The case against crisis-mongering
Strange no mention of Covid as a crisis the US would struggle to handle.  The most popular news network in the US is Fox News, and it is (although not uniformly) skeptical of vaccines, masks, lockdowns or even if Covid is real and killing the people its killing.  We can look at the rising delta variant infections and deaths to see how the US handles this.<p>Also missing is the threat of a full-scale war between nuclear-armed powers.  There hasn&#x27;t been a real non-proxy war between major powers for 75 years, but is there anyone who thinks tensions between NATO and Russia or China have been decreasing or even level?  They have obviously been increasing, so the potential of a nuclear crisis walks alongside all of that.  Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought so, as do others.<p>He says he is in an area with as progressive and pro-climate a local government as you could want, then he says he had to fight for his own initiative to put solar panels on his roof.  Every year more carbon pours into the atmosphere.  His assertion that amounts to &quot;liberalism is not preventing this, but is capable of understanding it&quot; is not encouraging.  Like Covid, major corporations at the center of the economy and hegemony are actively involved in spreading the idea that this is not even happening, which many buy into.<p>Insofar as fascism and events like Charlottesville, a town voted to remove a statue, a number of people came to protest, many openly calling themselves fascist.  One townsperson marching to remove the statue was deliberately run over and killed by the other side.  It&#x27;s a manifestation of a fascist movement and it had a certain size and result.  People are not wrong to notice Charlottesville or other things like that and see some level of a fascist threat, the question is how large it is - he is probably right that some reactions to such things are overblown, but they&#x27;re not reacting to something that doesn&#x27;t exist.  I probably agree with Yglesias on the odds of the country becoming fascist in the next decades, but with Charlottesville, storming the Capitol to stop the election count and such things, it is correct to concern those on the watch for fascism, even if as Yglesias says, this can become overblown.<p>Also some people just have a historical perspective Yglesias doesn&#x27;t get.  Like an imminent collapse of the middle class would strongly portend an attempted fascist seizure of power.<p>One sign of a sea shift - liberal is an old word, and speech codes, measures against hate speech, blocking presidents on platforms like Twitter, canceling and the like are departures from liberalism.  The groups and institutions which formerly supported freedom of speech are now in favor of different things.  There may or may not be good reasons for this but it is a departure from liberalism.  That these institutions and groups which formerly embraced liberal ideals with regards to speech have now abandoned them is a sign of changes within the institutions he discusses.  Liberalism hasn&#x27;t changed, the formerly liberal groups and institutions have abandoned aspects of liberalism, for good or ill.