Liberal statists

Hi John,

 

I found this article, "Conservatism Into the Future", by goggling "liberal statists", your characterization of which I quite agree with. It's a more accurate and less provocative term than Jonah Goldberg's "liberal fascist", I think.

 

However, I don't think you really understand them, i.e. what motivates them, or they themselves, for that matter (since it is largely subconscious), although that is what we need to do, if we want to oppose them (i.e. their ideology) effectively. Notwithstanding that we also need to understand ourselves and our own (also largely subconscious) motivations.

 

Man is not just a social animal, but also very much a tribal animal, having evolved behaviourally in emotional and material dependency on his tribe. The development of property rights and a money economy creates the illusion of individual independence, which, notwithstanding all the achievements of civilisation along way, has led us badly astray (into an evolutionary cul-de-sac).

 

The state has effectively taken the place of our original tribe, clearly demonstrated in its claim to nationhood (the nation being the natural extension of our original tribe), demanding its members commitment, loyalty and (in times of war) altruistic sacrifice.

 

What liberal statists are doing is taking the tribal role of the state seriously: thus the demand for state health care, for example, because the tribe was responsible for all its members well-being.

 

In taking the tribal role of the state seriously, they are, of course, serving themselves (often quite ruthlessly), by securing their own position within the tribe, i.e. the state. This is what motivates them.

 

I'm just scratching the surface here of what is a whole new way (paradigm) of understanding ourselves and our civilization in the light of our evolved Darwinian nature, the implications of which I'm still struggling with myself, and attempting to give expression to in this, http://darwinsprimeapes.blogspot.com/, and other blogs.

The ideology of "Liberal Statism", its unchallenged claim to the "moral high ground" and political power

LINK to Daily Telegraph article, Our human rights culture has now become a tyranny, by Charles Moore.

Charles Moore makes some very good points, but what he is criticizing are mere symptoms of a disease inherent to the state, which in the past we were generally blissfully unaware of, and even now are only beginning to wake up to. It is the state's need for moral authority, in order to justify the immense power it wields (to raise taxes, make and enforce laws, to send its men folk to war, etc.), which it used to derive from its preferred - varying according to circumstance - interpretation of Judeo-Christian scripture.

Until quite recently, the people of these Islands were not free to choose their own beliefs, but were coerced into accepting Christian dogma, which the Church, through the state, that it was instrumental in creating and running, used to exercise its power over society, from the highest noble to the lowest peasant, and from which, of course, it derived huge material advantage for its, especially higher, members (a lot better to be a shepherd than a sheep).

 The precipitous decline in Christian belief in the past century has left a partial moral power vacuum, which has been increasingly filled by secular (overwhelmingly liberal-left) morality, itself virtually the exact, but almost equally extreme, opposite of Nazi morality and ideology, which, of course, its rise to power  was largely an - at the time, understandable - overreaction to, as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Apartheid and Jim Crow.

This liberal-left ideology, which Jonah Goldberg poignantly refers to as Liberal Fascism, now represents the "moral high ground", which everyone (including those on the liberal right) must accept the validity of - or be dismissed and condemned as a rightwing extremist, neo-Nazi or "racist", which are the modern, liberal-statist equivalents of the medieval Jew! Heretic!, Heathen! or Non-Believer, i.e. "not one of us!"