American Liberals Are Idiots.

“Human reason is beautiful and invincible…It establishes the universal ideas in language, and guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice with capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, it is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.”
-Czeslaw Milosz

My first post mentioned that I would graciously offend every one of my readers at some point during the course of my blog. Considering who my readers are, this might be the one post which reaches that difficult quota. As a man who reads memoirs of ex-Black Panthers; idolizes Malcolm X, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. and The Weathermen; subscribes to anti-capitalist magazines; and has had rubber bullets fired at him from police during war protests, I feel my own leftist credentials are sound enough for me to step out there a little bit and comment on some things that have been pissing me off about those who generally share my ideals. My intention is not to preach, but rather to address my own concerns regarding what I perceive to be growing suicidal flaws in the thinking and philosophy of American liberals.

First, know thyself. So many people I know will quickly and unashamedly describe themselves as “liberals” whenever they are asked about their political beliefs…and often when they are not. While I admire their enthusiasm, I often wonder how much thought they put into this statement. I think most of these people have formulated their political opinions based on the notions of social change and social justice they passionately adhere to. In their own mind, believing in abortion and gay rights puts them at the opposite end of the spectrum from religious conservatives. These people may more appropriately call themselves “progressives” rather than “liberals.” Liberal is a much broader term that owes it roots to Liberal Political Theory. This is the philosophy developed during the enlightenment eras of French and English history, and means (in a very oversimplified explanation) human beings are given natural rights and social equality by God, and government exists merely to ensure that these rights are not trampled on, which is the foundation of our constitution essentially, and the philosophy that defines “Liberal Democracies” as governments that effectively serve this purpose, i.e. don’t abuse the civil rights of their citizens. Liberal comes from the word liberty. Conservative, in this sense, would represent the philosophy of a government based on order, and control of citizens. In the Unites States, however, we have tended throughout our history to make Liberal and Conservative economic terms; Liberal, to spend, and Conservative, to save.

Through some strange process (which continues to baffle our European counterparts) liberal has come to mean “big” government, meaning a government that spends on social programs, and conservative to mean small, limited government; governments that do not spend on social programs. Liberalism in its truest sense means individual rights, including the right to free enterprise, which may be at odds with American leftists who generally support government regulation of corporations and commerce, again, more of a progressive value than a liberal one. Why does all this matter (you ask drifting perilously toward a coma)? Because this is a world of post-partisan politics. The linear notion of liberal and conservative is no longer relevant. Liberals generally believe in government regulation of commerce, but not what goes on in our bedrooms. While conversely, conservatives seem to support anti-abortion and homosexuality laws, but will defend the free market vigorously. The important thing is to maintain your political stance on an issue by issue basis, and not take a position because you believe it simply to be the liberal position.

Respect free speech, for God’s sake. If you truly wish to define yourself as a liberal, then do not disrespect the greatest of individual liberties; the right of free speech and expression. There was once a production of “The Vagina Monologues” on my campus. Predictably, a minor outcry from a conservative segment of the student body erupted, which culminated in a demonstration on campus calling for the play to be banned. The demonstration amounted to little more than ten people, but the fear of a larger conservative response provoked a counter-protest from leftist students and faculty, who came out to defend the play. However, defending the free speech of those involved with the production led to a disrespect of the free expression of those who protested it. The much larger counter-protest devolved into surrounding the conservatives and shouting insults at them. Many called for the University to silence them. The liberals never saw the irony. Free speech means ALL speech. Those students had every right to protest that play, as the players had every right to put it on. Liberals have got to stop censoring opinions they do not agree with. It represents complete cowardice and self-righteousness. In this light, campus speech codes must be abolished outright. The conservative movement has grown stronger than the progressive movement, simply because conservatives have been the only ones with the balls to make an argument. Opposing opinions strengthen a debate, and cause the opponents to reach further understanding. Beyond that, a person who holds so weakly to their own beliefs, so much so they cannot even stand coming into contact with someone who disagrees, has no right to defend those beliefs publicly.

What happened to Feminism? Susan B. Anthony was a Feminist. Alice Stokes Paul, Dorothea Dix and Carrie Chapman Catt were Feminists. The other suffragettes who marched, and were imprisoned so women could have the right to vote were Feminists. My mother, who worked ten hour days, while my father stayed home and raised me (a domestic environment product of the post-60′s gender role reversal), was a Feminist. These women were also heroes. This heroic brand of Feminism, capital F-Feminism, is gone…replaced by an upper crust, bourgeois version that pales by comparison. Ladies, pull your heads out of your asses. Stop the self-victimization escape of blaming men for all your problems. Take some responsibility for how you treat other women. Negative body image is not caused by a patriarchal society. Most men prefer women with curves. The fashion industry is controlled by gay men and other women, so stop blaming straight guys because you hate how you look. Understand that the aim of true Feminism should be bringing into reality the feminine paradigm of a horizontal society; one that is based on equality of community. Today’s bourgeois feminists fall headlong into the masculine vertical paradigm; one person controlling another, controlling another, with an alpha-figure controlling all. I will always fight women’s inequality in the workplace. The glass ceiling oppression of women must be opposed, but women ask yourself, what is the value of a female President, if she held other women down to get there? And stop treating mother-hood as a taboo concept. Staying home to raise children is not insulting or degrading or oppressive. It is a beautiful sacrifice to ensure the health and stability of your kids. The sacrifices of Feminists in the past ensured that you have a choice as women. You did not have a choice before, and that was oppressive. Now, you can achieve anything you want to achieve, you are bound by nothing and that too is beautiful, but don’t look down on other women who would rather be mothers than professionals.

And congratulations ladies, you have successfully Oprah-ized the American male. The gender war is over, you won. Are you happy now? There are no real men any more because you have made masculinity a dirty word. There are two products of making men hate their own identity: the pathetic emo boy, who is more sensitive than you and talks about his feelings twice as much (and whom I have to lend a shoulder to cry on after a break up, while my female friends sail through break ups beneath the sheets like the most chauvinistic of dudes), and the idiotic, cock-rock, frat boy pseudo alpha male. The kind that watches The Man Show and beats off to the Juggies. The kind who listens to Michael Savage and Gordon Liddy and Bill O’Reilly, and really starts to believe their diatribes about White Christian Men being the truly oppressed in this country. You attacked men with emotion and not intellect, and as a result men have responded with emotion and not intellect. You have made us the weakest specimen of man to ever walk the planet. Is that really what you want?

Stay focused. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to go to war protests and see huge parties of people marching to “Free the Cuban Five.” In our efforts to care as much as possible, we have developed ADD. I am an exteme animal lover, just ask my friends how stupidly giddy I get when I see a puppy Cocker Spaniel walk by, but PETA, give it a rest. People come first. When we solve every human catastrophe in the world, then we can start on the animals.

Stop hating on America For all the flaws with the elitists who run its government, and the social ills that plague its underclass, the USA is still the greatest notion of a country the world has ever seen. Yes we have a violent genocidal past, but so do every one of the European nations we liberals inexplicably admire so much (have you met Europeans? I would rather hang out with Americans any day). Our Constitution is an incredible document. Have you read it lately? I keep a copy in my car so I can have it with me everywhere I go. Respect that Constitution, even the stuff you don’t like. If you like free speech and the fact that the police can’t just walk into your house and fuck your wife (well at least not before Bush) then don’t talk about eliminating the right to have guns. We have to be a fundamentalist about the Bill of Rights. If you can cancel one, they can cancel the others. Stop acting like the founding fathers were assholes. They were not Reagan Republicans, they were secular liberals who were slandered as Godless upstarts. Yes, they had flaws, they weren’t perfect, they owned slaves etc. But they also risked execution to bring about the world’s first true democracy. Say what you want about some ulterior motive, that risk was heroic. We have to be fundamentalist about the founding of our country too. If America was not worth creating, then it is not worth sustaining. It takes a pretty spoiled little rich white kid to believe that the freedom and privilege he was born into is somehow not worth sustaining. Any notion about Liberalism and individual rights has to be based on the notion that defending America is good. True liberals criticize American policies because they know we are better, not because they hate this country. We are better than racism, We are better than the Iraq war, we are better than Guantanamo, we are better than the Patriot Act. You know who truly hates America? George Bush and Dick Cheney. You know how I know? They undermined our Constitution at every level. Don’t blame America because those assholes claim to hold a monopoly on patriotism. They are not America. There are the enemy of everything America stands for.

Yes, you have a conscience. I hate moral relativism. If you had a Picasso in your living room, and in the middle of the night someone replaced the painting with an exact forgery, you would wake up believing with absolute certainty that the painting on your wall was an original Picasso. That would be your reality. Every sense you had would tell you that painting was real. Does believing the forgery is real make it any less a forgery? A recent study interviewed college students about the holocaust. What they found was horrifying. A majority of the students interviewed said they didn’t agree with the holocaust, but, much worse, didn’t feel they were in the moral position to criticize what the Nazis did. Conscience, after all is a subjective thing. Maybe we see the holocaust as wrong, but the Nazis didn’t, and because that was their reality, their innocence must also be a reality. Fuck that. A taste for spicy food is subjective. A dislike of the Foo Fighters is subjective. I hate them, you may not. Genocide must be objectively disdained. There are higher moral issues that cannot be beyond the basic human conscience. A subjectifying of the human conscience is what contributes to mass genocide in the first place. Liberals and progressives are opposed to the beliefs of the religious right. Because the religious right claims to hold a monopoly on conscience, and because leftists are too weak to make an argument, they have surrendered this front. The result are liberals and progressives avoiding arguments of conscience like the plague, and opting instead for ridiculous notions of relativism and a progression towards Atheism. You may not believe in God, but you had better examine the repercussions of what that means. Jean Paul Sartre said his Existentialist philosophy was a strict following of Atheism to its natural conclusion. If there is no God, there must also be no absolute truth. If there is no absolute truth, there is no such thing as right and wrong. If you believe in social justice at all, you must then believe in the concept of right and wrong. How do we define right and wrong? We define it by what our objective conscience tells us is morally acceptable and morally reprehensible. Do not abandon the conscience to religious conservatives. Demand that they bring their conscience out into the open where it can be subject to public criticism. How can followers of a peaceful religion line up gloriously to support war? How can believers of tenets like “love thy neighbor as thyself,” persecute and oppress people of different creeds, races or sexual orientation. The human conscience does not exist because of organized religion, organized religion exists because of the human conscience.

“Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Wheras, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain, and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
-Pope Benedict XVI

Remember that nothing is more sacred than the integrity of your own mind.

More to come. Thanks for caring.