Status Updates From The Tyranny of Liberalism: ...

Liberal tyranny is a soft tyranny. It depends on a pervasive system of social control that leaves little room for other ways of life but most often is not quite compulsory

The new official orthodoxy idealizes “choice” but is not itself optional, and the way it is formulated and applied is often tyrannical. It is taught in school, dramatized on television, and inculcated by all respectable social authorities. It extends its authority even into private life. Dissenters are treated as divisive and extremist, as bigoted fundamentalists whose views pose a threat to society

Traditionalists find it natural for each major aspect of life to run on its own principles while accommodating other spheres of activity. They do not try to make all institutions democratic, for example. They let family life, religion, and politics be family life, religion, and politics, each with its own value, way of being, and scope of action, rather than treating them as instruments of some master principle

sacrificing the lesser to the greater, giving up peripheral goods for the sake of things that touch him more closely and make him more truly what he is. In short, he is living in accordance with reason. To disrupt such a system of understandings and deprive it of social reality, as liberalism does when it reduces all goals to subjective preferences, is to discredit goods worth sacrifice and freedoms worth having.

populism has often been less a serious belief backed by theory and analysis than an attempt to avoid the necessity of dealing with troublesome issues by appealing to the people as a sort of deus ex machina

an appeal to the habits and desires of the people cannot serve as the basis for a serious challenge to contemporary liberalism. By its nature, populism lacks a stable elite. Without one, it cannot define and limit itself, establish coherent principles, and become the foundation of a stable political configuration

To the extent America succeeds in making itself truly universal, it seems likely to emulate international institutions like the UN or EU, which are incapable of generating loyalty and have disabled themselves through inefficiency and corruption. There is also, of course, the difficulty that not everyone may want to be a citizen or subject of world-America

Periods of Republican Party ascendancy, supposedly times of reaction, have in fact been marked by the consolidation and extension of liberal initiatives—in the fifties of the New Deal welfare state, and in the eighties and the first years of the twenty-first century of affirmative action, political correctness, mass Third World immigration, open-ended internationalism, and libertinism in popular culture

the link was snapped between government and American tradition as a whole—and between government and the people. The American public order has consequently entered an enduring state of crisis that features a combination of anarchy and soft totalitarianism

Simple conservatism has been unable to prevent the triumph of increasingly radical forms of liberalism. It has accepted the creation of a radically secular public order that treats substantive appeals to anything other than human will and scientific reason as irrational and oppressive. That development, which came to maturity in the sixties, has made simple conservatism an empty position

Without local diversity and autonomy there can be no stable and effective devolution of power and no limitation on the subject matter or goals of politics. Without prerational ties there can be no reliable basis for public spirit and no limit to how far disputes can go once started

Attempts to get rid of particular inequalities bring to the fore others, so that liberalism continually radicalizes itself. The elimination of hereditary privilege and the weakening of family connections is purchased by acceptance of inequalities based on market success and formal qualifications that seem more acceptable because of their relatively impersonal rationality

A government that feels called upon to reform social attitudes will find it difficult to stop short of controlling speech

Liberalism presents us with sordid idealism, bigoted tolerance, mindless expertise, moralistic permissiveness, dogmatic agnosticism, mainstream extremism, rigidly uniform diversity, radically elitist equality, totally administered freedom, and compulsory established rebellion. It promises moderation but gives us overreaching

Advanced liberalism believes itself tolerant, but its tolerance is intolerant in somewhat the way the Taliban are intolerant. As prominent spokesmen define the issues, it often seems that we are in the midst of a world struggle between two quasi-totalitarian religious movements: radical Islam and advanced liberalism.

Basic incoherence leads to incoherence in detail: liberal neutrality is one-sided, liberal tolerance is dictatorial, liberal hedonism denies us what we want, and liberal freedom centralizes power, undermines standards that make free social life possible, and destroys our connections to others, making us dependent on universal systems utterly beyond our control

Liberalism also proposes a faith—man-the-measure as the highest truth and preference satisfaction as the summum bonum—but cannot discuss what it is doing or why.

compulsory conformity is presented as diversity, indoctrination as neutral expertise, and rules that set strict limits on what can be said as the suppression of “hatred” and “bigotry,” and hence as liberation. Such a system of control is made possible by a centralization of intellectual life that makes molders of opinion—experts, educators, media people, entertainers—integral to government

an enormous and all-pervasive system of power dedicated to the control and transformation of human life backed by a huge public sector; lower- and middle-class recipients of public assistance; accredited minority groups and their representatives; corporate recipients of various favors; and media, journalistic, and expert functionaries who draw their importance from the power of the regime they defend and promote

Classic socialism aims at a uniformity that interferes with the growth and expression of diverse preferences, and therefore only makes sense for populations too poor to have formed them. It embraces a solidaristic ethos that can valorize reactionary working-class attitudes about gender relations, race, culture, and even religion
For such reasons, among others, the Soviet Union had lost its position of ideological...

any moderately self-seeking ruling class prefers cooperating with members of the ruling class in other countries to representing the interests of their constituents. The practical result of such influences has been the suppression of immigration as an issue in the interest of an emerging borderless world order

In a society in which the endlessly expanding demands of extremely abstract principles are determined and enforced by unelected officials insulated from popular influence by the support of the professional custodians of public discussion, it is not the people who rule

If no common culture can be assumed as authority, nothing is left but an appeal to perspicuously true universal principles. Without an appeal to such principles, liberalism would lose its claim to special legitimacy. It would also sacrifice the logic that defines it and so enables it to function and adjust coherently to varying circumstances without a unified hierarchical structure

Multiculturalism, for example, is fundamentally a denial that one’s acts can be judged by another’s standards. The effect is that it becomes impossible to apply any standard to conduct except the liberal standard of equal respect for persons and preferences. If I belong to another group, you cannot judge me by your group’s standards. Nor can I be judged by my group’s standards

Modernity, it is said, has been replaced by postmodernity, which has encouraged progressives to go beyond the Western concepts of reason and individuality on which liberalism is based but are now viewed as unfounded and oppressive. Freedom and equality, it is suggested, no longer require foundations or even intellectual coherence.

Traditional ties, standards, and identities must be destroyed so that populations become aggregates of unconnected individuals who are easy to sort and manage and unlikely to resist rationalized training, marketing, and propaganda

Because liberalism is a principle of government, its triumph arrives with the triumph of the men and institutions favored by the arrangement of power it proposes. It is thus the ideology of a ruling class. The victory of liberalism is the victory of managers, experts, educators, media organizations, and rationally organized bureaucratic and commercial interests

Traditional morality, which makes some desires superior to others, is thus understood as a devious effort to control others and becomes a stock example of immorality. It is understood as intrinsically oppressive, its ostensible concern with higher things a hypocritical pretense

The modern attempt to base social order on will is comprehensive. Science helps us control things physically, and what they are for us is molded by symbolism, social relationships, and biochemistry. People today believe they can manipulate such factors

People today believe they can manipulate such factors; they expect physical and social technology to permit reconstruction of all human reality