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Liberalism as Addiction
Philosophy; Posted on: 2008-05-14
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Love Me, I'm a Liberal
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by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Modern liberalism, so apt to see every social pathology as a form of
mental or
emotional illness, invites the application of a similar perspective on
itself.
Whether the issue in question has to do with teenage promiscuity,
adultery,
prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, kleptomania, school shootings, child
abuse, gang warfare, or corruption in government (though never cor****ate
greed, tax evasion, or white-collar crime), the liberal is always in a
hurry
to attribute the cause to the irrational yet irresistible impulse to
antisocial behavior. But this Weltanschauung that dims and enfeebles the
moral
imagination is a form of mental and moral addiction, operating on the mind
and
soul much as cocaine or whiskey act upon the body to induce intoxicating
highs
in the short run and intellectual deterioration, moral laxity, and
self-indulgence in the long one.
For thousands of years, Homo sapiens has resorted to drugs and alcohol to
achieve gratification across a spectrum of powerful sensations, among them
euphoria, the illusion of power, the transcendence of limits, and
self-integration with the cosmos. Liberalism provides access to all these
sensations, by ideological rather than chemical means. It is not
coincidental
that 20th-century liberalism, and not libertarianism, should have been
inseparably associated with what originally was called “free love” and
later
“***ual liberation,” and with the drug culture. The libertarian idol is
unfettered Action; the liberal one, Sensation—Action being subordinated to
the
instrumental role of promoting and sup****ting Sensation. What is more, for
liberals, the proximate object of sensation is always oneself. That is
only
one of many reasons why liberalism from its beginnings has recognized in
religion its foremost enemy.
Ultimately, there is no addiction without denial, whether in respect of
oneself or others. Recent presidential campaigns in the United States have
been marked by dishonest and disloyal repudiations of liberalism by
liberal
Judases in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Since Ronald
Reagan’s
last hurrah on the campaign trail in 1984, scarcely any American
politician
has permitted himself to be tarred by the “L-word” without making it clear
that he regards it as a fighting one. The easy temptation is the cynical
one,
to reply to the denial with a horselaugh. Yet addiction is addiction, as
every
addict’s family—far better than the addict himself—knows all too well.
Denial
may indeed be a conscious, or semiconscious, lie to oneself or to others.
More
often, it is simply a part of the illusory aspect of addiction. The
chemical
addict has existed so long in his drug-induced Shangri-La that it seems
like
empirical reality to him. Wholly acclimated and acculturated to the
entrancing
colors, sensuous textures, thrilling intensity or beguiling languor, and
heightened reality of this opiate world, he cannot recognize it as an
inverted
world—inside out, upside down, and viewed through a looking glass. It is
entirely possible, for instance, that Sen. John McCain believes in all
honesty
that he really is a conservative appointed to confront a party of
wild-eyed
liberals in the fall. He is part, after all, of a society to whose
drinking-water supply the liberal love potion was added some generations
ago.
If 300 million Americans daily consumed water that in fact was 50-percent
white wine, no one of those 300 million would be in a condition to
distinguish
the mildly squiffed state of his compatriots from his own pleasantly
relaxed
one. Likewise, neither Mayor Giuliani nor Mitt Romney nor Mike Huckabee
nor
Newt Gingrich nor President Bush considers himself to be a liberal. All he
knows is that he is not a Neanderthal. And Neanderthals didn’t have wine
to
drink, only water—and fresh blood.
Chemical addicts drink, snort, smoke, and shoot up to escape from reality.
Liberals embrace, or hold to, the doctrine of liberalism for the same
reason.
They do not take reality for their starting point for the very good reason
that, like all addicts, they have no interest in, or concern for, present
reality, but rather the realization of a new reality and the
transformation of
the human condition. Ignoring reality is a highly self-destructive habit,
and
so liberals are committed, equally with other addicts, to slow-motion
suicide.
“Liberalism,” James Burnham thought,
"has come to be the typical verbal systematization of the process of
contraction and withdrawal [italics mine]; . . . liberalism motivates and
justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it."
The instinct for withdrawal, added to guilt, self-criticalness, and
self-hatred, are classic symptoms of the addicted personality, as well as
the
liberal one. And in liberalism’s role in “reconciling” society to
withdrawal
and contraction, we discern still another parallel between the addict’s
tendency to attempt to draw others within the circle of his own illusory
universe.
In the land of the inebriate, the half-drunk man is king. Or so one might
suppose. Unfortunately, it is the half-drunk, not the drink-sodden, who
experience the heightened excitement of intoxication—who throw themselves
out
of windows in the expectation of flying, in preference to falling
downstairs
in a heap on the way out. Burnham thought that liberalism’s clammy-handed
hold
on public opinion and policy made it extremely difficult, if not
impossible,
for the Western nations adequately to face the problems that confronted
them
in the 1960’s—those arising from the Cold War, in particular.
The withdrawal from, or refusal to recognize, reality is an im****tant part
of
liberalism, but it is hardly the whole of it. Equally pernicious is
liberalism’s transcendental tendency. Liberals have often been accused of
wanting to bring down Heaven to earth. In fact, the heresy of liberalism
goes
further than that, by intimating that earth is really Heaven in disguise,
if
only we had the imagination to recognize it for what it really is. I
expect
that even atheists experience that warm interior glow, the sensation of
being
spiritually whole and complete and connected with something universal,
that
comes from sudden reconciliation, usually unexpected, with the most
unlikely
person, most commonly an enemy or a stranger one has rubbed the wrong way.
In
company with the saints, liberals hunger after this sensation, world
without
end. But unlike the saints, their means are insufficient to realize it,
and so
their reward is a frustrating sense of incompleteness, inadequacy, and
inexpungable guilt—the liberal’s distingui****ng psychological trait.
One of the many contradictions of modern liberalism is that an ideology
that
professes faith in the free and unfettered individual is deeply suspicious
of
the efficacy of individual action to solve what liberalism views as the
“problems” of society and of the world. Liberals, like the rest of us,
regard
good deeds by individual men and women as commendable—commendable, but
hardly
more than a brave and defiant gesture, like writing an inspirational poem
no
one will read. Liberals, assuming all human problems to be systemic,
insist
that these can be overcome only by systemic means—a hierarchy, that is, of
organizations and bureaucracies culminating in the state. The difficulty
is
not simply that the liberal assumption is a false one; it is that the
profoundly religious impulse to transcend self through good works is
compromised by the equally profound libido dominandi that is aroused by
participation in the life of social organizations that are by nature
competitive—that is, political. So the urge to self-transcendence is
joined
with, and fatally compromised by, the lust for power and for dominance—not
least the power to impose a regime of forced self-transcendence on society
as
a whole.
The sensation of power is as overwhelming a one as that of an harmonic
unity,
and indeed the two may overlap to a considerable degree. For those people
who
feel they have succeeded in transcending the world, the conviction that
they
have earned the power to rule the world comes naturally. Rule and harmony
are
not, of course, contradictory things. But the spiritual nature of
transcendence, and the earthly nature of power, are irreconcilably opposed
to
each other. Liberalism, for the last two centuries at least, has been
pulled
almost apart by the tug of war between these two—without liberals
themselves
knowing anything about it. Secure within the iridescent bubble of their
addiction, they have been content to remain ignorant of the possibility
that
any contradiction might exist at all. Liberals have long since forgotten,
if
indeed they ever knew, that love is humble.
Continue
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