Why not?

One of the callers to the John Dayl program this morning said something like: How can we defend America when there is all this political correctness, when our own government favors the immigration invasion? I pointed out that all my proposals for the defense of America take as their very starting point the expectation that the present suicidal liberalism will have been abandoned or overcome. If we believe that the reigning liberalism must remain in place, there is no hope in any case. Our hope that we can assert and defend ourselves as a nation once again rests on the assumption that the present liberalism will have come to an end, perhaps as a result of that very assertion.

Given the terrible difficulties of our situation, given the fact that only a radical change in the current order gives us any chance of survival, perhaps it is time for us to appropriate some of the liberals’ uplifting rhetoric for our own purposes.

For example, Robert Kennedy, imagining a liberal transformation of society, famously quoted a line by Bernard Shaw that forever afterward became associated with Kennedy himself and the ideals he represented: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

It’s time for us to say: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ We dream things that once were and could be again, and we say, ‘Why not?’”

- end of initial entry -

Allan Wall writes from Mexico:

I heard the interview this morning, on the John Dayl show.

I like the way you shut that one guy up by saying that, given his hostility to the U.S., you and he had nothing to discuss.

And as for the “why not” argument, which carried over into VFR, very well put. Convervatives have become so PC themselves that they won’t even consider real solutions, only the phony half-measures possibly allowed by liberals. What we have to do is unabashadly stand up for what’s right and try to convince the public to catch up with us. Anything less is just tinkering within the narrow paremeters allowed us by liberalism.

My reply:

Thank you, Allan.

As for what you said, exactly. There are so many people on our side who don’t see this. They’re beaten. If you say to them, “We need to do such and such,” their first response is to complain, “But the liberals won’t let us.” They think of themselves as right-wingers and anti-liberals, but they still operate completely within the boundaries laid down by liberalism! Breaking people out of these assumptions is part of our job.

Mark P. writes:

That is exactly right. However piecemeal or haphazardly created the new conservative world is, all that matters is that it be created, that there be a start. If, for example, the goal is to rid the Muslim influence from the Western world, then not letting the UAE have a port is a good start. The “diplomatic” consequences, the “official” channels, the inconsistency, the “Islamophobia,” etc. is just irrelevant white noise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 02, 2006 11:44 AM | Send