The Liberal Syndrome

Observing the constant discrepancy between what liberals say and what they do, between their stated goals and the actual results of their policies, it becomes obvious that their purported motives are not their real ones. In fact all Leftists, whether they call themselves liberals or libertarians or socialists or communists or whatever, display the same basic pattern of behavior: professing fine-sounding ideals about freedom, equality, justice, democracy, etc., while ignoring these ideals in practice, or actively destroying them to the extent that they have already been realized.

Now, the appeal of welfare-statism (the idea that the purpose of government is to give people goodies; that government is, in H. L. Mencken's phrase, "a milch cow with 150,000,000 teats") is obvious, and almost rational. Who wouldn't want to get something for nothing, as long as they can get away with it?

What is a socialist? One who has yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings;
Moocher, or looter, or both, he will holler
That paying his penny will earn him your dollar.

Of course, this has nothing to do with justice, since it's nothing but legalized and organized robbery on a mass scale. It violates the freedom to earn one's own living by forcing the productive to support the parasites. It is not democratic, because the parasite-class can never be a majority: the system can only work as long as enough of the productive majority can be gulled into voting with the minority of parasites. It is not really egalitarian, even if it happened to reduce the "ever-widening gap between rich and poor" that liberals are always wailing about (though liberals really despise the middle class and do everything in their power to destroy it), because it is founded on the inequality of rights: the "right" of some to subsist at the expense of others.

Precisely because socialism (the thing, if not the name) is so popular, it does not reveal the liberals' real motives -- certainly not the motives of the anti-socialist libertarian Left. Precisely because they are so unpopular, libertarians reveal the Leftist mentality in its pure form.

You will seldom, if ever, catch a libertarian doing anything that will actually increase the amount of liberty in the world. Quite often, in fact, you will find them advocating policies that would have the effect of extinguishing liberty where it exists. Yesterday they advocated unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet aggression, and today they advocate opening our borders to all the Third-Worlders who want to crowd into our Whatever Happened To Deporting Immigrants As a Public Charge? and voting booths. They are so concerned with their so-called "principles" that they will never compromise them, no matter how absurd and self-destructive those "principles" turn out to be.

You can see the same phenomenon in the politically-correct, "postmodernist" academic Left. Insulated from electoral and economic reality, they are free to espouse the most bizarre and nihilistic doctrines their fevered imaginations can dream up. But why do they do it?

Why do native-born, English-speaking Americans buy into an ideology that demonizes America? Why do heterosexual women (and men) buy into an ideology that despises femininity and demonizes men and manhood? Why do white people buy into an ideology that demonizes the white race? Why do intellectuals buy into an ideology that denigrates the intellect? Why do human beings of any culture, shape, or hue, buy into an ideology that sacrifices human well-being to the "rights" of spotted owls and lab rats?

Unless people are literally and certifiably insane, there must surely be some kind of payoff for their behavior, however counterproductive it may seem. Sometimes the payoff is literal and material -- but more importantly, it is psychological.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are perfect examples of the liberal syndrome. It is well-established that they are liars, crooks, and hypocrites. Both have profited materially by various forms of corruption in their political careers; at the same time, they are smugly and arrogantly self-righteous. To them (and to the whole Democratic party and their sycophants in the "news" media), lying, cheating, stealing, and abuse of power are perfectly fine as long as you pretend to be working for a "better world." This is why liberalism pervades Hollywood: the combination of make-believe and effortless righteousness -- in a word, the phoniness -- is nearly irresistible there.

A liberal can be as crooked as a corkscrew or as dumb as a box of rocks, and still feel better and smarter than everyone else, merely by holding "advanced," "progressive," politically-correct opinions. Actually being a good person takes effort: sometimes you're obligated to do things you don't really feel like doing, or refrain from doing things you do feel like doing. True intellectual superiority means having native intelligence, and actually using it. Liberalism requires neither. Reciting the party line, like a Buddhist spinning a prayer-wheel, is the easiest thing in the world.

All Leftists live in the mental prisons of their respective ideologies. To them, the utopia projected by their ideology seems more real than reality. Whenever reality deviates from the utopia, they either ignore reality or condemn it for not living up to their utopian fantasies. Liberals, however, take a singular, perverse pride in their alienation from reality: they can always be counted on to take the most irrational, unjust, and antisocial position on any issue.

When it comes to crime and punishment, for example, non-liberals understand that criminals are vicious thugs who deserve good long terms in the slammer, and maybe even a ticket on the Third Rail Express. Liberals, however, believe that criminals are poor deprived victims of society who only need a little TLC. Non-liberals feel compassion for the victims of crime; liberals make a show of their compassion for criminals. When crime-rates fall spectacularly (as they have in New York City, for instance), non-liberals celebrate the fact; liberals attack the policies that caused the reduction of crime.

What purpose is served by all this? Whom does it benefit (except criminals)? What can explain such perversity, except the desire to demonstrate one's moral and intellectual superiority by overthrowing common sense?

Picking out any liberal position at random, one can readily find a (seemingly) contradictory liberal position related to the same issue. The contradiction can always be resolved by asking: How do these positions reflect liberal snobbery?

With crime and punishment, for instance, the seemingly contradictory position is gun control -- which, liberals argue, is necessary to prevent crimes from being committed with guns. A moment's thought, however, should reveal that criminals commit crimes, while the effect of gun control is to make it difficult or impossible for law-abiding citizens to own guns. (It's always been against the law to shoot people. If someone isn't going to obey that law, why should we expect him to obey gun-control laws?) The truth, of course, is that the real purpose of gun control is precisely to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. To liberals, it is self-evident that anyone who owns a gun is morally and intellectually inferior to them, and therefore has no rights.

Liberals are really only concerned about two kinds of crime: "gun crimes" and "hate crimes" -- which is to say that they aren't really against crime as such, but only against guns and "hate." By "hate" they mean any attitude that is insufficiently "sensitive" to their certified minorities -- the endlessly-proliferating classes of "victims" of "intolerance." Actual, individual victims of actual, violent crimes -- robbery, rape, murder -- do not interest them.

To demonstrate their self-congratulatory "tolerance," liberals are both feminists and homophiles. Feminists argue that "gender roles," i.e. the differences between men and women, are "socially constructed," not natural. Homophiles argue that homosexuality is natural, and that only arbitrary social prejudices stand against it. Feminists suppose that obvious anatomical differences are (or should be) irrelevant to our behavior; homophiles suppose that behavior is determined by far-from-obvious genetic predispositions.

Logically, then, feminism and homophilia are opposites that could never coexist. But logic has nothing to do with either of them: their common purpose is to subvert natural sex-roles and the institution of the family. Liberals embrace both of them to show their superiority to old-fashioned notions of manhood and womanhood, sneering at housewives who "stay home and bake cookies" and at "bigots" who think that homosexuality is abnormal.

The emotional purpose, snobbery, is bound up with the practical results of liberalism: liberals raise themselves above society by tearing it down. Their economic policies punish success and productivity. Their positions on crime only make the world safer for criminals and more dangerous for the rest of us. Housewives contribute to society; homosexuals give each other AIDS and demand that the rest of society find a cure for it.

Back in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment philosophers rejected the authority of religion and tradition, and aspired to reconstruct society along rational lines. In the end, they largely succeeded in delegitimating religion and tradition, especially among the intellectual classes (which is why lawyers, professors, journalists, etc. are overwhelmingly liberal). Unfortunately, reason is not a very powerful force in human affairs. The habit of criticizing society, and the aspiration to reconstruct it, became increasingly irrational over the next two centuries. Criticism turned to subversion, and reconstruction to "deconstruction."

There were many turning-points along the way, at which the future course of "progressive" politics was set. In 1898, liberals championed Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of treason; in 1948, liberals championed Alger Hiss, who really was a traitor. In 1948, liberals advocated justice for black Americans; in 1968, liberals advocated injustice against white Americans. By 1998, the liberals' tongues were black with Bill Clinton's shoe-polish, and their moral/intellectual arrogance was matched only by their moral/intellectual fraudulence.

The future course of liberalism depends on how successful liberals are. Living in the richest and most powerful civilization in the world, they are (for now) protected from the consequences of their destructive policies. They are parasites whose own survival, in the long run, depends on the survival of their host -- even as they are driven by their ideological imperatives to attack and ruin their host.

Here it is in a nutshell...

“The great misfortune of the twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought.”
The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information
1991, Random House Jean Francois-Revel

I have frequently posted the following here:

Liberals are insecure about their own morality and compassion. In fact, deep down at their core they disbelieve that they possess these virtues.

This insecurity causes them to commit ever-more-outrageous acts of "conspicuous compassion", in order to demonstrate to others -- and secretly to themselves-- their moral superiority.

But the black hole within the souls of liberals can never be sated. It will eat the world--consume the universe--if not thwarted.

All of this would be sadly amusing were it not for the fact that the left discovered they could force others to pay for their displays of "compassion". Thus was born Forced Compassion (tm). Forced compassion is NOT compassion. It is easy to be "compassionate" when someone else is paying the tab.

Let Teddy Kennedy and Jane Fonda bankrupt themselves, take up the lifestyle of Mother Teresa, and give all they have to the poor. Then they will have the moral stature to lecture the rest of us on the inadequacy of our compassion and charity. Otherwise, every word that drips from their smarmy mouths will be met with the whisper, "Hypocrite" in every ear.

--Boris

Bookmarked.

I knew the Libertarians would be taking exception, and not without reason. The trouble with the language we use is that "liberal" in a reasonably old dictionary will describe what an American Libertarian subscribes to.

The reason for the present conflation of "liberal" with its opposite "socialist" is the failure of the term "socialist" as a brand name in America. As the article mentioned, the people who are in position to modify the language--journalists, professors, etc--wanted socialism. They simply applied the brand name Americans believed in--liberalism--to their own (socialist) policy preferences.

And note, the very term "socialism" was coined to mislead. When the ~~liberal~~ socialist says "society should" he means nothing other than that the government should (provide whatever, to whoever). The proper term for their policies would therefore be "governmentism"--but that would be a nice synonym for "tyranny", and just might not sell.

So the "socialist" abuses the root word "social" mercilessly and thereby succeeds in deflecting the American conservative from pummeling socialist nostrums with the obvious fact that "socialism" subsumes society into government, thereby substituting force for free social interaction. As to the dictionary's claim that socialism simply means government ownership of the means of production, spare me. It means government ownership of society in general and each individual (i.e., slave) within society. Dictionaries are written by socialists.

You'd have to read the link he provided to truly get where he's coming from (if you didn't sense it implicitly). The original poster is completely accurate, though, in putting libertarians and liberals (socialists) in the same camp, however. Here's why -- the liberals are, by and large, atheists, people for which religious expression can be tolerated only for the minority classes (which they bemusedly tolerate) and even then, as a point of cultural backwardness, which allows them to think of themselves as even more superior. For libertarians, there can be no God, because such an absolute worldview means that someone's expression of freedom could produce negative consequences. Someone could actually be wrong to sell porno. A libertarian, whom has substituted the free market for God, cannot acknowledge the fact that the free market can produce an evil or harmful solution. The libertarians have consistently missed the source of both the Constitution and the Declaration as the natural rights which derive from Nature and Nature's God. They cannot recognize an authority greater than themselves. Likewise, the liberal. There can be no mind greater than theirs, for their whole worldview is built upon being superior to everyone else. In this sense, both the liberals and the libertarians advocate practices which not only subvert liberty (for neither has an understanding of the basis of liberty) but work to destroy society. Although the libertarians are a lot closer to the truth than the liberals, both again are products of an ahistorical, modern approach to society...and both sound very good to those who don't examine either deeply.

You couldn't be more wrong. Libertarians are strict constitutional constructionalists and would be happy to go back to the original document before all the excess amendments(those after the first ten) were written. Nor are Libertarians anti-religion, but rather support the separation of church and state, and would see the government as exclusively secular, protecting all religions. The Libertarian party is made up of people from every religion in america, and isn't the bunch of atheists that you make them out to be. Clearly it is you who hasn't examined the Libertarian view very deeply. Why do you make a statement like "both the liberals and the libertarians advocate practices which not only subvert liberty (for neither has an understanding of the basis of liberty) but work to destroy society" lumping liberals and Libertarians together, and then failing to give examples of subversive practices they both support or how these practices subvert liberty or destroy society.

For libertarians, there can be no God, because such an absolute worldview means that someone's expression of freedom could produce negative consequences. Someone could actually be wrong to sell porno.

Libertarianism does not do away with notions of right and wrong. What libertarianism does say is that human beings have a God-given right to commit sin, if that is what they choose (the first thing God did when He placed Adam and Eve in the Garden was to warn them against the possibility of partaking from the wrong tree, thus granting them a way to commit sin). God did not create a world in which it is impossible to sin; God created a world in which it it possible to gain forgiveness for having committed sin. He gave Adam and Eve their freedom to choose, and thereby the freedom to learn from their mistakes.

Totalitarians will never forgive God for having granted man the freedom to commit sin, and they think they can actually improve upon God's design for this world by passing laws against everything they don't think God approves of. Their ideal world would be one where everyone is placed in a little cell where they can't hurt others and others can't hurt them.

Little do they realize that the thing that God approves of least are any and all attempts to place limits on man's freedom to choose. Man was placed on earth to demonstrate what it is that he really wants, so that God can be sure and give it to him, whether that choice is to make earth into a heaven and to live among celestial beings similar to himself, or to spend the rest of eternity with others who prefer to rot away in the lowest sewer of hell.

Back in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment philosophers rejected the authority of religion and tradition, and aspired to reconstruct society along rational lines. In the end, they largely succeeded in delegitimating religion and tradition, especially among the intellectual classes (which is why lawyers, professors, journalists, etc. are overwhelmingly liberal).

People choose to enter such professions because of their own dispositions, inclinations, and talents. If you are not liberal you will be but little inclined to consider becoming a journalist because you will not like to constantly write negative stories about society . . . especially not on short deadlines. Unfortunately, reason is not a very powerful force in human affairs.
This statement is a telltale marker of conservative thought. It also happens to be true. Articulated rationality is limited inherently because language itself is not rational. We learn our first language initially by oral tradition; attempts to "rationally" critique that very tradition are inherently limited.

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