Liberal, Left, Ctd

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

Continuing Liberal, Left, further notes, not necessarily in any particular order:

The left sees the world in terms of a zero sum game. What benefits one person is necessarily taken away from some other person. Liberalism thinks in terms of win-win situations. De Tocqueville wrote that American public-spiritedness arose out of a concept of altruism as enlightened self-interest:

Among us, men still constantly feign great abnegation which they no longer feel. The Americans, on the other hand, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state.

From the earlier Liberal, Left:

• 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.

Such an us-vs-them outlook fits perfectly with the zero sum game perception, even as liberal enlightened self-interest is harmonious with universal justice. It may be noted in passing that the sources of liberalism in the classical world are the Roman concept of justice, on the one hand, and Jesus of Nazareth's philosophy of cooperation, kindness, and altruism, on the other.* (The modern antecedent, as noted in The Liberal Founding, was the scientific revolution which preceded the invention of the liberal modern state.)

An example of liberal/left differences is the contrast between Women's Liberation, the feminism of the pre-counterculture era, and "feminism," which has replaced it. In Who Stole Feminism? Christina Hoff Sommers contrasted "equity feminism" with "gender feminism." The equity feminists of Women's Liberation cited "all men are created equal" as their philosophical claim to political and social equality--to equal justice. In the more radical feminism which followed, "womyn" are the virtuous gender and "all men are created equal" is a biased pronouncement of the patriarchy--us-vs-them.

Wikipedia contains an example of such modern ideologized feminism:

Elaine Showalter describes ... "gender theory", in which the "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system are explored".

As The Liberal Founding suggests, it is in the United States' DNA, so to speak, to be liberal. And so it is, but more so before the left effects of the counterculture. The late Roger Ebert's discussion of "American Graffiti" illustrates the change:

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

What characterizes a liberal society is yearning, because yearning is the entryway to ideals and aspirations; and because the dream is for all (see meliorism, above) it is pure and untainted. “The music was as innocent as the time,” Ebert wrote:

Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later.

The founding liberals thought in terms of a transformation of the whole world (see universalism, above). Thomas Paine proclaimed, “I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.” The music of yearning had been replaced by a music of decadence and aggression, folly and baseness. For example, by the Rolling Stones:

You can't come back and think you are still mine / You're out of touch, my baby / My poor discarded baby / I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

“My solemn belief of your cause,” Paine added, “is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

(*) John 10:10, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," could serve as a concise expression of the purpose of liberalism.