A repenting (former) liberal

Matthew H, an American living in England, wrote:

On your radio commentary on the Keith and Gail show, it was a true breath of fresh air to hear someone not sugarcoat the myths of liberalism, [but have] genuine ideas about solutions to this mess. I will start repenting tonight when I go to bed. ;-)

My reply:

Thanks very much.

Let me ask you a question. Some people say I’m not sufficiently clear in my definition of liberalism, that it could be confusing to people. Also, the English understand liberalism differently from Americans. So, what is your understanding of what I said about liberalism? And what is it about liberailsm that makes it the problem that it is?

Matthew to LA:

LA’s definition of liberalism as understood by MH:

Self-loathing; the betrayal of our nation’s core republic values (such as identity, sovereignty self-reliance, discipline, independence of government, national pride, family values, etc.); and the myth that immigration and diversity is part of the true fabric of our society and that America is a “grab bag” for all to invade and consume without prejudice, without acknowledging what makes us a “people.” The liberal myth, that multiculturalism is the only strength which makes us a great nation. White, liberal guilt coming from both sides of the political spectrum, and how we have lost the pure moral fortitude to defend what is right and what is wrong. “Consume or Die” has replaced “Live Free or Die” and the “tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free” slogan has been beaten to death at the expense of the generations and ancestors who were truly united as a nation of people from different cultures and religious persuasion. Equality being the biggest lie of them all to come from liberalism which you touched on. As I listen to mainstream, so called conservative radio shows chat shows in America, I have never heard anyone address this in the way you did.

“What is it about liberalism that makes it the problem that it is?”

With rights come responsibilities, and liberalism ignores the responsibility and emphasizes the rights of others to the point of a complete breakdown of TRADITIONS, common sense, morality, law and order, and national identity. And this affliction is ever so present in England today. It is almost too funny to cry about. Life is not FAIR! And liberalism has tried to reverse this fact, with disastrous consequences. Equality is one issue I challenge liberals on all the time. If we are all equal, than how is it that women and minorities need to given special treatment and cannot prosper based on their natural born strengths? These liberal attitudes and policies acknowledge that there truly isn’t any such thing as equality, and most liberals I speak to can’t respond to anything to argue, and just resort to calling me a racist or a fascist. Also, liberal political correctness has taken the debate out of important social, national and cultural issues and replaced them with lies and half truths that are “suicidal” to all of us.

On a personal note, I must confess over the last five years, I recently started a dramatic shift in my attitude towards almost everything.

When I became a father just three years ago, my liberal attitude really started to shed and I started to become less tolerant and started challenging my whole belief system, the systematic liberal, Massachusetts, guilty middle class attitudes that some members of my family, my peers and teachers instilled in me at a very young age. I am still shedding them everyday I wake up and see the irreversible liberal mess that is Blair’s Britain.

Like you said, we need to repent. That’s what I have started to do.

A reader writes:

I’ve been reading articles at VFR for the past few weeks. I agree with everything you say. Liberalism is a cancer that if unchecked will cause the death of this organism called America.

In fact your call for “repentance” from the spirit of liberalism is prophetic in nature. Accordingly I do confess to having liberal tendencies and repent of this sin. Please forgive me father for I have sinned against heaven and earth (America). I will now await the apocalypse of liberalism and have started earnestly at decoding that time and date. The liberal world will come to an end on October 6th, 2009.

As well, I will not argue against anything you say or write Lawrence for that only brings out the scorn and wrath of Auster. My will, from now on, will blend perfectly with yours as I meditate on the deep things of VFR daily.

Amen, and amen.

LA replies:

First, I don’t know how serious you are, but surely you are aware that a call to repentance is not the same as making oneself to be God. Yet that is what you seem to believe that I’m doing when you joke about bringing your will perfectly in tune with mine.

This is as big a misconception as when a New York Post reporter years ago mischaracterized Rush Limbaugh’s slogan, “Talent on loan from God.” as “I am God.” Liberals are so alienated from the idea of God, and the idea that there is anything above us, that if they hear a person say that he has talent on loan from God (which, by the way, is what Jesus tells us in several parables in the Gospels) or that we need to follow God, they think, since there’s nothing higher than us that can be God, and since this person is talking about believing in God or having some connection with God, he is saying he is God.

The same liberal misconception applies to morality and truth. Since liberals believe that there is nothing higher than the individual and his will, they interpret any assertion of moral or intellectual truth as an assertion by the speaker of his superior intellect or morality, and of other people’s inferior intellect and morality. This is why today’s schools do not allow pupils to say that they disagree with something that other pupils say, as it will damage their self-esteem. Instead, all discussion must be governed by consensus, in which no one can actually say anything. Similarly, no one is allowed to say that certain things are right or wrong, as this would damage the selfhood of people who believe differently. All this comes from the liberal belief that the self is the highest thing. But as the classic philosophers teach, truth is not identical with us and does not exist in us; it is outside us, beyond us, higher than us. We either try to move toward it and get in harmony with it, or we resist it and turn away from it.

In any case, apart from being annoyed at me for supposedly glorifying myself, what do you actually disagree with in my statements about liberalism? Is liberalism destroying Western civilization, or not? Are we in the apocalypse of liberalism (meaning the revealing of liberalism’s nature and destiny), or not?

Shrewsbury writes:

The first piece of free-association with the word “liberalism” your correspondent Matthew H. comes up with is “self-loathing.” Dear me, but I am so weary of this endlessly-repeated bromide. Can conservatives conceive of hesperophobes in no other way? Somehow I myself free-associate with this tendency those pointless “Hippies Smell” T-shirts—as a fumbling, depressing non-sequitur. Do the writers whose blitherings appear on the editorial pages of the New York Times seem to have a low opinion of themselves or their very well-groomed friends? Does not the liberal enemy show us, rather than self-loathing, in fact a kind of narcissist triumphalism? Do the liberals you actually know strike you as self-loathing? Or do they not rather hold themselves superior to the rest of American society? Do they not almost compulsively and continually refer to the inferiority of Bush, Christians, people who actually do something for a living, etc., etc.?

Gosh-a-mighty, is it really necessary to point out again and again that when liberals loath the United States and Western Civ generally, it is from a position of supposed superiority—that they think they have nothing to do with it, that it is beneath them, that they are an enlightened vanguard of a global civilization who are tainted by any association with their poor relations? Self-infatuation, yes; self-loathing—never. Even their vaunted “guilt” somehow never induces them actually to make any sort of amends (other than forcing others to sacrifice, bussing working-class kids to school with savages, etc.), and seems to me rather a function of pride than poor self-esteem: exalted enough to feel guilty toward Negroes, they are far too exalted to live next to them.

LA replies:

Certainly Shrewsbury is correct about the superior loathing of the West exhibited by liberals. But does that mean that white liberal guilt does not also exist? It seems to me they both exist simultaneously, though it may be hard to separate them out from each other. Perhaps, just as every ideology has it activist hard-liners and its passive followers, the same is true of liberal loathing of the West. The active types hate the West, while the followers feel guilty about the West. In any case, I think it’s clear that both tendencies exist.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 21, 2006 05:30 PM | Send