Post-War Liberalism is now in Fetal Position: Time for an Abortion
The Islamic invasion of the West, which means the insistence by Islamic fundamentalism that it be allowed to insert Islamic sub states into already existing secular states, is proving that the liberal myth of secular tradition-neutrality is suicide. The United States, let alone France and other European countries, cannot survive without embracing an explicit tradition as the foundation of the nation, and then protecting the clear dominance of that tradition. There is no such thing as a survivable tradition-neutral country. It is time to prohibit the liberals from continuing to think like children.
It is ironically the liberals, not the Islamic extremists, who are our most dangerous, but clearly waning, enemies. The liberals, in an utterly stupid fashion, are a fifth column destroying western countries from the inside, making them vulnerable to invasion. The invasion proper started when the immigrants became increasingly conscious, along with their foreign handlers, of the incapacity of post-war liberalism to protect any country from an aggressive non-liberal tradition. In the global neighborhood of rival, incommensurate traditions, liberalism is the little wimp which just cannot face the fact that it will be consistently bullied, even killed, if it does not learn to fight by asserting the incommensurateness of its own tradition. Ironically, liberalism must die in principle to live. Its cornerstone is the notion that it is rooted in universal reason and that it can spread this soil the world over. Liberals believe that if we give Islamic extremists good jobs they will become “rationally autonomous” of their fanaticism. Liberals consistently project their own superficial values. They are so boring, as a result of their own superficial intellectual commitments, they cannot understand why people get interested in passionate, traditional approaches to living life.
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During World War II the western liberal tradition demonstrated that it could temporarily admit to itself that it was an incommensurate, competing tradition, which could NOT tame Nazis with universal reason. But when liberals started killing Nazis with extreme prejudice it was the ironic suicide of liberalism. After two world wars in the same supposedly enlightened, scientific century, the liberal experiment was over. Reason, especially in the form of science, was and is simply making rival world-views more dangerous to one another. (See Iran, Russia, North Korea, Israel, et al.) It was not and is not making the world one; it was not and is not converting everyone on earth to the same tradition — modern western science. How could it? Science cannot deliver the metaphysical facts about the meaning and purpose of human life.
To understand contemporary western liberalism you must think of it as a zombie. It is the walking dead. And such a creature is very inept at defending itself. History has alienated it from its grand optimism — one world, one language, one reason, leading to universal peace and justice. Classical liberalism is dead. It has lost its faith. What it exercises today is intellectually and morally empty habit, a certain set of behaviors accepted as the operations of liberalism. Liberalism is no longer a living, competing tradition. It has, to the point of hilarity, morphed into conservatism — an irrational embrace of its customs, conventions, prejudices. Contemporary liberals may as well be Burkeians.
Even European liberals must be waking up to the fact that they want something western to survive Islamic imperialism and that “something” must be defined. What does it mean for a country — the country they want to live in — to survive? It must mean that its traditional political processes survive. It must mean that its traditional understanding of justice survives. It must mean that its traditional culture survives as the foundation of a traditional system of justice. But this kind of survival is impossible if a country like France, England, America, or any other western liberal society, will not explicitly embrace and then explicitly protect its tradition as a tradition — not as a product of mythological universal reason. At this point, such an evolution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is radical and inevitably religious. All roads to survival lead away from both liberalism and conservatism and to Christianity.
Some rival traditions are fundamentally incompatible with a republic as the champion of individual liberty. Therefore republics must explicitly repress those rival traditions within their borders or die. The liberals are now face to face with the fact, as they were during World War II, that people take their world-views seriously as their source of meaning and purpose, and if you do not happen to have a clear commitment to one of your own, you will be the first to be slaughtered on the perpetually violent battlefield of history; a battlefield soaked in blood screaming that there is no universal reason.
Contemporary western liberalism, as “progressivism”, as the zombie of classical liberalism, has lost the spine it demonstrated during World War II. Progressivism is liberalism without integrity. It is not principled, but opportunistic. It believes it can lay in the weeds in the face of aggressive Islamic fundamentalism and extremism. All that is left of classical liberalism, in the minds and hearts of Europeans and Americans, is an inappropriately fond memory of it. World War II proved that freedom is an incommensurate tradition which must often be defended by force. It was the introduction to the cold war. The end of the cold war has been the introduction of the new world disorder with the revival of explicitly religious struggle. There never has been and never will be a pax libertas. If liberalism is true then how could a culture as sophisticated as that of Germany devolve into the worst enemy of individual, rational autonomy?
The left has no normative spine left. The sure sign of this is the rise of uncritical multiculturalism. Prewar liberals would have been skeptical of this exaggeration of liberal tolerance.
Liberalism has no position about the meaning and goals of human life except that everyone should have the right to their own — no matter what country they are living in. But then why should anyone have such a right? Since liberalism has no conventional traditional commitments, it cannot say. It argues that these meanings and goals need not compete for the world. But of course the goal is very often to do exactly that — dominate the world either morally or through physical coercion. Liberals find both ambitions distasteful. Those who adopt such ambitions find liberalism boring.
Liberals are now so terrified of reality, of history, of the human nature they cannot change, that they would rather we commit mass cultural suicide than face it honestly. Post-war liberalism is now in fetal position on the ground. And I am afraid that all we can do at this point is kick it off of the road leading to the next war, no matter how unconventional. To quote the movie “Fury,” “Ideals are peaceful. But history is violent.” We were once engaged in a long twilight struggle with communism, explicitly recognized by John F. Kennedy, a liberal who may have been cured of paramnesia by the Cuban missile crisis. We have been engaged, and remain engaged, in a long twilight struggle with Islam which started over a thousand years ago and has not yet ended.
Liberalism is a myth which has no defense against any aggressive tradition, like Nazism, which intends to take over a country. Liberalism still argues, as a philosophically dead form of habitual behavior, that every country must be organized around universal reason and that because reason is universal the people of any competing tradition can be integrated into the rationalized concept of liberal justice; that everyone can learn mutual respect and tolerance and come to love individual freedom. This position is so stupid, so disconfirmed by history, it makes both Islamic fundamentalists and orthodox Christians laugh, and then get ready for a fight. The liberal attempt to separate the state from Christianity, from any explicit tradition but its own, is cultural, political, and physical suicide.
And so Christians, in response to Islamic jihad, must recognize that (1) the liberals are our primary enemy, our first objective, and must be driven off the road to sanity, and (2) Christians must become aggressive themselves in taking over the United States and then saving it by declaring it Christian. Given (1) and (2) the Islamic aggressors may as well surrender.
