Posted by
Icarus on Saturday, April 18, 2009 1:41:43 PM
A post by Jonah Goldberg, at
National Review Online's blog The Corner, inspired me to pull out a book I've not looked at for some time, Robert Nisbet's
Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. In it I found Nisbet's definition of "Liberalism" very interesting given the times we are in today. It begins:
"The question is how liberalism has come to represent, after two centuries, so blatantly schizoid a condition. There are two easily predicatable penchants in the contemporary liberal mind. One has to do with power, the other with freedom reaching the boundary of license. Liberasl are first and most important the ardent oadvocates of the kind of power that is resident in the national state. They are never so happy as when something in the private economic or social sector is being broght within the purview of the federal bureaucracy. When they see somthing big and private, they lust for its nationalization.
"But at the same time contemporary liberals are perversely the friends, if not the ardent advocates, of certain types of freedom in the moral and legal realms. They sympathize with the mugger and the rapist in contrast to the vicitm. Indeed the only victim with whom liberals identify is what they call the victim of society, of a social order not yet fully politicized in the name of equality. There is no extreme of obscenity and pornography that liberals will not justify in the name of the First Amendment. Fully liberated women, homosexuals, lesbians, sniffers of cocaine, members of the Weatherman underground, and thrice-convicted felons who can write letters are all objects of liberal adoration. The lover of political power, a liberal is the knee-jerk adversary of al moral authority."
I do not believe that anything approaching a majority of those who voted for Obama in November, 2008, approach "so blatantly schizoid a condition." I think they care about their fellow Americans, but were too busy watching
Dancing with the Stars, or
Lost and getting their news from the various
Alphabet Networks that they did not know to whom they were giving power.