To all: thank you for the comments. As ever they are appreciated, whether or not I agree with what's been said. In the article I refer to a difference between American 'liberals' and Liberalism. Sabrina also refers to the same difference (all I have to say to you, you trollop, is 'Yeah, what she said').
The American Left is so far removed from the intellectual rigor, discipline and dedication of the European Left that I'm almost embarrassed to use the word in connection with the self-indulgence, over-weening arrogance, petulance, spleen and infantilism of a gaggle of celebrities and self-publicising political lightweights that characterise 'democratic' politics in this country. The defining characteristic of this cabal of wannabes and hasbeens is not its liberalism (they are utterly illiberal in any meaningful sense of that word) but its socialism. The nakedness of that word is covered by the figleaf of a johnny-come-lately political category, that of 'communitarianism'.
I won't bore you with the history of term, but in general, in America, it is taken to mean an emphasis upon the community at the expense of the traditional liberties of the individual, and a reliance upon government to provide solutions from the top down, solutions that are better created and administered at a local level. In principle communitarianism in its American 'left' forms relies upon redistribution of income via progressive taxation policies (from the rich to the poor - and I, since I'm one of the 55% of the American population who pays taxes, am one of the rich - even though my income is presently below the median figure) and the sacrifice of personal responsibility and accountability to fictions such as quota systems in employment and education, quotas based on skin color.
In Britain the socialist experiment that began with the Labour government that came to power in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and received its final death blow at the hands of that vile creature, Margaret Thatcher, was primarily characterised by state ownership of industries such as coal and steel production, the railways, medical provision, and others. In America, more crudely, it's charaterised by the belief that any and all problems are to be resolved through state expenditure, and that the failure of any particular social program can be rectified by pouring good money after bad.
It's political philosophy, insofar as it has one, is based on the premise that no individual can be held to account for any failing in his personal life because every individual is in fact no more than a product of his community. His 'value-system', derived from his community, is deficient - rather than his character. Everyone is to be 'helped' out of poverty, because poverty is no more than economic deprivation contingent upon the resources (or lack of them) within his community - not whether individuals are too stupid, too weak, too lazy, too irresponsible, too self-indulgent, to do something about their situation themselves.
An example: I know myself to be a lazy man - so it's to my advantage that I can't claim welfare till I've been a resident here for ten years. It means I'm forced by necessity to work since I'm not so lazy that I'm willing to live in poverty when by my own effort I can attain a lifestyle that satisfies me. By the time I'm able to claim welfare I'll have no need to do so - because I presently have a sufficient incentive to make me take care of shit now.
But the natural-born American has no such incentive. Instead, like the old Labour slogan promised to the people of Britain after WW2, he has 'care from the cradle to the grave'.
This crude, money-based, socialism by another name is what passes in America for 'liberalism' (and yes, I know what I've written is a caricature - but it has within it a grain of truth).
Liberalism, by contrast, is a set of principles and a political philosophy characterised by individual agency, individual responsibility, and individual accountability. Its political economy is characterised by Adam Smith's 'guiding hand' of free-market economics and laissez faire Capitalism and it too, in its best practice, gives primacy to individual agents, characterising them as responsible and accountable for their actions.
Where the American Left describes people as being motivated by needs and by rights, the Liberal describes people as being motivated by character and by obligation. Character is whatever there is in a man that can be discerned about him through observation of the general quality of his actions in the world - and while character has in it something that derives from the community into which he was born and its influence, and something in particular from his parents and family, character is what results from those influences in the response to his world of the individual concerned, results for which he is responsible and can be held to account by wider society.
The question of rights in America is complicated by the existence of the Constitution - which mixes a tiny handful of natural rights, the right to pursue happiness (to pursue it, not have it handed to one on a plate) for example, with a great many more artificial and constructed rights (the right to privacy, for example, which by some bizarre extension has led to a 'right' for a mother to kill her children, so long as she does it while the majority of the child is still in the womb). The Constitution makes the question of rights complex because there is enormous confusion, particularly on the Left, as to which is natural and inalienable and which is constructed and artificial. Since the latter has somehow been ellided into the former so that nothing seems to distinguish them, and since the Constitution itself is a production of Man, it seems that not merely the creation of rights but the satisfaction of them as well must proceed from the actions of the Agent that first formulated and proclaimed these rights - 'the government'.
In the process of this ellision taking place, all question of obligation appears to have been entirely forgotten. Political obligation, how it's legitimately created and how it's legitimately satisfied and maintained, has long since passed from American political discourse - whether of the Right or the Left.
Political obligation is something incumbent upon the citizen simply in virtue of his being a citizen. If citizenship confers rights (whether this be in the form of the recognition and proclamation of a natural right, or the creation and conferment of an artificial right) it of necessity also carries obligations - because you can no more have a political right without a corresponding obligation than you can have water without both hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
If the citizen enjoys the protection of the state as a right then he is under obligation to contribute to the defence of the state - it's not something you undertake because doing so will pay your way through college. Since you already enjoy by right the benefit that creates the obligation, that obligation is independent of any further benefit that may accrue to you through the obligation's fulfilment. You may of course go into your country's Armed Services solely because doing so will pay for your education - but you then have no right to bitch when you are called to defend your country in a war you didn't expect and in which you may die.
Insofar as American 'liberals' see the individual at all they do so as one whose only obligation is to personal development and personal 'empowerment'. The individual of the Left's imagination is a bag of useless 'needs', needs artificially generated by advertising, over-eating, and an attitude to sex that is obsessively prurient in the same moment that it's obsessively puritanical - as we all know, unless you're a screaming faggot you have no hope for advancement in Hollywood, because the new puritanism of the Left insists that it's immoral (and financially improvident) not to conform to whatever its latest sexual/social diktat is - and homosexuality, like blackness, is the new chic.
As part of this new puritanism the Left requires that each individual submit himself to these needs in a kind of permanent ecstasy of instant gratification - because self-control and self-discipline, the deferment of gratification in the interest of some larger goal (which is the bedrock of the Liberal character) has become, somehow, unnatural. And again, as we all know, whatever is unnatural is also immoral.
The American 'Right' (which is as far removed from the strength, conviction and self-sacrifice in a greater cause that led to the writing of Burke's 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' or the creation of the 'Federalist Papers' or, indeed, the Constitution, as the Left is from its ancestors in Europe) ought to be much more Liberal than the 'liberals' of the Left. At least, when I considered the everyday language of the Right here, minimal government, minimal taxation, personal responsibility and accountability, I was tempted to consider them Liberals in the old sense of the word.
In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The Right in America are, simply, conservatives - some of them even Conservatives with a large 'C', as was that sainted clown Ronald Reagan, so beloved of Margaret Thatcher and so revered for restoring American greatness - which he did, so I'm told, by invading Guyana. Why is it America that your military ventures since the Vietnam war have involved no more than the toppling of miniscule regimes who posed no significant threat to you whatsoever and were many times weaker than you?
It's disquieting to watch the world's last Superpower (and my adopted home) engage in pointless wars with pygmies - and still only just manage to win - if win you have in Iraq.
The Right's conservatism is not motivated by any commitment to a philosophy of accountable and responsible individualism, it's policies are not formed on the basis of a commitment to a vision of the world and the individual's place in it, but are instead motivated by profit maximisation and a revolting, anile nostalgia for an America that never existed, where the drones lived and worked peaceably in their own little cells in the hive and America ruled the world by default and in virtue of possessing a working economy in a world otherwise shattered by catastrophic war.
They talk of the Muslim enemy as if they were generals on a WW2 battlefield, and inept enemies at that, waiting to be crushed by superior firepower. They talk of the American way of life and the American Dream as if America were preserved in the amber of the 1950s, as if that way of life had not changed radically, as if there were not a plethora of American Dreams: the Latino dream, the Black dream, the White dream, paralyzed by self-doubt and confusion as it is. If what they want to conserve once existed it exists no more.
Instead of equal rights for all in a true meritocracy, and equal obligations, they support quotas in education and in employment. Instead of responsibility and accountability they promote the breeding of countless bastards through welfare programs that pay out according to how many children a woman has, irrespective of whether those children can be fed, clothed, housed, educated, without appeal for and reliance on state funds - children that will become as useless and parasitic as the undisciplined whore that bred them.
The Right in America is no more closely connected to the old sense of the word Liberalism than is the Left - and both Left and Right are equally paralyzed by political malaise, political and social ennui, and equally as incapable of inciting in Americans a renewed sense of themselves, a renewed sense of commitment to and willingness to defend what they are. Because both are equally in the dark as to what that is.
Just as the citizens and subjects of fin de siecle Europe welcomed the advent of the First World War because it came to them initially as a breath of life in a world rendered dead and moribund, the life crushed out of it by the weight of outmoded and defunct civilizations, so I welcome the conflict that will, inevitably, consume the remnants of the world that came to be in the aftermath of two apocalyptic conflicts and the advent of nuclear weapons.
I hope to live long enough to see the world created in the last half of the twentieth century burn to ashes and crumble into the trash heap of history. If I do who knows? I might live long enough to see the rebirth of a true Liberalism once more.
