Man, that is a little crazy. But Kerry’s words, quoted above, are exactly right.

I have been reading a bunch of Willmoore Kendall’s old essay for a project I’m working on. I was stuck the other day that Kendall, in a debate with James MacGregor Burns, observed that one feature of Liberal project (Kendall always capitalized Liberal and Conservative: I may begin following his lead on that) is the attempt to produce a nice, neat, two-party system: a party of the Right and a party of the Left. This to achieve their majoritarian designs, and make of American politics a system predicated on the exercise of pure, naked will. This, Kendall contended, is something profoundly alien to the American political tradition — a tradition developed precisely to mitigate the exercise of will and replace it with government by consensus, by the “deliberate sense” of We the People (Kendall loved that phrase).

Kendall seemed to take great delight in the fact that much of the opposition to the Liberal revolution came from _within_ the Democratic Party. He worried that the polarization of our politics into two philosophically opposed parties would fracture this cherished “deliberate sense,” and imperil self-government by injecting a Machiavellian, majoritarian ruthlessness.

Kendall was also prescient in identifying the capture of the Supreme Court as one of the primary means to this majoritarian end. He was calling for a constitutional amendment to reduce the Court, or action under Article III, Section 2, as early as 1964. But at the same time, he was alone among American Conservatives in applauding the Civil Rights legislation of the ’60s — precisely because it was achieved by Congress, through the deliberative process, by consensus and compromise.

One wonders whether Kerry, now that he trails even Sharpton in the polls, realizes the end of his campaign is near, and observing those shrewd pols the Clintons keeping their distance from internationalist loonyism that pervades the party’s primary voters, has decided to try to distance himself from an upcoming electoral disaster, so as to at least protect his senate seat.

Kerry is an interesting case to me not because of his tactical political calculations, but because, in his self-righteousness and incoherence, he typifies an essential facet of liberalism.

As a by-the-numbers, orthodox, and utterly unimaginative liberal, he automatically denigrates and despises his own country, especially when it asserts itself as a power-wielding entity in the world. His panacea and god is internationalism, consultation, the UN—anything that would cancel out a clear responsible actor, such as the United States, and replace it by an amorphous but sanctified multilateral “process.” America acting unilaterally represents power, inequality, militarism, primitiveness, dominance, evil. Multilateralism represents equality, peace, humanity, sophistication, goodness.

So, that’s his ideology as an orthodox left-liberal. However, this ideology keeps running into the reality and exigencies of war, which force him into jaw-droppingly incoherent statements, such as voting for the war, but then saying we carried out the war in the wrong way because we supposedly shafted the UN and did it without UN support (as if, after the UN had shafted us, we had any choice in the matter!) Now, those Kerry contradictions have been written about a great deal in the media, and by me at VFR. But this latest Kerry statement attacking Dean is a kind of meta-Kerry-style contradiction. Now he’s attacking Dean for saying pretty much the same things that he, Kerry, has been saying all along.

All of this is the result of Kerry’s liberalism running up against the reality that his liberalism would leave America defenseless. He can’t give up the liberalism, and he can’t (at least too obviously) say that he wants to leave America defenseless, so he twists and turns. His very orthodoxy and unimaginativeness as a liberal, combined with the fact that he’s not completely irrational and irresponsible, leads him to engage in blatant contradictions between liberalism and reality, even as he remains cluelessly enclosed in his self-regard.

It sounds like a case of making unprincipled exceptions to unprincipled exceptions, except where a lack of principle would appear too exceptional.

(If that didn’t make much sense, then it probably describes Sen. Kerry.)

“It sounds like a case of making unprincipled exceptions to unprincipled exceptions, except where a lack of principle would appear too exceptional.”

Let us attempt to unpack Mr. LeFevre’s comment.

Kerry has said all along that the U.S. shouldn’t fight Iraq without the UN. That is the liberal principle which disdains national sovereignty and power. But he leaves himself some wiggle room. Circumstances of politics and the commonly perceived threat of WMDs forced Kerry to vote for the war resolution that gave the President the authority to make war on Iraq when and how he wanted. But shortly after that vote, Kerry reverted to his liberal principle that we shouldn’t make war without being part of a coalition that includes France, Germany, and most of the world. His unprincipled (from a liberal point of view) vote for the war resolution is incompatible with the liberal position that we shouldn’t make war without the UN, so he’s been forced into a staggering series of contradictions, saying on one hand that Hussein was a real danger that had to be stopped, and insisting on the other hand that Bush did the worst thing in American history by toppling Hussein without having the UN in charge of the war effort. To eliminate the contradiction, he’s gone so far as to misrepresent the war resolution itself, implying that it required Bush to get the UN’s backing.

But now Dean comes along and, more categorically than Kerry, states that America must in all cases have UN backing in order to go to war. Apparently, Dean’s articulation of the principle would not leave any wiggle room for the Kerry-style unprincipled exception of giving a president authorization to make war when vitally necessary; nor would it leave room for the Kerry-style contradiction of then turning around and attacking the president for acting on that authorization. The Kerry position is the standard liberal position, of wanting to have such things as national sovereignty, national defense, and civilization while simultaneously delegitimizing them. The Dean position, at least as Kerry perceives it, is a more pure leftist position that would _categorically_ make it impossible to have a sovereign national defense. So, against Dean’s more categorical articulation of liberal principle, which would make Kerry’s unprincipled exception impossible, Kerry is forced into a more categorical articulation of the unprincipled exception than he had previously uttered. Now Kerry affirms that the U.S. must have the ability to act on its own behalf for its own security. But, from the point of view of Kerry’s own multilateral principle, this remains an unprincipled position.

Definition of a liberal: a person who wants to eat his country and have it.

Amidst all the Kerry blather, one gets the impression that a lot of verbiage is being expended in an effort that ultimately comes down to developing a rationale for doing nothing. Liberals seem to confuse talk and discussion with action, and think that because they have talked a lot about something, nothing need actually be done.

It’s not just that liberals confuse talk with action; it’s that the very end of liberalism is to render action impossible, along with the clear definitions and concepts (including the principle of non-contradiction) that make action possible. That’s why, even though the liberal believes in talk and negotiation above all else, words, his bread and butter, don’t actually MEAN anything to him. For the liberal, the function of words is to OBSCURE meaning and DELAY action. Thus liberals support a Resolution 1441; but as far as they’re concerned the resolution doesn’t actually mean what it says. Rather, the resolution is to be understood as part of an ongoing process of consensus and consultation designed to keep things in an eternal state of irresolution, where there will be no action—and thus no sovereign entities performing any action—and thus no power—and thus no inequalities of power. Of course, it’s impossible to do away with power and inequalities of power because they are built into the nature of society. As a result, under the liberal system I’m describing, we have, not the visible and accountable power of a society performing action in history, but the invisible and unaccountable power of a disembodied elite seeking the paralysis and dissolution of all actual societies.

Mr. Auster wrote (Dec. 18th, 04:53 PM),

“Rather, the resolution is to be understood as part of an ongoing process of consensus and consultation designed to keep things in an eternal state of irresolution, where there will be no action—and thus no sovereign entities performing any action—and thus no power—and thus no inequalities of power.”

Those who remember their thermodynamics from college physics and chemistry will immediately recognize, in this state of perfect “equality of power” where no action is possible which the liberals constantly strive after, a situation analagous to the thermodynamic “heat death” of the universe — a state in which will be no useful energy, no action or possibility of accomplishing anything whatsoever, no information or meaning, and maximum entropy. In other words, liberals are constantly striving after a perfect state of death.

As Conservatism (i.e., normalness) yearns for life, love, and meaning, Liberalism is a death wish, yearning for meaninglessness and non-existence. This is not to say all liberals harbor a death wish and yearn for non-existence. Only the leaders do. The rank-and-file are clueless dupes and useful idiots exactly like the ones who drank the Kool Aid for cult leaders Jim Jones and the one in California who was supposed to have them beamed up afterward to “a flying saucer traveling behind the comet Hale-Bopp.”

To expand on Unadorned’s chilling point, this state of political “heat death” is not just a static end point. It is something that the liberal elites are actively imposing on society by suppressing everything that would disrupt it—NOT allowing truth to be spoken, NOT permitting affective loyalties to normative moral and cultural values, NOT allowing decisive action to rid society of disorder; but rather maintaining society in the state of death. The European Union is where this organized state of death is the most advanced.