Catherine Liu: the Psychology of Liberalism | Doomscroll

You know, you and I have participated in, you know, political movements and leftist spaces. Don't you feel like sometimes you're in a room with like a lot of really fragile eggs who can't deal with actual confrontation or contradiction because if they bump up against each other, they think they're going to crack that, you know. Um, we need to discuss why left politics has no popular appeal, why it gets absorbed by liberalism, why we're in the situation today, this new communitarianism that was sort of the structure of the internet at the bottom of the California ideology is all about this instantaneous transformation. The thing now that people are rejecting, I think, is that in actuality, democratic forms and capitalism cannot coexist, and capitalism is eating democracy alive.

Welcome to Doomscroll. I'm your host, Joshua Cinderella. My returning guest is Katherine Louu, a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine. She is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class.

to what do you attribute this emphasis on morality specifically the word care among white collar professionals in the last few years so DWott says that when mothers give birth to children and adult human adults take care of that child they move into a special state of being where they're vigilant and have to care for this infant to the detriment often of themselves there's like this unthinking sacrifice and giftgiving. We all receive that kind of care or else we would not be alive. I mean, we're born like little mole children really. We can't move our head.

We can't we have no spinal control. Um our heads go back this way if we they're not supported. Um which is psychically and physically damaging. And so you have the holding of an infant is about this kind of intense vigilant attentiveness that wikat says we move out of as the child as the infant becomes more independent.

But this intense state of care I think is the proper idea of um using that term. We translate it, dilute it in liberal in the liberal world into caring about animals, caring about earth, caring about art, caring about um social justice. But that kind of care is so reduced and so reified in liberal discourse today. And there's something liberating about the right and the Republicans when they're like, "We ...