The more dominant liberalism becomes, the more threatened liberals feel by any remaining milquetoast conservatism

(Note, December 11: I’ve continued to make minor revisions in this entry to make the ideas clearer.)
Do you want a laugh? Read this, from the Daily Mail (via Lucianne.com):

RFK Jr lashes out at Fox News saying the network ‘has divided country in a way not seen since Civil War’

Robert F Kennedy Jr has blasted Fox News as a detrimental force in American life as he took potshots at conservative news networks….

He noted that 22 per cent of Americans get their news from Fox, telling HuffPost Live that the network has ‘divided our country in a way that we haven’t been divided probably since the Civil War’.

Let’s assume that Kennedy, who is clearly no brain, is sincere in what he says. How could he believe that Fox News (!!) is dividing the country as much as or more than the Southern Secession and the Civil War, in which the country was split in two and 600,000 men died?

Here’s my theory. Liberals do not think that their liberal belief system is one particular belief system in a world of numerous belief systems. They think that their belief system is simply identical with what all rational and good people believe. No rational and good beliefs, `other than liberal beliefs, can possibly exist. Therefore any dissent from any aspect of liberalism is an attack on rationality and goodness itself and constitutes an immediate existential threat to the order of the world.

Remember how G.W. Bush said in his 2005 inaugural address that any tyranny anywhere on earth is a threat to our freedom and must be subdued? Similarly, liberals believe that any disagreement with liberalism, no matter how weak and ineffectual, is a threat to the normal workings of human life and must be subdued.

Furthermore, liberals don’t just believe that their beliefs are identical with goodness; they believe that they themselves are identical with goodness (as discussed in my 1996 speech, “The Political Religion of Modernity”). Therefore conservatism is an attack on themselves, on their very existence, on the existence of all rational and good people.

Finally, I said above that any dissent from liberalism constitutes an existential threat to the order of the world. But what is the order of the world? Since, according to liberalism, there is nothing higher than the human self, and especially the liberals’ human selves, liberals themselves are the order of the world.

And that’s why RFK Jr. thinks that Fox News, because it offends him, has divided the country more than the Civil War.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 10, 2012 01:17 PM | Send