Will liberals ever see the truth about Islam?

Liberals automatically and totally reject, as a fantasy born of bigotry, the warnings of Islam critics that Islam is incompatible with the West and that Islamic immigration is a threat to the West. What, then, will it take to persuade liberals of the truth about Islam? Perhaps news stories like the one posted in the previous entry, from the August 4 Daily Mail: “Family of albino Muslims terrorised after one of them marries a Christian man.” If the Muslim community in a Western country threatens other Muslims with death for marrying non-Muslims, doesn’t that prove that Islam is radically incompatible with the Western way of life?

Yes, it would prove it—to a person of normal mind who is open to truth and who cares about the well-being of his society. But, as I have written before (see this, this, and this), I think that when push comes to shove, a significant number of liberals, perhaps a majority, will not be persuaded by stories like this. Why? Because at bottom many liberals are so hostile to our society that they are unwilling to take its side, especially if that means defending it from a non-Western or nonwhite group.

In other words, conservative Islam critics are operating under the belief and hope that when liberals finally see how radically illiberal Islam is, they will turn around and join the Islam critics in opposing the Islamization of the West. But the horrible truth is thliberals’ own liberalism—their conviction that our society is unequal and discriminatory and therefore no good—makes it impossible for them to defend our society against a non-Western group, even when that group threatens our society’s liberalism. Over and over we have seen how the liberal belief in non-discrimination and tolerance toward the Other morphs into suicidal embrace of the Other. Therefore, it will not matter how much evidence is presented to them of the threat that Islamic immigration poses to the Western liberal order. They will go on supporting the Islamization of the West, until the West is destroyed.

What hope is there then? As I have said from the start, I see just two ways that the rule of liberalism over the West can come to an end. Either the West will be destroyed, and its liberalism with it; or, at some point short of the destruction of the West, enough liberals will see the ruin that liberalism is causing and will abandon their liberalism, opening the possibility of a return of sanity.

In response to what I’ve just said, some may wonder: why should we wait for the liberals to change? How about a non-liberal seizure of power in each Western country? The problem with a conservative seizure of power is that anything done by a non-liberal government would be fanatically opposed by all the remaining (and still very powerful) liberal elements of society, leading to a civil war that would destroy much of the society and that could only be won by killing millions of people. Which returns me to the point that I don’t see how the West can be saved, short of liberals’ voluntary abandonment of their liberalism.

- end of initial entry -

Karl D. writes:

One of the liberal justifications for Islam and black crime you see over and over again is the tiny minority argument. I call it the liberal “One percent solution.” If there are one hundred people of a certain race packed into a certain town and all of them turn out to be criminals except for one, then nothing can be done. As you see, not ALL ____ are criminals.

Clark Coleman writes:

Your comments sound pretty close to despair. I see the political situation very differently. I think that the American voters are typically about 40 percent left-liberal, 40 percent “conservative,” and 20 percent mushy moderates. It is true that most of the “conservatives” are right-liberals. However, only the 40 percent who are left-liberal are impervious to empirical evidence. The other 60 percent are willing not only to make unprincipled exceptions, but to oppose liberal policies that are proven failures and support conservative alternative policies, even though they are not prompted to develop a coherent political philosophy of conservatism.

When will we have 51 percent of the public adopt a coherent philosophy of traditionalist conservatism? Perhaps never. When will we have 51 percent of the voters permanently give up on the failed policies of liberalism? When the situation is bad enough to force them to do so. With respect to different issues, that happens at different points in time, and usually pretty slowly. But Obama’s election might have been the catalyst to push this process along faster than we ever could have dreamed of otherwise.

LA replies:

First, “despair,” or even “pretty close to despair,” has nothing to do with it. I was laying out what I saw as the possible scenarios. The value of those scenarios is not related to how “hopeful” or “despairing” they may be, “how “optimistic” or “pessimistic,” but to how well they correspond with reality—to how true they are.

Second, you make a good argument. If a majority of the country supported genuinely non-liberal policies, and elected leaders who were committed to genuinely non-liberal policies, that might be enough to change the country’s direction away from its current suicidal course. However, your scenario does not seem to be substantively different from my second scenario, namely: “Enough liberals will see the ruin that liberalism is causing and will abandon their liberalism, opening the possibility of a return of sanity.” Those “enough liberals” in my scenario would be needed to raise the non-liberal vote over 50 percent in your scenario.

August 7

Steve B. writes:

When in the history of man has any group voluntarily given up the kind of power that the left possesses in this country? I am afraid the democratic option left the building quite some time ago.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 06, 2011 10:42 AM | Send