The essential liberal

In a VFR discussion in February 2004 about homosexual marriage, a commenter said:

“As a straight male engaged to be married in the summertime, I find myself ashamed of the institution of marriage, as I would of membership in an all-white country club.”

As I pointed out in that thread, this is the quintessential attitude of Western liberals. Western liberals do not think of themselves as nihilists or cultural destroyers, since there are things about our culture that they like and value. They value the institution of marriage, for example, but they are also ashamed of it in its entire historical incarnation, because it excludes marriages between people of the same sex. If they are heterosexual, they value heterosexual love, but they are also ashamed of the fact that heterosexual love is considered normative in our society and marginalizes homosexual love. If they are Christians, they value Christianity, but they also feel ashamed of it because Christianity by its very existence as a religion distinguishes itself from and claims to be more truthful than other religions. They value our nation, but they are also ashamed of it because—even under our current, multicultural order—it does not yet equally include all peoples and all cultures.

Liberals like their civilization, and simultaneously are ashamed of it and seek to change it in ways that must destroy it. There is thus no principled difference between them and leftists who openly seek to destroy civilization. And as the destruction of the West gets nearer and nearer (for example, with the submission of the West to Islam as seen in the cowardly response of Western governments to the cartoon jihad), the liberals’ superficial differences from leftists will fall away, leaving only the will to surrender to the toppling of our civilization and to the new, non-Western order that will replace it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 14, 2006 01:55 AM | Send