We are seeing the ascendancy of liberalism, in its full-blown, PC, multicultural form

Richard W. writes:

My thoughts on your recent articles and postings follow (and I apologize they are not better organized. I’m operating at my personal limit of grief right now, over what I’m seeing):

Two grim articles on your site bring home the reality that I think we are all sensing. We are at a crossroads and the future looks unlike the future we’ve envisioned and hoped for.

Instead we are faced with the specter of being strangers in our own land, of seeing Socialism become the norm and the once-free USA turn into another leftist state with all of the loss that entails. Personal freedom, freedom of speech and thought, religious freedom, cherished rights.

It’s been a long time coming and we have to admit, in retrospect, that we played our hand badly. Newt Gingrich helped spearhead a real conservative moment in America, but the vision and momentum were lost pursuing the Clinton scandals and secondary side issues.

We chose poorly and our leaders were not up to the task at hand. The entire first six years of Bush saw no progress on rolling back government, no real championing of the principles that animated us. A lost opportunity.

The fallout of that is not just, or even mainly, a disenchanted base. Rather it is the full ascendancy of liberalism, in its full blown PC, multicultural form, as the new norm.

McCain is not the cause, he is the symptom, or if you prefer, the proof of the irrelevance of traditional conservatism. There are just not enough of us to change things, and our ideas have been successfully mocked, misrepresented and marginalized.

Say “conservative” to 20 year olds and few are likely to be able to give a coherent explanation of our ideology. They will, though, no doubt mention our obsession with abortion, gay marriage and other issues that have made us appear simply odd, to them. Kids today have grown up with TV sitcoms where gays are just another feature of life.

The culture wars matter greatly, and we’ve lost them definitively. Politics is an afterthought, and will follow along shortly, as it always does.

What comes next?

What to do? That’s the interesting question for us. For the Republican Party this issue is a simple one. In a two party system both parties want to own the middle and a flank, to get to 51 percent. Our electoral system is self balancing. If “conservatives” of whatever stripe cannot even deliver the nomination then the Republican party will go elsewhere to get to 51 percent. McCain suggests a real move to being “the War Party.” Whether that, coupled with his open borders, is enough to overcome the Dem 51 percent strategy remains to be seen, but I doubt it.

Electoral politics cannot be the primary method of moving the conservative movement forward at this juncture. We simply don’t have the numbers, the focus or the arguments to carry the day. We have too many factions, too many liabilities (Larry Craig is still in the Senate representing “conservative family values”) and not enough assets.

Realistically the whole idea that the USA is homogenous and must agree on everything from school curriculum to smoking bans is ultimately a liberal idea. Just as in the primary process a few big states dominated by big cities will more and more set the national agenda and the rest of us will be expected to adhere.

That too is part of the liberal victory. That too is a key component of our ideology (states rights) that our leaders did not believe in or advance when they had the chance.

Still if there is a place to stand and fight, a position to dig in for, this is the only one that I see worth the effort.

Our future lies in separation, disobedience, and disdain. At the same time we need to build institutions and seize institutions that support our values and dreams.

We have lost the USA. We have lost California. And New York and many many other states.

Rather than fight to hold back the tide of liberalism we need to concentrate our numbers in a single location and go about “not agreeing” to the best of our ability.

Organizations like The Free State Project, or Free State Wyoming are perhaps the largest achievable political goal we could accomplish. If not enough conservatives are willing to make the hard sacrifice to hold a state or two, then we are destined to become an underground.

At this point I see few other options that will deliver anything of substantial value to use, other than separation and perhaps partition, if we have the courage to work for it.

Do we?

- end of initial entry -

Charles G. writes:

I’ve mentioned this before, but there has to be a disconnect between the voter and his government. We’ve got to work on the voter’s psyche, his tendency to associate patriotism with his willingness to trust the government.

Actually, the two are completely separate things. It was only in the mid-19th century that the central government acquired this holy icon status that has since been built up and taken over by liberalism. Once a great enough number of people begin to see the government as a parasite, they will re-evaluate the meaning of patriotism and stop granting the federal government a monopoly on that concept. We are a flesh and blood nation, not a federal idea or concept nation.

A disastrous Obama presidency could be a Godsend for traditionalists of all stripes. I don’t think things are all that bleak. To paraphrase Lenin, give liberals enough rope and let them hang themselves. How much more affirmative action, taxation, sexual license, racial spoils, drugs and other PC corruption are middle class white people willing to put up with? Let’s find out.

LA replies:

Interesting. Let me put it this way. America probably is the most patriotic country on earth. This patriotism is a mighty force, proceeding from the truly great things about America that deservc to be loved. But Americans’ normal instinct of patriotism has been misdirected toward universalist liberalism. (See my entry, Wounded GIs, and the follow-up, The ambiguous thing that America now is.) What I think Charles is suggesting is that as the U.S. government becomes increasingly non-national, non-American, weird, socialistic, and malign, the normal American patriotic impulse, which has been deflected toward liberalism, will break its attachment to liberalism and return to the earlier, more organic sense of nationhood.

My only disagreement with Charles is that I don’t think that this more organic sense of peoplehood, is purely “flesh and blood.” That European-style phase does not work in the American context, because even in the Founding period, when Americans were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, what made Americans a people was not just common ethnicity and race but shared political principles, religious morality, way of life, and so on.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 13, 2008 06:20 PM | Send