An Entomologist's-Eye View of Predatory Liberalism

Just finished After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy. However, there must be a Volume 2, because he left out the promising part. Rather, his description of the nature of advanced liberalism leaves little reason for optimism.

Example?

"[T]he moment the germ of liberalism is introduced into the traditional body politic, that body is doomed to death. And its death leaves Power standing alone above the brittle shell of its defunct contents."

If you've ever wondered why the state behaves so stupidly, this is why. The state is not about intelligence but about power. Which is one reason why things get worse only a little more slowly when Republicans are in charge.

In a functioning democracy -- not merely a place where "voting" takes place -- there are centers of power distributed throughout the society. But "the state is at war with the intermediary institutions of society." "All command other than its own, that is what irks Power" (Williamson).

We certainly see it in Obama, what with his attacks on the Catholic Church, private enterprise, the Boy Scouts, marriage, the family, self-defense, educational choice, etc. In each case the goal is to crush a little area of power that has the effrontery to challenge the state.

Thus, "these characteristics are entirely expectable in a pseudophilosophy emanating from a moral and intellectual delusion that fatally misconstrues reality, which it almost violently denies even as it revolts against that reality. Power is required to defy the universe..."

It takes a whole lot of energy to deny and defy reality (which is one reason why mental illness is so taxing). This would explain why the left, in order to have any power at all, pretty much needs all power.

Which is why they are so offended by the existence of, say, talk radio or FOX News. How dare they defy the herd! Likewise, one conservative truth teller in the humanities department is a major headache for the left, as is a black person who has strayed from the ideological plantation.

In addition to destroying intermediate institutions, the left must create a different kind of human being. The whole scam collapses if they can't accomplish that, hence the totalitarian temptation that is never far from leftist thought: "liberalism depends on a certain kind of human being, a type it must either create or extend, if necessary by eliminating uncooperative types" (ibid).

This is because "Liberalism is inspired by faith in a specific view of human nature to which it is irrationally wedded, a view that requires closing certain lines of enquiry on the assumption that they are beyond debate."

How, you ask, is this different from, say, the Inquisition? First, the Inquisition wasn't only an aberration, but perfectly contrary to Christian ethics. Conversely, inquisitorial tactics are essential to leftism.

Moreover, the Christian Inquisition only resulted in -- what, 5,000 deaths? whereas leftism murdered 100 million or so just in the 20th century. And this doesn't take into account the unintentional deaths resulting from, for example, the banning of DDT or the breakdown of the black family.

"Liberalism for this reason should be recognized as a new religion, a system of moral absolutes based on a denial that moral truth is knowable, which consists of nothing less than the deification of man" (ibid.)

No, it is not "ironic" that those who supposedly deify man also murder him in the tens of millions. Rather, predictable, for "Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god" (Davila).

Leftism is ultimately an assault on the very civilizational foundations that gave birth to it. Thus the special animus for Christianity:

"The Left hates Christianity and its satellite institutions because they represent metaphysical reality, which leftists have always despised, denied, and labored tirelessly to overthrow, for the purpose of supplanting it with a synthetic version of their own construction."

The resulting spiritually and intellectually enfeebled mass men are "fit for nothing but socialism." But the state prefers such a "mass undifferentiated man because he is easier to govern." Like shoveling around bags of wet cement.

Now that I think about it, contemporary liberalism features two main types, the agitated and excitable hysteric-activist and the LoFo slugs who are manipulated by them.

Marriage -- or the sacralization of the male-female union -- is the foundation of civilization, so the left's attack on it is utterly predictable.

Someone -- I think Mark Steyn -- mentioned that the same people who have spent the last 40 years telling us that marriage is either a meaningless piece of paper or an oppressive institution now want to buy into it.

This will work out as well as their infiltration into the educational system (or into anything else, for that matter; they can't even run the Post Office, but they're qualified to redefine man). Only an omnipotent state can presume to invent marriage instead of simply recognizing it.

But progressivism continues to progress -- or metastasize, rather -- so now we are stuck with "America's first ideological president," fully equipped "with his pseudo-intellectualism and suprapolitical vision."

Such "ideological thinking" is "an infallible sign of the hopelessly immature political mind." Among other things, it "induces a false spiritualism far more damaging and dangerous than materialism itself."

Indeed, "Civilization and ideology are mutually exclusive things" (ibid).