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How liberalism became anti-nonwhite, and anti-white
In a previous entry, a reader pointed out that in the late 19th century, “it was the left that began to sing the praises of imperialism. Men like Léon Gambetta, Victor Hugo, and Jules Ferry spoke of the need to expand and spread the glory of France to all the backward peoples. It was ‘progressivism’ that was imperialistic, not monarchism.” It is true that progressivism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries wanted to include and improve the backward peoples in the forward march of a presumptively superior Western civilization. Think of the great statue of Theodore Roosevelt at the American Museum of Natural History, with Roosevelt on horseback accompanied by an African native walking on one side and an American Indian on the other. But the flip side of the progressivist vision was the idea that backward peoples were an obstacle to progress. Thus Planned Parenthood, a leftist organization, originated out of a desire to advance the human race by preventing the less intelligent from reproducing. Other progressives and leftists spoke of the outright elimination of backward peoples. The readiness of more than a few of today’s supporters of universal democratization to advocate the mass slaughter of all Muslims if the Muslims refuse to be democratized (see the discussion boards at Lucianne.com) would seem to be a contemporary expression of the same progressivist sensibility. But there is a further irony. While some late 19th and early 20th century leftists saw Third-World peoples and cultures as obstacles to liberal Western progress that had to be eliminated, leftists after 1960 began to see white Western civilization itself as the main obstacle to liberal progress that had to be eliminated. How did this change occur? It was the logical progress of progressivism or liberalism toward ever-greater alienation. Liberalism begins by rebelling against kings, then it rebels against aristocracy and arbitrary privileges and class differences. Up to this point, liberalism is not against society itself. But because the only explicit and formal principle of liberalism is the belief in equality and freedom and ever-continuing progress toward ever greater equality and freedom, liberalism has no principles other than liberal principles, and thus has no principled adherence to any traditional and actual social order, and no way of articulating and accommodating itself to the inequalities that any actual social order must contain. Therefore liberalism contains no principled limit on its own demand for ever greater equality. At a certain point, therefore, liberalism inevitably “flips” from being against arbitrary and unfair inequalities, to being against any inequalities. From this radicalized point of view, the white West, being more successful than other civilizations and therefore by its very existence making non-Westerners seem inferior, becomes the main obstacle to liberal equality and progress, and must be eliminated.
To put it another way, as long as liberals entertained the hopeful belief that the backward peoples could be improved and raised to the level of the white West, they believed in the white West, or rather in a progressive, expansive, ever-more inclusive version of it, as symbolized by the statue of TR. But when liberals realized that some backward peoples are incapable of becoming equal to the West, then Western society itself, with its higher achievements and standards, came to be seen as the main problem, because by its very existence it demonstrates that not all human beings are equal. In the American case, this momentous change of perspective, which turned liberals from champions of the West into mortal enemies of the West, occurred in the early to mid 1960s, when the intractability of black achievement deficits became apparent. I discuss this in my article, “Guilty Whites.” Email entry |