Western civilization is founded on the idea that due to our inherently limited capacities, we lack the right to coerce others and therefore have a right to equal Liberty, from which springs our tradition of Human Rights, Democracy, Free Discourse, and Free Markets.
It might be worth looking at these as more aspirational than foundational. They aren't where we started; they are goals we might aim for, even if we have never been there yet.
The societies in which they have been most loudly proclaimed have in fact practiced all manner of coercion and inequality. The United States took land by conquest from its existing occupants, even in violation of explicitly negotiated treaties; maintained chattel slavery for most of a century; and had legally-enacted racial inequality for a century after that. Revolutionary France explicitly denied freedom of worship, and effectively denied freedom of political dissent through the public murder of dissidents. The Soviet Constitution explicitly proclaimed freedom of speech; but in reality, speaking freely got you sent to a very chilly prison. (And all these societies had official rationalizations for why all the conquest and slavery and censorship and murder were in service to their ostensibly foundational views of liberty and equality!)
To claim that our civilization is founded on non-coercion and equality is to deny the less-pleasant historical facts of our various polities' actual foundings. In contrast, viewing liberty (and Liberalism) as aspirations rather than foundations allows us to proceed even though we can't undo the wrongs of the past. We can't undo the historical injustices; but we can learn from them and do better to achieve our aspirations in the future.
Seems to me like a "glass half full vs half empty" situation. What was the standard alternative to a society that preached freedom and oppressed many people? Probably a society that oppressed even more people, and also taught everyone that it was the right thing to do.
In your historical examples, you mention the negatives, but don't mention the positives. For example, revolutionary France has abolished slavery; so if we (rightfully) criticize USA for the slavery, it seems fair to mention this as a point in favor of France.
If we compare these examples to societies that existed at the same time or the same place... well, I don't know the historical rate of political opponents murdered, but I suspect that it was pretty high; it's just that when the kings or the holy inquisition do it, most people accept it as their divine right. Similarly, Soviet Union was a horrible place, but Russia has always been (and still remains) a horrible place.
(Also, Soviet Union did not exactly consider itself Liberal. Lenin would call most liberal things "bourgeois".)
So I think the criticism is that you can declare your aspirations overnight, but it may still take years, sometimes centuries, to implement them in real life. Therefore we should think of wannabe-liberal societies as being on their way towards something good, rather than being already there.
Maybe we can agree on something like this: Our group can still validly strive for virtue, even if the people who started our group, and who loudly and famously cheered for virtue, did a lot of unvirtuous things. We don't have to take their cheering literally as a description of their practices.
Right, that was never the intention. I actually think there's something noble about them realizing and expressing the ideal values even though they fell short of them. It would be very easy to rationalize their shortcomings, as most people do and did all throughout history. Instead, they left an unfulfilled ideal as legacy for future generations to fulfill. That dream was their gift to tomorrow.
Yes, this will be discussed in more length inside the book. But I think by saying that our civilization is founded on the idea I am implying its aspirational nature as you suggested, rather than claiming it is fully realised (indeed, the point of my book is exactly that it still isn't). And if we look at the US I think it's literally true that it has been "founded" (as in, "the founding of the united states") on this idea, since it is stated in the deceleration of independence (though phrased very differently, of course)
Many of the same people who cheered for liberty also practiced slavery; including the author of that Declaration. We could as well say that the USA was founded on the contradiction between liberty and slavery; which proved to be an unstable foundation indeed — as this contradiction briefly but violently tore the country apart a few generations later.
One year ago I began writing my book -
Mechanisms of Liberty: The Shortcomings of Modern Liberalism and How to Fix It
It deals with ideas I've been interested in for at least six years already. A year ago, someone challenged me about Liberalism. I wrote him a message explaining the perspective I developed on Liberalism over these years, and realized that I should expand it into an essay, because I don't know anyone who says the same things I do.
After about a month of work on the essay, I realized that what I was working on was much more than just an "essay" - it needed to be a book.
This is the first time I'm writing about it in detail publicly. Here's a longer description of it:
Western civilization is founded on the idea that due to our inherently limited capacities, we lack the right to coerce others and therefore have a right to equal Liberty, from which springs our tradition of Human Rights, Democracy, Free Discourse, and Free Markets.
This idea is called Liberalism, and Liberalism is in peril.
It is currently being attacked on all fronts. More and more people are blaming the problems humanity is facing and our inability to solve them on a fundamental failing of Liberalism, whike pushing for illiberal alternatives.
Meanwhile, even the defenders of Liberalism don't seem to truly understand it, and fail to give satisfying answers to criticism.
This book takes the shortcomings of modern Liberalism seriously, but argues that the fundamental principles of Liberalism are correct. That correct implementation of them resulted in progress and prosperity. And their failures were because of misunderstanding and misimplementation.
To solve our most dire problems and create widespread liberty and prosperity, this book offers a comprehensive new vision of Liberalism, spanning over 30 subjects where its principles are misimplemented in a way that endangers both it and us, and suggests solutions that accord with its principles.
It's not easy for me to shed the self-doubt and say this, but - I believe this book is extremely important. It's not nearly finished yet - I wrote 15,000 words - but it's at the top of my priorities, and I work on it every day (most of the work is research, not writing).
I also posted this on Twitter. I'd be grateful if you share it :)
Edit: I've been asked to share more details about the content of the book, so here's some things I plan to discuss or look into: