Maybe this is facile but it's been bugging me.
I was thinking about this, and the modern liberal is fundamentally not liberal.
Like, yeah, ok, it's a dogshit ideology that destroyed the world, more than once.
But there was a time when it was radical, at least compared to Feudalism.
Now? I don't even think most liberals are anti monarchy. Like they literally aren't. If you ask them point blank, should all royalty be abolished, or was the French Revolution worth doing, they're gonna flat out say no.
The modern liberal essentially believes in two things. The absolute inviolability of the power and legitimacy of Western hegemony and institutions. And that things remain basically the same, and cannot change for any reason, because change is bad unless you can be sure it'll make things better.
That describes Conservatism. These people are conservative, fundamentally.
Conservatives that speak woke, maybe. But they believe all the same shit. Hierarchy, domination, and sadism, just mediated by the market and culture instead of whatever "conservatives" believe.
And actual conservatives are just proto, or outright, fascist at this point. They're completely untethered from the conservative tradition.
Right underneath our noses, liberalism died. Good riddance maybe but, there are, legitimately, none left.
Plenty of liberals during the French Revolution, particularly the liberal nobles, were in favor of a constitutional monarchy. Sure, some radlibs made it into power for a while, but after Robespierre lost it and got guillotined himself, they cracked down hard on the liberal left, to say nothing of the Enragés. Bonaparte's rise to power was not the end of the liberal bourgeois revolution, but its fulfillment - efficient meritocracy (relative to the Ancien Régime), free trade, an economy kept afloat by the spoils of war, and the poor kept in their place. Utterly liberal.
You got a point there. I guess I'm thinking of liberal in like the Thomas Paine kind of sense, and not what many of them were actually like.
But even in the American tradition, there's been a severe hollowing out.
If it hadn't been for radlibs like Thomas Paine, the US could very well have been a monarchy.