I find it so hard to understand the liberal viewpoint of things.
One minute the USA is fascist for overturning roe v wade and possible other amendments, the next minute the USA is the global defender of democracy. One minute the USA is facing the most social instability with gun violence, inflation, wage stagnation, over policing, the next minute we are the shining city on the hill that must set an example.
You’d think after Korea, Vietnam, and the war on terror we’d learn are lesson about exporting democracy and just mind our own business. But america is not in the business of learning lessons.
We care so much about Taiwanese independence but what of the indigenous people HERE? What of Hawaii? What of Puerto Rico?
Stay strong y’all. See through the contradictions and keep applying Marxism Leninism to the times! There is still hope yet!
the liberal way of thinking is undialectical in the sense that it thinks it can take the good and separate it from the bad, when both are literally and historically interdependent and opposing. this is why you can have essentially blanket reverence for the “good” parts of the founders (freedom of speech, democracy etc) while still being aware of the bad parts, i.e. fucking slavery, genocide, settler-colonialism, and clear oligarchy. to any historical materialist, not only are the bad parts primary because they’re basal and not superstructural, but the bad parts cannot be separated from the “good” parts because that’s just not how history works lol: these aspects are interdependent on each other and cannot be understood outside of their unity. but the liberal is idealist and metaphysical, thinking that “liberal values” are essentially the same as during colonial times and that because of these values i.e. how people think people have become more inclusive over time as they apply liberal values to more people. nevermind the fact that the basic contradictions that resulted in slavery and genocide were never resolved, but simply developed, and yet we see this upholding of “liberal values” through the times clear as day in pieces like the hamilton musical.
big wall of text, but you can pretty easily use this framework of analysis on the phenomenon you’re describing as well: yes, liberals recognize USA is horrible because of modern slavery in prisons that is still the backbone of our domestic economy, child labor, human trafficking, modern genocide and ethnic cleansing as it relates to africans but also indigenous peoples, bad wars at least in some cases abroad, and now an uptick in institutional patriarchy. but at the same time they’re able to claim that the US is the best country in the world and better than any other country because of its liberal values (or in many cases a revisionist understanding of its history, like previously described). they again see these things as separate and not co-constitutive. this is often the case for radlibs like anarchists as well, noam chomsky being a hilarious example
Even the “good” seems pretty empty at this point. “Freedom of speech” unless you talk about alternatives to capitalism. “Democracy” for white landowners, later expanded to allow a certain set of white people to vote for a select set of candidates. The “liberal values” are empty and always secondary to capitalist values.
yeah ofc, the good was never really good to begin with for the most part, with the exception of liberal identity politics being at least some sort of progress even if it’s empty and generally not applicable to proletarians. as the empire’s power wanes and slides further and further backwards we’ll come to see how longstanding those gains even were in the first place.