George Jonas and the Like.

Since Larry G liked the GJ article I posted, here is another, Liberalism: It’s Own Worst Enemy.

As Kagan notes, born-again autocracy masquerading as a respectable alternative to Western-style government is a dangerous ideological rival to liberal democracy. Any others? Well, there’s militant, theocratic Islam, a self-evident rival since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Tribalism is another obvious rival, though probably self-limiting. Competing tribal doctrines might ignite cruel little wars, but lack the monolithic force of totalitarian ideologies. Actually, a European Union-type of techno-corporate state seems a greater threat to a free society. The EU’s kind of supra-national bureaucracy, less bloody and more sophisticated than a communist state, is nearly as coercive and more likely to succeed.

I think the force with the greatest capacity for becoming a threat to liberal democracy is liberalism itself — meaning loony-liberalism, a kind of ideological ménage à trios between Timothy Leary, Karl Marx and Al Gore, at once passionate and arid, that in Western societies has all but captured the educational and judicial machinery of the state. In some, it’s a virtual state religion, whose matriarchal, environmentalist, multicultural, anti-male, anti-family, anti-individual and public-hygiene shibboleths are enforced by Orwellian regulatory agencies, commissions and tribunals, better known as the smoke-, smut-, seat-belt-, thought-, language-and calorie-police.

It’s good to remember that we are not small in numbers, we who fight against encroaching totalitarianism, and we have many wise people* on our side. Wisdom, now there’s something in short supply on the left, cleverness and arrogance they have by the bucketful, but wisdom? They don’t even have doubts.

*For example, Theodore Dalrymple. ["People who deny responsibility for their own actions use a language that portrays them as passive victims of circumstance." "The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism."]

And Thomas Sowell. His book A Conflict of Visions should be compulsory reading for all high schools.

Here’s a quote I picked up on his site:
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
— T. S. ELiot.

Does that remind you of a certain someone?

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