Cato libertarians take a step to the left

The Cato Institute is a leading libertarian organisation in the U.S. The Institute recently published a significant article about race. It's fascinating to read because it shows the logic of how left-liberalism developed out of classical/right-liberalism.

But I need to quickly set the scene for this. All forms of liberalism begin with the idea that what matters is a freedom of the individual to be autonomous: to have the liberty to choose to be or to do whatever, as long as it does not limit a similar liberty for others to choose to be or to do whatever.

But this raises the question of how a society of atomised, autonomous individuals each seeking their own subjective good can be successfully regulated. Although there is no single answer given by liberals, the dominant form of liberalism in the mid-1800s, classical liberalism, emphasised the idea that the market could best regulate society. Millions of individuals could participate in the free market, each seeking their own profit, but the hidden hand of the market would ensure that the larger outcome was a positive one for society.

So what went wrong? The classical liberals would say that as long as everyone had an equal opportunity to participate in the market, then everyone had an equal human dignity as an autonomous individual.

But in the later 1800s this was queried. If I am poor and uneducated do I really have the same opportunity in the market as someone who is born to private schools and so on? The new liberals thought that there needed to be a greater role for government intervention to overcome institutional disadvantage.

And so the modern left emerged. For decades there has been a right-liberal party which emphasises markets (Republicans, Tories etc.) and a left-liberal one which emphasises government programs to overcome inequality (Democrats, Labour etc.). Libertarians have mostly been purist right-liberal types, pushing for limited government, markets, and liberty understood as individual autonomy.

So it is no surprise that the Cato Institute piece on race begins as follows:

Libertarians tend to think of freedom as either a means to an end of maximum utility—e.g., free markets produce the most wealth—or, in a more philosophical sense, in opposition to arbitrary authority—e.g., “Who are you to tell me what to do?” Both views fuel good arguments for less government and more personal autonomy.

That's exactly what you would expect from someone on the liberal right. Autonomy, free markets, limited government, freedom. But look at what happens next:

Yet neither separately, nor both taken together, address the impediments to freedom that have plagued the United States since its founding. Many of the oppressions America has foisted upon its citizens, particularly its black citizens, indeed came from government actors and agents. But a large number of offenses, from petty indignities to incidents of unspeakable violence, have been perpetrated by private individuals, or by government with full approval of its white citizens.

You can tell what this is leading up to. It's leading up to the left-liberal idea that there are institutional, systemic barriers to equal participation. That disparities in outcomes are to be explained in terms of institutional oppression, racism and systemic discrimination. And that's exactly where the Cato writer goes:

Take, for example, the common libertarian/conservative trope: “We believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” Most people, outside of the few and most ardent socialists, should believe that is a fair statement. But to say such a thing as a general defense of the status quo assumes that the current American system offers roughly equal opportunity just because Jim Crow is dead. Yet, that cannot possibly be true.

Think of the phrase “Don’t go there, it’s a bad neighborhood.” Now, sometimes that neighborhood is just a little run down, doesn’t have the best houses, doesn’t have the best shopping nearby, or feeds a mediocre school. But, more often, that neighborhood is very poor, lacks decent public infrastructure, suffers from high unemployment, has the worst schools, and is prone to gang or other violence. And, in many cities—in both North and South—that neighborhood is almost entirely populated by minorities.

There are only two conclusions possible when facing the very real prospect that thousands or millions of Americans live in areas you warn your friends not to go, even by accident: Either everyone in those areas is a criminal, or is content to live among and be victimized by criminals; or there is some number of people, and probably a large one, trapped in living conditions that cannot help but greatly inhibit their opportunities for success and advancement.

He goes on at length about racism and white supremacy and how the Federal Government has helped to overcome this more than markets have. He stops a short of endorsing big government solutions, but you can see how the logic of his argument prepares the ground for this.

The mainstream left and right are not so different from each other. They both exist within the same philosophical framework, sharing the same assumptions about what human life is for. Mainstream leftism is an attempt to perfect the liberalism that came before it, to realize it in a more equitable and consistent way.

The challenge for those who dislike what the modern West has become is to step outside of the liberal framework entirely - to be neither of the left nor of the classical liberal/libertarian right.

What do Chinese net users think of the white left?

If a Chinese net user wants to insult their opponent they are likely to use the derogatory term baizuo which means "white left." What do they mean by this?

According to one source:

baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Why would ordinary Chinese people dislike the Western left so much? Here is the reason given:

The stigmatization of the ‘white left’ is driven first and foremost by Chinese netizens’ understanding of ‘western’ problems. It is a symptom and weakness of the Other.

The term first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a baizuo for her open-door refugee policy. Hungary, on the other hand, was praised by Chinese netizens for its hard line on refugees, if not for its authoritarian leader. Around the same time another derogatory name that was often used alongside baizuo was shengmu (圣母) – literally the ‘holy mother’ – which according to its users refers to those who are ‘overemotional’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘have too much empathy’.

Many Chinese on social media came to identify Hillary Clinton with the white left and so supported Donald Trump in the American election. When one public intellectual, Rao Yi, took the opposing view,

An overwhelming majority of Zhihu users thought that Rao had only proved that he was typical of the ‘white left’: biased, elitist, ignorant of social reality and constantly applying double standards.

The Chinese seem aware that a modern liberal politics is suicidal:

According to Baidu Trends, one of the most related keywords to baizuo was huimie: “to destroy”. Articles with titles such as ‘the white left are destroying Europe’ were widely circulated.

To understand why the Chinese might reject the white left so firmly, it helps to consider moral foundations theory. This is a theory popularised by Professor Jonathan Haidt. Based on research into different cultures around the world, it was found that there are six basic moral foundations:

1. The care/harm foundation: the focus here is on maximising individual care and minimising harm, protecting the vulnerable.

2. The fairness foundation: not cheating the system, people rewarded according to their contributions.

3. The loyalty/betrayal foundation: being loyal to our tribe/team (including patriotism).

4. The authority/subversion foundation: respecting the authority or hierarchy necessary to preserve social order.

5. The sanctity/degradation foundation: protecting a sense of what is hallowed or sacred in institutions and ideals.

6. Liberty/oppression: not wanting to be dominated/bullied by a tyrant.

What Haidt found was that Western liberals are very strong on the first foundation (and also to a degree the sixth) but are not very committed to the others. Traditionalists, in contrast, were found to hold all six foundations in equal regard.

If, then, you are a Chinese net user, who is used to taking all six moral foundations into account, you are likely to perceive the white left negatively. You will see them putting all the emphasis on the first foundation (care/harm) - hence the criticism of the white left as being "hengmu:" overemotional, hypocritical empathisers. Similarly, the lack of emphasis on fairness (as proportionality) on the left leads to the criticism by the Chinese of the support by the white left for free riders. And, finally, the lack of a concern for the loyalty foundation leads the white left open to the accusation by the Chinese of destroying their own tradition.

A rad trad criticism of liberalism

Some readers might find this interesting. It's a description of the outlook of radical traditionalists within the Catholic Church. There is clearly an overlap with the criticism of liberalism I have made at this site:

The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which (Catholics hold) are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

Because of these positions, the “radical” position—while similarly committed to the pro-life, pro-marriage teachings of the Church—is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government. It is comfortable with neither party, and holds that the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of liberalism—the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (“conservatism”—better designated as market liberalism).

This is a principled criticism of liberalism, one that reaches down to first principles. I was especially interested in the final observation - that the mainstream parties are usually just "two iterations of liberalism," with the left wing party oriented to "the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere" and the right wing party being oriented to the pursuit of individual autonomy in the economic realm.

Regular readers will know that I agree with this understanding of mainstream politics (though the emergence of an anti-globalist right is starting to modify the political landscape).

Interesting thoughts from Lord Glasman

The electoral success of UKIP has brought some interesting thoughts from a Labour peer, Lord Glasman:

UKIP has done us all a service in one key respect: it has forced the elites to confront the flaws in our democracy.

...I have come to the conclusion that Labour is in danger of losing England.

...the cohesive world which the [labour] movement helped to create has now fallen apart.

People are isolated and lonely, and feel both dispossessed of their inheritance and abandoned by their rulers.

It is no surprise, therefore, that so many core Labour voters – people who work and are members of a real village, not the global one, who love their country and their family – feel abandoned and neglected by the party that was established by their forebears.

That is why it is not just the Conservatives who are bleeding support to UKIP.

UKIP has benefited because people feel powerless.

The dispossession they feel is not an individual complaint, but a shared grievance.

I believe that this Government is incapable of responding. The Conservative party is nowhere near conservative enough. It is a liberal party that serves the interests of those who already have much.

Neither the Conservative nor Liberal parties are held in the hearts of people as the local election results show. They lost seats by the hundreds.

I'll go on to mention Lord Glasman's proposed solutions in a moment. It's worthwhile pausing first to consider what is important in Lord Glasman's observations.

First, he admits that diversity and globalism have undermined a sense of belonging to a cohesive world. So much for the "diversity is strength" mantra.

Second, he admits that people feel dispossessed and powerless. This raises the issue of agency. Much of what liberalism does was supposed to increase the sense of agency possessed by individuals. Agency means an ability to self-determine rather than to be constrained by aspects of the social structure:

In the social sciences, agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure are those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and his or her decisions.

If people are feeling increasingly powerless and dispossessed then it can hardly be said that the liberal approach to agency has worked. I would suggest that two things have gone wrong. First, liberals have emphasised individual agency at the expense of collective agency (so that, for instance, a nation of people no longer feels that it has the capacity to determine its future). Second, the underlying assumptions of agency itself are mistaken: "structure" sometimes helps to enhance agency, as structure provides the framework and cultural support that provides the context for meaningful choice.

Third, it is interesting that Lord Glasman wishes that the Conservative Party really were conservative rather than liberal. He's not the first left-winger I've heard utter this thought. At some level, people do understand that you need a genuinely conservative force in society to hold things together and to represent a truly national interest.

So what does Lord Glasman propose the Labour Party do? Amongst his suggestions are the following:

Labour’s policy review is built around three themes: family, place and work.

That is what people care about.

Only through coming together for a common good can a decent human life, based on faithful relationships and an attachment to the people you live and work with, be forged. It is an active task not a passive policy.

Immigration and Europe, which are closely connected, have ruptured Labour’s relationship with its own supporters.

We need to heal that rift.

People feel powerless because we do not control our borders, we cannot shape our destiny and we have lost our sense of political community.

We need the Church and unions to find a common good between them to support people to fulfil their obligations to their loved ones and ensure normal dramas don’t turn into a catastrophe.

The future is based on skilled work and respecting work, and preserving our proud inheritance of shaping our own destiny together.

What's good in this? Well, he does state clearly that open borders makes people feel powerless and not in control of their national destiny. He believes that Labour lost support on the issues of immigration and Europe. (Note, though, that he doesn't offer a firm policy of limiting numbers in future.)

He also talks about the importance of faithful relationships and family, but again without any particular policy recommendations about how a culture of stable family life might be upheld.

In a more general sense, he also recognises that there is a problem within modern liberal societies of people losing particular attachments and a sense of togetherness.

Should there be a leftist nationalist party?

I was at an Australian reddit site the other night and stumbled upon an interesting thread. Someone asked the question why there were no left-wing nationalist parties in Australia (I don't think there are any right-wing ones either).

As an insight into the mind of left-wingers, a common answer was that the left doesn't support nationalism because it wants to help everyone:

Homiros: If you are a true left party, your main focus should be the welfare of all people.

FvHound: Us lefties don't want a compromise with the right. We want to help EVERYONE

Clearly, there are left-wingers who like to see themselves as compassionate types. Perhaps, therefore, an important aspect of challenging left-wing thought is to point out the hurt and damage that left-wing positions cause to many people.

Why would the left think of itself as helping everyone? Two possible causes spring to mind. The first is the political shift that happened in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The older liberals in the U.S. believed that the Anglo-Saxons had a special dispensation to bring freedom and Evangelical Christianity to the world. The new liberals challenged this view by rejecting the ethnic particularity and (often) by rejecting Christianity, in favour of a more ecumenical, cosmopolitan and humanistic view.

If you see yourself as serving "Humanity" in a cosmic sense, rather than God, then your focus will be a universal one (you won't be focused on helping your own nation, as the entity you have set up to serve is a global Humanity).

However, another possible explanation is that the leftist view is a cut-down, secularised version of a certain type of Christian ethics. If you think that the essence of morality is a vaguely universal command to help everyone including (or especially) the stranger or the marginalised, then you might well think that being a good person means, vaguely, a commitment "to help everyone".

It's true that the modern left has become cosmopolitan. However, what is less clear is that the move to vaguely universal commitments has oriented the left toward "serving everyone". The universalism seems instead to go along with a radical individualism, in which what matters is individual rights or the unfettered pursuit of individual wants or the liberty to define one's own good.

Furthermore, where the left is oriented toward community, it is often on an "assortative" basis, i.e. it is a gathering of people who share the same intellectual aspirations, the same political values and similar lifestyle markers. The left is very good at establishing community for itself on this basis - in some ways it has replaced the idea of ethny.

Why is this significant? Because when a communal identity is an ethnic one it means that we show a love for, and service toward, our coethnics who may not be part of our own caste or class: they may live in the countryside and not the inner city; they may eat fast food and drink beer; they may watch Channel 10 and not the ABC; read the Herald Sun and not The Age and so on.

But the left is not challenged in this way. In practice, leftists often show a disdain for those who do not share their own lifestyle markers - that is part of the way the boundaries of leftist community are upheld.

What traditionalists would argue is that we are not called to help everyone in a vaguely universal way. Our commitments are more bracing that that. We are made for particular relationships, relationships which imply specific loves and duties. Christianity does, it is true, remind us that our commitments don't stop at those we are most closely related to; this does not mean, though, that we are stripped of our given natures, or that we disregard natural law (or much of scripture) and seek to erase the significance of all those relationships bar the single, universal one.

For that reason a leftist should, just like any other person, seek to fulfil a relationship with a spouse, with children, with a wider family, with a local community (including those who do not aspire to intellectual class status) and with coethnics, as well as then helping others.

The matter with Kansas

Salon is a lefty magazine, but I found an interesting article there on American politics. The author, Thomas Frank, observes that the economic decline in a state like Kansas hasn't led the working-class to move leftwards but instead to become conservative. The working-class, populist rebellion is focused on opposition to a liberal elite.

What interests Thomas Frank is that the powerbrokers on the left believe that they can safely ignore the rightward shift of the working-class. Why? Because they believe that they can rely electorally on a "coalition of the ascendant," namely upper-class professionals, minorities and millenials (Generation Y).

These days, the big thinkers of the Democratic Party have concluded that they can safely ignore the things I described. They’ve got a new bunch of voters these days — the famous “coalition of the ascendant,” made up of professionals, minorities and “millennials” — and it pleases them to imagine that with this unstoppable army at their back they will win elections from here to eternity. There is no need to resolve the dilemmas I outlined in “Kansas,” no need to win back working-class voters or solve wrenching economic problems. In fact, there is no need to lift a finger to do much of anything, since vast, impersonal demographic forces are what rescued them from the trap I identified. They now have the luxury of saying, as Paul Krugman did on the day after the 2012 election, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”

That's interesting. In Australia politicians still have to win over some of the working-class vote to get over the line. So they still have to be seen to care to some degree, at least around election time. But what happens when that's no longer necessary? It seems that the left-wing party can then drop the pretence.

Maybe we traditionalists will end up working amongst those left behind.

How do you bridge this gulf?

There is a gulf in understanding between those who follow "interest group politics" and those who identify with the larger tradition they belong to.

The leaders of minority groups often understand that in a liberal society the aim of politics is to create a formal structure through which self-interest can be equally pursued (with the formal structure including definitions of rights). They see the aim of politics, therefore, as being to organise as a minority interest group and to make sure that this framework (of pursuing self-interest) is structured in a way that is biased for rather than against their own group. The minority groups will often assume that this has also been the focus of the majority, meaning that the majority has used its influence to structure society to its own benefit (hence the notion of majority privilege dominant on the left today).

White liberals who belong to the majority often perceive society the same way that minority groups do, and so tend to be sympathetic to claims of majority privilege.

But for most members of the majority all this is very confusing. They don't see their society as being a field of contest for competing rights. Their society means much more to them than this. It has a meaning as an entity in itself: as a source of identity, as an expression of the culture that is connected to one's own people, as a means of transmission of a distinct tradition.

Furthermore, the non-liberal member of the majority will want his society to be ordered according to objective moral truths, rather than being merely a system enabling the pursuit of self-interest.

So there is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf in understanding here. Unfortunately, the majority has to understand that it is liberal whites and minority interest groups who are running the show, so their understanding now dominates.

I have had readers in the past who have insisted that liberals aren't interested in the truth and that there is therefore no purpose in trying to argue with them logically. I've mostly disagreed as there do exist principles within liberal thought which liberals follow through to their logical conclusions.

However, I agree that liberals, in thinking about the nature of society, aren't as oriented to what is objectively true or good. Instead, they focus on relationships of power - on who gets to benefit from structures which limit or empower the pursuit of self-interest (when liberals praise someone for being "empowered" doesn't it often mean that the person has thrown off limitations in the pursuit of what they want?)

It should also be said that even though it is left-liberals who have made interest group politics their own, right-liberals did much to prepare the ground for it. It was right-liberals who pushed along the idea of society being made of millions of rights-bearing individuals each pursuing a rational self-interest. It was not a long step from that to the idea that the contest was not just between individuals but between interest groups.

So even though it's true that right-liberals often hate the idea of interest groups replacing individuals (with many complaints about the intrusion of ethnicity, culture and race into politics), it was right-liberals themselves who set up the idea of society as being a neutral or vacant space rather than a space that was already inhabited by a particular culture, tradition and people.

Out of the Antiworld: right and left

For most of the 1900s, political debate in the Anglosphere countries was limited to arguments between right and left liberals.

James Kalb has described the differing outlooks of right and left liberals in his recent essay Out of the Antiworld. He argues that both kinds of liberals want to make individual preference the supreme good in society. Right-liberals tend to be those who like action and who therefore see the satisfaction of individual preference in terms of "the unlimited pursuit of career, power and money in a sort of competitive free-for-all". This right-liberal "party of action" focuses on "markets, entrepreneurs and minimal regulation."

The left-liberals want to maximise individual preference differently. This party consists of:

experts, officials, and explainers, who are enormously influential in a complex, bureaucratic, technological, and media-ridden society like our own. Such people are less interested in action and acquisition than in the creation of a scheme of total control through exact knowledge. The ideal they strive for is a sort of EU writ large, a universal system of social management run by expert functionaries that secures and fine-tunes maximum equal preference satisfaction for everyone everywhere. Such a system requires uniformity, centralization, and strict limits on disturbing factors like enterprise and competition.

In 1965 the Federal President of the Australian Liberal Party (our right-liberal party), Philip McBride, made this comment:

...We are not to be held back, nor do we want to see Australia held back, by the belief that our national destiny is to be found in a bureaucratic State where theorists are paramount

You can see that in 1965 right-liberals were focused on the debate with left-liberals, not with traditionalists. McBride saw his opposition as being the left-liberal party of "experts, officials and explainers".

But if the debate is limited to an argument between right and left liberals can we really be surprised if society drifts ever further in a liberal direction? James Kalb has made an excellent contribution with his essay to opening up debate, by criticising liberalism as an "operating system" rather than just opposing this or that liberal policy.

The trifecta of privilege

In a discussion about the Zimmerman verdict, an American TV host, Thomas Roberts, claimed that being white, male and heterosexual was a "trifecta of privilege":

MIKE BARNICLE: You mentioned - that it was depressing, that it was a terrible weekend, that the verdict is unsettling for so many people in this country and probably around the world. I'll tell you what’s truly unsettling to me personally as a parent. I have three sons. Not one of those sons that I have to tell listen, don't run when you see a cop, you know don’t establish eye contact with a cop.

THOMAS ROBERTS: Right.

BARNICLE: You know, watch out when you're here. Watch out when you're there. I never had to do that. But if you're a black parent, you do that. You do that. It's part of raising your children.

ROBERTS: Well, with all due respect your three boys have hit the American trifecta of privilege.

BARNICLE: True.

ROBERTS: They are white, straight males. Presumably. So they have hit the trifecta of American privilege and from there we go down hill. So if you are an other in this country, and that means if you are an LGBT, if you are hispanic, if you are black, if you are a woman right now we are fighting to prove why other is no the bad and why we are due the value of our American rights. I mean, Trayvon's rights were obviously violated, stalked, followed presumed to be suspicious from the get-go by somebody who was the self-proclaimed watch commander of his neighborhood who was packing heat to go to the grocery store.

This is a familiar left-liberal way of seeing things. The focus is on some groups, namely whites, males and heterosexuals, being privileged at the expense of other groups.

If you look at indicators such as income, education and careers then it's not clear that white, male heterosexuals are always and everywhere privileged. Asian Americans do better than white Americans in all these areas; lesbians do better than heterosexual women when it comes to income; females do better than males when it comes to education and so on.

Thomas Roberts is himself homosexual. He wants to put himself in a non-privileged group, despite the fact that he has a high status, high income professional position.

So what explains the idea that white, heterosexual males are privileged? I think it happens for the following reason. Liberals believe that it is the act of choosing for ourselves that makes something moral. For this moral system to work, everyone must be equally free to self-define their own good. And this means that liberals will think it most wrong for some people to pursue their own self-determining choices at the expense of others seeking to do the same thing - that becomes the focus of moral evil.

The sense that liberals will have is that American society was created by the self-defining choices of white American males. That is what brought about the culture, the institutions and the environment that people live in. But that is a morally inadmissible situation; it means that the self-defining choices of this group of people defines the environment that other people live in.

A consequence of this is that it becomes important to deconstruct that culture and those institutions until they no longer exist as the environment that people live in.

So what then replaces them? There are two angles to this. First, it won't be thought so bad if the white culture is replaced by another one, as minority cultures are associated with resistance or subversion rather than the creation of systems of dominance or privilege. But, second, liberals might also aim at a diversity or plurality that prevents any one group from establishing a "hegemony".

And so the very mixed suburbs, in which no single group predominates, and which is experienced by traditionalists as lacking a clear expression of culture, fits in with liberal aims. The environment is no longer influenced by the self-defining choices of any particular group.

Therefore, it is not just markers of education, income and career which matter to liberals in defining privilege (though these are certainly part of the equation). There's also this other concern with the way that American institutions and culture have been defined by white heterosexual males and this concern cannot be allayed until traditional America has been thoroughly deconstructed.

Traditionalism has a very different starting point to liberalism which leads us in a radically different direction. We do not believe that it is the act of choosing for ourselves that makes something moral. Instead we believe that there are objective moral goods that can be known to us.

And so the aim is to discern and to defend what is good in human life. When we look at the culture and the institutions we inherit, our aim is to recognise the good that has been handed down to us within this tradition, and to build on it, rather than to look for patterns of privilege in how a social environment has been defined.

A part of the good that traditionalists recognise is being connected in our identity to our own culture and people (ethny). And so we do not wish to deconstruct these in order to create a "definition free" environment, but rather we want to maintain their continuity - we do not want to lose something that has a significant value, that inspires our love and which forms part of our identity and part of the setting which makes our social commitments meaningful.

Nor do we think of diversity in the same way that liberals might. For us, diversity is a world in which different peoples are allowed to predominate in different areas and so flavour those areas with their own distinct cultures. When liberals invoke diversity it has the sense of mixing cultures within a particular area so that no single one can predominate and define the environment. But that means that such an environment is likely to lack any clear cultural flavour.

It's about primacy

You may recall the recent stoush on the English left between feminists and transsexuals. In short, a white feminist called Suzanne Moore wrote an ode to female anger which included the line:

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.
 

That set off the transsexuals who accused white feminists like Suzanne Moore of being privileged. Which then led another white feminist, Julie Burchill, to write angrily that everything she had she got for herself and that:

we are damned if we are going to be accused of being privileged by a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs.

Well, Julie Burchill's column was removed from the newspaper site; a female minister called for her to be sacked; and she is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission.

And that has led her friend Suzanne Moore to question the direction of the left:

The wrath of the transgender community has been insane. They say I haven't apologised enough and I probably haven't...The sexual and political confusion is nasty and, while I accept some of it is my fault, is it all my responsibility?

...I feel increasingly freakish because I believe in freedom, which is easier to say than to achieve and makes me wonder if I am even of "the left" any more...

And I am serious about freedom of speech. If Lynne Featherstone can call for a journalist and an editor to be sacked, this does not bode well for having politicians and lawyers running the press, does it? Do you actually want to be governed by humourless, authoritarian morons?

How has the left ceded the word "freedom" to the right? It maddens me.

No party represents freedom now...People died for my right to offend you... you may continue to hate me, put me on lists, cast me out of the left. Free-thinking is always problematic...
 

She has a point. The enforcement of "tolerance" has become increasingly intolerant and coercive, to the point where freedom of speech, of association and of conscience is being eroded.

But what's more interesting to me is that a white feminist should be starting to feel this way. Liberalism hasn't targeted everyone equally. There has been a hierarchy of sorts, in which those groups tagged as privileged lose moral status and can be discriminated against, whilst those tagged as oppressed are told that they will get special treatment to aid their advancement.

Obviously, if you're stuck in the first group liberalism won't be experienced as positively as those in the second group.

Women have been told for a long time that they're in the "special treatment" category - but what happens as other groups press their claims and being female is no longer such a trump card?

The other interesting development in this affair is the column by Dan Hodges, a leftist who has worked for the British Labour Party. He wrote that the dispute was:

...illustrative of some of the problems affecting the radical Left at the moment: not least the fact that a significant fraction of the radical Left is utterly bonkers.

....But the fight for equality has always been a bare-knuckle one. That’s because – in truth – it’s not based on equality at all. It’s about primacy...

Though those fighting the good fight would never be caught dead admitting it, they’ve spent decades constructing, and scrapping over, a tightly defined hierarchy of oppression. And that hierarchy is invariably a self-serving reflection of prevailing internal power cliques.
 

In other words, the group which proves to have the most power gets, as its prize, to claim to be the most powerless and therefore to deserve primacy.

Rudd's missing national identity

Yesterday I wrote a post on Malcolm Turnbull's attempts to define our national identity. Turnbull, if you remember, is a right-liberal - a leading member of the Liberal Party. As such he is a true believer in a civic national identity. This means that he rejects a traditional identity based on a common ethnicity and instead believes that you can have a stable national identity based on citizenship and a shared commitment to liberal political values.

Turnbull's civic identity, when it came to the crunch, turned out to be remarkably thin. It came down to Australia spending more on welfare than the U.S.

But Turnbull's civic nationalism was less shocking that what followed. Kevin Rudd, the former Labor PM, was the next politician to talk about Australia's identity and he presented Australia's development in quasi-religious terms, as a casting out of national demons of racism and sexism to get to the promised land of tolerance, diversity and membership of a global village.

If you're at all conservative it sounds a bit mad. It is reducing the existence of an historic nation of people to the terms of Rudd's political ideology.

But I don't think we should be surprised. One of the secrets of Australian politics is that the leaders of the Labor Party have not only given up on a deeper traditional nationalism (as have the Liberals), but they've given up on a civic nationalism as well.

There's a reason for this. If you're a liberal and you believe that we should be free to self-determine who we are, then you won't like a traditional nationalism, because that's based on what liberals dismissively call "an accident of birth", namely an inherited ethnicity. With a civic nationalism, ethnicity no longer matters - anyone can become a citizen.

However, civic nationalism is still in its own way exclusive. A civic identity might make our ethnicity not matter, but it still makes our nationality matter. And nationality is usually just as arbitrary as ethnicity - we gain our national citizenship because of the state we happen to be born into.

Therefore, the drift of liberalism is to move away from all distinctions of nationality.

The leadership of the Labor Party seem to have reached that point decades ago. For instance, when former PM Bob Hawke was asked what defined an Australian he answered:

An Australian is someone who chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes
 

That's the answer of someone who doesn't take distinctions of nationality very seriously. The next Labor PM made his position even clearer. Paul Keating once ranted against the idea of civic nationalism, complaining that it was "exclusive" and that it relied on:

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is “citizenship”. Who is in and who is out.
 

Keating, in other words, had openly moved beyond distinctions of nationality, even those based on citizenship and a civic identity. And what of Rudd himself?  Back in 2005 a Labor Party committee recommended the formation of a Pacific Community:

There would be a Pacific Parliament, a Pacific Court, a Pacific Common Market, a common currency and military integration.
 

Far from having a strong sense of a distinctly Australian national identity, the Labor Party was already at the stage of wanting to merge Australia's sovereignty into a larger regional state. When Rudd became PM in 2007 he decided on an even more ambitious project, that of creating an Asia-Pacific regional bloc:

Kevin Rudd wants to spearhead the creation of an Asia-Pacific Union similar to the European Union by 2020.
 

Which leaves us with the current Labor Party PM, Julia Gillard. Her Government has created draft legislation which would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of nationality or citizenship - a law which doesn't exactly uphold the spirit of a civic nationalism.

So when a Labor leader is asked to talk about a specifically Australian identity they're in an even more difficult position than a Liberal leader. They have already moved a long way toward the idea that nationality shouldn't matter, not even a civic based one.

So it's not surprising that Kevin Rudd should present Australia's development in political-ideological terms as a shift toward an ever greater liberalism. What else could someone who is "post-national" do?

One of their motives?

Daybreaker wrote an interesting comment in the last post. In it he pointed out how all-embracing the charge of racism has now become:

You can't avoid being charged with racism if you are white. That's because "racist" basically means "white".

University of Delaware:

“[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

That means that whites count as racist, and non-whites do not.

That means that the mandatory policy in all white nations to get rid of "racism" is the same thing as a policy to get rid of whites.
 

I agree with Daybreaker that this is the logic of the leftist position on race.

Left-liberals choose to explain race differences in terms of one race (whites) being socially constructed to exploit and oppress other races. Whites get to be exceptional in a highly negative way. Whiteness is held to exist as a manifestation of privilege, discrimination and racism. Therefore, those who defend being white must be, by the leftist definition, "white supremacists" - people who want to maintain a supremacy over others.

As Daybreaker points out, the logical solution then becomes to defeat whites and whiteness through mass immigration and the breaking up of formerly white societies. The demographic decline of whites becomes, for leftists, a mark of progress to be cheered on.

Leftist anti-racism becomes, in effect, an anti-white movement. Getting rid of racism comes to mean getting rid of whites and white societies.

Daybreaker also made a point in his comment that I've made at this site as well. Whites get targeted by the left in this way, despite the fact that we are not even the most privileged ethnicity. On measures of income, careers, family stability and education, Asians are on average the best off in countries like America or Australia.

So why target whites? I don't want to attempt a complete explanation in what follows. I just want to point to one particular strain of thought on the left.

It seems to me that there exists a certain kind of person who reacts badly to the existence of order, authority or structure in society or within reality itself. Why? Perhaps because they think of this as a power existing outside of their own self which, in their pride, they think of limiting their own self, rather than as giving meaning to it. Perhaps they want their own self to be the organising power. Perhaps there is a personal bitterness or disappointment toward representatives of authority or power in their own lives, for instance, in the relationship with their father.

Whatever the reason, such people seem to view white, conservative, Christian males as symbols of an order or authority that they see as a hostile force at an existential level - it scares them or at least discomfits them at some level of self and being to be confronted by such symbols.

And it's what traditional whites mean symbolically that seems to matter. Asian Americans, for instance, are more privileged in a range of fields, but their success doesn't carry the same symbolic weight, as they aren't (yet) associated with traditional structures of authority or value or order in society. Similarly, Republicans are mostly right-liberals who self-neutralised a long time ago. And yet there are some on the left for whom the symbolism of Republicans as white, conservative, Christian males still very much matters.

This helps to explain too why some on the left see themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, even though they became the establishment decades ago. They continue to understand their own political mission in terms of opposition to the symbolically powerful white, Christian male. They are still, in their minds, fighting an entrenched power structure, whereas they themselves, no matter how powerful, are the liberating force, opening society up to some new possibility or some new experiments in living that will somehow take things forward, i.e. that will open up the path to human progress.

If I'm right on this, then so much the worse for liberal Christianity. The Christian tradition has always set itself strongly against a spirit which, on sensing a power or authority or order outside itself, reacts nihilistically out of pride or hubris. In the Christian tradition the fall of Satan is understood along these lines. And yet so many Christians today fall in with a programme that has its origins, at least in part, from this spirit which is so strongly condemned within the Christian tradition.

For instance, there are those on the left who use open borders to destroy the existence of a "whiteness" which they associate negatively with order or authority. Instead of condemning this as a manifestation of nihilism (or of the kind of pride which led to Satan's fall), there are many in the churches who fall in line with it or even put a Christian gloss on it as being an act of charity. The churches have not confronted what they ought to have confronted; they have not examined what might lead a person to be disloyal or to seek to destroy. It's an uncomfortable fact that a relatively small number of nihilist spirits have ended up on the winning side, despite transgressing a core aspect of Christianity.

I did it from my own resources?

Here's another angle for looking at the differences between right and left liberals.

The right liberal parties tend to attract people who get psychological satisfaction from having competed in the market, earned their own money and raised their own family. These people can say "I did it from my own resources, through my talents and hard work. I can therefore count myself a success."

And so the right liberal parties tend to attract successful independent tradesmen, those working in private industry, small business operators, the married and so on.

The left liberal parties are more oriented to those people looking to state welfare as a guarantee of well-being, such as students, single women and pensioners. They also cater for those who use collective power to advance their interests (unionists) and who are therefore less likely to have that right liberal "I did it myself" mindset. The left liberal parties also appeal to minority groups by telling them that members of the majority group are not successful because of hard work and talent but because of institutional privilege and by promising the use of state power to transfer wealth and status to minority groups.

These differences are seen most starkly in the U.S., as in many other places in the West the right-liberal parties have adopted much of the left liberal point of view (someone like Thatcher stands out as an exception).

Obama is clearly on the left of the spectrum. During the recent election he used the "Julia" ad campaign, showing a woman who uses state welfare for support during the course of her life, and he was also criticised on the right for a speech in which he emphasised that people don't succeed through their own efforts and resources:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

So where do traditionalists stand in all of this? It would be easy for traditionalists to say "Well, we support the right liberal view, in which we think ourselves a success by working hard to earn our own money and raise a family. We reject the left liberal view that white men succeed through institutional privilege (racism and sexism)".

But leaving it at that would be a big mistake. The framework I described above excludes a traditionalist understanding of life. Once we accept the framework as it stands we lose. Our task is to take as many people as we can outside the existing political format.

For instance, where does the current format leave the issue of nation and ethny? The debate is between those who want to do it on their own and those who see whiteness as a form of privilege. So the right wing mentality tends to reject a concept of "white pride" on the grounds that we can't take credit for things we don't achieve ourselves as individuals, whereas the left rejects it as a defence of supremacy.

There is no place within the current format for the idea that a member of the majority might have a positive identification with an ethnic tradition of their own and feel a sense of duty to contribute positively to that tradition.

How would we create a place for such an understanding? We need to extend the idea of what a successful life means. It can include "I worked hard from my own resources to earn a living and support a family". But it should be much more than this.

What matters too is how richly we experience life. And this requires that we avoid being shut in to our own sense of self and losing our responsiveness to the outside world. If we manage to retain a sensitive response, then our individuality is substantially enhanced.

For instance, we might work hard as men and manage to support our families and that is certainly an achievement. But if as well we retain the responsiveness we have as men to our wives, and the paternal love we feel for our children, then we don't lose in individuality but we have a stronger sense of who we are as men and as fathers.

And it's the same when it comes to ethny and nation. If we have a sense of the larger existence of the ethnic tradition we belong to; if we recognise the good that the existence of this tradition represents; if we feel connected to past and future generations; if we feel a pride in the positive achievements of our forebears; if we accept the loyalties and the duties that naturally flow from membership of a tradition; and if we feel rooted within a place and a community associated with our tradition - then our individuality, our sense of who we are as an individual, is immeasurably enhanced.

I do often feel a pride in my Anglo-Australian forebears. Just this morning I stopped off at a suburban park with my family. I hadn't been there before and I was impressed with the care taken to create such a place. The gardens were made generations ago, so obviously I personally had nothing to do with their existence. But even so I felt a pride in my forebears for building so well.

We have to avoid, as the poet Sir Walter Scott put it, being "concentrated all in self". If we are limited to the satisfaction of being self-supported through our own resources, then we risk losing the kind of responsiveness I described and with it important aspects of self and identity.

Second vision: the liberal left

I began this series by arguing that the liberal right and left have a similar starting point, but that this is drawn out in two different directions.

The starting point is the idea that the highest good is a freedom to be self-made. Right-liberals take this in one logical direction: they argue that if we are to be self-made then we should be self-reliant rather than dependent on the state.

Left-liberals take the same path as the liberal right for quite some distance. They too believe that the highest good is a freedom to be self-made. What does it mean to be self-made? Most mainstream left-liberals believe that we have made it when we succeed in the public sphere, for instance through academic and career success and the status, money and power that comes with this.

This view of what it means to be self-made overlaps with that of the liberal right. The liberal right believes that we become self-made through the market; the liberal left agrees that career success is a major part of "making it".

What are the impediments to being self-made? Possible impediments include those things that we don't make for ourselves, such as our race or our sex . For right-liberals, people who believe that such things matter in a public setting are "bigots" who are "prejudiced". In comparison those who are "enlightened" will be blind or impartial to race or sex in a public setting.

And here begins the divergence. The liberal left does not believe that relying on "morally enlightened" individuals acting through the market and within the institutions of a civil society will remove impediments to people being self-made. The liberal left believes that this will continue to allow impediments such as race and sex to matter, i.e. that there will continue to be inequality and therefore social injustice.

The argument of the liberal left is that society was created to privilege some groups (i.e. white males) at the expense of others. So the problem is a systemic one rather than a matter of individual bigotry or prejudice. It doesn't matter if a white male is an enlightened progressive, he still occupies a privileged place within the system. It is whiteness and patriarchy, and a systemic racism and sexism, which have to be overcome through a radical, if gradual, transformation of society.

And what are the agencies for such a transformation? First and foremost the state. Second, social movements of the oppressed, such as women or minority groups.

Which brings us to a series of contrasts between left and right liberalism, despite the similar starting point.

i) The right has a more positive view of civil society. Right liberals don't want individuals to be dependent on the state. So they look instead to a social structure built around civil society (but the emphasis is usually on voluntary associations rather than natural ones). In contrast, the left is more likely to see the institutions of civil society as being manifestations of the patriarchal or racist system designed to privilege some over others. For the left, the ideal is more commonly the individual being guarded in his rights, and supported in his lifestyle choices, by the liberal state.

So the contrast is "individual & civil society" versus "individual & state".

ii) The right is more likely to think that society can be best regulated by the actions of a free market. Millions of individuals will compete in the market and the result will be to the larger benefit and progress of society. The left though has tended to see this as producing an unacceptable level of inequality and has looked instead to the neutral expertise of a state bureaucracy to regulate society. In 1928, the English Fabian Beatrice Webb explained this preference as follows:

What bound us together was our common faith in a deliberately organised society – our belief in the application of science to human relations, with a view of betterment...we held by the common people, served by an elite of unassuming experts

The contrast here is "society regulated primarily by the market" versus "society regulated primarily by state experts".

iii) The right has focused to a greater extent on equality of opportunity, the left on equality of outcome. This has come up in the news recently, with claims that the Democratic administration of Barack Obama is going to sue companies or schools for race bias, even if the rules of those institutions are applied equally to the races. If the rules are thought to have "disparate impact" (a greater effect on some races than others) then the charge of racism will still apply. This might include, for instance, a bank which has certain lending rules, which leads to some races getting loans at a higher rate than others:

Under this broad interpretation of civil-rights law, virtually any organization can be held liable for race bias if it maintains a policy that negatively impacts one racial group more than another — even if it has no racist motive and applies the policy evenly across all groups.

iv) The right wants the public actions of individuals to be colour blind, i.e. people are not to act as members of "tribes" or "collectives" (but a private, sentimental attachment to an identity is more acceptable). But the left wants people to actively see race or sex so that institutional privilege isn't hidden and is confronted. Furthermore, the left views public, organised, political action by women or minorities as liberation movements which can be harnessed to deconstruct white male domination of society and so the left is more open to identity politics. Also, given that the left locates racism within whiteness, this then means that other traditions get a pass and can be viewed more favourably as colourful expressions of culture rather than as means of domination and oppression.

So the contrast is that the right is more hostile to the role of collectives or tribalism in the public sphere, whereas the left runs with a kind of identity politics.

All of the above forms the ordinary political discourse of Western countries. It can be difficult to see a way through it, as politics is framed so tightly around it. Many people react by getting defensive ("I'm not sexist") or they join the political drift in which those who want to be supported as individuals by the state and those who believe that the left identifies with them as women or ethnic minorities go for the left-liberal party, whereas those who see themselves as part of a stable family unit or who believe that they are targeted by the left-liberal party as men or as whites go for the right-liberal party.

But that leaves things as is. The challenge is to move beyond the confines of a liberal politics, whether of the left or right variety.

A Newsweek low point

In 2006 Newsweek magazine ran an issue with the front cover headline "Is your baby racist?"

The cover story was an argument in favour of the left-liberal, rather than the right-liberal, attitude to race/ethnicity.

Right-liberals believe that you can make race not matter by being blind to it (colour blind). But left-liberals think that if you don't see race it will continue to matter, i.e. there will still be racial disparities. Therefore, left-liberals want people to see race and to intervene to treat the races differently.

There are left-liberals who think that whiteness was constructed to create an unearned privilege and to oppress the non-white other. Therefore, they believe that white societies must be deconstructed and that an assertion of white identity is a defence of "supremacy". Non-white identities, on the other hand, are regarded more positively as means of resistance to injustice or as expressions of culture.

And so the Newsweek article opened with an account of an experiment in which white parents showed their children multicultural books or videos. All of the parents supported multiculturalism, but some of them dropped out of the experiment when they realised they would have to point out the existence of race to their children:

At this point, something interesting happened. Five families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, "We don't want to have these conversations with our child. We don't want to point out skin color."

These were presumably the right-liberal parents who believe that race can and should be made not to matter by being blind to it.

The Newsweek writers, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, hold these parents to be wrong on the basis of research showing that very young children if left to their own devices won't become race blind but are likely to notice race and to identify with their own race. Furthermore, putting children in diverse environments is only likely to raise this awareness of race.

And so what the Newsweek writers wants parents to do is to speak openly about race to their very young children (the critical period being from 6 months to first grade).

But this is where the story gets particularly nasty. The racial message that Newsweek wants white infants to get is not a neutral one; the idea is to demoralise young white children through guilt:

Bigler ran a study in which children read brief biographies of famous African-Americans. For instance, in a biography of Jackie Robinson, they read that he was the first African-American in the major leagues. But only half read about how he'd previously been relegated to the Negro Leagues, and how he suffered taunts from white fans. Those facts—in five brief sentences were omitted in the version given to the other children.

After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works. "It also made them feel some guilt," Bigler adds. "It knocked down their glorified view of white people."

And what about non-white children? Instead of guilt, the emphasis is on instilling in them a sense of ethnic pride:

Preparation for bias is not, however, the only way minorities talk to their children about race. The other broad category of conversation, in Harris-Britt's analysis, is ethnic pride. From a very young age, minority children are coached to be proud of their ethnic history. She found that this was exceedingly good for children's self-confidence; in one study, black children who'd heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort and ability.

So Newsweek wants white children to be knocked down in their sense of identity, but non-white children to be raised up. How could that possibly be justified? The Newsweek writers have a go at it with this argument:

That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If "black pride" is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It's horrifying to imagine kids being "proud to be white." Yet many scholars argue that's exactly what children's brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent—it'd be redundant.

The Newsweek writers assume that their mostly white readers will agree that "It's horrifying to imagine kids being 'proud to be white'". Horrifying? Really?

If a positive identity is "exceedingly good for children's self-confidence" then why should white children miss out? According to Newsweek it's because white children belong to "the race that has more power, wealth and control in society" and therefore white children have security and confidence and ethnic pride is "redundant".

That's wrong for several reasons. First, the race that does disproportionately well in the U.S. are Asians; they do best per capita in education, in professional employment and in family stability. Whites come next and then blacks. But when it comes to self-confidence, studies show that blacks have the highest level of self-esteem, then whites, and Asians come last. So you don't get self-confidence by belonging to a race which does well educationally or professionally.

And, anyway, the value of identity is not limited to its effect on self-confidence. It is a good that is basic to human life. We don't, for instance, say "it's horrifying to imagine white people marrying and having children because that is good for their self-esteem and they already have too much of that compared to others". Instead, we hope that white people, just like others, will get to enjoy the love and fulfilment that comes with a successful marriage and parenthood, goods that can be realised in life despite differing levels of wealth or status.

And it's much the same when it comes to identity. Whether we are wealthy or not, self-confident or not, does not make identity "redundant". It remains significant in our lives regardless.

White parents should neither be denying race nor attempting to instil racial guilt in their children. To do either is to neglect one part of a parent's loving care for a child. White children, just like any others, should be raised to positively identify with their own ancestry and tradition. If this increases their self-confidence in life, that should be welcomed; it is unjust to think that a child should be deliberately deprived of either identity or self-confidence in order to further a plan of racial levelling.

The Newsweek story - some background

I was pleased to hear of the recent demise of Newsweek as a print magazine.

Newsweek was very much liberal in its politics, as is illustrated by a story it ran in 2006 on the topic of race/ethnicity.

The story was a left-liberal criticism of the right-liberal attitude to race.

The right-liberal attitude to race is easy enough to spell out. Liberals want individuals to be self-determining. Therefore, they believe that predetermined qualities like race shouldn't matter.

Right-liberals hold to this consistently. They believe in a colour blind society in which the only thing that matters is who we are as individuals. In Australia this right-liberal position is a minority view, though it has an influential supporter in columnist Andrew Bolt. Bolt has written of how he once attempted to identify with his family's Dutch heritage but that,

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

Traditionalists like myself reject this attitude because it means that we only identify with ourselves - a tremendously individualistic if not narcissistic position to take and one that denies a love of a larger tradition that we belong to.

But left-liberals are also dissatisfied with the right-liberal view. Left-liberals believe that if we are colour blind that race distinctions, in particular racial inequalities, will remain in existence. Therefore, to make race not matter (i.e. equal outcomes) it is necessary to "see" race rather than be blind to it, in order to deliberately intervene to bring down the better performing race (the "privileged" race) in favour of the underperforming one (the "oppressed" race).

Why do left-liberals believe that racial inequalities will continue if a society is colour blind? That's a really interesting question, because if we really are all equal in the sense of being on average the same, then a colour blind society should produce equal outcomes over time.

There are several possible answers to the question. The official one is that left-liberals believe that "whiteness" itself is an artificial social construct invented to justify the systematic oppression of the non-white other. Therefore, anyone who supports a white identity is assumed to be a defender of "white supremacy" (since left-liberals believe that whiteness has the purpose of creating a privilege over others). It means too that the achievement of equality depends on the deconstruction of a white society.

So for left-liberals being colour blind in a white society won't create equal outcomes, even if we are all born the same. The white society itself has to go.

The left-liberal view is therefore more complicated than the right-liberal one. The aim remains that of making race not matter, but to achieve this one has to "see" race and treat races differently. And because whiteness is thought to be the origin of racism, discrimination and inequality, then a white identity is morally tainted, whereas other identities are more positively associated with the struggle for justice, or else are simply regarded as expressions of culture.

The right-liberal view is strongest in the U.S., but in most of the West the left-liberal view has triumphed. And perhaps one reason for its victory is that a colour blind society hasn't led to race not mattering. On a range of indicators some races do better than others. This strengthens the hand of those who believe in direct intervention to force equal outcomes.

That's a lot of theoretical background, but I think it explains the Newsweek story, which I'll cover in my next post.

Blamers

Here is a banner from the 2009 Pride parade in Stockholm. It was part of a float organised by Swedish anarchist feminists. The banner reads "We hate white rich straight men".

There's reason to take note of the slogan. It expresses openly a political idea that is widely held on the left. The idea is that the reason there is injustice in the world is that white, rich, straight men created society to be unjust in order to enjoy an unearned privilege over those that they "othered".

Most on the left don't conclude from the theory that white men should be hated. But many do conclude that the great moral cause is to oppose the white racism and the sexism which is thought to maintain white privilege and patriarchy. To be against white racism, in particular, is thought to be the great moral crusade of our times.

That has a number of negative consequences for ordinary whites. It means that any success that white people have is attributed to an unearned privilege rather than to hard work, or to family stability, or to stable community life. That's in contrast to the success that people of other races have, which is, in ordinary fashion, held to be a result of their efforts and talents.

It means too that it's difficult for whites to identify positively as whites. Most young white people are subjected at school and at university to a barrage of messages about white racism, and those who do attempt to identify positively as whites will often be assumed to be motivated by a desire to uphold "white supremacy". Again, whites are treated exceptionally in this regard - there is no similar pressure on, say, Australian Aborigines, to identify negatively as a people.

Finally, the theory that whites are to blame for social injustice means that few on the left are concerned about the future fate of historically white nations and peoples. First, the theory portrays whites as all powerful, so it's difficult for many on the left to recognise that whites might be vulnerable. Second, the aim of the theory is to bring whites down, so the focus is on how to disempower whites, rather than how to help them survive into the future.

Will the world enter into an era of social justice - of perfected freedom and equality - when there are no more rich, white, straight men around? That is what the leftist theory predicts - but given human nature it seems highly unlikely. Already it's the case in the U.S. that Asian Americans are on average wealthier, better educated and are over-represented in the professions compared to whites. As whites decline, it's likely that Asians in both the U.S. and Australia will come to dominate in these areas. So what, then, was the point of the decades long assault on the white majority?

Sisters of Marxianity

Laura Wood has posted some items which are rightly critical of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the largest organisation of American nuns.

I went to the LCWR website and found it to be inspired more by radical leftist ideology than by Christianity. A good example is a statement on racism which runs like this:

Racism in its institutional form continues because some people assume, consciously or unconsciously, that white people are superior. Therefore, the dominant race of whites develop and maintain institutions that privilege people like themselves and give less credibility to the contributions of other peoples and cultures. White privilege often goes unnoticed because it has been internalized and integrated as part of one’s outlook on the world by custom, habit and tradition.

Peggy McIntosh, author of White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, wrote about her experiences of white privilege. Her education gave her no training in seeing herself as an oppressor and advantaged person. Any work to benefit others was to allow "them" to be more like whites. She described white privilege as similar to an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.

Social rules about what work is, who works for whom, how work is compensated, and the social process by which the result of work is appropriated operate to establish relations of power and inequality. These relations are reinforced by a systematic process in which the energies of the have-nots are continuously expended to maintain and augment the power, status, and wealth of the haves. This structural relationship between social groups is exploitation. (Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference)

That's a left liberal analysis of race, not a Christian one. The left liberal analysis goes like this:

i) The aim of politics is to disband unchosen social ties so that we are left as self-determining individuals subject to the same autonomous conditions of life

ii) Our race, just like our sex, is predetermined rather than self-determined and therefore must be made not to matter

iii) But race does still seem to matter. Some races do worse than others in education, in employment, in crime statistics etc.

iv) This is to be explained by a dominant group setting themselves up as a false racial category (whites) in order to enjoy an unearned privilege at the expense of an oppressed group (blacks)

v) Whiteness is therefore an artificial and oppressive social construct which only those whites seeking supremacy would want to uphold.

vi) White privilege is also to be regarded as systemic, as the institutions and culture of society were created to serve it

vi) Whites should therefore seek to deconstruct themselves and their society as whiteness is a uniquely immoral category associated with race supremacy and privilege

When the nuns endorse Peggy McIntosh's complaint that she was not educated to see herself as a white oppressor they are following not Christianity but left-liberalism.

Christianity cannot follow along the same lines as left-liberalism as Christianity accepts that we have a creator which means that we do not autonomously self-create who we are. To put this another way, if you believe that you are autonomously self-created, then you do not have the Christian view of man's relationship to God.

So Christians will focus on different things to liberals. Less on achieving equally autonomous life conditions and less on making predetermined qualities not matter.

If race does matter in certain respects that does not invalidate the core purposes of Christianity. It does not require Christians to resort to a class/oppressor analysis or to seek to deconstruct white people and white society.

The minds of the nuns of the LCWR have been colonised by a secular ideology. They may as well be just any other kind of leftist academic or political activist. They have made themselves redundant as nuns and therefore it is no surprise that their numbers are falling so rapidly.

Why the left doesn't care

I used to wonder if white leftists ever had pangs of conscience over their policies (if carried on for long enough) imperilling the existence of a whole race of people.

But then I realised that if you look at the world through a left-liberal mindset that you're unlikely to register the fact of white decline.

Why? The official end goal of liberalism is a world of "equal freedom" - which means more specifically a world in which individuals are equally autonomous - which means more specifically a world in which no-one is impeded in carrying through their individual life aims by predetermined qualities like their sex, race, ethnicity, sexuality etc.

But liberals have to recognise that qualities like sex, race and sexuality do affect life outcomes. An example would be lower average incomes and educational achievements of black Americans compared to white Americans, or lower lifetime earnings of women compared to men.

So liberals are confronted with a world they see as immorally ordered. And they have to explain why such an immoral order exists.

They are not likely to argue that different outcomes occur because of the differing natures, interests, talents, capacities or life aims of the sexes or races. They would see this as a pessimistic view, one in which the immoral ordering of society was inevitable.

Instead, liberals "optimistically" stick with the idea that society is progressing toward a more moral social order and that the continuing distinctions between the sexes and races are socially constructed and can therefore be reformed.

But why was society constructed immorally to begin with? This is where left-liberals, as distinct from right-liberals, take a particular path. They believe that one group of people organised themselves as a false category in order to "other" and oppress everyone excluded from that false category. The whole system of society, the theory goes, was structured to maintain the supremacy (the unearned privilege) of the false category group.

So who exactly are these people running a false category scam and morally disordering society? Unfortunately if you are a straight white male like myself, the do-badders identified by left-liberals are whites, males and straights.

That left-liberal theory has some very unfortunate consequences. First, it means that white society is treated as being exceptional in a negative sense. If a non-white group does well it can be explained in terms of hard work or a stable family life. But if whites do well, it is due to an unearned privilege. Similarly, left-liberals can look sympathetically on the expression of non-white cultures, whilst taking a hostile view toward a similar expression of a white culture (since the white culture only exists to assert an unjust privilege).

That's why left-liberals are quick to label a white person who takes pride in his culture as a 'supremacist'. That might seem illogical to the average person, but if you are a left-liberal and you believe that whiteness was created for the purpose of maintaining supremacy over others, then someone identifying positively with a white culture will be assumed to be supporting "supremacy".

And a final consequence of the theory? Left-liberals are unlikely to recognise the seriousness of the position that the white peoples of the world find themselves in. After all, the left-liberal theory is that inequality continues to exist because whites are a dominant power oppressing the non-white other. So your whole focus will be on white privilege and dominance in the world rather than vulnerability.

I recently saw an example of this kind of thinking in a comment to a story in the left-liberal Salon magazine. It began with a more conservative commenter challenging the Salon readers with a question: why is it that the solution to the race problem is thought to be mass immigration into Western countries, a measure that if continued will lead eventually to the genocide of whites, whilst Asian and African peoples are allowed to continue their own existence?

A Salon reader responded with this:

Nobody is advocating the "genocide" of white people. It's laughable how you equate a moderate decrease in the economic and cultural influence of whites as some kind of spectacular genocide.

But when you've been privileged for that long, I guess you do lose all sense of perspective.

The Salon reader simply hasn't registered the real position that whites are in. He or she is still fixated on the idea on the idea of whites being privileged, and as such can only recognise a "moderate decrease" in the position of whites. There are no pangs of conscience from the Salon reader because:

a) The focus is on whites being privileged and so nothing more than a "moderate decrease" in the position of whites is recognised

and

b) It is implied that this "moderate decrease" in the position of whites is a moral thing, a taking away of privilege rather than an assault on historic human communities.

What can be done to challenge the left-liberal position? Plenty of things.

i) The left-liberal position thrives when it goes unchallenged. The more non-liberals we get into the political class, the less room there will be for unexamined assumptions on the left.

ii) We can point to the fact that the system doesn't work to privilege whites the way that the left-liberal theory assumes it to do. For instance, whilst blacks do worse than whites in certain areas such as income and education, Asian-Americans do significantly better than white Americans, i.e. it is Asian-Americans who are, on average, the most privileged and not white Americans.

iii) We can point to other explanations for group distinctions. Among them are differences in IQ, in other inherited traits, and in deeply rooted aspects of culture and family organisation.

iv) We can challenge the underlying assumptions on which the whole edifice of the left-liberal approach rests. Is a well-ordered society really one in which predetermined qualities are not allowed to matter? Does that really lead to the freedoms which are most important to people? Does the use of the state to suppress group distinctions really create a free society? And aren't there other important goods alongside freedom which contribute to the moral ordering of a society?

v) We can point to the injustice in regarding whiteness as exceptionally immoral, for instance, when the success of migrant groups is attributed to hard work and determination, whilst that of whites is attributed to unearned privilege.

vi) We can point to ways in which it is obvious that whites do not occupy the oppressor role, for instance, the trends in interracial crime in which whites are more likely to be victims rather than aggressors.

vii) We can personally reject liberalism to the degree that we no longer give it moral authority. And, following from this, we can attempt to organise our own non-liberal networks, institutions and, perhaps one day, communities.

Rossiter's liberal mind

At the Town Hall site there's an article titled "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." In the US, the term "liberal" is usually used to refer to what we would call left-liberals, so I assumed before reading it that it would be an attack on left-liberalism.

And it's a good attack. But the problem is that the author, Lyle H. Rossiter, hasn't broken cleanly with liberalism himself. He stands by principles that are clearly classically liberal (right-liberal), even if he stretches them a little in a conservative direction. So we are left stuck with the choice between a right and a left liberalism.

This is how Rossiter outlines his right-liberal political convictions:

Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.

There's a good side to this. Rossiter's right liberalism aims at a rugged individualism which encourages personal responsibility.

But it is inadequate to hold a society together and it's closer to left-liberalism than Rossiter realises. It's also a difficult combination of propositions to hold together. After all, if the stress is on the idea of the sovereign, self-determining individual, then what binds that individual to an external standard of morality? Why wouldn't a sovereign, autonomous individual say to himself "I'll choose to do what I want to do or what I think is right for me as an individual"? And what would bind that individual to tradition, which in its very nature is the creation of a collective that predates the individual? And if there is only the individual, bound to law and to contract and to voluntary cooperation, but not to collective forms of identity such as ethnies or nations, then on what principled basis can the influx of individuals from diverse sources be opposed? And if that is not opposed, then what is to prevent the eventual domination of politics by those arriving to take advantage of Rossiter's ordered liberty and who are willing to act as a collective to achieve their aims?

As you would expect from a right-liberal, Rossiter criticises the left-liberal preference of relying on the state to regulate society and to redistribute resources in the name of equality. He does score quite a few hits in his criticism of the left-liberal mentality:

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.

That's some slapdown. But Rossiter leaves out the intellectual underpinnings of all this. Left-liberalism begins with the same kind of assumptions that Rossiter's right liberalism does: that individual autonomy is what matters. The left-liberal assumption is that it is the capacity for an autonomously self-created life that makes us distinctly human. Therefore, if some people are born with an advantage in pursuit of such a life, then we have a literal case of human inequality: some are being treated as more human than others due to an unearned privilege.

That seems unjust to left-liberals and so they look to the state to create conditions of equality, in particular by attacking whatever "ism" is held to be sustaining the privilege of some over the disadvantage of others. Left-liberals become committed to the view that equality is the natural condition of humanity and that inequality has been socially constructed. Inequality is not the result of different capabilities or interests or natures but of a system, i.e. of systemic discrimination or prejudice or exploitation. And so the left-liberal state does embark on a radically intrusive programme of remaking society.

There are considerable differences between right and left liberalism, but they share a great deal when it comes to first principles and both are suicidal to the societies which adopt them. So the aim should be a clean break from both and the opening up of politics to other approaches - and for this reason I can't feel enthusiastic about Lyle H. Rossiter's attacks on the liberal mind.