I think there are various motivating factors behind liberalism.

Firstly, many people don’t need to have a worked out philosophy of life with which to justify their existence. They just live and try to enjoy themselves. Intellectuals are different. Intellectuals aren’t necessarily wiser than other people, but they need a world view. Once you have such a world view it is very painful to jettison it. Liberalism has become entrenched as a kind of substitute religion for Western intellectuals.

Secondly, not everyone is fully natured. For instance, if a boy grows up in a good family and within an intact culture, he will probably be highly responsive as a man to the femininity of women (as part of his masculine nature). He will therefore object when this femininity is degraded by other men or by women themselves. But some men end up weakly natured, in terms of their connection to women, to morality, to family, to ethnicity, to God and so on.

Thirdly, liberalism is usually able to find a social and economic basis for itself. For instance, some businessmen gravitate to liberalism because they resent the idea of limitations on their economic activity. Some minority groups support liberalism because they don’t share the same form of identities as the mainstream.

Liberalism is hard to explain because it’s the world we live in. Because of that everything somehow supports it. It draws support from puritanism and licentiousness; idealism, cynicism and realism; love of power, love of freedom, and love of dependence. You can pick out particular things (fear of extreme violence and tyranny, for example) and show how they add something specially potent to the mix. Still, everything contributes to it and it seems impossible to escape. I think that’s why arguments on VFR end in accusations of liberalism or neoconservatism.

Since it’s so all-embracing I think the explanation for it also has to be all-embracing. So in the end I’d blame liberalism on fundamental modern concepts about man, knowledge, the world, etc. The modern view, I take it, is that we live in a single, fundamentally material world that has no purpose except human purposes. Once you accept that view then the triumph of the will becomes the highest law and the taming of that rather alarming principle becomes the fundamental problem of morality and politics. The liberal project is to tame it through equality—the most formal and empty, and therefore legitimate, of moral concepts—and technology. Equality says each will gets equal respect, and technology tries to satisfy them all as much as possible. If the modern understanding of the world is really correct it’s hard to think of a better response, and that’s why everyone today is a liberal.

I found Jim Kalb’s posting to be very helpful in understanding a certain facet of the liberal mentality.

I have a couple of quibbles though (I know it’s hard to cover all bases).

From a certain political angle, the fact that the triumph of the will is the highest principle must indeed be alarming.

Nonetheless liberals have mostly seen the assertion of individual will not as a danger to be tamed, but in a positive way as the primary means of self-realization.

At times, the assertion of will has been portrayed in heroic terms, at other times, as with existentialism in the 1950s, in a more desperate way as a source of meaning in a Godless universe.

A lot of liberals don’t seem to have given much thought to the issue of how to tame competing wills in the public sphere.

I guess what I’m arguing is that the fundamental problem for liberals in morality and politics, and the core of the liberal project, is not how to tame the assertion of human will, but how to extend its domain.

Here’s one way to try to make sense of it. Liberalism releases will and desire, but only in the private sphere. In the private sphere, people can do whatever they feel like (with the exception of those specific activities controlled by political correctness), and no one can gainsay it. At the same time, what used to be the public sphere has been radically reduced in scope and meaningfulness, with more and more behavior that once would have been considered public (and thus coming under the rules of the public sphere) being considered private, and thus free of any restrictions. Here’s a typical example. An acquaintance just told me about an official at his church who was wearing shorts while performing his duties at the church on Sundays. Other church volunteer workers were offended by this, but were afraid to say anything to him about it. The man’s wearing whatever he feels like is seen as a private choice, which is unrestricted, while the activity of other people telling him that he shouldn’t dress that way is seen as an expression of public and shared values, which is not allowed or at least greatly inhibited. For a person to assert any public standards is seen as indicating that he has a “problem,” a lack of tolerance, and is trying to boss other people around. Multiply the pattern just described throughout the whole society.

Liberalism releases the private freedom of persons to do whatever they like in rejection of any notion of a common good, while it radically curtails the freedom of persons to engage in public and political speech, i.e., speech pertaining to what is the common good.

The fundamental understanding on which liberalism is based is that the good is simply the desired. Mark Richardson is right that the primary initial impulse in liberalism is therefore the liberation of wills and their expression. What makes liberalism an absolute urgent necessity though is not that it’s good to let people do what they feel like doing. It’s terror at what the triumph of the will would mean in the absence of the egalitarian restraints liberalism imposes.

I think Mr. Kalb’s points are not in conflict with my own. He says that liberalism releases human will, and then faces the challenge of how to makes society safe from all those liberated wills, which it does through egalitarian constraints. My point was that liberalism releases human will in the private sphere, and constrains it in the public sphere.

Liberalism is so expansive and inclusive that everyone is right. I think Mr. Kalb is right in substance but his formulation implies that liberalism’s egalitarian tyranny is a prudential matter of self-restraint. I don’t think that works.

I don’t think liberals care about the ideology of tyrants, and they don’t see themselves as in need of restraint. The tyrant is always the other, and it is not possible for the tyrannical other to be a real liberal. It is not necessary to think about what the tyrant himself thinks because tyranny is just plain evil, which needs no explanation. The tyrannical other may talk liberal talk but it is just deception and propoganda aimed at grasping for power, whereas REAL liberals always have genuine emancipation of the oppressed as their foremost priority. That is why in recent centuries different kinds of liberals have spent so much energy killing each other off en masse — because I am the REAL emancipator and YOU are the REAL oppressor, no matter how important freedom and equality are claimed to be in _Mein Kampf_.