The problem is liberalism

VFR reader Shrewsbury writes:

I must continue to laud and commend you for focusing so implacably upon the necessity of the eradication of liberalism, in contrast to other “conservative” webloggers, who are obliged to respond to the day’s outrages with jesuitical pretzel-twisting in order to fit their responses and prescriptions within an unconscious liberal worldview, which you so rightly call “hypnosis”—as who, the clown in a mesmerist’s act, should interpret any and all phenomena, and respond accordingly, within the context of believing himself a chicken. You, however, have gotten down to the nub and the kernel, the center and the sink: as long as liberalism persists, nothing is possible.

Indeed, a Mussolinian or Francoite fascism would be better than liberalism, because at least fascism does not require the destruction of one’s culture and people merely for the sake of one’s own self-aggrandizement and vanity. And it occurs to me now that liberalism is sort of like a mirror image of fascism in that instead of aggrandizing oneself through a puffed-up faux patriotism one aggrandizes oneself through a puffed-up faux anti-patriotism; whereas a proper conservative traditionalism would have nothing to do with a puffed-up faux anything.

By the way, through no fault or intention of my own, I am a family man and willy-nilly have far more to do with numerous young persons and their associates ages 11-24 than any rational man would wish; and it seems to me that the coming generations, while hardly conservative or traditional in any way yet, do have a vastly more jaundiced view of liberalism and its favored “minorities” than those preceding (extending even unto the truly pathological “Greatest Generation”), and will, in the fullness of time, be far more open to your arguments than their elders have been….

Regards,
Shrewsbury

I thank Shrewsbury for his compliments and his excellent remarks on liberalism. What he’s saying is so important. As long as we remain standing on the ground of liberalism, we’re essentially compromised and helpless. Real criticism, and a new politics, only become possible when we’re standing on different ground. Of course this does not mean the rejection of all ideas and values associated with the word liberalism, especially the older idea of liberalism; it does mean that liberal values cannot be our highest and defining values.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 09, 2006 07:32 PM | Send