Has the madness of liberalism gone so far that only a world war can end it?

Kristor L. writes:

I’m still out here, still reading VFR every day. I’ve just been too disheartened by the political spectacle the last few weeks to write anything. I was rambling back through my Inbox, cleaning things up, and came across your article, “A journey into the far hells of liberalism,” and it struck me as an exact description of how this presidential race feels. It is as though I am in a nightmare, journeying deeper and deeper into a land where all the people are howling incessantly to each other as loudly as they can about the beauty of the Emperor’s new suit. The connection of the political discourse in this country to anything like reality is—well, it’s just gone. It’s as though they’ve all gone insane. Not the vile sycophants who write at VFR, of course. But there just aren’t enough of us. I feel like the VFR sycophants are Xenophon’s 10,000, stuck deep in the middle of Persia and fighting our way home—except that Greece is gone.

Lieberman and Lindsay Graham had a big editorial in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago about how we need to provide the Georgians with conventional heavy arms and training, so they can stand up to the Russians. I laughed. The piece was suffused with their desperate fear that the “new world order” might collapse. It was pathetic. I couldn’t help thinking, “they’re pissing in the wind.” Reading their earnest urgent whining, I could feel the coming war in my guts. This is a new feeling for me. Horrible; I hope it’s wrong, but I’m afraid it isn’t.

I have thought for a long time that the fastest most humane way to peace in “Palestine” would be to unleash the Israelis, to let them whomp their adversaries permanently and just take over the whole shooting match for good, oil fields and all, rather than reining them in every time they get within 20 miles of Cairo. Wars should be fought to their natural conclusion—destruction or surrender of the loser—or they’ll never be finished.

Why is it a problem for nations to conquer each other, or destroy each other? Is it really nice, in the long run, to be so nice about this? What is nice about propping up a failed nation, such as Egypt, which so long as it continues to exist is really nothing more than a gigantic falsehood? What is nice about creating a nation, such as Palestine, that has not by force of arms earned its right to exist? Is it not true that the net effect on the actual welfare of “Palestinians” of such a Potemkin pretense will be worse than if they were forced by rude shocks to recognize and adapt to reality as it really is? Why should we confer nationality as a form of welfare? Why should we be surprised that when we do we are beset by welfare cheats?

A war is coming; a big war. That’s what happens when the minor adjustments toward international equilibrium effected by small wars are prevented by an overwhelming fear from taking place. The seismic pressure builds and builds, and then there is a titanic explosion. I can’t help thinking that it will be to WWII as WWII was to WWI. I dread it, but am forced to admit that it will probably be good for us. We have been living too long in Sybaris. We have been playing pretend—so much so, that we have even pretended our enemies are not enemies, have even given them boatloads of money so that they can pretend. It begins to seem as though the jig is up; that we must soon pay the price of our bad faith with the world, that we must sojourn a while in the wilderness.

All because we have turned away from the Truth.

This is a wholly disordered message. My thoughts are all astray. You see why I have not been commenting lately. For the first time in my life, I am filled with foreboding. Perhaps I should spend more time in prayer.

Keep up the good work.

LA replies:

I’m glad to hear from you, though I’m sorry to hear you are feeling discouraged lately. There are periods we all go through when we feel overwhelmed by everything that is happening, but we come out of it.

In this connection, let me reflect for a moment, not on the substantive content of your discouragement, but on its “temporal structure.” Seeing this may perhaps help you come out of the discouragement sooner.

It seems to me that there are two parallel tracks of the madness of liberalism: the external progress of liberalism in the outer world, as it takes over and perverts and destroys more and more of society; and our own individual, developing experience and understanding of liberalism. So, is it really the case that the world has gotten objectively more insane in the last few weeks? Or is it that you, because of where you are in your own intellectual development, are personally realizing and feeling the liberal insanity in a way you haven’t done before?

The question can’t be definitively answered, because each of us only experiences the first track (the external progress of the liberal destruction of society) through the medium of the second track (our individual, gradually increasing understanding of the nature of liberalism and its destructiveness). We all live in the same liberal-dominated world. But our respective individual experiences of that world are very different, because each of us is at a different stage in the development of our understanding of liberalism.

As for your question whether the stresses and disorders created by liberalism can only be resolved by war, perhaps very large-scale war, there are certainly good reasons to believe this to be the case. As you point out, liberalism, by prohibiting real war, i.e., war that actually results in a winner and a loser, leaves various conflicts simmering forever and thus adding greatly to human conflict and misery. In this sense, prohibiting decisive war is no more humane than banishing moral judgment or prohibiting parental discipline or limiting society’s ability to punish criminals. These reforms, done in the name of human kindness, in reality unleash human evil and disorder and so create vastly more unhappiness.

- end of initial entry -

Laura W. writes:

I can understand Kristor’s sadness, anger and foreboding. But, if he’s feeling hopeless, he indeed should spend more time on his knees. There are many reasons to remain hopeful even if immense suffering and world war are immanent. There’s eternal salvation, of course, but there’s also ordinary hope. Parts of this country still offer safe, nearly crime-free refuge to those working on a new order. We have our fundamental civil rights; we can say what we please and educate our children ourselves. The libraries are still up and running and as long as they are open, some will discover the truth and the impossible is possible. We have the physical beauty of America itself, it’s land, which remains untainted in places, mysterious and beckoning and filled with the same eternal truths found on library shelves. It will be there for our children’s children or their children when the worst is over. We can give them the courage to wait.

Adela G. writes:

Kristor L. writes: “This is a wholly disordered message. My thoughts are all astray. You see why I have not been commenting lately. For the first time in my life, I am filled with foreboding.”

I thought Kristor’s message was very eloquent and not at all disordered.

I, too, sometimes cannot bring myself to comment on the horrible effects of liberalism on our world and I, too, am for the first time in my life filled with foreboding.

But the very fact that Kristor and I share those feelings shows that neither of us is alone. And as far as I can tell, all of us here at VFR are of like mind, though naturally we vary as to how we respond emotionally to the terrible plight of the West.

So I hope Kristor takes heart and even some hope from the community here at VFR. True, we are few in number. But I am sure there are others out there whom we don’t know but who agree with us. And there are others who will come to agree with us as the times become even more dire.

Liberalism is inhuman, it seeks to deny and destroy all the natural bonds among people. At some point, people will realize that the equality liberalism promotes is not a virtue but a void. Then I believe humans will reassert the primacy of human nature and liberalism will be defeated. I cannot say that this will be painless or bloodless. But I do believe that humanity, not as an empty abstraction to be manipulated by liberals but as a living reality, part of the natural order ordained by God, will prevail. Even if I am wrong and we are all to perish by liberalism, I hope that we who see it for what it is will resist it for as long as we have breath in our bodies.

And I hope Kristor will feel sufficiently encouraged to comment here more often.

Mark J. writes

Kristor notes that “[w]e have been playing pretend—so much so, that we have even pretended our enemies are not enemies, have even given them boatloads of money so that they can pretend.”

Not only do we give our enemies—well, if they aren’t our enemies right now, they are at least our competitors—money, but even worse we invite them to attend our institutions of higher learning to learn the secrets of the disciplines and technologies that give us our competitive edge in the world! For instance, why in the world have we allowed the Chinese to come here and get advanced degrees in physics, math, engineering, and so on? In the history of the world has there been a civilization so dumb as to invite their competitors to come and learn the stuff needed to be able to duplicate our advanced weapons systems, or the technologies that have given our businesspeople an advantage? Even something like an MBA degree confers on these civilizational competitors of ours the hard-won knowledge of how to run an effective business that we pioneered and developed at our cost over the last couple centuries. Why are we teaching it to them? It’s infuriatingly naive. Not to mention that it displaces American citizens from those positions in those institutions. I suspect we may find that we were better off when the Chinese were an inward-looking, socialist backwater with no real understanding of business or advanced technology and science.

LA replies:

As I’ve said many times, starting in the Carter era when I was still a liberal, I could not understand Americans’ enthusiasm about bringing China out into the larger world, as though this was some marvelous thing. Wasn’t it obvious that we should prefer that that huge, Communist country remain closed up within itself rather than being active on the world stage?

Kristor writes:

Thanks, Lawrence, for your thoughtful and compassionate response. On the one hand, I do think the world has gotten objectively more insane of late. The Democratic Convention qua media and cultural event has been a sort of wild paroxysm of the Gnostic Leftist fantasy. The headline in this morning’s SF Chronicle is, “Obama Explains His Dream for America.” See what I mean? The journalist who wrote that understands the whole thing, consciously or not, as a mere dream. Yet people buy it. “We can totally remake the world,” the Obamians say, “if you’ll just trust us, join with us.” And their mad enthusiasm is infectious, because in their delusion of power they feel intensely happy and hopeful, feel as though everything is freighted with delicious meaning and significance. When such fits overtake people they can willingly drink the Kool-Aid, willingly strap bombs to their children. When a nation succumbs to enthusiasm, anything can happen. This is an extremely dangerous time.

On the other hand, it is surely true that my own development contributes to my sense of pessimism. VFR is as usual a helpful factor. No, really; I’d rather be in touch with the truth and feel bad about it than live in la-la land and feel OK, so that if VFR helps me understand the truth better and concomitantly helps me feel worse about the state of things, that’s all good. VFR is the Cassandra of our age, or the Jeremiah. No wonder you provoke such strong negative reactions! Let’s hope that your tocsin about the invaders doesn’t prompt the Trojans to tear you to pieces.

The recent thread on women’s fashion is a good example of what I am talking about here. Thanks to VFR, I now walk through the San Francisco financial district and see what I had never before seen: essentially all the women, of every age and shape, wear clingy elastic clothes that reveal almost everything about their bodies, and their choice of undergarments. Around half of them show serious cleavage; almost all of them expose their upper chests. Now that I have noticed what has become normal for women, I am embarrassed for them, that they feel they must dress this way to be acceptable, to “dress up” for the office. What have we done to our women? The more we struggle to ignore their sex and treat them as mere humans, the more aggressively they display, and thus insist upon, their sex.

Then there is the set of threads about minority on white violence all over the country, which has radically changed my notions about America. It is bad enough that wildings seem to be cropping up all over; bad enough that I will this week be giving my blonde daughter a “safety talk” before she heads back to school in rural Minnesota (!). But the recent string of armed and violent restaurant holdups in my Berkeley neighborhood has me looking over my shoulder and wondering how soon it will be before my house is invaded and it is down to hand-to-hand combat. The social chaos seems to be swelling, like the dome under Yellowstone.

So, yes, I am awakening more to reality; I am awakening to the reality that things really are getting worse.

I should also say that I don’t think another world war would kill liberalism. The first two didn’t; why should a third? All that a world war would do is knock some of the wind out of the Gnostic chiliasm that has always more or less afflicted the West. It would make more Republicans and Scoop Jackson Democrats—that is to say, more hard-headed, realistic right-liberals—and, yes, it would probably make more Traditionalists. And it would toughen us up. But the end of liberalism is not going to happen until we go through something as profound as the Enlightenment. I would like to think that when that sea change happens, it will be back to an essentially Christian ontology and epistemology, a reversion back toward the mean of the West. It probably won’t happen in our lifetime.

But it might. Indeed, it might be happening right this minute. As I said, this is an extremely dangerous time; dangerous for liberals, too. The internal contradictions of liberalism are these days so acute, are pitched so fine, and are so difficult to miss (which is why PC obfuscation is so critically important to the dominant regime, and so pervasive), that it seems only a matter of time before some innocent calls out, and is heard to call out, that the Emperor has no clothes. And then the whole thing could come crashing down. Indeed, as you have pointed out, such an awakening might be made much easier for people if we were to elect Obama as Emperor, so that we all have a personal focus for our discomfiture with the absurdities of liberalism. Hitler made it easy for the world to reject Nazism, and Stalin made it easy to reject Sovietism. As the personal incarnation and apotheosis of the Gnostic liberal animus, Obama might so heighten the contradictions inherent thereto that it becomes possible for the nation to wake up and spew it forth.

The ideal, of course, would be that the overweening self-regard and fantastic excesses of Obama’s mere campaign would suffice to awaken us, making it all the harder for a President McCain to move left. This would preserve to us the conservative SCOTUS, and prevent the return of the Fairness Doctrine, while minimizing the damage McCain could do. But let me not succumb to fantasies of my own devices and desires.

Richard W. writes:

Let me add my voice to the others praising Kristor’s essay. I did not find it disordered in the least, and felt that he made some fascinating points that I have not seen elsewhere.

I have often thought that the current policy of suppressing all wars, and preventing total victory in wars that are in process, is absurd. Bush’s father’s decision to leave Saddam in place after sending 500,000 troops to fight him, as well as calling him Hitler, was the classic example. But there have been so many, especially concerning Israel, as Kristor points out.

All of these remind me of the U.S. Forest Service policies of “no forest fires” that prevailed for 40 years from the mid 1950s on. The end result of this policy was a huge build up of dead wood and underbrush that eventually created “super fires” far more destructive than if smaller ones had been allowed to burn. Whereas a normal fire in a pine forest results in the immediate re-seeding of the forest via burnt pine cones the high temperature “super fires” completely incinerate all organic matter, including organisms in the top soil and leave a sterile environment in which nothing can grow for years.

Let us hope the “super fire” of world politics which Kristor and many others feel is coming doesn’t devastate our society this completely, but it may.

It’s my belief that the USA as currently formed will probably not survive a major war. The fault lines are too deeply cut for us all to hold hands and work together, as we did in WW2. We saw that the Vietnam War almost pulled the country apart, and it was small in comparison with WW1 and WW2.

The left will not start as patriotic supporters and slowly morph into war opponents, as they did in Vietnam. Rather they will pick up at the endpoint of Vietnam: huge protests, non-compliance, siding with the enemy, treason and support for our enemies, inciting desertion by our troops, and all the rest.

Just imagine the complexity of reviving a draft in 2009, for instance. Would we draft women? If not, why not? What possible reason would make sense given a woman vice-president, women CEOs, and women currently in all branches of the services? Would pregnancy be an automatic “out” for women who have been drafted? Would they be required to serve after giving birth? Would fathers be given the same rights or time-off to do “care-giving” of newborns?

Or, imagine the gay exclusion. That would have to go. As there is no real sanction involved in being gay these days. Would not tens of thousands of scared or weak men simply take the option of “telling” on themselves to gain immediate discharge?

This is merely one issue, the draft.

But in thinking about it I just don’t see the social cohesion in the USA that we would require to fight a serious “all hands on deck” war. In fact as a traditionalist conservative I would wonder if it really was in my best interest to see a cohesive response if that meant the intolerable unconstitutional status quo was strengthened and propped up.

Perhaps in this way I am not that different from many on the left, in this regard.

It is an old leftist aphorism that “War is the health of the state.” Our two biggest wars, the Civil War and World War II, both resulted in a tremendous increase in the size and scope of government, in the breaking down of traditional society, in the extension of liberalism to more aspects of life. Would not a full-blown war result in that once again? I suspect it would, but only if we were victorious.

I think it is questionable than we will prevail in large future conflicts. I think it likely that international war will lead to civil war in the USA, the results of which are very hard to predict.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 29, 2008 07:45 AM | Send