One Of The Self Defeating Habits of Liberals

One of the most aggravating things about liberals - the real ones, the ones who hold that equality, rights and moral obligations are as real as the screen you're reading this on -  is the belief that that means we owe those who oppose equality, universally held rights and a moral obligation to respect those a level playing field in politics.   Politics is a special category of social action BECAUSE it holds the potential to destroy equality, equal rights through handing power to those who either deny equality or who believe they and their side is not morally obligated to respect and observe those rights.  It also holds the potential to make equality and a decent life possible.

Among affluent, would-be,  liberals, those with far less to lose than poor people, people in the working poor and, especially, the destitute, the superstition that they owed right wingers, fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. an equal chance to gain power and destroy democracy, the common good, and, yes, the lives of many, many people is one of the stupidest, most ridiculous and most immoral of scruples.  It will generally be fueled by some stupid saying by Voltaire or Jefferson, both of whom were quite able to be generous to the most depraved of political sides who posed no danger to them but did to large numbers of other people without their resources and position in society.   Anyone who could, especially from a position of total safety,  defend the rights of Nazis, the Rwandan mass murderers, Pol Pot to speech that led to the slaughter of huge numbers of people is, to put it  plainly a preening idiot with no morals and no right to be considered any kind of liberal, certainly not in the American sense of that word.

We have no moral obligation to enable those who advocate inequality, the denial of rights or the denial of a moral obligation to respect the rights of each and every person to the necessities of life, an equal vote, and other benefits of life.   The history of this, the last and each and every other century shows that such people are remarkably able to lie themselves into power where they destroy lives and the equality that is the best insurance against total depravity and despotism.  Anyone who doesn't learn from the history of the Nazis and others who have gone from a multi-party election to putting the homicidal and genocidal despotism they promised their supporters into effect is willfully blind.  The lesson of recent history includes that a "free market-place of ideas" with elections doesn't come with a safeguard against totalitarian fascism being the result.   Real world events in as sophisticated a country as Germany was shows that faith in some unseen hand of nature, holding a society back from falling into the pit under the recipe for democracy simply isn't there.  Reason is certainly not enough, helpful though it can be, neither is mere slogan based scrupulosity.

Liberals fell for some self-defeating lines, mostly at the behest of the publishing industry and the professional writers who had a financial interest in pushing that absurd line.  Liberals do not owe anything to Nazis, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, or any other anti-democratic political ideologues, we don't owe anything to pornographers, capitalists, those who legally enslave people and destroy them for profit and who use government to legalize their doing so.  No, we don't owe them a thing.  Their self-interest, their profit, which is the polluted soil their ideology grows from is not the same as the bases of liberalism, the respect for other peoples' welfare, their needs, their need for and right to the material and spiritual necessities of, not only life but a decent life, is, by right, superior.   Egalitarian democracy, the only kind that deserves the name of democracy, is, in every way, superior to all of the alternatives.

Liberalism begins at a practical disadvantage in persuasion because it is always more difficult to persuade people that it is better to not be selfish than to be selfish, to sacrifice our comfort and luxury for other peoples and, indeed, the entire planet's needs.  We don't need idiots posing as liberals adding the burden that insists that we owe the selfish even more than they've hogged for themselves already.  Such liberals are the ones who turn first.  They have no durable morals because they deny the necessary religious and metaphysical force that makes those durable so they have no problem throwing the poor and disadvantaged and those discriminated against under the bus. Especially if they get to preen and pose and pretend that they are being virtuous as they do it.   Real liberals need to get over them and their polished lines, their theatrical and cinematic lies.  Anything that results in or carries the risk of the opponents of equality and inherent rights gaining power endangers real people and the very real basis of all life.  That and the people advocating that deserve our total and complete opposition, keeping them from power and defeating their program is the one and only reason for political liberalism to exist.  It only exists to the extent that we do so.