Yea, I hear you, that's certainly possible. But I'm not reasoning top-down from liberalism's unpopularity, but rather bottom-up from the inability most people have to grasp the components I mentioned. Some of them are much simpler concepts than liberalism, and are applicable in many cases that people have more direct stakes in. And yet, in my experience, vanishingly few people are capable of grasping them to any reasonable degree.
We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still being extremely illiberal.
That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those that disagree with our holy belief system?".
To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture dungeon.
> Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945)
We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still being extremely illiberal.
That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those that disagree with our holy belief system?".
To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture dungeon.