The essence of liberal society: treason

Below is an abridged version of December 2009 entry, “How whites become traitors to whites”:

Mark Richardsonwrites about the liberal two-step that turns whites against whites (and also men against men). Here’s how it works. Whites accept the leftist claim that whites are oppressive as a race. But once this declaration of collective guilt has been issued, individual whites who aspire to prominence in society find themselves deprived of moral status, since they are part of this oppressive white race. How does an individual white win back his moral status and resume his rightful role as a leader of society? He does it by breaking ranks with other whites and announcing that he is not like those other whites. He is not oppressive, exploitative, bigoted, exclusionary, and narrow-minded. To the contrary, he is egalitarian, supportive, compassionate, and inclusive, and nothing human is alien to him. Once he has made this leap to liberal virtuecrat, his social and career advancement henceforth depends on his being an enemy and a judge of his fellow whites.

Richardson’s analysis complements my idea of the liberal script by which liberal society operates … Once the articulation of the white population into liberals and non-liberals has occurred, the action of the liberal whites in exposing, deriding, condemning, expressing contempt for, and marginalizing the non-liberal whites becomes the central moral drama of the society.

Richardson’s scenario … shows how the liberal whites became liberals. They did it in the act of accepting the leftist claim that whites are guilty, and then in separating themselves morally from other whites by declaring that they are not like them, and by committing themselves to the cause of extirpating white discrimination from society.

Remember, at different times the same whites can be assigned to the “liberal” or the “non-liberal” role in the script. The script has nothing to do with reality, but with symbolism. Notice, for example, how Republicans, instead of reacting indignantly when they are absurdly accused of excluding blacks from the Republican Party, accept the charge, and commit themselves anew to doing much more to attract blacks to the party. In effect the Republicans, who in reality are liberal and non-racist, accept their assigned role in the liberal script as non-liberal, racist whites. The liberal script, by which liberalism dominates the society, cannot continue to function unless the “non-liberal” whites voluntarily accept, or at least fail to protest energetically, their assigned role as racists.

Richardson’s scenario also sheds light on the perennial issue of whether liberals are guilty or not. Whenever the subject of liberal guilt comes up, someone will invariably point out that liberals are not really guilty, but the opposite: they’re wildly enamored of themselves. This is true, but, if so, what then becomes of liberal guilt? And how did this situation come about? The answer is that it came about by whites (1) accepting a collective white guilt, then (2) individually asserting their own individual virtue as compared with the general run of guilty whites. In the liberal script, the mass of non-liberal whites are guilty, while the select liberal white is not guilty but infinitely worthy and self-congratulatory. However, even though the white liberal, the protagonist in the liberal script, is not himself guilty, white guilt is what the script is about, namely the constant ascription of guilt to the generality of whites by the good whites.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 27, 2011 09:14 AM | Send