Donald Trump brought the void to the
entire liberal establishment. He brought it emptiness and confusion and, more
importantly, he brought it fear of the American people. The liberal sun is
setting in the West, and all that remains for its worshippers is an unbearable
sorrow for the power they have lost, of bewilderment and anger, a sense of the
lengthening shadows of their irrelevance, and a gathering realization that,
from having dwelt within the deep corruption of the Obama administration, they
have nothing to offer the people but their old socialist handbooks, their
consuming hatred for the new president, and a roiling temper of revenge.
The liberal mind is a dark place --
an irrational, predatory, enslaving, and uncivilizing influence. It has become
its own refuge, its own closed system of thought and behavior, its own electric
carnival of delusions. It can switch reality on and off with the swipe of a
finger. It can turn wishful clay on a magic potter's wheel until it has made
new creeds out of its own lies and new religions out of government. Its
proselytes have placed their left hands upon Marx and sworn an oath of fealty
to a pernicious ideology of power. Not only have its priests and ministers
raised society above the individual in their egalitarian rituals, but they have
also elevated the state above society. They eulogize "diversity" and "inclusion"
in their propaganda, but when the diverse and the included have entered the
great House of Liberal Thought, the wide doors close behind them, and they are
not permitted to leave.
In Philip K. Dick's sci-fi
classic, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, the remnants of humanity that have not emigrated
off-world live in cities perpetually darkened by the clouds and radioactive
dust of a post-Terminal War. The people dwell in communities that are neither
society nor civilization. With most forms of life made extinct by war, they
have created animal and human counterfeits to merge with the remaining culture
as a necessary means of survival. No one knows with certainty if anything is
real, and no one cares to ask. Better to live with viable simulacra and mood-altering
machines than to acknowledge the truth of what intelligence gone wrong had made
of the world. Reality is only a suggestion -- and even the androids think they
are human.
The liberal establishment is too
much like this closed, unavailing, dysfunctional state following the Trump
apocalypse. Liberals have fallen into a slough of nihilism, for a high tide of
common sense has poured over their little castles made of sand; and now they
must survive on the products of weak imagination and alternative certainties,
on implanted memories of things that never were and on the futility of things
that cannot be. Their unreality, however, is a dynamic medium, changeable with
art and perfectible with language. To speak this language is to speak a
terrible ignorance that misinforms with purpose, an ignorance that does not
tolerate correction -- a language that makes hatred possible. And if they can
survive on the authorship of their own fictional reality, one can only wonder
at their infinite capacity for self-delusion. To lie and believe the lie is to
forswear one's humanity; and one might therefore ask of liberals if they too
think they are human.
It is a universal irony that the
study of democratic societies should often prove a history of free peoples
searching for tyrants to enslave them. One has only to examine the bloody
record of democratic origins and endings to understand the multifold
opportunities available to radical interests for exploitation and overthrow.
Although America's republican form of government provides the greatest
resistance to despotic methods, it cannot entirely escape the vulnerabilities
inherent to the democratic process itself. We now find our nation disturbed by
the cultish and non-moral spirit of intellectual dishonesty, error and arrogance
that defines the liberal problem in America, for although liberal activists
have proven the perfect stewards of the nation's political and cultural
decline, yet they scorn the world that offers no thanks for their instruction.
It is the definitive modern liberal
conceit: that the world waits upon instruction. There are legitimate spaces in
our literature for fantasy and imagination, but handbooks on racial politics
and social justice are not among them. Liberalism is a mythos of political
narratives in which the settled laws of human nature do not apply, thus
allowing for an infinite range of social theories to flourish and multiply
unconnected to reality. Its poets do not answer to reason; rather, they are
hard-wired to the sentiments that direct reason towards misshapen ends. The
ability to persuade oneself with one's own lies, to willingly forfeit one's
conscience to the tribe, and to justify one's own corruption by teaching it to
others is a genius discovered only in a truly liberal intelligence. The modern
cult of liberalism thus affords some gratification to the uncounted numbers of
unfinished minds desperately looking for a great lie to believe in -- for the
lie shall set them free of conscience, personal responsibility and the burden
of defending freedom itself.
History is the axis of every passing
moment. We participate in the constant turning of that necessary human study
and its promise of greater understanding. A long familiarity with the
ungovernable forces of human nature must precede all political reflections.
Only through that gate are we allowed to proceed along a determined course of
right action. The study of history informs us, however, that we are now caught
in the march of folly -- bitter, repetitive clashes of misguided ideology and founding
principles -- in which each succeeding administration of our government, in
order to accomplish its ends, must first destroy the works of its predecessor.
If this is not folly, then the word has no meaning. Folly is a universal
solvent -- a progressive agent of change. In its triumph, it has reduced many
forms of government to an elemental sludge; and its influence is certain to
continue through American politics, as the authors of liberal doctrine have
promised a Stalinist annihilation of history itself.
History is abandoned when social
theorists believe they know all the answers. According to the leftist
handbooks, democracies are little more than precursor states with limited life
spans, necessary procedural stages for a new authoritarian world order
ultimately without political parties, without choice, without freedom, but with
an absolute promise of social equality -- reminiscent of the old Soviet bloc
system. The prospect of eventual one-party rule is the reason why leftists
regard democracy so highly; and that length of darkness is the path that
liberal instruction is now taking the Democratic Party.
Every presidential election, from
this moment onward, will represent a hinged point in the trajectory of
historical freedom -- an unequivocal turning towards or turning from the
founding principles of our nation. The world anticipates 2021, the year in
which Philip Dick set his post-apocalyptic tale. We should know by that time if
progressive interests have recovered the political powers commensurate with
their contempt for the American people, the great majority of whom, the left
believe, are governable only by force. That reliable plantations have already
been established by the left gives credence to their despotic sentiment,
outlining the prototype and purpose of a new dystopian form of liberalism for
the 21st Century.
Philip Ahlrich can be reached for comment at phahl@icloud.com.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/the_liberal_problem_in_america.html
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