POSTED ON NOVEMBER 2, 2013 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN LIBERALS
A NEW THEORY OF LIBERALISM
A distinguished writer and friend whom we greatly admire writes with timely thoughts based on painful
experience, submitted for your consideration:
I’m always searching for a whole-field theory of liberalism that reconciles its craziness,
destructiveness and sanctimony. I thought the “liberalism is a mental disorder” meme came close,
but in the end was too easy. It’s like having a madman as a villain in a story–you don’t have to
explain, motivate or justify his behavior. It’s the dif erence between “Friday the 13th” and “Crime
and Punishment.”
A recent sad experience with a friend undergoing rehab has left me with another analogue. I now
think liberalism is an addiction and displays all the behaviors commonly associated with
addictive behavior.
Well, not “liberalism” per se. That policy-agenda is really an elaborate metaphorical delusion built
to camouflage the true drug these poor souls crave so desperately: moral superiority.
It’s as powerful as heroin or cocaine. It supplies a terrific high: all sense of personal failure,
betrayal, guilt, inef ectiveness, irrelevance, of being nothing and nobody, disappears in a flash.
Instead our hero feels extraordinarily good about himself. He is helping. He is compassionate. He
is without sin. He is sensitive, caring, part of the solution and not the problem. He feels handsome,
daring and heroic. He thinks it will get him laid. How could he not love this?
He cannot see the harm he is doing, either at the micro level or at the cataclysmic macro level; he
cannot see how his “generosity” with other people’s money, for example, has devastated the black
community, turned it bitter, hopeless, impulsive, violent and addicted itself to free stuf from the
gub’mint as well as the crutch of “racis” to justify everything.
But you have seen this most explicitly in the last few weeks, as Obamacare, a hopelessly idiotic
delusional program meant to redistribute wealth (in the form of medical care) to the unfortunates
who’ve never paid a tax in their lives, has crashed and burned. As anybody who knows anything
about the addictive state knows, when the addict is threatened with the cut-of of his supply, he
becomes a monster.
I saw this with my friend, who it turned out had been lying to me for years about his addictions.
He loved me; I kept him alive. But he could not help himself from using me and feeding me a
tapestry of lies to keep the money coming. I thought I was “helping,” just as liberals think they are
helping. But I learned, finally, that I was just enabling. This is a lesson liberals will never learn.
As the collapse of Obamacare reveals, they go into reflexive monster mode. Like any addict, they
will lie, cheat, steal, even become violent when their supply is threatened. They have no moral
qualms about betraying their closest friends because the moral part of them is dead. They see
only the end of their high and that becomes the defining issue of their life. They will do anything
to protect it. That is why they are such wily opponents and such aggressive defenders of what the
whole of the rational world now realizes was fabrication, delusion and ultimately fantasy.
So if we look to liberate them from the agony they don’t even know they suf er from, we must look
to the known cures of addiction. Terrible, hard work, draining and demoralizing, but I th
A NEW THEORY OF LIBERALISM
A distinguished writer and friend whom we greatly admire writes with timely thoughts based on painful
experience, submitted for your consideration:
I’m always searching for a whole-field theory of liberalism that reconciles its craziness,
destructiveness and sanctimony. I thought the “liberalism is a mental disorder” meme came close,
but in the end was too easy. It’s like having a madman as a villain in a story–you don’t have to
explain, motivate or justify his behavior. It’s the dif erence between “Friday the 13th” and “Crime
and Punishment.”
A recent sad experience with a friend undergoing rehab has left me with another analogue. I now
think liberalism is an addiction and displays all the behaviors commonly associated with
addictive behavior.
Well, not “liberalism” per se. That policy-agenda is really an elaborate metaphorical delusion built
to camouflage the true drug these poor souls crave so desperately: moral superiority.
It’s as powerful as heroin or cocaine. It supplies a terrific high: all sense of personal failure,
betrayal, guilt, inef ectiveness, irrelevance, of being nothing and nobody, disappears in a flash.
Instead our hero feels extraordinarily good about himself. He is helping. He is compassionate. He
is without sin. He is sensitive, caring, part of the solution and not the problem. He feels handsome,
daring and heroic. He thinks it will get him laid. How could he not love this?
He cannot see the harm he is doing, either at the micro level or at the cataclysmic macro level; he
cannot see how his “generosity” with other people’s money, for example, has devastated the black
community, turned it bitter, hopeless, impulsive, violent and addicted itself to free stuf from the
gub’mint as well as the crutch of “racis” to justify everything.
But you have seen this most explicitly in the last few weeks, as Obamacare, a hopelessly idiotic
delusional program meant to redistribute wealth (in the form of medical care) to the unfortunates
who’ve never paid a tax in their lives, has crashed and burned. As anybody who knows anything
about the addictive state knows, when the addict is threatened with the cut-of of his supply, he
becomes a monster.
I saw this with my friend, who it turned out had been lying to me for years about his addictions.
He loved me; I kept him alive. But he could not help himself from using me and feeding me a
tapestry of lies to keep the money coming. I thought I was “helping,” just as liberals think they are
helping. But I learned, finally, that I was just enabling. This is a lesson liberals will never learn.
As the collapse of Obamacare reveals, they go into reflexive monster mode. Like any addict, they
will lie, cheat, steal, even become violent when their supply is threatened. They have no moral
qualms about betraying their closest friends because the moral part of them is dead. They see
only the end of their high and that becomes the defining issue of their life. They will do anything
to protect it. That is why they are such wily opponents and such aggressive defenders of what the
whole of the rational world now realizes was fabrication, delusion and ultimately fantasy.
So if we look to liberate them from the agony they don’t even know they suf er from, we must look
to the known cures of addiction. Terrible, hard work, draining and demoralizing, but I th
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