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What happened to my liberalism?
Jun. 17th, 2018 10:34 pm I want my Liberalism back. It would be easy to say that at some point recently I stopped being a liberal. But it would miss the mark. A more accurate statement would be that at some point, liberalism pivoted away from being the enlightenment driven political philosophy that it was, that sought to repair the Dickensian economic disparities that marked the dawn of the industrial age, and became something else.
I was in the academy during the germination of the new liberalism, and what I saw disturbed me. From mantras like "racism is prejudice plus power" to efforts to transform language into something incapable of giving offense, it seemed to me that my liberalism, with its fine moral subtleties was being thrown over for a new fundamentalism in which power was the only sin, powerlessness the sole virtue, and winning the ultimate crime.
What passes for liberalism now is a philosophical approach that seeks to identify and correct "systems of oppression." The liberal position that powerlessness confers virtue is as facile as the conservative notion that powerlessness is the product of sin and possession of power is virtue's reward. In order to stand as a political philosophy, liberalism needs to articulate something more than oppositional defiance to conservatism.
Liberals are going to need to do more than merely identify the oppressed in any power dynamic and then root for the underdog. They are going to need look at the moral systems of both the oppressor and the oppressed, and decide which it is better to have in power. Do contemporary American feminists really want to give power to people whose moral framework requires women to serve as baby mills, neither seen nor heard? Do those of us who fought so hard to reverse the Defense of Marriage Act really want to empower societies that still treat homosexuality as a capital offense?
Liberals like to use the term "Apartheid" to describe the situation in Israel. The moment that Nelson Mandela was freed was a watershed moment for justice in South Africa brought about with lots of suffering, hard campaigning, and Tropicana orange juice undrunk. But the analogy is a weak one, because Hamas is not the African National Congress. The ANC did not call for the extermination of whites, whereas Hamas' charter calls for the extirpation of all Jews from the Holy Land. Moreover, the ANC did not seek to replace a democratic government with an oppressive theocracy, which would be Hamas' plan precisely.
If racism is prejudice plus power, you might do well to examine your underdogs' prejudices before fighting for their power to reify them.
I was in the academy during the germination of the new liberalism, and what I saw disturbed me. From mantras like "racism is prejudice plus power" to efforts to transform language into something incapable of giving offense, it seemed to me that my liberalism, with its fine moral subtleties was being thrown over for a new fundamentalism in which power was the only sin, powerlessness the sole virtue, and winning the ultimate crime.
What passes for liberalism now is a philosophical approach that seeks to identify and correct "systems of oppression." The liberal position that powerlessness confers virtue is as facile as the conservative notion that powerlessness is the product of sin and possession of power is virtue's reward. In order to stand as a political philosophy, liberalism needs to articulate something more than oppositional defiance to conservatism.
Liberals are going to need to do more than merely identify the oppressed in any power dynamic and then root for the underdog. They are going to need look at the moral systems of both the oppressor and the oppressed, and decide which it is better to have in power. Do contemporary American feminists really want to give power to people whose moral framework requires women to serve as baby mills, neither seen nor heard? Do those of us who fought so hard to reverse the Defense of Marriage Act really want to empower societies that still treat homosexuality as a capital offense?
Liberals like to use the term "Apartheid" to describe the situation in Israel. The moment that Nelson Mandela was freed was a watershed moment for justice in South Africa brought about with lots of suffering, hard campaigning, and Tropicana orange juice undrunk. But the analogy is a weak one, because Hamas is not the African National Congress. The ANC did not call for the extermination of whites, whereas Hamas' charter calls for the extirpation of all Jews from the Holy Land. Moreover, the ANC did not seek to replace a democratic government with an oppressive theocracy, which would be Hamas' plan precisely.
If racism is prejudice plus power, you might do well to examine your underdogs' prejudices before fighting for their power to reify them.
