The problem for the liberal is that most people do not want to be transformed. They want life to be better but not qualitatively different. It is only the liberal, or the “progressive”, as he prefers to be called today, who welcomes revolution and relishes the violent tactics necessary to bring it about. For the progressive, it is an article of faith that the masses will resist change and must be forced to swallow it.
This is a crucial difficulty, and it gives rise to all sorts of persuasion, nudging, compulsion, and outright violence. If the masses don’t know what’s good for them, they must be made to change. Every liberal in history, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Barack Obama, has adopted this course of action. The current liberal lions, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and their lion cubs – New Jersey’s Sen. Cory Booker and California’s Sen. Kamala Harris – appear to be even more radical.
Booker speaks repeatedly in favor of what he calls “the collective good”. Apparently, he knows what that good is, and others do not. And he seems willing to use uncivil means to achieve that collectivist end, such as lashing out at DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. His humiliation of Nielsen was not just embarrassing. As I saw it, it revealed a cold, vicious, Leninist temperament, a willingness to sacrifice individuals in the service of the collective and of his own political ambition.
Then there is Harris. “Loose regulations and lax enforcement … That’s abandoning the middle class,” she says. What she seeks, apparently, is more government control with herself in charge.
Both of these über-liberals claim to know more than the rest of us, but what is it they know?
In a truth worthy of Wittgenstein, one could say that what they “know” is that they know, and nothing else. And what they oppose is any suggestion that they do not know.
In other words, liberalism is a temper, not a philosophy. It has no fixed content – it can be either communistic or fascistic, racially “progressive” or virulently anti-Semitic, pacifistic or militaristic – but in one respect, it never changes. It exerts control and demands obedience.
Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.
May 31, 2024
QotD: Progressives believe you need to be changed to their design
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