Mr. Auster wrote,

“In the absence of explicit traditionalist principles, a society, whether religious or secular, will inevitably keep moving ever further leftward.”

One reason is that part of liberalism involves something hugely attractive, probably as attractive to vast numbers of ordinary non-political people as pornography is — i.e., extremely hard to resist — and that something is the act of showing how “self-sacrificing” one can be with other people’s property.

That’s the liberal practice, at any rate. In theory, of course, it’s supposed to be how self-sacrificing one can be with one’s own property.  But the things liberalism destroys — which it either fritters away or outright targets for destruction — are not things liberals or their willing followers perceive as belonging to them.  And frittering away other people’s property in order to get one’s holier-than-thou highs is an activity many ordinary, completely non-political people simply find impossibe to resist as they clamber aboard the liberal band-wagon.

The kind of inadequate personality which by and large is attracted to liberalism does not value the “things of tradition” which conservatives find worthy.  These are things the liberals don’t care about and therefore perceive as “other people’s property” and consequently as “tools” to be used in their never-ending quest to show how moral they are by destroying “things of value” (which they don’t value) — and these tools are the more useful for the liberals’ purposes the more they are held in high esteem by others (because it means the liberals’ “sacrifice” is bigger).  

Just let anyone touch something a liberal actually values (if inadequate personalities can be said to truly “value” anything, locked as they are in the infantile stages of development) — his new Porshe or BMW, for example, or the expensive, snobbish bottle of French wine in his refrigerator — and you’ll see how fast he reacts and how suddenly his phony façade of “self-sacrifice” evaporates!

Part of the “mugging by reality” that makes someone into a conservative involves the realization that things of great value — things essential for our happiness and for the health and well-being of the society around us which we treasure — are destroyed every time the liberals get their paws on the levers of power.

It is true that one ought to be against diversity where it means also diversity of disvalues, such as the more diverse sexual practices. In general, the rarer and more deviated is that way because the facts of life are against it, like an endangered species. To be for diversity, as for rarities which are that way because life is against them, is anti-moral and anti-value.