Belief in equal rights as a state of grace

Bruce Charlton is somewhat of a kindred spirit of mine when it comes to voting.  In fact he takes his criticism further than I do: he repudiates voting as a stupid and even demonic decision procedure tout court, at any scale and in any context.  So there are bus stops even further down the line than I go.

Below a post on why the political Left feels no qualms about engaging in voter fraud (well worth reading in its own right), I commented as follows (edited and expanded):

The Left recognizes that the process of voting is meaningless – what matters is getting the ‘correct’ answer. 

I don’t think that fully captures the relationship between the Left and voting. The Left cares deeply about equal rights. Indeed it cares about little else. All the “social justice”, all the looking out for the little guy against The Man, all the disquietingly clinical “compassion” is fundamentally, for liberals, about rectifying inequalities.  “Equal rights” is justice to the liberal mindset, despite the fact that it reduces the incommensurable value of human beings to utilitarian calculation, setting itself against nature and nature’s God.  Universal suffrage voting is the sin qua non of equal rights, the liturgy in which each autonomous individual expresses precisely, quantitatively equal political power.  It is the Black Mass in which all of the autonomous Wills of self-created free and equal individual liberals are aggregated into one tremendous Will.

The problem is that humanity doesn’t always choose liberalism; therefore giving precisely equal political power to all of humanity does not in practice result in the undistilled liberalism that it “should”.

Liberalism solves this problem by dividing actual humanity into liberals and enemies of liberalism. But because actual enemies of liberalism cannot exist – if liberalism had enemies, that would imply that liberalism asserts the substantive moral superiority of one group over another, a violation of absolute equality – the enemies of liberalism are viewed as something less than human, as clinical impediments, as subhuman disease rather than human enemy: as the untermensch. In practice then liberalism becomes an expression of the wills of free and equal supermen, self-created through reason and will, emancipated from the chains of history, tradition, arbitrary (that is, non-willed) nature, and anything else that stands in the way of the emergence of the free and equal emancipated new man.

All forms of modernity share this human/subhuman division of humanity as a way of resolving the inherent dissonance: that in order for liberalism to be legitimate on its own terms everyone must equally want it and freely embrace it; but in fact, in the end, nobody really wants it. So those who overtly reject liberalism are Nazis: in one of history’s great ironies, the Nazi becomes the ultimate transcendent oppressor-untermensch, contrasted to liberalism’s free and equal new man.

Right wing racist sexist homophobic Nazis aren’t the only group that leftism dehumanizes, by any means.  Anyone who isn’t the emancipated new man – self created through reason and will, the autonomous demigod Chooser precisely equal to every other Chooser – ultimately stands in the way of liberalism, and must either be assimilated or destroyed.  Medical waste bins are filled with the hacked up body parts of other subhumans, while still others are slowly dehydrated to death, having lost their capacity to autonomously choose.  But political right wingers aren’t just subhuman.  They have chosen their subhumanity, chosen to reject and oppress the liberal vision of unfettered freedom and absolute non-judgmental equality for all: a transcendent affront and heresy.

I’ve discussed this dynamic in a number of places over the years; e.g. here (and in the comments there).

Anyway, to the extent the Left uses whatever tactics it has to in order to disenfranchise the illiberal untermensch it is justified (in the leftist’s view), because they are Nazis anyway and ideally shouldn’t be allowed to vote. The liberal sees someone who votes based on illiberal motives similarly to how the average conservative sees felons who vote, or even dead Chicagoans.

Non-liberals[*] haven’t fully accepted the liberal social contract, and so they are not in the proper state of grace to receive the Sacrament.

[*] In reality, nearly everyone in modern first world societies has some greater or lesser loyalty to political liberalism.   But much like the “fact” that everyone who believes in stricter rules of engagement than I do is a radical pacifist, everyone to the political right of me is a racist sexist homophobic Nazi.