Liberalism is Not the Problem
The conservative media often talks about the many ways Liberals are dismantling and destroying our society. Mark Dice has a book called ‘Liberalism: Find a Cure’, Michael Savage has one called ‘Liberalism is a Mental Disorder’, and the internet is full of memes calling out Liberals when they let their craziness show (which is often).
However, as bad as it at times seems, Liberalism is not truly the problem, and I will tell you why.
The premise of ‘Conserve-atism’ is the preservation or conservation of tradition, culture, and values. Temperamentally, conservatives tend to prefer orderliness and industriousness. They work hard, like people and things to be in their proper role and place and enjoy working toward goals.
On the other hand, Liberals tend to be oriented more toward aesthetics and ideas. They like to be creative. They like to think of new inventive solutions to problems. This is fairly well documented in the psychological literature. As it turns out, openness to experience, the same trait that Liberals tend to have at higher rates than conservatives, literally changes the way that they visually perceive the world.
At this base level, you could categorize the two personalities in this way: conservatives maintain and preserve the systems which are necessary for our society to function, while liberals work to shake up those systems, eliminate outdated concepts, and push culture forward.
But there’s a dark side. Too much conservatism can lead to stagnation. When societies advance, those which are too conservative tend to get left behind, as we saw with the very tradition-oriented Native American tribes who failed to develop the same technological advancements as Western Europeans, leading to their historic defeat. If human beings had been entirely conservative throughout history, we’d still be living in caves or throwing sheep into volcanoes to impress the gods.
The point is, without Liberalism society would have never progressed and our traditions and culture would never have evolved throughout the centuries. From Paganism to Christianity to the Scientific Enlightenment, every major historical progression has been by definition a Liberal event.
As important as Liberalism is, when taken to its extreme it can be very dangerous. Society has to maintain itself and too much change is rarely good. The reason that culture and tradition exist is because there is no way that any one person, or any society, could invent a perfect new social structure, economy, or government. To think so is so incredibly arrogant and dangerous that it’s simply beyond words.
If the most extreme version of Conservatism is Fascism, defined as an authoritarian state which forces tradition on society, then the most extreme version of Liberalism would be an authoritarian state which forces rapid and dramatic change on society. The most prominent and painful of these hyper-Liberal ideologies has in recent history been Marxism.
To see the world through the eyes of a Marxist is to view all of history and human relations through the narrow lens of oppressor and oppressed class. In Marx’s view, the wealthy class (the bourgeoisie) oppressed the poor class (the proletariat) by their very existence and if society were only to remove these class distinctions, we would all finally have peace.
Of course, this notion is utterly wrong, ungraceful, and dangerous. To view the world in such narrow terms is to omit every aspect of our being that doesn’t fit inside the narrow concept of class identity. If you want to know how things end up when people begin viewing the world in this way, take some time to read about the Gulag system in Soviet Russia or the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China.
The Western world is seeing this ideology unfold in a new and even more dangerous way. As the radical left has undeniably taken control of the Democrat party and virtually the entire left-wing culture, we are seeing the ideology of intersectionalism proliferate in Universities and popular culture.
In essence, intersectionality is an expanse of the Marxist view from the moneyed class and the poor class to virtually every immutable characteristic imaginable. Through alleged privilege, straights oppress gays, whites oppress blacks, men oppress women, able-bodied individuals oppress the disabled, cis oppress trans, and the list goes on.
This view is completely antithetical to the Classical Liberal ideas which our history and country are based on. In the American view, all men (meaning humans) are created equal with equal spiritual value. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are always to be respected. Free speech is for all. The right to self-defense is universal. We are not born under equal circumstances, but we have equal dignity as human beings.
These revolutionary axioms, if you look at the great expanse of human history, are incredibly new. Not only are they new, but they created the freest, most prosperous, and yes, the fairest and most equal societies in all the world, not despite their adoption, but because of it.
However, the modern left no longer holds these truths to be self-evident, to borrow the words of Thomas Jefferson. Even the American Revolution was not revolutionary in terms of being a usurpation of the current way of thinking. Those aforementioned ideas were part of English life long before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The American Revolution was fought to preserve this wonderful history; the hard-fought preservation of these Classical Liberal English values which King George III was trying to squash with his Monarchy was the underpinned goal of the revolution. It was meant to free the people of Colonial America to follow the procession of their own values, not to destroy that history and implement some new social order they thought would solve all of their problems and cleanse them of the guilt of their ancestors sins.
The great Irish philosopher Edmond Burke coined the phrase ‘Evolution not Revolution’ and this is what I believe people most need to hear at this moment in history. Progress is necessary and good. Liberalism in its proper form is wonderful and extraordinary, but the wrong kind of progress is devastating.
If we want to create a better future, then we have to recognize the incredible value of our heritage; no history is perfect, but no civilization which denies and desecrates its own past has ever sustained itself in any meaningful way.
Conservatives and Liberals have to work together to figure out which parts of our culture can be improved upon and which should be left untouched; trial and error is an inevitable part of the process, but when we deviate from the norm, we must deviate with care so to avoid making things infinitely worse than they already are. This is not an option; this is a necessity.
Let me get this straight; our biggest issue in society right now is not Liberalism, it’s a radical expression of liberalism which threatens to tear apart our society so badly that mass suffering would have to ensue before we can put the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again.