Liberal, Left

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. - My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

 "The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

A collection of notes on the difference between liberalism and the outlook of the left, in no particular order:

• The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
• The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
• The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
• This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
• “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
• In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group.
• This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
• The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
• This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
• The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.

To be continued . . .


(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’