Tuesday, May 28, 2013

How does a liberal philosophy measure up?

How do liberals choose to present their political philosophy? One recent attempt to do so was made by Richard Reeves and Philip Collins. They are both influential figures: until recently Reeves was a director of policy for the British Liberal Democrats and Collins was the chief speech writer for Tony Blair.

In 2009 the two men wrote a piece for Demos titled The Liberal Republic. It is a restatement of basic liberal philosophy. Here is how it begins:
The ideal animating this essay is that of a liberal republic, in which individuals have the power to determine and create their own version of a good life. The 'good society' is one composed of independent, capable people charting their own course, rather than a perfect shape to be carved by the elite, out of the crooked timber of humanity.

Liberals demand that people be permitted the space to construct their own life; republicans insist that power be held in people's hands. A republican liberal prospectus recognises that a self-authored life requires both independence and individual capability. But it is founded on the conviction that people are in charge of their own wellbeing. By contrast, conservatives on left and right prefer power to be exercised by institutions, rather than people. They fear that, in the end, people do not know what is good for them.

That's very orthodox. The "animating ideal" is that of autonomy: individuals, it is claimed, should have the power to live self-determining and self-authored lives. What matters is the self-determination, not what individuals happen to choose. Part of the justification for this is that only individuals know what is best for them.

But does liberalism really end up, in practice, looking like this?

The answer is largely no. For instance, Reeves and Collins seem to imagine that liberalism will make people more capable and independent. So far, though, it has done the opposite: it has made a larger number of people dependent on state welfare and it has dissolved the moral beliefs and standards which once encouraged people to make the kind of life choices which would leave them "capable and independent".

And just stating it this way makes clear what the problem is. If you tell people that there are no right choices, but only the goal of making your own choices no matter what they are, then how can a society hold to the standards which once encouraged the more sustainable kind of life choices? How, for instance, do you maintain a culture of family life through which women can be supported to raise a family without state welfare? How do you support a culture of masculinity which encourages the stronger and more resilient qualities in men?

Second, liberals do end up telling people how to live their lives. It's interesting, for instance, that Reeves was a policy director for Nick Clegg until 2012. Nick Clegg is the political leader who has called the traditional family "absurd"; who wants men and women to be "liberated" from their traditional identities; and who wants "international governance" to replace that of the national state. Those are three radically intrusive interventions into people's lives and hardly neutral.

So why does this contradiction come about? The problem is that it is not neutral to choose autonomy as the "animating ideal" of society. That in itself is a value assertion - and, as it happens, it is a very radical value assertion. Therefore, liberals will be biased in how they want people to live and they will have to intervene radically in society to make their value the dominant one.

For instance, take Clegg's hostility to the traditional family. Clegg doesn't want people to be interdependent, he wants them to be independent. That means women must be independent of men. So instead of relying on a husband for financial support, a woman must instead fund herself through a career or be supported by state spending. Furthermore, if your ideal is a self-authored life, then motherhood, which is a traditional and "biologically predetermined" role won't seem as good as a uniquely chosen career path. And so the focus becomes the question of how to liberate women from a motherhood role, which then requires radical interventions into family life, into our identities as men and women, into levels of state subsidies for childcare and parental leave and so on.

Third, the liberal claim is that they are allowing people a greater opportunity to create their own version of the good life. If that were true, then the ordinary person would feel immense gratitude to the liberal politicians of the past 50 years. Instead, the ordinary person feels disempowered and cynical toward the political process.

One reason for this is that there is a built-in flaw in the liberal claim. If your ideal is that of a society in which millions of individuals are each pursuing their own version of the good life, then you have already greatly restricted the kind of life that individuals can lead. Since humans are created for a life together, within families and communities, the deepest ways that we express and fulfil ourselves require a social setting. But if your field of vision is limited to the self-determining individual pursuing his own independent course, then how do you get around to upholding the social settings which make the most important expressions of self possible?

What tends to happen is that liberals end up focusing on those aspects of life which can be chosen at a purely individual level. That might include travel, consumer choice and entertainment (i.e. lifestyle choices). Most of all, though, liberalism ends up being boiled down to "self-expression through a creative, influential and high status career." You need to be an academic, or a medical specialist, or a concert violinist, or an author, or a speechwriter to a prime minister or something like it to really live up to the liberal ideal.

That's one reason why the liberal ideal leaves many people with more ordinary jobs cold. It's difficult to fit such work into the liberal narrative, and so many people continue to attach importance to more traditional values, such as those of family, identity and community. Although liberalism has certainly had an influence over popular culture, it has mostly been an elite view that has been pushed in a top-down way onto society.

That's another reason why it jars to hear Reeves and Collins claim that liberalism is the populist position in contrast to a more conservative, elitist view. It is not conservatives who dominate the institutions; if anything, there is a flaw in the conservative understanding of politics which makes conservatives not take institutions seriously enough. It is liberals who have dominated the institutions and forced "elite" views onto the general populace.

29 comments:

  1. The reason why liberals get it wrong is that they fail to see that there are two major axes on the left/right scale.

    Axis one concerns thoughts and behaviour. This is the one they focus on, and they see the left as offering individuals the freedom to pursue their goals independent of societal constructs. The 'institutions' they talk about perjoratively are things like God/religion, family, and marriage.

    Axis two concerns economics. Here the distinction is between people being productive enough (whether individually or as part of a family grouping) to be self sustaining vs. people who are reliant on the state and general welfare (i.e. welfare from the government rather than from family or private charities). Ironically, on this axis, the 'left' favours strong government intervention and welfare vs. the 'right' favoring individual empowerment (whether as a singleton or as part of a family group of course).

    So you end up with a curious hybrid under 'left liberal' thought - personal irresponsibility when it comes to behaviour, but supported by the state economically if your choices cause you material poverty.

    A 'right liberal' meanwhile would still allow for personally-dictated behaviour, but at the cost of bearing the economic consequences.

    I doubt that most conservatives would have that much of an issue with right liberals; the reason for the dislike of left liberal philosophy is that it tends to be the more society-focused and productive conservative who pays for the left liberal's dissolute behaviour.

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  2. "It is not conservatives who dominate the institutions; if anything, there is a flaw in the conservative understanding of politics which makes conservatives not take institutions seriously enough. It is liberals who have dominated the institutions and forced "elite" views onto the general populace."
    -
    That's very true.

    One problem is that political correctness is totalitarian in that its adherents see only those who subscribe to its ideology as fit to occupy positions of power, and it takes an instrumental view of what a "position of power" might be, so that any position that might be used to push a politically correct agenda qualifies, even if the job isn't supposed to be about that.

    What that means is that when the politically correct get into an institution, they start trying to hire and promote more of their own, while being as nasty and intolerant to the non-politically correct as they can get away with, and they play a team game in doing this.

    Conservatives tried to be open to all talents, and they don't gang up to attack non-conservatives on a regular basis.

    So the politically correct flooded into the universities and all other institutions where they were invited, thrived without opposition, and purged the non-politically correct to create tribal moral communities where there were severe sanctions for being too far right but none for being too far left.

    These ideologically closed shops have been promoting political correctness ever since.

    Political correctness shows its family resemblance to Communism. "In the name of your principles, we demand you grant us freedoms and rights we will then deny you in the name of our principles."

    But Communism was openly collectivist, and that almost challenged people to gang up and play a team game against it, which is what it takes to beat it.

    Political correctness is also collectivist, and all about group rights (from which whites are excluded). But it combines this with constant, bogus claims that it is all for the individual, and demands that all collective identities it disapproves of be dissolved in a spirit of fairness.

    By playing a totalitarian collectivist game while demanding that its targets function only as isolated, effectively rightless individuals, political correctness has been very successful.

    The consequences - besides including white genocide - have been shattering to freedom.

    Casper Weinberger once condemned Communists and those who attacked the non-Communist West by saying, here you don't have to fear the midnight knock. Well now they come for you at 3:20am, for twittering.

    And what has personal freedom got to do with having your life dictated to you by family court? And how is the personal autonomy being promoted of children whose lives are ruined by divorces that the politically correct promote? The children's choice in nearly every case would have been for mum and dad to stay together - but the politically correct don't care what powerless individuals want.

    The politically correct are total hypocrites.

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  3. In other words, liberalism is not for losers. And liberals are deft at letting everyone know (by default) who the losers are. They know that the power to change society comes from people who are not brainwashed by the prevailing orthodoxy. Liberals have had their change and, as always, those who recognize the fatal defects of the status quo will originate a shift back toward center.

    Thank you Mr Richardson, one of your best.

    Hannon

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  4. Brave for the entire article. Bravo.

    Liberals aren't neutral, liberal are the elite and the entire the liberal lifestyle leads into a Frankenstein mixture between right-liberalism (e.g. big multinational/international corporations, running amok with consumerist capitalism) and left-liberalism (e.g. technocratic, bureaucratic, centralized, collectivist anarcho-tyrannical government).

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  5. Some well expressed comments, thank you.

    Daybreaker, your recent comments have highlighted one aspect of modern politics. You wrote:

    "By playing a totalitarian collectivist game while demanding that its targets function only as isolated, effectively rightless individuals, political correctness has been very successful."

    That's particularly true of left-liberalism. Right liberals are more likely to insist that everybody function as isolated individuals. But the left encourages "oppressed" groups to act together in a collective way to challenge the system. The left, for instance, is happy for women to organise collectively or for black Americans and so on.

    The left does ask that the existence of these groups isn't "reified". What this means is that those within the women's liberation movement or the black liberation movement aren't supposed to believe that the category of womanhood/black race has a real, essential existence.

    The formal idea goes something like this: "Whites invented the category of race, it doesn't really exist, but those grouped as blacks are disadvantaged by it and should organise collectively on the basis of it to challenge the system of white privilege".

    In practice such subtleties are largely forgotten and blacks are allowed to believe in their own reality as are women in a way that those put into the "oppressor" category aren't.

    Anyway, the point I really want to make is this: left-liberals are smart enough to know that if you allow one group of people to act collectively, and suppress others from doing so, the group with collective rights are being put in a much stronger position. That's why the left allows those groups it favours to act collectively.

    But that then goes against the liberal idea that we are all being "empowered" through the liberal ideology. Clearly, many of us are being deliberately "disempowered".

    One thing we need to do is to challenge white women when the system insists that white men have no collective rights. The obvious question to ask is this one: "Do you really want the men of your own community to be disempowered? Do you really think that is in the long-term interests of your own tradition and your own sons and daughters for the people meant to be defending you to be deliberately disempowered?"

    Daybreaker's framing of the issue should help clarify things for us. It shows us that we should not be so defensive when liberals disallow our collective, communal rights. Liberals *know* that this is disempowering. Liberals *know* that this makes others stronger whilst undermining our own existence. We should feel a kind of moral righteousness in kicking back against liberals who try to foist such a situation on us.

    (continues in next comment)

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  6. One last point. Right-liberalism isn't much help here. It can be tempting to fall back to the right-liberal position because it seems more even-handed, i.e. everyone is supposed to give up a collective existence equally.

    But there are several problems with this.

    a) A notion of collective rights is still disallowed

    b) In practice, whites find the right-liberal position the lesser of two evils and flock to it, whilst non-whites like the leftist position and stick with it. That means that whites *voluntarily* give up the notion of their own collective rights, whilst non-whites are encouraged to continue to promote their own collective rights.

    So the imbalance continues.

    c) The right-liberal leaders, especially those in the mainstream political parties, seek the votes of women and minorities and so go a considerable way to recognising the collective rights/demands of these groups. They don't have to do this for whites, as whites have either voluntarily given up a collective existence (right liberalism) or have had it deliberately denied to them (left liberalism).

    d) Right-liberals also tend to believe that if people have equal opportunities there will be roughly equal outcomes (given that they believe that such things as race and sex don't matter, only personal character).

    So if there is not the same level or type of outcome in matters like career or income or education, right-liberals tend to be sympathetic to the left-liberal programme of social levelling.

    In other words, right-liberals tend to go along with the left-liberal programme of group rights for some groups and not for others as long as it's not done too explicitly (e.g. right-liberals tend to prefer informal quotas to formal ones).

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  7. This is one of your best posts, Mark.

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  8. Mark, this was a good post and in those two comments you accurately said what I was getting at and added important extra steps that I did not have. So thank you.

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  9. When you tell a man that he may "choose the good," you are telling him that he may choose what is good for him." It's all about his happiness, because there is nothing higher than the individual will to serve as grounds for duty or acts of self-sacrifice.

    But, of course, liberals are not really in favor of leaving individual wills perfectly free to choose the good. We simply disagree over which acts should be regulated, and by whom.

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  10. JMSmith: "But, of course, liberals are not really in favor of leaving individual wills perfectly free to choose the good. We simply disagree over which acts should be regulated, and by whom."

    "Freedom of speech" turned out to mean pervasive pornography plus the police arresting you at 3:20am for twittering on race and religion. It meant much less freedom, but a vast increase in debasement. It was freedom to degrade traditional white society, and profit by doing so, but not to defend traditional white society and criticize those wrecking it.

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  11. Right liberals haven't successfully defended anything much since World War II. Part of the reason, as Mark reminds is, is that they never intended to, because a right liberal is a liberal. But they haven't even been able to defend their own respectability and their numbers in key institutions like academia. Why not? This, at VDARE.com, has a lot to do with why
    not. (It's a good idea to go and read the whole thing, and also this.)

    The Richwine Atrocity: How Come Only The Left Retrieves Its Wounded?
    By William H. Regnery on May 28, 2013 at 11:14pm

    I have an unusual personal perspective on the Jason Richwine atrocity. William F. Buckley's breakthrough book was his first, God and Man at Yale. In the early 1950s, he scoured Manhattan for a publisher, without success. This caused him to go far afield and contact a small Midwestern house then located in a walk-up office in a Chicago suburb. The publisher was my uncle, Henry Regnery.

    And the rest is history—save for two incidents.

    The book not only made Buckley's reputation but also certainly added luster to my uncle's struggling firm. However, the Henry Regnery Co. suffered an offsetting financial blow when, at the behest of Mortimer Adler, the contract to publish the Great Books series for the University of Chicago was withdrawn because of the Buckley book.

    Regnery issued Buckley's next book, McCarthy and His Enemies, co-authored with his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. But there would be no hat trick. By then, Buckley was a bankable literary commodity and could cut a better deal with an established New York house. So he did.


    What do you call a man who sells out those who absorbed the costs of angering left liberals in order to give him a break when he needed it?

    A right liberal hero, self-actualizing by optimizing his value in the market-society.

    So what do you call someone who angers the left and pays the cost of doing so to stand by a right liberal?

    A loser, who the right liberal hero left behind on his way up. Also: a sucker.

    Over time, this ethos must have an effect on which coalition holds firm and achieves its goals, and which one fails - particularly at the expense of those members of the coalition in the worst position to punish betrayal. (That would be social conservatives, not big businesses.)

    Right liberals can be stern on "free riders", but their ethos makes them aspiring free riders themselves.

    And they don't understand what they are losing, even institutionally. Their emotional organization chart consists of something like
    * Hank Rearden / Dagny Taggart / me
    * some second-hander
    * masses of valueless nobodies.

    People who resonate to the notes of that harp are not going to fight for and conquer key institutions.

    They will show up nicely dressed for the social battle, looking like a "leader", and try to be the smart guy who hangs back out of the fight but is in for the looting.

    People like William F. Buckley, Jr. or Tony Abbott don't deserve support, not only because of what they stand for (and don't stand for), but also because they simply will not stand. In the long run they are sure losers.

    The future will be won, if at all, by people who stand by each other even when visible costs exceed rewards, and even when they have a chance to rise from spear-carriers to stars by selling out. They will need reasons to do that. And they will need an understanding of the power of institutions and a respect for the people who take and usefully hold small places in key institutions.

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  12. Daybreaker,

    Good summary on right liberals. The liberal goal is and always is the self. Those that think government intervention will help them will be economically left liberals. Those that think it will hurt then will be right liberals. However, this stance is driven purely by self interest. And thus is malleable based on the circumstances presented to the liberal. So left liberals will try to get rich off the market when they can (Al Gore worth $400 mil) and right liberals will benefit from the government when they can (banksters getting bailouts).

    What matters to the liberal is self advancement. All ideological believes that are touted are touted solely because they allow the self to advance. Thus their views are whatever helps the liberal in that particular moment. Left liberals will try to hide this fact, but right liberals will be right out in the open about their will to power opportunism (Rand).

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  13. People who resonate to the notes of that harp are not going to fight for and conquer key institutions.

    Good point.

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  14. Great article - highlighted by the fact that as Cameron talks of 'muscular liberalism' and redefining the purpose of marriage his soldiers are murdered on London's streets. The liberals are powerless to stop the beast they've created. Made worse as they leave the middle east, dismantle the drones and the extremists go on the march.

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  15. Lawrence Auster [Private correspondence.]: "This insight confirms in me in my core principle that the concrete sense of peoplehood is the sine qua non of all conservatism. Once you give that up, you're done for. You've given up your concrete collective existence. So what are you? In order to have the things that conservatives believe in, religion, traditional values, a way of life, a rule of law, a high culture, family values, national defense, whatever, YOU MUST FIRST COLLECTIVELY EXIST. And conservatives who have given up that sense of collective existence are unable to hold the line on any other issues."

    I think that's right.

    Of course what applies to conservatives applies also to right liberals and left liberals.

    They have given up on our collective existence as a concrete people; "deconstructing the majority so thoroughly that it can never be a majority again" in any and all white countries is a liberal project.

    Obviously that means the balance of the basic "friend or foe" dichotomy is shifted decisively to destroying foes. And one could go on about how that hyper-combativeness is destructive, and it would all be true.

    I think a more fundamental point is, what happens to your motivation to secure all the good things that liberalism promises to secure for us, when there is no concrete "us"?

    It's obvious that in practice liberalism is not at all in favour of freedom of speech, security against arbitrary arrest (say just for carrying a British flag) and so on.

    Maybe a reason why they don't really care about these things is that there is no concrete national "us" to secure them for.

    There is only the oppressive enemy, white Christian males. And according to liberalism, that identity is fake and must be deconstructed to utter destruction.

    All the artificially imported and promoted groups hostile to the "oppressors" are theoretically not supposed to "reify" themselves, as Mark noted, and in any case they do not add up to a rational, biologically sustainable "us". They only exist instrumentally, to deconstruct the "oppressors".

    So is failing to secure promised goods for a nonexistent "us" all that serious? Maybe not.

    If there is no real Australian nation, for example - if the occupants of the big island and the little island are just whoever happens to be here before the next massive wave of leftist-sponsored mass immigration sweeps them away too - how important is it, really, that these heterogeneous wanderers on the road to nonexistence enjoy free speech, secure family lives and so on?

    From the way liberals actually act, it's not important at all.

    What's important is that liberals beat the enemy. And whenever there is a clash between doing what will deliver power and victory to liberals, say by jailing conservatives for speaking up, and doing what will deliver promised goods to a nonexistent collective that can't really complain and is going into oblivion anyway, liberals dive for power and victory for themselves every time.

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  16. Mark Richardson: "But that then goes against the liberal idea that we are all being "empowered" through the liberal ideology. Clearly, many of us are being deliberately "disempowered"."

    The latest Lefty mantra: Check Your Privilege.

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  17. What's important is that liberals beat the enemy. And whenever there is a clash between doing what will deliver power and victory to liberals, say by jailing conservatives for speaking up, and doing what will deliver promised goods to a nonexistent collective that can't really complain and is going into oblivion anyway, liberals dive for power and victory for themselves every time.


    But ya know, they really 'n' truly believe in autonomy, and if we can just logically explain to them the flaws in that philosophy, we'll be, like, totally better off while the liberal boots are stamping on our faces forever, or something.

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  18. Nah,

    You misunderstand the reason for clearly stating and criticising the state ideology.

    It is to liberate ourselves from it in a principled way.

    You have to remember that before anything can happen on the ground you need a group of people who have first broken from the moral logic of the state ideology - and that's not an easy thing to achieve.

    Our audience are those who can see that things are going wrong and who are looking for an explanation. Our responsibility is to clearly state that explanation in a way that allows the principled break from liberalism rather than something like "things are OK except policy X has gone too far" or "I can just passively vote for the opposition party and that will put things right".

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  19. You misunderstand the reason for clearly stating and criticising the state ideology.

    It is to liberate ourselves from it in a principled way.


    Liberate ourselves? Who is "us"? I don't need liberating from it. Those who do need liberating won't be liberated via a statement of principles.

    You have to remember that before anything can happen on the ground you need a group of people who have first broken from the moral logic of the state ideology - and that's not an easy thing to achieve.

    Again this won't be achieved through logical argumentation.

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  20. Nah, I think your assertion is incomplete. You may be right that rational explications of how liberalism has gone wrong are insufficient to result in the change we seek. But such discussions are a crucial component of any larger movement wherein different actors employ different strategies-- direct action, party reform, etc.-- to achieve the goal of change.

    While different modes of action may work against otherwise natural alliances, clearly stated principles are an indispensable means of building ties in advance. If I understand him correctly, this is what Mr. Richardson is aiming toward.

    Hannon

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  21. Clearly stating and criticising the state ideology definitely helps some people. It helped me.

    And I didn't mean my criticisms in this thread only to be sarcastic shots at the dominant ideology. I was trying to make real points that Mark built on very usefully.

    My point about the modern left acting on behalf of "we are the world" simulacra is also serious.

    The old-time leftist labor movement was all about delivering the goods for a real community, or at least to a real and essential part of it, and after the breadwinners got their share the wives and children gained too. Delivering the goods in that sense implies motivation and accountability - people can see if you are getting things done for them or not.

    When you get into the business of abolishing the (white) people and electing a new (non-white) people, which is definitely the business the modern left is in, accountability to a real community is out the window, but place-seeking and point-scoring (like the Tony Blair government secretly promoting mass immigration to "rub the right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date") are still highly motivating.

    These are motives that make for bad policy and bad outcomes.

    This is not a joke. Your motive for something like stealth mass immigration may be frivolous, but the consequences will be anything but.

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  22. Again this won't be achieved through logical argumentation.

    Nah, there is an element of truth to what you say but also something that is dangerously false.

    The element of truth is this: people often start to break with an orthodoxy not through intellectual dissatisfaction but by becoming aware that something that they value is being lost.

    The dangerously false aspect, though, is the idea that intellectual debate has no influence.

    Think, for instance, about the men's movement. For years, there were only isolated individuals arguing against feminism. Then the anti-feminist movement suddenly achieved lift-off. For a year or two the movement was forming itself politically and it wasn't clear which way it would go. If there had been even a dozen intelligent voices putting the traditionalist view, there could easily have been a traditionalist wing of the movement.

    But there weren't a dozen, just myself and a couple of others. And so gradually the movement crystallised into the political form we see today.

    Why weren't there more traditionalist voices? In part, because too many traditionalists don't appreciate just how important at critical moments the political argument can be.

    The left blows us out of the water in this regard: it is ever ready to seize upon political opportunities and it recognises how important it is to get leverage within "opinion forming" institutions.

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  23. Daybreaker, your comment of 12.05 is really interesting. I'll have to think on it a bit.

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  24. Mark

    In regards to some groups being reified in terms of an opposition to white oppression - a common argument from the left I have seen is that 'whiteness' or the 'west' is already an established collective - represented by the status quo. Therefore it's not right to argue that white's are being denied collective action. And we can see that's why opposition to 'how things are' (racism, poverty, pollution et al) are described in terms of opposing white christian male hegemony...

    The irony is that the status quo is deeply liberal (and promoted by white academia) and strives to be race-neutral in outlook...

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  25. Apropos from Bruce Charlton:

    Where do Leftist ideas come from?

    Harvard maybe, or the New York Times, or NGOs or what?

    No, No, No - None of the above.

    Un-ask the question - it is badly formed.

    There are no Leftist 'ideas' - there are only oppositional slogans - slogans in opposition to Christianity, tradition, decency, patriotism, natives, men... stuff like that.

    They are not ideas, because there is no requirement for cohesion or internal consistency or consistency between the ideas or anything of that sort.

    Leftist 'ideas' are not ideas: they are just slogans, sound-bites, notions, propaganda images - that's all they are.

    These are so easy and obvious to manufacture (anyone can do it by simply asking Why? over-and-over again, or playing-the-opposites-game of negating every statement - for goodness sake four year olds do this all the time!) that it is deeply misleading to try and locate their origin.


    So why knock yourself out trying to analyze the logic and coherence of slogans that have no requirement for logical coherence in the first place?

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  26. It's not true that liberal ideas are just slogans.

    Liberals write books on political philosophy, something that only Jim Kalb is doing at the moment on our side.

    The political philosophy then helps to form the principles by which liberals govern society.

    It's true that liberals have trouble making these principles consistent, but that's because liberalism doesn't describe the truth of reality well.

    It's part of our job to explain why.

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  27. We don't need to write books on political philosophy. Our books have already been written - that's why we're "traditionalists", remember?

    The political philosophy then helps to form the principles by which liberals govern society.

    And as Bruce said, that philosophy is at bottom nothing more than the negatioon of everything we believe in, like Christianity, tradition, decency, patriotism, men, marriage, etc.

    It's true that liberals have trouble making these principles consistent, but that's because liberalism doesn't describe the truth of reality well.

    Liberalism does not believe in truth or reality, and does not regard logic or objectivity as necessary or even desirable. Once you get that, you will appreciate that liberal "philosophy" has no other purpose than to advance a political agenda. The word for such works is not "philosophy", but as Bruce said, propaganda.

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  28. We don't need to write books on political philosophy.

    So we just let liberals dominate the intellectual sphere then?

    Our goal ought to be not just to write books, but to dominate the writing of books of political philosophy.

    We need more books than they produce and we need better books.

    And as Bruce said, that philosophy is at bottom nothing more than the negation of everything we believe in

    If Bruce said that he is wrong. Liberals have tried to make sense of the world, but they have done it in a way that logically leads to the dissolution of traditional society.

    Liberalism does not believe in truth or reality, and does not regard logic or objectivity as necessary or even desirable

    But they still have beliefs and these beliefs when carried out have certain logical consequences. That is what we have to explain.



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