Someone objects to me having said that liberalism is about moral absolutes. Well, the real thing is. It isn't about anything else. And when you have one thing as a moral absolute, you have to hold its opposite to be morally wrong and to fight against it. And I've gone through those moral absolutes often enough that even people who read me casually know what I'm about to say without having to think about it. Liberals hold that everyone, including them, has a real moral obligation to treat people equally and that they have a right to being treated exactly that same way, especially they have the same right to being treated well. Liberals hold that everyone has the same rights to have their rights respected and that no one is entitled to a privileged position in that. No one is more equal than anyone else. Not even the clever and hip in their own minds.
Real liberals hold that people have a right to have their needs met by society and that people who can't provide for themselves are not to be allowed to linger and die in abject, miserable poverty while other people wallow in an excess of material luxuries. That people have no right to bend the law to allow them to steal from the mouths of the poor and destitute or even the lower middle class to add to the billions they've already managed to get through dis-illegalized theft, as O Henry may have put it. Real liberalism is founded on what gets called "The Golden Rule" and, as Jonathan Edwards did put it, "liberal provision" to the poor by society. It is founded on the absolute equality of all people. In fact, since the objection to my talk about liberalism as moral absolutes equates it to fundamentalism (I doubt the guy really knows the meaning of the word) here's more of what the vilified Calvinist preacher of hell fire and damnation said on the topic of equality,
The proper objects of our liberality are not limited to those of the same people and religion because our enemies, those that abuse us and injure us, are our neighbours, and therefore come under the rule of loving our neighbours as ourselves.
Now, isn't it a poor excuse for liberalism if Jonathan Edwards, in Puritan ridden 18th century Massachusetts outdoes Mr. Liberal in 21st century New York City in his liberality? As could be pointed out, apropos of my second post yesterday, he certainly outdoes most of the liberals since the Georgia Peanut Farmer, Jimmy Carter, in terms of liberal provision to the destitute and so many of the heroes of liberals in the post-war period. He was more radical in terms of economic justice than most of the lauded Brit radicals who were so notably stingy to the poor, spending endless turgid words about how to make the inadequate subsistence they insisted on was bountiful even more inadequate, so as to not spoil the poor and their children.
No, liberalism stopped existing, certainly in any kind of real or effective form, when it applied a lazy moral relativism to its basic moral holdings and capitulated to the privileged. The liberals who did that were mostly from the affluent and near affluent class, or those holding degrees as a ticket to affluence, replacing snobbery and a concentration on lifestyle issues for the basic moral holdings of liberalism. Liberalism became about defending smut from being called smut more than it did providing for poor folks. It has devolved further, as the internet has taught me, into disdain for the very people who liberals once existed to defend and champion.
If I had to bet on it, I'd bet on lots more of those "fundamentalists" finally taking the moral absolutes taught by Jesus seriously and becoming liberals in deed if not in word, even as those officially denominated liberals retreat farther back into neo-liberalism and then neo-conservatism. It was left to the last great liberal president we've had, the Southern conservative educated as a public school teacher - who the Ivy League product, The Best and the Brightest* disdained as a vulgarian - to make the greatest attack on poverty and make the greatest progress towards legal equality in our history. Johnson's progress was built on the effort and suffering of, largely, Southerners who still believed in the reality of those moral absolutes. It was the War on Poverty that neo-liberals and neo-conservatives attack because they don't believe its goals are more than delusional, not the way the world really works.
You've got to believe that equality is real and absolutely morally binding to be a liberal and if you don't believe it's really real, you're already on the down slide.
The history of the past thirty-five years proves, liberalism isn't just on the ropes, it's lying on the mat and the man is counting. And that isn't all because conservatives are pulling every dirty trick they can, I don't mind pointing out with the help of that media that the pseudo-liberals, especially those who make money off of the media, spend so much of their time defending instead of real poor people in all their unpicturesque unfashionableness**. It's because real liberalism was found to be hard and definitely unfashionable and was given up by "liberals" who wanted to be groovy and up on the latest trends in the 1960s and getting it on in the 1970s. "Liberalism" became all about ending the broadcasting code and restrictions on I Am Curious Yellow (a remarkably stupid movie posing as art) which, since you could make money off of them, were far easier to do in comfort than mount The Poor Peoples' Campaign and things like that.
* Who pressured him to escalate the war in Vietnam and sandbagged his efforts to end our involvement, splitting the liberal coalition and, as The Reverend King predicted, would divert the funds needed to implement the War on Poverty. Those Ivy League liberals were never liberals. The Ivys are where kids get talked out of real liberalism. Look at Obama and his economic team.
** Those real poor people so stubbornly refuse to look like they came out of a Walker Evans print or the cast of Grapes of Wrath.
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