Why liberals never think about the consequences of liberalism

A reader writes:

Hussein’s trial started getting out of hand just around the time I finished The Camp of the Saints, which is by far the most disturbing work of fiction (?) I’ve ever read. As I was reading about this farcical trial and roiling The Camp around in my head over and over, something struck me about the leftist mindset.

Sure, leftists refuse to accept reality, we all know that. But leftists also refuse to accept the fact that things can change fundamentally, or be threatened, or be lost. They insist on a “fair” trial for Hussein because they cannot concieve of hundreds of thousands of their neighbors being gassed and interned in mass graves, or someone they know saying the wrong thing and being fed into an industrial plastic shredder. They want mass immigration while thinking they won’t eventually have to live among the immigrants. They bleat loudly that we should have maximum equality, tolerance, socialism, egalitarianism, but deep down they think they can still hold onto that good-paying job, the SUV, the fancy restaurants.

They think that America, with all the perks they enjoy, can never cease to exist. We can let ourselves become the minority to Moslems, Hispanics, whoever else, and the only change will be the amorphous value of “diversity” that the multicult is always swinging like a sword. In short, they honestly think they can have it all.

But America can be defeated. And if it crumbles because of multiculturalism, the result will be much the same as in The Camp of the Saints. They will realize their folly far too late, and will have condemned in brutal fact the country that they condemned in words for so long.

My reply:

For many years I’ve been saying that liberals think the goods of civilization are permanent, like rocks or stars, so they don’t feel they have to do anything to protect them.

Liberals take for granted the goods of civilization, while complaining about their unequal distribution and demanding everyone’s rights to their equal distribution. So how can liberals think that the goods of a society—including the society itself—can ever be threatened, when they have never been concerned about producing or preserving them, but only about people’s “rights” to have them? To think about how to produce goods is to assume that they have a legitimate value, which is to be earned by the effort involved in producing them or by an equivalent effort. But for the liberal, no value that actually exists, in and of itself, can ever be truly legitimate, unless it be equally distributed. But since values by their very nature can never be equally distributed, they can never be legitimate. Liberals therefore cannot conceptualize the meaning and value of the goods of their society, and therefore they cannot imagine the permanent loss of those goods. Yes, they can conceptualize a failure to distribute the goods or a withholding of the goods from those who have “rights” to them, but they cannot conceptualize the non-production or non-existence of the goods. Their is because producing goods and making the society function is not the concern of liberals, but of “conservatives.” Just as national defense is the concern of “conservatives.”

This is of course a central theme of Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand’s collectivist anti-rational villains—who live off the values that are created by the virtuous even as they slime and drag down the virtuous—only survive as long as the virtuous, out of an undeserved sense of guilt, allow themselves to be used in this manner.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 09, 2005 11:30 AM | Send