Popular morality works through a zero-sum game. In its view, if we remove all of the bad, we are left with good. Under the Platonic conception, we have a duty not only to avoid bad, but to actively achieve good, even through bad methods. This means that pacifism, withdrawal and tolerance are not moral goods, but moral ills.In this difference the extremity of conservatism emerges. It is not enough to avoid acting in a way that appears scary. Nor can one hide behind approving of everyone and everything. In contrast, we each have a duty to do what is moral in order to conserve the ongoing direction toward what is good. While this makes us all policemen for social order, it also obliterates the complacency that allows civilizations to slide toward chaos.[1]
Result: we are left with the left's precious, beloved, moronic "diversity," the perfect formula for importation of and tolerance of our enemies, ethnic strife, and bloodshed.
Notes
[1] "Conservatives, turn to Plato." By Bret Stevens, Amerika, 12/2/15.
6 comments:
I don't attribute any kind of ordinary, logical, quasi-ethical reasoning as outlined in your post to explain the Left's support for open borders. They support this policy (and all the others) to acquire power (and money) and defeat their opponents. The basic low information, non-leftist, democrat will support any policy promulgated by the Left because authority figures they trust make supporting the policy a moral imperative. Conversely, non-support is heretical.
There is that class of operatives who want power anyway they can get it. Still, the idea that all that needs to happen is for bad things to stop being done is prevalent in the liberals I know. I can't think of one exception. What these people are on the lookout for is people who are not Gutmenschen. If you are mean, they are suspicious of you. They must not think that there are enemies in this world because they do nothing that looks like fighting back. The idea of enemies is strange and repellent to them so talk of resistance with them is absurd. YOU are a racist or bigot for counseling self defense or a healthy aggression.
I think liberals actually believe this and it goes beyond obedience to their authority figures.
I would like to find some of those non-leftist Democrats. Surely that is a kind of Democrat that went the way of the passenger pigeon.
Perhaps people prone to the progressive belief have a child like notion that the Bad can be proselytized with words and attitudes and converted into Good.
Why is there an unending empathy for the Other (particularly moslems and criminals). These people are the tools of societal transformation. To the non-ideologue, these people have a prima facie need of a hug.
Democrats (especially friends and relatives we know) can be non-ideologues and avidly support the party line narrative without deviation. We don't understand their thinking except as devotion to a cultist like belief.
Your point about unending empathy for the Other is interesting. I knew a very liberal woman lawyer when I worked in D.C. and it seemed to me that when she went on about homeless people sleeping on steam grates in the winter it was as though she made no distinction between them and her. It seemed she thought strongly that she COULD end up there herself. Definitely some kind of an identification. Now it is worse as middle class people are definitely losing ground and must surely feel anxiety about how thin their margin of security is. That doesn't mean they are liberal but she sure was then. Seymour Martin Lipsett's Political Man argued that people in vulnerable occupations like lumberjacks and stevedores went left so maybe even the diminishing middle class will do so as well. Venezuela couldn't get enough socialism for, what, 14 years but they seem to have tired of privation. Economic upheaval, which I think is in our future, may have the same effect of a short-term swing to the left.
An ardent Democrat relative of mind, for whom I had done a big favor, was visibly distressed at my joke that he had to repay me by listening to a week of Rush Limbaugh. I was just jerking his chain but he got very serious all of a sudden. It wasn't going to happen.
I wish it were proselytization that the left engages in. Character assassination and economic ruin seem more their style.
First, I seem to recall that "Big L" libertarians believe strongly in open borders. I wonder how many of them feel now about millions of illegals flooding across our southern border and the threat of many thousands of young jihadi muslims being deliberately imported into our country by our own government.
Secondly, I can see - having been out of work a couple of times and nearing the end of my resources - how a man with a wife and children who is otherwise conservative could grasp at the straw of welfare to see that his family is fed and sheltered. Thanks to a little help from friends (returning help I had given them) on two occasions, I never had occasion to go there, but with so many out of work in this country, and with the allure of food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits, I'm pretty sure even some conservative people are swallowing their pride and accepting these entitlements.
The difference - as you implied, I believe - is that the Left sees nothing wrong with this, while the conservative at wit's end will stop just as soon as he is successful in getting another job. In the America we inhabit today, however, he could very well end up discovering there is no end to the nightmare he is living.
Reg T, on your first point I think they just don't care. They don't give a damn. Period. Their precious god of Libertyatwhatevercost is what rules. I don't know if this biomechanically correct but when I scratch my nose my arm only uses a portion of the power in the muscles. I don't use all the force I have to that. With humans I think the aberrant mental equivalent is illustrated by the saying that a little learning is a dangerous thing. It's fun to know stuff but learning how to fly a paper airplane doesn't mean that I'm now in possession of the secret of personal flight. Leftists pride themselves on their "compassion" but it becomes a compassion that embraces the entire world. Liberty's great but there are reasonable limits on how other people exercise their liberty and one of those limits is that you don't get to wander around in our country whenever you feel like it.
I believe that people who believe in personal responsibility still have to acknowledge that most people don't have a farm and the kind of self sufficiency we had with that. Our jobs become vitally important to us and it's no joke to be fired or laid off. Unemployment assistance is a reasonable accommodation to the realities of the modern economy. There should be a limit to benefits but that would be no problem if the economy were otherwise humming along, which it has only done episodically since the mid-60s in my casual assessment. Now, an out-of-work breadwinner must surely be justified in feeling something like panic as he sees his prospects so much diminished now. It's far, far from obvious that the savants of government and their lawn jockeys know how to boost the economy. Keeping their hands off of it is the Prime Directive in any sane polity but you can be sure that idea is anathema to those fools.
All the "stimulus" tricks have been tried and the hull isn't rising out of the water now. It's easy to be a doomsayer but where are the indications that anyone grasps the significance of our entitlement programs and unfunded liabilities? Whistling past the grave yard just doesn't begin to capture the degree of self-deception and irresponsibility. If not animus.
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