Pages

Search This Blog

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

The Liberal War on Liberalism

The Liberal War on Liberalism

07/16/14
John Allen Gay
Ideology, Society, Civil Society, Religion, United States, United States of America

Drunk with victory, a creed founded on tolerance is turning away from its roots.

The idea of liberalism, at bottom, is about freedom and toleration. It is less a positive creed than a belief that private choices and opinions ought to be respected. The liberal does not find diversity threatening—or at least does not think the state should be in the business of fighting it. But, of course, liberalism is more than an idea. It is a political movement, and political movements have lives of their own. The ideas they are associated with evolve with the movement. Much of modern American conservatism, for example, is only vaguely connected to the conservative idea. Is the American liberal movement going the same way?
Yes, says Damon Linker in The Week, warning of “an ugly triumphalism on the left” that has seen liberalism “decline from a political philosophy of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant dogma.” He cites as examples the public campaign that led to the firing of Mozilla Foundation head Brendan Eich over his donation to a 2008 campaign against gay marriage in California, a range of efforts to restrain intellectual freedom at universities, and the warnings of imminent American theocracy that followed a rather narrow Supreme Court ruling on one of the finer points of the Obamacare contraception mandate. “What makes [all this] a dogma,” he writes,
is the inability or unwillingness of those who espouse it to accept that some people might choose, for morally legitimate reasons, to dissent from it. On a range of issues, liberals seem not only increasingly incapable of comprehending how or why someone would affirm a more traditional vision of the human good, but [also] inclined to relegate dissenters to the category of moral monsters who deserve to be excommunicated from civilized life—and sometimes coerced into compliance by the government.
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-liberal-war-liberalism-10882

No comments: