There is an important book in here, waiting to be written. Mr Auster? Anyone?

Yet another example of what has been discussed here is to be found in Dennis Prager’s latest article appearing at Townhall.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20040511.shtml

The near-genocide he refers to is being committed against Southern Sudanese, who are black Christians or Animists, by the largely Arab Northern Sudanses Muslims. Once again, the folks who always profess their great concern for black people and are first in line to scream about racist oppression are strangely mute about the genocide, rape, and slavery suffered by black people in the Sudan. While Prager doesn’t attack the issue head on, he at least ascribes the hypocritical lack of coverage (contrasted with the feeding frenzy going on over Iraqi prisoner abuse) to an agenda-driven media.

The agenda, of course, is the leftist goal of bringing down western Judeo-Christian civilization. Opposing or exposing the sufferings of Sudanese blacks does not advance this agenda. Hence the story is buried and shoved down the memory hole.

In reply to Carl, I think the decisive factor as to whether the left wants to involve itself in each case is not the identity of the victim, but the identity of the victimizer. Thus the left only defends oppressed blacks if their oppressors fit the “oppressor” script, as white Western Christian businessmen or whatever. If the oppressor is black or Moslem, opposing such an oppressor doesn’t help advance the leftist agenda. Opposing black Hutu mass killers in Rwanda would not express or advance the leftist world view; but opposing Orthodox Serbs, would. Opposing Moslem terrorists or Arab tyrants does not advance the leftist cause; opposing Israel “oppressors,” does.

Mr. Auster’s observation that “the left DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THE THINGS IT PROFESSES TO CARE ABOUT” nicely encapsulates what I began to realize only in the past few years. Maybe what finally did it for me was the way the Left, after having run John Tower and Robert Packwood out of town on a rail for their sexual offenses, responded with a “ho-hum” to the Clinton sex scandals. I recently noted an article Steve Sailer wrote in 1992 (http://www.isteve.com/clinthar.htm), in which he naively predicted that the Clinton’s tomcatting tendencies might get him into a world of trouble, given the left’s hightened vigilance against “sexual harassment.” That might have been true, if the Left had actually given a rat’s patootie about sexual harassment in itself. I was similarly amazed by the Left’s sudden discovery during the Clinton years that the independent counsel statute was dangerous—something that Justice Scalia told anyone who cared to listen, in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson—and that it could be exploited for purposes never foreseen by its creators (by which they meant that it could be used to bring Democrats as well as Republicans down).

This kind of shamelessness was of a sort that used to be seen only among Communists, for whom the summum bonum was whatever advanced the interests of the Party. (American Communists, for example, argued that Americans had nothing to gain by getting involved in World War II, then turned on a dime after June 22, 1941, to begin screaming that America’s safety demanded that we fight the Axis (and, just by coincidence, support the Soviet Union). And Soviet Communists had the chutzpah to denounce the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Forest that they themselves had perpetrated.)

Maybe I’m too young to know better, but my gut tells me that once upon a time liberals were better than they are now. Frank Capra, for example, was the quintessential Hollywood liberal, yet was a champion of basic decency in a way that no one on the Left today (and certainly no one in Hollywood) comes close to being. For another thing, I have a hard time believing that Hubert Humphrey or Paul Douglas could ever be as blatantly unprincipled as the Democratic leadership in the Senate today. (Even Harry Truman, who was pretty nasty as a partisan brawler, at least seemed to believe firmly in something, which makes him look good in comparison with the likes of Bill Clinton.) I wonder, is my rosy perception of liberals in past generations just an illusion created by the passage of time?

It’s no coincidence that the left’s ruthlessness and lying remind Seamus of Communists’ ruthlessness and lying. This change in American liberalism that we’ve been discussing corresponds with the radicalization of American liberalism.

It’s very interesting to think about how this happened. While there are many angles to it, the first clue I had was from an unpublished article I read about 14 years ago called The Essential Liberal by Gregory Curtis which explained the following. Liberals used to believe in progress toward greater equality, blah blah, but they also believed in the basic institutions of our society and thought greater equality could be achieved within those institutions. In the Sixties, they stopped believing that their liberal goals could be achieved within the institutions, and instead saw the institutions as the _obstacles_ to liberal equality. That was Curtis’ basic argument.

Thus they became radically alienated from America, including traditional morality, which was also now seen as an obstacle to equality rather than as being aligned with and in harmony with equality. They are anti-Americans. Their goal is to overthrow this system. If they can’t overthrow it, then they at least want to spend their lives expressing their hatred and resentment of the system. Complaining about black on white crime, or about a liberal Democratic President harrassing women, or about Moslem terrorists beheading an American, just doesn’t have any emotional or political profit for them. The only profit for them is in carrying on their war against the system, the oppresor, in whatever guise in which he appears—whites, businessmen, Republicans, conservatives, soldiers, police, middle class white husbands, white historical figures, and so on.

I was raised in a New Deal Democratic family and I saw liberalism change as Mr. Auster describes. The change came from the mid-60’s on. A typical liberal Democrat of 1960 revered traditional American heroes, for instance.

Remember the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention? They were supposed to cause the defeat of the Democratic Party that fall. I remember (described in Theodore H. White’s book on the 1968 election) Hubert Humphrey campaigning in Massachussetts early that fall. College demonstrators turned out chanting, “Dump the Hump!”

From then on, we saw the ascendance of the “alienated liberal,” who carries out his war against “the system.” This continues even when they, themselves, became “the system.” An example is Bill Clinton’s behavior with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton figures he’s thumbing his nose at “traditional morality.” Even though he is President, Clinton is in a way, still “protesting.”

It is a plausible, attractive (to a conservative like me), and comprehensible idea that liberals don’t actually care about oppression but use the charge of oppression to oppress people they don’t like. It seems, though, to be a weak generalization because the liberal often finds plausible distinguishments and will point to instances where it has opposed oppression. For example, when a lady accused Clinton of rape, Clinton’s henchmen and feminist backers pointed out that the lady had previously denied rape (if I have my facts straight). No prosecutor would touch such a case without strong physical evidence. This is a distinguishment.

An example where liberals opposed oppression is the participation of liberals in supporting (half-heartedly in many cases) through funding and with their children soldiers, the conservatives’ staunch opposition to Soviet and Chinese totalitarianism.

I thought a fundamental idea here is that we cannot refute through wholly rational argument (which is based on generalizations) the purported purposes of the liberals. We must, instead, be able to defend our values with both rational argument and traditional values that can’t be derived from some theory of everything.

Good point by Mr. Murgos. All I can say is that when I wrote the comment that began this discussion, I was not intending an all-embracing theory of liberalism; I was responding to Thucydides’ thought that revealed something about liberalism that I hadn’t seen as clearly before. I did not mean to say that “Liberals do not care about fighting oppression, period.” I was thinking of particular instances in which liberals plainly do not care about opposing the specific oppression they say they oppose. However, there _is_ a global “oppression” that they do consistently oppose: the oppression of traditional values and standards; the oppression of transcendence; the oppression of patriotism; the oppression of natural hierarchies; and so on. And of course they have unprincipled exceptions to all of these anti-oppression campaigns, but that’s always the case.

I’m afraid that’s not a completely satisfactory answer, but it’s all that comes to me at the moment. In any case, I don’t have a single all-encompassing theory of liberalism, though I believe in its possibility.

One of the clearest examples to me of the “liberal” indifference to oppression is their silence about black African genocide. Blacks wiping out other blacks does not fit into any of their preconceived egalitarian dogmas about how the oppressed would be fine if the oppressors left them alone. The white colonialists left, and repeated genocide is the result. Best not to talk about it if you are a “liberal” (a.k.a. a leftist).

Mr. Coleman is right. The abominable element of genocide isn’t the mass murder component, to the liberal: the abominable element is the racism. The mass murder element is morally neutral.