Gee’s Reviews > The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command > Status Update

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