And you replied: Again, we must separate the movers and shakers from the useful idiots. The useful idiots may need the fantasy of equality and a human-made and controlled earthly paradise, but the ones behind the scenes simply sell that idea to gain power. It is a screen behind which they advance so as not to awaken the wary. Once they have the power more brutal methods are used to control.
I agree. Liberalism is a fantasy to the useful idiots; to the power-obsessed, it is a tool for mobilizing and harnessing ignorance, intellectual sloth, and superstition into a weapon of conquest. In this (and in other ways) it is identical to Islam.
The reason I glommed onto your comment (besides its validity) is that I have for a number of years been thinking about the weaknesses of liberalism with an eye toward figuring out a way to hasten its defeat. The idea that liberalism is a fantasy view of the world (similar to the "magic thinking" that is characteristic of shizophrenia) is one of the weaknesses I keep coming back to.
Our information culture, and the large numbers of people who earn their living by collecting, interpreting, and packaging information for the public, has given rise to a subculture that can spend most or all of its time in an intellectual universe that is almost completely untouched by everyday reality. My view is that it is within this subculture that liberalism finds its most influential followers. One hundred years ago, the number of people who could live this way was tiny: only the insane and the very wealthy could live this way. Today, there are millions who can. This is a side-effect of our unbelievably wealthy society, which has the power to alter reality in so many ways.
The answer is sitting in front of us: the internet, and other means of instant mass retail communication.
Islam is taking its war on modernity to the next level now because its leaders (the ones who benefit materially from its power to convert ignorance into a political force) realize that if they don't make their move now they'll never get the chance.
It may be that the grim men and women who are the minds behind liberalism, whose livelyhoods and futures depend upon it continuing to be taken seriously, see the same thing happening to their creed. Their enemy is not so much George Bush, or Republicans, or even conservatism. Their enemy is the exponential increase in the ease with which truth can be discovered, examined, and disseminated freely. Because of that dynamic, the space in which they operate is getting smaller every day.
This is why they are fighting tooth and nail to retain their power over the courts, which are the branch of government most insulated from reality. Judges are dictators, and liberals have always liked dictators. They just don't like defeated dictators.
(steely)