An Obama presidency, far from calming down demanding liberal interest groups, may instead add fuel to the fire
by Christopher Roach
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4589 views much of history as a morality play. The past was very bad. We are making progress. The future will be better. But every new achievement serves also as an indictment. The past is guilty of offending the liberal goals of inclusion and equality. As Lawrence Auster has noted, every advance of inclusion and equality is an indication of how the past up until this point was less inclusive and equality and that we still have a “long way to go.”
An Obama presidency, far from calming down demanding liberal interest groups, may instead add fuel to the fire. Moderates and establishment conservatives are confused. Why can liberals find so little to love in our country and civilization’s history? Why is every defense of the past and its heroes met with predictable bromides: “Well, it’s easy to be patriotic if you’re white and privileged. Most people didn’t have access to the good life in America’s past, and, even if more and more do, many still do not, which is the height of injustice.”The ending of certain inequalities and oppressive forces, including the ending of slavery, women’s suffrage, defeating the Nazis, and the magnanimous civil rights movement, are of no consequence. Far from decreasing America’s collective guilt, these liberal achievements add to the bill.
Why? Because liberalism does not permit a non-liberal definition of the good. To the extent nonliberal values like safety, peace, and prosperity are admitted as important political goals at all, they are always trumped by the liberal goals of inclusion and equality. Consider the liberal view of racism in the stark example of post-colonial Africa. Much of Africa was once under white-rule. By the mid-twentieth century this meant prosperity, efficient government, European-style capital cities, the rule of law, and rising standards of living for white and black alike. Since the overthrow of white rule in places like Rhodesia and South Africa, the continent has declined on nearly every measure of human flourishing: GDP, life-span, violence, and corruption. Nonetheless, the white-ruled past is considered more worthy of condemnation than the tragic present. In the comparison of broke, crime-ridden, and unstable “democratic” states with wealthy, safe, and orderly white-rule regimes, the latter always loses no matter how extreme the differences.
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/liberal_judgment_and_the_liberal_scale_of_values/