Fellow Liberals, Have the Courage to Believe You Are Right. Everything Depends on That [June 2006]

Do you think that your political positions are morally superior to positions you've rejected? Sounds strange when you put it that way, doesn't it. Why would you hold a position you weren't convinced was morally superior? Only two possibilities come to mind, unthinkingly following tradition and practicing self-interest divorced from morals.  There are some positions that seem to be adopted by reason alone but since just about everything government does has an effect on the well being of someone, those certainly have a moral dimension, thought about or not.

The first post on this blog claimed our right to believe the moral superiority of our political positions and their firm base in reason. We have to stop cowering in conditional statements and apologetic poses of false modesty. Those are ineffective, weak and are not honest. It's not our personal virtue that is at question, it doesn't all come down to us. It's that our political positions are firmly grounded in the common good, reason over superstition, generosity over greed and facing that large parts of our law favor the wealthy few over the rest with no basis other than that they have the power to bend the law to their liking. If anyone doesn't agree that our positions are superior we should require better arguments than "that's the way it is" and "you're self-righteous" because that's about all there is to most of it.

The fear of asserting the moral superiority of liberalism is that we'll be as obnoxious as William Bennett, that moral exemplar of the right, and the rest of those modern moral exemplars who lecture us continually while enjoying lives that would make ancient Roman aristocrats blanch. Now that Ann Coulter has joined that number there is no doubt that morality or even sanity are not requirements to march in with them. There are people who like to lord their own superiority over other people but they are mighty few on the left as compared to those on the right. Conservatives certainly haven't suffered any ill effects from their being moral nags.

Of course, if we stand behind our convictions they will accuse us of self-righteousness. They do now even when there is a total absence of any assertion of righteousness on our part. As mentioned this is in the face of the tidal wave of finger waving everyone but the wealthy gets from the right wing axis of drivel. They'll do it anyway but why should we listen to them? Are you afraid of annoying conservatives? If one of us gets too full of themselves that 's the time to tell the person to cut it out but it's no reason to stop believing in our positions.

Conservatives, as always, make the mistake of thinking that morality is all about them, an adornment of their sacred selves. That's how they see it and they think that's the way everyone does. But that's their problem, not ours.

People on the left have some great examples to follow. There is no doubt that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. had a deep knowledge of his moral failings. There isn't a great moral leader who isn't aware of their flaws. And there were people like J. Edgar Hoover to remind him if he ever forgot. But can you doubt that he had absolute faith in the rightness of his beliefs? He put his life, the lives of his family and friends, the bodies and lives of countless people on the line for those beliefs over and over again. And no one knew more about what that really risked than he did. He knew from experience that some day the attacks he and his family had survived would likely end in one that would kill them. He knew what that looked like, he had seen it with his own eyes. Keeping on with that knowledge doesn't come without complete conviction.

If we don't have the courage to believe in the morality of our positions, we won't ever have the courage to change anything.

Update:  2013   I stand behind the ideas this piece is based on though, in a number of ways, it is somewhat naive.  Since I wrote it I've come to see a lot of the people I was encouraging to believe in their positions are not really especially liberal but are just a different flavor of libertarian.

It was also after writing this that I came to see that materialism was fatal to liberalism - in the modern, American sense of the word, not the perversion of laissez-faire economics.  American liberalism is founded in the intensely radical position that people- I'd say all of sentient life - transcends the limited consideration allowable in materialism.  Peoples' lives and experience transcend the economic and utilitarian analyses allowable under materialism.  And the key to that position is the radical, counter-intuitive FAITH that all people are created equal, the proof of that found in the long human history of the disastrous consequences of denying that belief.  We are at the cusp of discovering the further existence of the human species depends on seeing the world in transcendent terms, terms that are anathema to materialism.

So often, while looking at the writings of materialists during my study of them, I'm impressed how often, explicitly on the basis of  that materialism, people otherwise presented as being in some way progressive will deny that equality is real.  My study of eugenics, both before and after the most glaringly clear trial of eugenics in the 20th century, especially, of course, that under the Nazis in Germany, has led me to believe that materialism will always tend towards a basic denial of equality, a presumptuous advocacy of seeing people as of unequal, reduced to the most banal of economic analysis.  In that, such "liberals" are no different from the most primitive of "rightists" except in a few details of expression.  Eugenics was considered a progressive, even liberal idea.  That could not be more untrue if by "liberal" you mean the American style of liberalism.

There were two reasons I started writing blog posts, one was trying to discover why American liberalism had failed.   Looking back, another was my shock in seeing "liberals" on blogs widely supposed to be liberal expressing a denial of equality,  a denial of free will, a denial of the reality of morality.  Of course I'd been seeing such things expressed by people on "the left" for decades but never so explicitly expressed as on blogs and comment threads.   In that I saw one of the keys for understanding the failure of liberalism, which is far, far more radical than most of what is called "the left".  When I read such books as Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson, I saw that what was derided by such "leftists" as backward and compromising was, in fact, far more radical and far more a departure in real life consequences from what constituted the "right" than  alleged "radicalism,"  generally Marxist or otherwise materialist, was.

The frequently expressed hatred of "liberals" by "the left"  is frequently not much less than that same hatred expressed by the far right.  The reason for that is that real liberalism, the insistence that people exist as the possessors of rights and obligations to respect those rights, exceeding the material and economic analyses so beloved of such "leftists", isn't a rival to "the left", it is an absolute negation of that economic, utilitarian dogma.  That kind of "leftism" fails to produce real, human progress towards an equal, decent, peaceful, life in a sustained environment because it doesn't believe in what is necessary to produce that.  They believe the metaphysical basis of that is an illusion.  I absolutely doubt you can really believe in what real liberalism is based in and materialism at the same time."   That accounts for how so many of the "far left" have found it so easy to go to the far right, it's because the basis of both of them is, for all practical purposes, identical.   It is the far more radical position of traditional American liberalism that is different and far more difficult, requiring real sacrifice of peoples' personal abilities to rig things for their personal advantage when they have the intelligence, social, ethnic, gender or economic position to do so.

You have to really, truly believe in equality, inherent rights and the reality of a moral obligation to respect those  in order to sacrifice for them.  In that sacrifice is found the real existence of liberalism and the only real meaning of human life and experience.