I'm not sure I understand the chain of causality. Are we over Christianity or not? Are we blaming the left for the morality plays of the right?

> If we are vigilant against a return of fascism and not against murderous police officers, our liberalism is not worth much.

Aren't murderous police officers a symptom of fascism? I think that we weren't really that vigilant against fascism after all.

> Shklar did not provide present-day examples of moral cruelty

Interesting!

> Anyone working in a university, cultural institution, or large corporation today has spent recent weeks reading emails, attending meetings, and participating in conversations that are theaters of moral cruelty. White people in such contexts are asked—or required—to admit that they are culpable, that they lack ethical and epistemic authority, that they must listen to and heed the demands of victims of racism. They humiliate themselves, literally kneeling in propitiation.

This is not what reparations actually look like. An example of modern reparations can be found in the case of the Chicago police who ran a torture ring for several years; not only was a fund set up to compensate survivors, but an education program was added to Chicago's public schools and universities in order to teach people about the torture ring and the legacy of racism in Chicago. [0]

The bit about kneeling is extremely ironic in the present day, to the point where I almost cannot believe that it was written in 2020. The literal kneeling is being done by African-American protestors who are critiquing the tendency of police to murder people in the streets [1][2]; kneeling is distinctly not being done by white people!

> Shklar found such acts of self-debasement no less cruel and terrifying than the violence that they are supposedly meant to resist.

And this equivocation is the end result of all of that windup. Yikes. No, being asked to show basic human decency and solidarity with African-Americans is not the same in cruelty or terror as the violence of fascists, whether in the 1930s and 40s in Europe or in the 1970s and 80s in South America or indeed in the past couple decades in the USA.

> Shklar warned that the “megalomaniacs of interwar Europe,” Hitler and Stalin, learned this lesson from Nietzsche. There was, in her account, a clear line from his critique of moral cruelty to the totalitarian regimes that had destroyed the world of her childhood and nearly killed her.

This seems to ignore both the massive chumminess between Hitler, Mussolini, and then-Pope Pius XII, and the fact that all three of them explicitly criticized and oppressed leftists, particularly Communists.

I would be more interested in this thesis if it could isolate Stalin in particular, and show how Lenin's leftist ideals ended up creating a uniquely totalitarian state in a way that centrism would have prevented. But one of the lessons of the previous century is that left-right is not the correct political axis for discussing tyranny and ethnic cleansing; we must also consider the totalitarian-anarchist axis.

> Liberals must not make decent people choose between liberalism and self-respect.

How exactly does recognizing every person's rights lead to a lack of self-respect? If I work to ensure that some particular right is extended to the disenfranchised, then have I somehow lost some ability to consider myself in my own position and station? I feel like this is the same sort of traditionalist appeal as in pop country music, where liberals (usually coded as "city" or "fancy" folk) are antagonized at a distance in order to justify clinging to some particular tradition.

We need to be more social, not less liberal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge#City_reparations

[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/06/portlanders-conv...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Kaepernick#Activism