The madness of the left and what we should think about it

(Note There is a discussion in this entry about the conditions for liberals to convert to conservatism. As of August 8 it continues.)

QR writes:

This evening I spent reading leftist blogs in train-wreck fascination. The bloggers were all white, feminist, and atheist. Some of them were obviously quite intelligent, a fact they let show through when they took brief respites from hurling nasty epithets at Christians, capitalists, and Intelligent Design theorists. Sometimes people in the comments would politely say things like, “I agree with you, but your tone is sneering and juvenile, and the creationists [their word] you’re arguing with have been very cordial to you and didn’t resort to the name-calling you’re doing.” The response to this was invariably dog-piling.

Ever since I became a race realist, which hasn’t been very long, I’ve been seeing over and over that the enemies of the white race are not nonwhites, but rather white leftists. After an evening like this, I can’t help but wonder how on earth a people bent on suicide can be rescued.

Not that I really have any choice but to keep doing what I can in this fight. But after reading stuff like that, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the bother. (That is, of course, a mood, not a philosophical conclusion.)

LA replies:

I know what you’re talking about. Liberal blogs are quite literally mad, with no arguments, with nothing but hysterical denunciations of conservatives and Christians, completely unconnected from reality. The schools, the culture, have trained the twenty somethings to be nothing but irrational haters. It’s beyond terrible. It’s very unsettling. I don’t know what can be done about it. Someone said recently that the only value that white liberals carry now is in their genes. That sounds like a brutal thing to say, but sometimes I think it myself. And at least it means that we don’t want to eliminate them, as they basically seem to want to do to us.

You write:

“Ever since I became a race realist, which hasn’t been very long, I’ve been seeing over and over that the enemies of the white race are not nonwhites, but rather white leftists.”

A distinct possibility is a future civil war in the West between liberal whites and non-liberal whites. In fact, we already seem to be involved in the early stages of such a civil war. It is a horrible possibility, that we must seek to avoid at all costs, but there is a logic leading to it.

You write:

“After an evening like this, I can’t help but wonder how on earth a people bent on suicide can be rescued.”

I have no answer to this. If the overall direction of the West remains as it is, then the West is doomed. The faith and hope by which we live is that the direction will change.

Also, it would be interesting to see if there are people who have come from this insane leftist background you’re describing and become conservative, or relatively conservative.

After all, isn’t this what the light-weight, entertaining conservatives, the Harry Steins, the Mark Steyns, and the Ann Coulters, are supposed to be about—their inadequate conservatism is excused by the fact that they form a bridge to liberals, giving them an undemanding “conservatism” that can attract them away from insane leftism? That argument has often been made to me to mitigate my harsh judgment of Steyn and Coulter. But is there evidence backing it up?

LA continues:

Here is a more hopeful scenario. Nothing stays the same. The irrationality of today’s younger leftists is so extreme that it can’t endure. Either they will grow out of it, or their children will reject it.

Hannon writes:

You wrote:

“Here is a more hopeful scenario. Nothing stays the same. The irrationality of today’s younger leftists is so extreme that it can’t endure. Either they will grow out of it, or their children will reject it.”

I think this is exactly so, but the generational shift is not a linear process. It must, it would seem by observing history, accompany some dramatic and periodic social change that overpowers and penetrates daily norms across all strata. In short, violent conflict, usually in conjunction with economic malaise and a ripening of other social ills.

Of course I am not advocating any action to precipitate such a development; these things happen on their own as it were. But it seems a simple fact that generations, even in a highly divergent society as in the U.S., cannot simply continue to pass on their dominant traits forever. Those habits or ideologies will sour or meet resistance or decay naturally, any of which will be speeded along by any timely and upsetting jolt to the system.

[The next two comments, taking opposite sides of the same issue, arrived in my e-mail at the same moment.]

Murray L. writes:

This is long. Apologies.

You ask:

After all, isn’t this what the light-weight, entertaining conservatives, the Harry Steins, the Mark Steyns, and the Ann Coulters, are supposed to be about—their inadequate conservatism is excused by the fact that they form a bridge to liberals, giving them an undemanding “conservatism” that can attract them away from insane leftism? That argument has often been made to me to mitigate my harsh judgment of Steyn and Coulter. But is there evidence backing it up?

I don’t know if there’s any statistical evidence backing it up, but my own trajectory from left to right was assisted greatly by writers such as Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, P.J. O’Rourke, and even David Horowitz. I grew up in Australia, within an extended family in which the political spectrum extended from moderate to extreme leftism, corresponding to the employment situation of the family member in question (with the academics at one end and the privately employed engineers at the other). Such an environment is an ideological monoculture, which was only reinforced by highly trusted outside sources like the ABC (Australia’s notoriously left-wing public broadcaster) and by the thinly-veiled statist indoctrination prevalent even then (1973-1985) in the schools.

To someone from my background, conservatism was an outlandish and baffling ideology, explicable only in terms of mean-spiritedness, selfishness, and/or stupidity. Even moderate conservatives hardly worthy of the label were smeared in the media as extremists with ridiculous views hardly worth mentioning, except when they became momentarily useful as foils for more serious conservatives (cf. John McCain). Nearly everything I saw and heard in those formative years served to confirm the essential rightness and virtue of my inherited views, and the stupidity and malevolence of conservatives.

Even many leftists are apt to discover that the left is fractious, self-contradictory, and often highly ridiculous, but in the absence of dissenting viewpoints, I continued to believe that these were the excesses of well-meaning people who were busy making a better, more liberated world. The crack in this facade came early in my graduate studies, when I spent time researching the claims and history of the environmental movement (almost entirely a movement of the left), and realized that it would be no great exaggeration to state that the entire movement was based on gross fabrications, from Silent Spring and The Population Bomb on to the nonsense of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

And this is where writers like Steyn become useful. When I realized that the environmental movement had been lying to me all my life, I naturally began to wonder what other lies I’d been told by their allies on the left. So I started looking and have found so much that I haven’t been able to stop, even some eight years in. The Steyns and O’Rourkes are “gateway conservatives,” illuminating the absurdities and untruths of the left, and providing the wavering liberal/leftist with a funny, accessible and somewhat defensible pathway to the right.

The trouble is that most conservative converts never move far beyond the initial entry point; they find a comfortable spot (which they call pleasant-sounding names like “classical liberalism”) and stay there. That was my trajectory too: unwilling at first to call myself “conservative” because of all the nasty connotations, I went from “libertarianism” (better named “libertinism”) to “classical liberalism” to “atheist conservative” to “traditionalist atheist conservative” to “traditionalist Catholic conservative.” (I also like Dennis Mangan’s suggestion of “reactionary.”)

But the catch is that you have to be willing to follow the train of ideas where it leads, and few appear willing to do so. I was led slowly to theism and VFR-style traditionalism by a dawning comprehension of the consequences of the arguments I was making, to the point that I am now well beyond conventional political categorization. This prospect doesn’t much bother me, but I think it’s an insurmountable barrier to many, including the Steyns et al. They have too much to lose.

Aaron S. writes:

You write:

After all, isn’t this what the light-weight, entertaining conservatives, the Harry Steins, the Mark Steyns, and the Ann Coulters, are supposed to be about—their inadequate conservatism is excused by the fact that they form a bridge to liberals, giving them an undemanding “conservatism” that can attract them away from insane leftism? That argument has often been made to me to mitigate my harsh judgment of Steyn and Coulter. But is there evidence backing it up?

Here’s a topic I’ve been wondering about, and I don’t have a clear position yet, but a couple of observations. I’ve noticed that on VFR from time to time, some commenters will mention that they couldn’t have made the journey to traditionalism (or even weaker forms of conservatism) without first engaging the arguments of the neocons, libertarians, or the other flavors of typical NRO fare.

While this may be true for some, I do wonder if on the whole, precisely the opposite may be the case. In recent years I have made a few liberal friends who seem rather intrigued by traditionalist arguments—I suspect they quite literally have never heard them. Now I do not pretend to have converted these people, and suspect they may regard me kindly as a curiosity, but they DO listen, and the tone seldom gets hostile.

Could it be possible that in gently placing REAL philosophical distinctions before people, they stand a better chance of changing in the long run? It seems that liberals routinely charge neocons and libertarians with advancing arguments as covert exercises in race hatred. Might it be the case that in forthrightly making arguments that acknowledge racial, religious, cultural differences, we remove the source of suspicion and get an entirely different kind of conversation?

Also, it increasingly seems to me that aesthetics are important here. Liberals are often people who exhibit a deep sensitivity to matters artistic. Perhaps there is some great truth to the charge that right-liberalism vacuums the world of beauty in reducing everything to ownership. Now of course the left’s cure to this problem is more monstrous than the disease, but their prejudices about conservatism on this point are daily confirmed by the parade of vulgarity one gets from the populist right.

August 5

Stephen T. writes:

You write, “A distinct possibility is a future civil war in the West between liberal whites and non-liberal whites. ”

I’ve been thinking just the opposite: There will never be another major war between white people—either between white nations or among whites in a civil war. I think all wars in the foreseeable future will involve ethnics, either immigrants or those in other countries. I really believe whites have advanced beyond that and a WW2-like scenario—Germans killing French, etc—is just unimaginable to me, at least in our lifetimes.

Question. Which would be preferable to live in: a liberal mostly white society or the typical Hispanic society, a great deal of which is fairly “conservative” by many measures? I’ll take the former. In Minnesota, for example, there’s a large population of Scandinavian-style white ultra-liberals + a large population of white Christian conservatives. For the most part they coexist well and respectfully, each side winning some/losing some, but maintaining the social orderliness and civilized nature that is the hallmark of whites for the last half-century or so. In a Mexicanized culture, you get many conservative values but you also get a form of toxic chaos, hostility to academics, petty violence, etc, that I think is so potently poisonous to the European-style standard of living and antithetical to well-ordered democracy that it’s eventually fatal.

LA replies:

What is your reason for thinking there can’t be an intra-white civil war? It’s not that I’m pushing the idea. but the absolutist claims of the white liberals, their program and need to eliminate white non-liberals, is plain. There is at least a logic leading to civil war. u

Ray G. writes:

I’ve been wondering lately if we as a nation are headed for real civil strife and/or civil war. Obama and his army of followers are trying hard to impose a Chavez-like political environment on us; at least it appears that way to me.

This man is tearing the country apart. He is a radical in sheep’s clothing, using a big smile and a soft tone, with mass media on his side. I see violence coming soon.

August 7

Murray L. writes:

I don’t wish to portray my own experience as typical—I believe I can say without vanity that I am more curious about ideas and less afraid of social stigmatization than most people I have encountered—but while I can see the logic of the point made by Aaron S. in the previous post, I don’t think many liberals are “inchoately hungering” for substantial arguments by traditional conservatives. In fact, I’d hazard that the most likely reaction of most liberals—even wavering ones—to traditionalist arguments would be horror and outrage.

I can’t find it from searching his blog, but Mencius Moldbug once wrote something to the effect that his initial, visceral reaction to VFR was one of shock at finding arguments which challenged so many of the moral categorizations with which he’d been indoctrinated since childhood. I remember this because that was very similar to my own initial reaction when I first started to read VFR back in 2007—an emotion very close to shame, as if I was viewing a type of pornography. And I was by that time much less liberal than I had been when I started out in 2001, having long since recognized libertarianism as mere licence and “classical liberalism” as a half-hearted figleaf for those who wished to remain socially acceptable.

My point is that liberalism is nothing if not a moral worldview, and a monolithic one at that. It maintains strict boundaries on its adherents’ minds by presenting all opposing positions as stupid, selfish, or evil. We only have to look at its treatment of books like The Bell Curve, The Skeptical Environmentalist, or The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, or of personalities like Allan Bloom, Justice Scalia or Robert Bork: In each case, baseless accusations of crankery, racism, or general wrongthink are wielded to prevent liberals from even looking at the arguments on their merits. “Oh, that book’s written by a crazy racist, it’s not worth your time.” As many have pointed out before me, liberalism relies very heavily on social pressure to maintain its predominance.

But like most such monoliths, the liberal worldview is very vulnerable to cracks: If just one argument gets through, or one person presents contrary to expectations as not obviously insane, angry, or evil, then the whole facade is shown to be unreliable. That’s why the more conservative (and Catholic) I get, the nicer I try to become; when a liberal encounters a friendly and generous (but staunch) traditionalist, it upends their entire worldview and shows their expectations to be built on falsehoods. I believe the Steyns and O’Rourkes serve a similar purpose (Coulter is a different case, since she tries to offend)—by presenting moderate conservative viewpoints in an amusing, non-confrontational fashion, and by humorously pointing out liberal absurdity, they make conservatism seem … less threatening, I guess, and the kind of view one can hold in public.

August 8

LA in reply to a brief e-mail from Aaron S.:

Well, Murray L. just posted another comment. (In fact, the same weird coincidence happened as four days ago: your and his e-mail arrived in the same batch.)

Aaron S. replies:

Murray L. and I must be experiencing some Catholic variant of mental telepathy or something.:)

He makes some very strong points and I agree in the main with what he has to say. He is also well aware that his experience may not be typical. Maybe traditionalist apologetics is—like its religious counterpart—inseparable from the art of knowing one’s patient.

With that caveat in mind, perhaps a few observations on its general character are in order. Murray is right when he says that there is no inchoate hungering for traditionalist arguments on the part of liberals. If I seemed to be suggesting as much, then yes, what I said was certainly overdrawn. Liberals do, however, (like all human beings), possess an inchoate hungering for the good. Yes, liberalism is indeed a moral system, but I would say that it is at the same time a deep sickness of the soul, a compulsive drive to self-abnegation. For this reason a liberal, to the extent that he is completely and consistently liberal, is driven to undermine and destroy the conditions of his own happiness, even in small things. This is why, as Lawrence frequently points out, liberal man must live by unprincipled exceptions.

As traditionalists, a big part of what we must do, in effect, is to show people how they could most consistently and completely love things to which they are in many cases already drawn. If we merely tend to the “negative” side of the argument—that is, demonstrating to people how liberal views end in absurdity—then chances are that the underlying compulsion will remain. Now this is much more easily said than done, and I can’t personally claim a great deal of success. As a college professor, I’ve wondered just how many semesters of hard work at “deprogramming” are necessary to break some students of the relativism they’ve ingested as mother’s milk. For some, a few demonstrations of absurdity suffice. For most, though, much more is needed, and even when they understand mentally, they are driven by habit to take up old patterns again and again. Here is where I think most people require something more positive, and not just the ridiculing of the negative.

Steyn et. al. are like teachers who draw up some clever reductio proofs and retire. True, the elements of those proofs may have been prohibited from the discussion, and raising them is therefore a valuable exercise. True also, many of the bright pupils may be converted by running through the proofs. But I’d say we need far more in most cases.

This is why I think that Lawrence’s frustration with these people is justified. It is not just that these figures dominate the political-intellectual landscape so completely, but more importantly, their dominance can make it seem as if the right has abandoned the Good itself.

LA replies:

What I meant when I suggested that there is an inchoate hunger for traditionalism on the part of liberals was something along the lines of Jim Kalb’s brilliant observation, in his 2000 essay, “The Tyranny of Liberalism,” that, while liberals say that the notion of an objective moral truth must be rejected because it limits people’s freedom to choose their own values, what if what people really desire is an objective moral truth? In other words, said Kalb, liberalism claims to be freeing people to have what they want, but in fact liberalism prohibits people from having what they really want, which is truth.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2009 10:04 AM | Send