Are you left/progressive? Or are you liberal?
I've already written that all democracy, science, justice, and genuine intellectuality are liberal.
That liberalism is the central theme of first-world modernity.
And that liberalism is the methodology of the good life. [These assertions haven’t been challenged yet. Feel free.]
Left/progressivism conflicts with or violates many of the values, methodologies, ethical principles, and standards of liberalism, as will be discussed below. Yet on our campuses, and in the news, left/progressivism seems to predominate over liberalism. [Former President Obama criticizes two aspects of progressivism, the desire for a revolution; and “cancel culture.” (When Virginia Governor Northam continued to serve after a youthful picture of him in blackface emerged, the media kept asking why he didn’t resign.) These two topics don’t appear in this post. Perhaps in a later post.]
First example. In a widely hailed article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that the policy he was advocating would end "white guilt." Liberalism holds that statements such as race [derogatory characteristic] or gender [derogatory characteristic] are prejudicial, and as such, not allowable. Andrew Sullivan, in "We all live on campus now," suggested that important decisions should not be "based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation."
There is a tendency, with left/progressivism, to treat certain identities as "oppressor groups." It is acceptable to attribute derogatory characteristics to these groups, or to their members. This violates an important principle of liberalism: All people are created equal. Egalitarianism is the principle which made first-world modernity the first era in history to condemn slavery unequivocally.
Sullivan adds,
This is compounded by the idea that only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make. And that campus orthodoxy is now the culture’s as a whole.
Second example. The left/progressive belief that identity is important, as seen in the two preceding paragraphs. This, too, conflicts with the values of liberalism. If all are created equal, then the only identity that matters is "human being," and all possess it.
Someone recently tossed off a remark about "the patriarchy." Apart from the problem that its vagueness makes it difficult to construct a refutation, it treats a particular identity, possessing the immutable characteristic, male, as having a derogatory nature, "oppressor." For left/progressivism, "patriarchy" is a term thought to resist evil. It is a logical consequence of progressivism's implicit decision to abandon egalitarianism, to divide humankind into a good group, the oppressed, and a bad group, the oppressor, and to support prejudicial language against those who are born into the bad group.
Liberalism opposes progressivism here because to abandon human equality invites the us-against-them conflict which has always beset us; because it initiates a slippery slope whose terminus is the reintroduction of slavery;(1) and because liberalism considers such remarks to be bigotry.
/*****/
Where to find out about liberalism? The inspiring passages of the Declaration and Constitution are liberal. President Kennedy’s presentation to the Houston Ministerial Association is a stirring liberal argument for separation of church and state. Naipaul’s presentation, “Our Universal Civilization” is liberal. The concept of the Rights of Man is liberal, plus the meta-right to the pursuit of happiness.(2)
(1) Slavery is justified because the slave has a “slave nature,” said one Greek thinker.
(2) Andrew Sullivan: “ … The most radical statement of the Enlightenment, which is why it is indeed of such world-historical importance. As I write I have no idea as to the conclusion of this new drama in world history, except that it will have ramifications as large and as lasting as the end of the Cold War.
What power four little words—the pursuit of happiness—still have.”
Orwell in 1946 explains why Trump gets so angry when reporters remind him what he said: A totalitarian ruler “has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. … Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, …”
In “The Prevention of Literature,” Orwell speaks of “a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course.”
However, Orwell continues,
From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a re-evaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
Note that the URL is in Russia!
[https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/prevention/english/e_plit]
David Smith in The Guardian:
“For more than three years, [Jonathan] Karl has been on Trump’s trail, even receiving a hug from Kanye West in the Oval Office. He has also witnessed Trump’s war on the media with barbs such as “the enemy of the people” – a phrase which, Karl notes, the Nazis used in 1934. So what message does it send to the rest of the world?”
I think it is deeply disturbing that you have authoritarian leaders around the world who shut down a free press, jail reporters and potentially even worse and do so invoking the words of the American president. So you see Erdoğan and Putin. You see it’s been documented in Kazakhstan and in Egypt. You see authoritarian leaders echoing the precise words of Donald Trump, talking about ‘fake news’ as reporters are thrown in jail.
The other thing that I think is really troubling is when the president calls real news ‘fake news’, when he suggests that the act of being an aggressive reporter is ‘treasonous’, it has undermined the faith in an independent free press among a significant segment of the population.
The revision of the past Orwell often spoke of is one of Trump’s frequent tactics. When Journalist Yamiche Alcindor calls him on contradicting what he previously said, he doesn’t deal with the issue, but calls her “snarky.”
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS NewsHour put the US president’s own words to him. “You’ve said repeatedly that you think that some of the equipment that governors are requesting, they don’t actually need. You said New York might need –”
Trump interrupted twice: “I didn’t say that.” Alcindor stood her ground: “You said it on Sean Hannity’s, Fox News.” Then Trump lied: “I didn’t say – come on. Come on.”
Henry Giroux:
As Orwell often remarked, historical memory is dangerous to authoritarian regimes. In Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, it is a crime to read history against the grain. In fact, history is falsified so as to render it useless both for understanding the conditions that shape the present and for remembering what should never be forgotten. As Orwell makes clear, this is precisely why tyrants consider historical memory dangerous; history can readily be put to use in identifying present-day abuses of power and corruption.
But Trump’s worst enemy is reality, and the fearless thinking which exposes authoritarian efforts to mislead and delude the people.
It is a terrible spot to be in. And history will record him as a monstrous perversion of the aspirations of the Founders.
What will it say about the perfect storm of errors and misguided notions which put him in the White House?
