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
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