Why opposing liberal anti-discrimination is not enough

Jeremy G. writes:

I agree with you that there is something about the West as a whole that has allowed liberalism to steadily advance. But tolerance among the masses is only a symptom, a manifestation of a belief in nothing, and is not the problem. The problem is not unrestrained tolerance but a lack of a credible affirming philosophy for European man. Christians, for example, are still intolerant of homosexuality because they have a strong belief that homosexuality is wrong. When the masses of whites in the south strongly believed that racial integration would be devastating, they resisted it. Today they have largely adopted a liberal belief system and now they can be tolerant of nonwhite immigration. The liberals themselves are extremely intolerant, of racially conscious whites for example. They call this “zero tolerance” instead of “intolerance”. The problem we face is not tolerance, it is the lack of a strong and healthy affirming philosophy for ourselves. It is important to make a correct diagnosis, so we know how to resist our ruin and rebuild our incredibly damaged civilization.

LA replies:

I agree one hundred percent.

But I must return to my challenging question, which first struck me in full when I addressed the Council for National Policy in a beautiful hotel on the California coast in February 2002:

How is that patriotic, Christian, traditional-values conservatives—grassroots pro-military, pro-family, pro-capitalism conservatives—TOTALLY ACCEPT OPEN BORDERS?

It’s not exactly because they have no belief in country and in traditional values; it’s that they believe that discrimination is wrong, that any concern about race and ethnicity is wrong.

And here is the insight that came to me five years ago. There is something lacking in their patriotic traditionalism, namely their traditionalism has become a matter of “issues.” They support family, they support lower taxes, they support national defense. But these issues don’t come together in the most essential thing that would tie all those issues together, the thing that Americans used to have but have lost: peoplehood, nationhood, a concrete identity.

Without the concrete identity as a people, all their “traditional values” start to take on the coloration of abstract neoconservative “ideas.” They believe in this idea, they believe in that idea, but they don’t believe in themselves as an actual people and civilization continuing through time, something that Americans always believed in until the last couple of generations. Therefore they don’t see how openness to a mass influx of Mexicans threatens America as a concrete entity, because they don’t think of America as a concrete entity. They see America as a collection of issues and values, such as strong family and a strong military. And they believe mass immigration is entirely compatible with that collection of issues and values.

So I agree with you entirely and I’m glad you said it because it helps complete my argument. We must attack non-discrimination, and, more fundamentally, we must seek to restore our lost sense of peoplehood, without which it is not possible for us to oppose the non-discrimination idea.

At the same time, this problem is very different from the anti-whiteness of the left. The problem is within ourselves, it is not being injected into us by Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 18, 2007 11:47 AM | Send