Why different kinds of liberals think each other are Nazis
August 13, 2018 § 6 Comments
Liberalism is a theory or understanding of the just exercise of authority. It is specifically commitment to political freedom and, concomitantly, to equality before the law.
Commitment to political freedom is commitment to rights, that is, to the empowerment of certain people or claims; empowerment always and necessarily achieved via authoritative discrimination against other people or claims. I’ve used the metaphor of a coin with a pretty side and an ugly side as an image of how liberalism approaches the question of authority: both sides of the authority coin are always present, but liberals see only the pretty side – the empowerment side that they personally like – of their own coins. Liberalism is thus ultimately a mechanism for people to beg the question in favor of their own preferred exercise of authoritative discrimination.
Picture liberal society, then – the whole society as opposed to individual liberals – as composed of liberals carrying around their coins held high, gazing raptly at (what they personally believe to be) the pretty side. Other people walking along with them in the same direction holding similar coins (where the coins represent each person’s understanding of the just exercise of authoritative discrimination) also see the pretty, empowering side.
When groups of liberals come across other liberals walking a different direction, though, they see the ugly, authoritative side of each others’ coins and accuse each other of being tyrants: of being the Low Man. Each sees the other as inauthentically liberal, as selfish, sick, insane power hungry tyrants who mouth the words of freedom and equal rights but don’t really mean it.
Note: this was originally a comment, but I’ve had to search for it and reference it enough times now that I thought it deserved promotion to its own post.
Zippy Catholic 
Zippy, I’ve borrowed your ‘pretty side-ugly side’ metaphor on numerous occasions in the past to illustrate the same basic point with those in my little circle. All with proper attribution, of course, but nevertheless.
Prof. Bertonneau has recently put up several posts/essays at the Orthosphere that seem to me apropos to your current iteration. Culminating in his review of Le Bon’s The Crowd. The Crowd of Le Bon being what I often now refer to as “the common herd.” Having now read the first few chapters of Le Bon’s The Crowd, I see that he is not telling us anything we ourselves do not already know by first hand experience. What he does say is that the crowd (or mob, or common herd) cannot be persuaded by argument.
When I think of the crowd today, what I most think of is the twits on Twitter and the friends on Facebook, and other forms of (brain-dead) social media. They all comprise a mob, and as such, cannot be persuaded by reason.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
I’m reminded of 1 Peter 3:15 – we should be able to give an account of the hope in us, but that account isn’t itself what converts.
T. Morris:
Yes, that is why well-adjusted “normies” almost inevitably end up in the “green zone”:
TomD:
That’s a pretty interesting association. I’ll have to think about it some more.
I’ve had a rather “eventful” year, but I hope to get back to the “get copies of the Usury book out to clergy” initiative soon. We’ll see if and when Providence smiles on the project.
And thus you get absurdities like, “Soviet Russia was bad, but true communism has never been tried.”
Which, for the record, even a passing familiarity with Bolshevik history proves is on a plane of ignorance and self-conceit to be wondered at by mere mortals.
[…] There are no Nazis. There is only you. […]