we have never been liberal

We Have Never Been Liberal: Occidentalist Myths and the Impending Fascist Apocalypse, Lilith Mahmud

• Trump: the injection of racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic language into legitimate discourse threatens to undo strides made toward social equality
• liberalism as a cultural category ... lends false precision to a loose and contradictory set of contemporary beliefs and values about individual freedom, rights, government, and private property ... lends false precision to a loose and contradictory set of contemporary beliefs and values about individual freedom, rights, government, and private property ... the belief in liberalism is a cosmology that structures political subjectivity and belonging for many Euro-American subjects
• the origin story of liberalism peaks in the European Enlightenment ... many Enlightenment philosophers were also Freemasons and formulated their political, social, and economic ideas in the secrecy and exclusivity of Masonic lodges ... set off on a path of self-cultivation on which they learned to embody the spirit of fraternity, equality, and liberty ... trained to become better people: to embrace a secular morality and a nondogmatic faith, to think rationally and display moderation, to appreciate the sciences and liberal arts, and to respect all people regardless of social differences
• "The Masonic experience illustrates two key points about liberalism: first, that being liberal in the Occidentalist sense is an aspiration, not a fact, and it takes a painstaking labor of self-cultivation to naturalize it as a Western trait, and second, that widespread and systematic instances of illiberalism within Euro-American societies are coded as exceptions that only prove the rule"
• "For the intelligentsia who believe in liberalism, the likes of Trump and his European predecessors are a scandalous anomaly. Scandals, however, usually expose what we already know, even as they offer a momentary opportunity to rewrite the script."
• the end of history
• white supremacist capitalist patriarchy