Have I done such a poor job of explaining my ideas?

(Note: a couple of days after this entry was posted, the dialog resumed with my uncomprehending correspondent, and is perhaps is making progress. See below.)

The other day a friend long familiar with my writings remarked that notwithstanding my constant theme that today’s mainstream conservatives are really liberals (expressed most recently here), the idea seemed pointless, because I had not demonstrated why the idea matters in any practical sense. I was astonished by this, because I think I have demonstrated it to the point of nausea.

Take immigration. Mainstream conservatives say—and have been saying in a chorus for almost 20 years—that the growing cultural problems and divisions in the West associated with non-Western immigration have been caused by “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism is, of course, a leftist ideology. So the conservatives are blaming the cultural problems proceeding from mass immigration solely on the left: “Those leftists are the problem, not the immigrants, and certainly not us conservatives!” In reality, the mainstream conservatives themselves believe in the liberal ideology of non-discrimination, particularly the non-discriminatory admission into the West of persons from every culture and nation on earth—and that is the source of the problem. Multiculturalism is largely a symptom of the presence in the West of vast numbers of unassimilated and unassimilable non-Westerners; at the very least, multiculturalism is legitimated and energized by the increasing numbers and power of such people.

Now to believe in the non-discriminatory admission of all peoples of all cultures and races into one’s society is certainly a liberal belief; indeed it is an extreme liberal belief. It is a belief so extreme that no society that holds to it can survive very long. Yet the people who have this belief call themselves conservatives, and they go on, year after year, smugly imagining that the “left,” with its multiculturalism, is the sole cause of the ongoing loss of the identity, autonomy, and confidence of Western societies, and that this phenomenon has nothing to do with the growing presence in the West of vast populations of non-Westerners, a growth supported, facilitated, and celebrated by the conservatives themselves.

The total unquestioning adherence of conservatives to non-discriminatory mass immigration is also the underlying cause of the “Usual Suspects” syndrome, in which every single mainstream-conservative Islam critic without exception, even while crying to the skies that Islam represents a mortal threat to our society, fails to utter a single syllable about the need to reduce or stop Muslim immigration.

If the destruction of the West by mass immigration is to be stopped, the conservatives must realize that they subscribe to an extreme liberal belief system that is the real cause of the problem, and they must renounce it.

This is just one example of why the idea that today’s conservatives are really liberals matters in the most urgently practical terms. I have made this argument scores of times, in scores of different ways. Yet the friend of whom I speak, who knows my work as well as anyone, thinks I have never made it. Have my writings been that futile? Maybe I should have been a lawyer or an investment banker.

As I wrote the last sentence, the following Bob Dylan verse popped into my head:

I wish I’d been a doctor,
Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost,
Maybe I’d have done some good in the world
Instead of burning every bridge that I crossed.

- end of initial entry -

Bob writes:

Absolutely not!

If not for your blog I would not understand liberalism anywhere near as well as I do. I believe I have learned more from your writings than all other sources combined.

Until the Internet was invented by Al Gore I had stopped keeping up with current events. No more newspapers (Investors Business Daily is the only exception), no more watching the news on TV and no more listening to the news on the radio. I can’t stand all the liberal crap that is “reported” as news.

I have been reading blogs since the 2000 presidential race and I haven’t looked back. I discovered your site maybe two years ago, and it is my favorite.

Keep up the great work.

Alan Roebuck writes:

Let me reassure you that you have, in fact, done the best job I know of explaining liberalism, warning about mainstream liberalism (er, sorry, I meant to say “conservatism.”), and showing how liberalism is a mortal threat to our civilization. I cannot see how anyone other than a liberal could say what you say he said!

As a professor, I know only too well that even the clearest teaching that is humanly possible sometimes falls on deaf ears. If there were any weakness in your presentations, it would only be that it is so clear that it frightens some people.

In conclusion, I can only say, Bravo, sir, and keep up the vitally necessary work of defending the civilization we love!

Thucydides writes:

Rereading your interesting post “Have I Done Such a Poor Job of Explaining My Ideas,” I see a hint of discouragement at the end.

For those who have set themselves the task of trying to understand our culture and explicate its character to others, it is necessary to accept that most of what they say will not, indeed, cannot be heard. Most of our fellows, even fairly intelligent people, are not philosophically inclined, nor do they have any real curiosity about such matters. They are usually well-meaning people who are largely interested in knowing what is the right, i.e., socially acceptable thing to think on some particular issue or story, and don’t even dream of trying to understand things at a deeper level.

This was well illustrated by some recent television advertisements for the New York Times, mentioned by Peggy Noonan in one of her columns. The ads featured what she called “an earnest dunderhead,” saying that he “likes the way the Times tells me how to think about a story.”

In an age in which the sources of knowledge and opinion, the universities, the think tanks, the media, etc., are given over to narrow and intellectually impoverished perspectives, based on our inheritance of a shallow Enlightenment liberalism, public thinking on morality will similarly be narrow and impoverished. The upshot is a kind of Bloomsbury moral subjectivism or intuitionism that is now prevalent in our culture. We know what such attitudes did for the Bloomsbury folk in their lives.

Couple the closed mindedness and lack of intellectual curiosity of liberal intelligentsia with its commitment to an incoherent morality, and it will be seen that those who set out to modify that culture are engaged in a Sisyphean, if not quixotic task. Is the effort worthwhile? I think it is. Even if few others are brought to beginning to identify the assumptions under which their thinking proceeds, and to see the limitations of such assumptions, and thereby come to understand the absurdity of much that is presently considered to be beyond question, the effort has meaning in itself. Is it too dramatic to think of this as comparable in some ways to the work of the biblical prophets? If our culture seems headed for ruin, and I believe it is, one would not want to stand idly by.

So, please, do not become discouraged.

The friend to whom this blog entry is a response writes:

I believe conservatives are also responsible, through their universalism, while liberals are responsible through their multiculturalism, two sides of the same coin, but I don’t see what’s especially gained by calling the conservative view liberal, as if that made some definitive short work of the matter.

LA replies

Ok, good question. Maybe we never talked this through. What’s gained by calling the conservatives’ conservatism liberal is that it’s the specifically LIBERAL nature of their conservatism that the conservatives don’t see, and this blindness is what allows them to go along with the liberalism. For example, they believe in a formal universalism (liberalism), while also believing sentimentally in nation (conservatism) and IMAGINING they this position is conservative. They don’t understand that the universalism is liberal, i.e. that it’s about universal equality and freedom, not about a particular substance; and they don’t understand that the universalism must inevitably eliminate the nation along with its particular substance.

In short, they lack a conscious grasp of conservative principle as distinct from and irreconcilable with liberal principle. Without such a grasp, they will always drift in a liberal direction.

Tell me if this makes sense to you.

Conservative Swede writes:

Your friend wrote: “I don’t see what’s especially gained by calling the conservative view liberal”

The way I see it, it happened the other way around. When everything went left, and the old-style conservatives died out, liberals started calling themselves conservatives. What Lawrence has done is to restore the original meaning of conservative and liberal, quite as the original meaning of amnesty has recently been restored here at VFR. So the question should rather go the those doing the change in the first place.

If we do not use proper concepts, we will not be able to think properly.

It’s like when I come into a shop to buy a tool and the price tag says $49.90. Then I will talk about it as something costing $50, otherwise my visual impression of the price-tag of 40-something will fool me into believing that it’s cheaper than it really is. If the salesman will insist that the cost is $49.90 and not $50 as I say, I would give him 10 cents and say “Now it costs $50.”

We need to do what we can to preserve the sanity of our thinking even if we are constantly bombarded with wily concepts.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 14, 2007 06:34 PM | Send