Liberals, Nazis, and Fascists
A non-British reader living in Britain writes:
A British liberal friend referred to me as Mein Fuhrer after I suggested that taxes should be cut in Britain. Can you believe it?
LA replies:
One evening in the summer of 1992, I was sitting on a log in front of a camp fire by the Tatshenshini River in the middle of British Columbia wilderness chatting with the leader of the trip, who was a liberal from Berkeley, California. We got into discussing the homeless issue, which was a burning issue then. At one point I said, “If you subsidize something, you get more of it.” The trip leader, who was sitting next to me on the log, poked me hard in the thigh with his finger and said, “That’s a fascist thing to say.”
In the eyes of today’s liberals, if you want LESS government you’re a fascist!
Non-British reader replies:
The liberals seem to have a cause of their time—and these are essentially moral superiority fads.
I have read about the ’80s and early ’90s and it is a fact that the U.S. media spread unbelievable lies about how Reagan’s economic policies were causing an explosion in “homelessness.”
Today the liberals have different causes—global warming, African poverty etc. What happened to the homeless? Have they been forgotten? Oh I know what happened! Bill Clinton got elected and the problem just disappeared miraculously!
They also like to say that the 1980s was the decade of “greed.” Funny no one coined such phrases for the mindless speculation in Bill Clinton’s time which culminated in the disaster of the dotcom bubble. That wasn’t “greed.” Oh no! Couldn’t possibly be greed!
LA replies:
Yes, the left is completely opportunistic in whatever cause it picks up. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that they don’t believe in whatever they are pushing at the moment, but rather that, like Muslims, they believe in one overarching idea, and they always find a way to fit each new circumstance into the advancement of that idea.
Conservatives commonly attribute liberal opportunism to liberal narcissism; what motivates liberals to jump from one cause to another in such an apparently unprincipled way is the desire to make themselves look morally superior, whatever is happening. While this often seems to be the case, I think that there’s something deeper at work here, which is that liberals are motivated by a sincere desire to be morally right according to liberalism. Their liberalism is not, primarily, about making themselves look good; rather it is about their desire to be moral persons as they understand it. And so, whatever is at the moment the “right cause” for “right-thinking people” to believe in, that is what they will feel morally obligated to believe in. The cause du jour changes, but the overall direction of all the various causes du jour is the same: the pursuit of equality, the dragging down of the superior (and therefore immoral) white Christian West, and the elevation of the liberal tribe to their rightful place as the rulers of mankind.
Just as we go wrong when we think that Muslims are motivated by simple “hatred” of non-Muslims and fail to see that Muslims have a bona fide (though destructive) belief system that they are trying to follow, we go wrong when we think that liberals are motivated by simple narcissism and fail to see that liberals have a bona fide (though destructive) belief system that they are trying to follow. And in both cases the motive for our misconception may be the same. In the liberal society in which we live, it doesn’t cost us much to criticize Muslims for bigotry or liberals for moral preening. It would cost us a great deal to criticize Islam as Islam, and liberalism as liberalism.
Dimitri K. writes:
I believe the liberals are opposed to any authority, which they consider to be Fascism. As for the central government, or better, the world government, that institution in their minds is not an authority but rather an impersonal instrument of their collective rule.
LA replies:
I agree with Dimitri and made a similar point in this article.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 23, 2007 01:58 AM | Send