A VFR golden oldie

In practice, rather than abolishing evil things, liberals end up abolishing all things.
—Matt, View from the Right, February 13, 2004

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Terry Morris writes:

That’s a great entry, and a great discussion between the commenters, on the homosexual “marriage” question.

Brandon F. writes:

Fr. Seraphim Rose says that the last traditional institution liberalism will destroy is itself, since destruction is its core motivation.

LA replies:

Which shows how prophetic was the scene in “Yellow Submarine” in which a creature who has a sort of giant vacuum for a mouth, vacuums up all the objects in his environment, then he vacuums up the environment itself, so there’s nothing left but himself, then he vacuums himself and disappears.

LA continues:

I used that movie scene once before to make a similar point, describing the hollowing-out effect of the neoconservative ideology on our nation and culture:

Like the magical creature in the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine that sucks up every object in the vicinity until it swallows itself and disappears, conservative proponents of the “American Idea” fail to recognize the suicidal nature of their project: once our notions of political order are completely abstracted from the ethnic and cultural matrix that gave them birth, the notions themselves begin to dissolve under the onslaught of rival particularisms, which rush in to fill the cultural vacuum left by the act of abstraction. Thus our universalist immigration policy, by bringing in cultures and peoples too diverse to be incorporated within a single national and civilizational identity, has inadvertently helped release the very forces of cultural separatism and group rights that the conservatives dread. The attempt to reconstitute the American identity solely in terms of a civic bond defined by universal ideas is therefore doomed; as America’s current fragmentation indicates, a civic bond cannot long endure in the absence of an experienced cultural bond.

Avoiding The Issue, National Review, February 21, 1994.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 07, 2008 01:24 AM | Send