Amerika

If all politics are methods for controlling people with ideas and liberalism is fully within the realm of politics, then liberalism is a method for imposing its own progressive brand of control over others.

• Human rights are the core of liberalism;
• Human rights are a precondition for progress and stability;
• Human rights can only be secured by true democracy;
• True democracy is inseparable from political and civil liberty

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Violent Pacification

Liberalism is a child of the White Western European Enlightenment age. Its developers and proponents generally remain White Western Europeans who happen to be liberals.

By making liberal policy into law, imposing intervention on non-conforming lands abroad, and going to war to impose liberal democracy in Korea, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, liberals aggressively assert the supremacy of their ideology over that of others.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. This, surely, is the acid test of any liberal creed. Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. A community of the broad-minded is a pleasant place, but requires no great moral effort. The key issue is how the liberal state copes with those who reject its ideological framework. It is fashionable today to speak of being open to the “Other”. But what if the Other detests your openness as much as it does your lapdancing clubs?

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Mandatory Liberty

Intolerant of the intolerant, historically and contradicting their bullet points, like all political orders, liberal rulership dominates, imprisons, torments and kills unrelated, foreign outsiders to impose their order.

Toward dissenting insiders within the liberal order, the soft totalitarianism of ostracism is used instead. It comes as little surprise that some scholars describe this behaviour as a dictatorship of well being.

Contemporary liberal democracy amply demonstrates the degree to which the economic and spiritual needs of citizens have become homogenized. Citizens act more and more indistinguishably in a new form of “dictatorship of well-being.”[34] Certainly, this homogeneity in liberal democracy does not spring from coercion or physical exclusion, but rather from the voter’s sense of futility. Official censorship is no longer needed as the ostracism resulting from political incorrectness becomes daily more obvious. Citizens appear more and more apathetic, knowing in all likelihood that, regardless of their participation, the current power structure will remain intact. Moreover, liberal democrats, as much as they complain about the intolerance of others, often appear themselves scornful of those who doubt liberal doctrines, particularly the beliefs in rationalism and economic progress.

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Dehumanizing Humans

Anyone expressing dissent from liberalism is first met with a barrage of ad hominem attacks: inhumane, racist, divisive, intolerant, backward, ignorant, Nazi, Hitler, etc. This attack is intended to reposition the dissenter into a (according to the forcefully dominant and popularly marketed liberal worldview) morally and thus politically inferior position.

I believe that the continuation of a peaceful American society will depend on our learning how to respectfully listen to one another. One of the most troubling facets of life today is the powerful movement by left-leaning organizations and governmental officials to engage in character assassination, by labeling anyone who disagrees with their liberal utopian vision for society as unworthy of participating in the conversation about our nation’s future. A quick look at global history reveals the dangers of following such a short-sighted approach.

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Undemocratic Democrats

It is not about the lofty bullet-pointed ideas of liberal public relations marketing. It is all about a power structure maintaining its control at all costs, even to the extent of jailing heretics and commitment to world wars.

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character.

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The liberal, humanist ideas are one of its methods of appeal toward this end. As indicated above, the ideas of liberalism today are not at all the goal itself.

The reasons for all this, though widespread today, are simple and individual, not complex and conspiratorial like some Dr. Evil hell bent on world dominion.

Briefly, the goal is institutionalized collective defensiveness against personal fears (inadequacy is a big one), real, or imagined, and projecting the incarnations of these fears onto detractors, while themselves blindly becoming the incarnation of these fears.

As Herr Nietzsche would have it:

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Time will tell if liberalism will continue imposing its Mediocracy of Safety on the world against the wishes of the world’s diverse people or on its own detractors within.

We know that Dambisa Moyo is no fan of systematic Western aid to Africa, but in a longer interview she also adds that she’s not particularly interested in supporting democracy, either.

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Tags: liberalism