed merely to the values of liberal tolerance and values-neutral proceduralism stand a chance in defending itself without having to resort to some degree of paternalism?"
I don't believe that it can, and you've indicated one important reason why. Value-neutral liberalism isn't capable of expressly accommodating its own tacit values and distinctions of worth.
The shared moral communities, common forms of life, and the values and virtues that take hold in the *polis* are prerequisites for even conceiving of formal/procedural liberalism.
Classical republicanism looks like a better philosophical alternative. It's no accident that the US Constitution deliberately took ancient and renaissance republics as its model.
Citizens have duties to the *polis* (however we can manage that abstraction in today's world, which is no small problem in itself) in addition to the duties of the *polis* to the citizenry in matters of rights and autonomy.
Recognizing this doesn't have to lead to the kind of centralized collectivist paternalism that (IMO rightly) concerns the laissez-faire sort of liberal. Those strands of liberalism which can't distinguish between different sorts of responsibility to the community, or between kinds of collective agents, are a glaring blindspot for those on the right. The left deviates in the other direction, unable to see anything *but* collectives.
Classical liberalism only gets you halfway to what we want, and unfortunately we're seeing how 50% leads to a spectacular crash.
I suspect that as long as we're locked into these narratives, and unable to even imagine alternatives, we're not going to see much change. But then, that's part of the whole postmodernist predicament, isn't it?
I would consider myself a pragmatic free speech absolutist. I see fake news and other disinformation as posing potentially existential threats to civilization, not as more "grist for the mill" in the marketplace for ideas. As such, it would theoretically make sense to try to put a stop to it in the furtherance of the American virtues worth defending (whatever those are. I would use the Bill of Rights as a starting point, but many on the far left would object and many on the right would praise those virtues in principal but disregard them in practice, aside from the 2nd Amendment anyway).
However, there are no longer gatekeepers that I would trust to decide what is and is not fake. I don't trust the mainstream media (or most independent media for that matter). I don't trust academia. I don't trust the government, Republican or Democrat. And I sure as hell don't trust Alphabet, Facebook, and Twitter, or the robots they create.
This puts me in the position of being a free speech absolutist not because I think completely unfettered free speech is conducive to our collective well-being (it's clearly not), but because it is better than a system of censorship administered by ideologues, demagogues, and authoritarian institutions. I don't see how information warfare and fake news can possibly be suppressed in any way that could be accepted as legitimate by a critical mass of society, even if we could by some miracle broadly agree on some basic virtues worth promoting. And trying to impose such a system without widespread legitimacy (which is basically what is happening now) will only further fuel distrust. I wish I could end this with some sort of positive proposal, but I'm at a loss.