You Can’t Out-Liberal the Liberals
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Conservatives can be more diverse than Liberals, but that won’t score them any points because it’s not really about diversity. They can be more Feminist or more Gay-friendly or more environmentalist. And they will only be mocked for it. Because liberalism isn’t about any of these things, it’s about the package deal. The only way to out-liberal a liberal is not on any single value that he claims to profess, but on every single one of them. And at that point you become a liberal.
The Left does not have any fixed values. It only has values of convenience. A conservative politician who has an affair is derided for breaking with a concrete moral code. But no such moral code is there for the opposite side. Not on any issue.
Radical groups cannot afford to be bound by morals. The 9/11 terrorists went to a strip club. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah run drugs. But those things are fine because they’re working toward a big program. And when you work toward the big program, the little stuff falls away. Like everything else they do, it’s just a little evil for the sake of a greater good.
The American Left is mostly legal now, but it thinks like an insurgency. It keeps two sets of values, it lies to itself and to everyone else about what it is and what it is doing. And those bad habits, garnered from European radical movements have flowed into the cultural veins of American liberalism leading to consistent inconsistency and showy hypocrisy.
Like Communism, there is only one big program and no mandatory practices that might get in its way. There are a billion rules, regulations, laws, guidelines, mandates and assorted rubbish heaps of paper listing the things that you are supposed to do and in what orders, but none of it really matters except to the little people who are forced to obey.
Membership has its privileges. Not at the lowest ranks, but moving up the ladder means that you are valuable enough not to have to follow your own movement’s idiotic rules. The peons may spend more than they can afford to keep down their heating bills, but their betters take jet planes around the world to lecture on the dangers of global warming. The peons may worry over whether they have sufficient awareness of their privilege, but their betters will make racist jokes and chase every woman in the room.
Hypocrisy is the outcome, but in a totalitarian system it’s also the point. When there are too many rules, then power becomes the privilege of not having to abide by them. And hypocrites are usually the loudest shouters on any given issue, because loudly denouncing everyone else is the surest way to advance up the ladder and to avoid being denounced for their own shortcomings.
This pattern of hypocrisy is accepted on operational grounds. An official position on sexual harassment is replaced with one that focuses on the outcome of making feminist policies possible. An official position on diversity is traded in, once again, for the outcome. And under the rule of hypocrites, the outcome is all that counts. It’s always the ends justifying the means until it turns out that the ends are power and the means are also power and the circle has closed itself.
Liberalism has a myriad of standards, but no single fixed standard. You can be a liberal who has Nazi sympathies. You can be a liberal war criminal. You can be a liberal racist. You can be a liberal rapist. You can be a liberal polluter, profiteer, union-buster, abuser of employees and assorted things of that nature and none of it ever flunks you or your party or your movement because it’s all about the ends.
What you cannot be, however, is more liberal than a liberal on any issue because there is no such thing. The issue is a means. Diversity is a means of creating a base that is dependent on the liberal elite and loyal to them. So are unions, and just about every liberal policy there is. And the means cannot be used to subvert the ends.
The diversity of Bush or Romney is viewed as a means, a collection of tokens, because that is what it is on the liberal side. And even if liberals believe that Bush and Romney are sincere about diversity, diversity, a mere means, cannot be used to subvert an end, that being the entire liberal program.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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"And like arguing with an idiot, trying to win a values contest with someone who has no values, only ends up making the man with values seem like a fool."
Good point. I'll cease arguing with this blogger.