AGAINST LIBERAL POLITICS

 

 February 10, 2009

 
 

Liberals believe man’s past is the record of a fundamental evil, and that the farther we leave it behind, the better. The more nearly opposite to the past we become, the more ameliorated world history will be. They see nothing at all good in our history, except for those few figures in the past who were the harbingers of those today who see the way out of that history. They see themselves as the sole source of rectitude, justice, and sympathy.

 

But what they do not see is that the good of today actually depends wholly upon what was good in the past: that is, solid, middle-of-the-road tradition is the vehicle that carries goodness forward. It cannot be otherwise. Liberals don’t see, furthermore, that the complete break with the past they propose is not visionary but, rather, uncomprehending in the extreme, and will only result in a race-to-the-bottom morality, a Lord of the Flies world.

 

They insist on living in a world of fiction and in a world of the ideal, in a world of theoretical substitutes for reality, in order to distance themselves from the unyielding paradigms of life. They see themselves as the end of a long, inevitable process of moral and intellectual development that finds its culmination today in them, the end of history, as it were, when the long reign of injustice is overturned finally by the ineluctable force of truth. The narcissism here is extreme. The real truth, however, is that liberals have voluntarily separated themselves from the actuality of the world as it can only be, while claiming that that tragic dissociation is a higher spiritual state. They have made their irrelevance the center of the universe.

 

Moreover, they defend their weak theses by means of emotional postures that usually rise to nothing more than the contrived, and they avoid, in their determination to live a life of estrangement from the actual, any true commitment to empirical evidence or rational sobriety. They attempt to transform their flight from reality into objective nature. The more they feign worry over the “carbon footprint” of man, the more we realize how strong is their disinclination to accept the actual, how strong their hatred of the past, and how strong their belief man is an aberrant species, and America a nation with a completely evil past.

 

The difficulty in accepting liberal politics, then, is that a sickly atmosphere of victimhood is encouraged and foisted upon those already the most vulnerable, with the result that a milieu of clear decadence is generated, touted as a new moral state. But the self-inflicted nature of this milieu of sickliness is not perceived.  Liberals just love the claims of the absolute, of the irrefutable, and of the ideal: the difficulty is that this ardent love evinces a desire to flee, a desire for refuge. Liberal politics, then, is the rejection of self-reliance.

 

Finally, liberals implicitly posit that only their perspective is legitimate, and that any other point of view is tainted with some sort of mental or moral illness, such as racism. It is inconceivable to a liberal that another point of view could be valid. They think themselves to be an enlightened elite, but are merely myopic. In their dissociation and estrangement, they have mistaken their separation from the genuinely existent as an embracing of the universal, but they really only manage to arrive at the hypothetical, the abstract, and the nonexistent.

 

Tony Downing