LITTLE ROCK — Three articles caught the attention in the past week or so. Taken together they explain a great deal about contemporary liberalism.
The first was a piece by National Review’s Dennis Prager in which he made an interesting distinction about how liberals and conservatives see each other. As he presents it, conservatives believe that liberals are wellintentioned but misguided and naïve, that their beliefs are false and likely to lead to all kinds of negative, unintended consequences if accepted, but they are, for the most part, decent.
Liberals, on the other hand, don’t just reject conservatism as a belief system, they see conservatives as evil creatures motivated by greed, sexism, racism, etc., and not only hate conservatism, but hate conservatives, especially the Republican strain thereof.
The second piece was a hilarious cover story in The Weekly Standard by Matt Labash titled “Living Like a Liberal,” representing his not particularly serious efforts to remake his life, including everything from shopping habits, parenting and eating according to liberal guidelines.
Beneath the humor was an important insight-that contemporary liberalism is an all-encompassing belief system that dictates not just political positions but every aspect of existence.
Whereas most conservatives tend to dismiss the idea of the personal as the political, liberals are expected to adhere to a massive array of do’s and don’ts in their personal lives to keep up with the constantly expanding rules of political correctness. Anyone who has seen some of the goofy columns onthe Slate online magazine on the most environmentally sound ways to cook a Thanksgiving turkey or buy an engagement ring gets the idea here.
The third article was Benjamin Plotinsky’s “The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm,” published in City Journal and reprinted in the Democrat-Gazette. Plotinsky ties together the points made by Prager and Labash with his succinct observation, “The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience.”
Just as with “the God that failed” called communism, liberalism is a secular religion, a form of utopianism designed to create Heaven on Earth rather than in the hereafter.
The hatred that Prager detects in the liberal treatment of conservatives is of the kind that religious fundamentalists have historically reserved for apostates, heretics and competing religious creeds. In this sense, contemporary liberalism, while masquerading as an enlightened alternative to religious orthodoxy, features an orthodoxy of its own every bit as rigid as that possessed by the torturers of the SpanishInquisition or today’s Islamofascists.
The observation that liberalism is a secular religion also explains the all-consuming nature that Labash identifies. Like religious fundamentalists of various stripes, contemporaryliberals see their politics as the most important element of their identity and subordinate all other aspects of their existence to it.
Whereas most conservatives don’t pay that much attention to politics, liberals begin to live for politics from an early age and seek their salvation within it.
Liberals, then, are different from conservatives not simply in terms of holding different views on health care reform or taxation, but in terms of their approach to politics specifically and life more generally. It is the crusader, “pester thy neighbor” nature of liberalism that leads it and other forms of leftism down the totalitarian path. Uniquely endowed with virtue and moral purity, liberals can’t help but see all those who challenge liberalism as venal and impure. To embrace liberalism is to embark upon a life-consuming effort to combat the ignorance and backwardness of one’s fellow citizens.
Leftism of various stripes has historically presented itself in opposition to ecclesiastical authority. In reality, liberalism has its own gospel, icons and devils (otherwise known as Republicans).
It also has its own redeeming God-governmental power. The only major difference is that traditional religion simply seeks to save souls. The religion of liberalism has the more serious tasks of perfecting humanity, ushering in world peace and saving the planet itself.
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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville.
Editorial, Pages 77 on 08/15/2010