I came across this phrase, "coercive utopianism", the other day and I don't recall where, so I can't credit the site. But googling it shows that it's been around a long time, at least a couple of decades.
The phrase encapsulates very nicely why I am no longer a liberal, because contemporary Western liberalism, with its deep drive to enforce egalitarianism in every sector of life, is a subset of this.
Certainly Marxism is the most visible and rankly evil form of CU but the seven-pillared liberalism I have come to reject is another and it is in fact more global in its reach and aspirations. Marxism was about economics, the rich classes vs the poor classes. But PC CU has wider goals. And rather than being overtly and violently revolutionary, it is a species of Gramscian gradualism and proceeds not through force of arms drive by obvious anger and submerged envy but through corporate regulation driven by obvious ethics and submerged guilt.
It is rare that anyone who is vulnerable to the siren song of highminded liberal ethics would not eventually be snared in the sevenfold embrace of this discourse, or would at least resist it.
Then the lion shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox. The baby shall play by the cobra's den, and the child lay his hand on the adder's lair. There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD, as water covers the sea. Isaiah 11
Let's take the Holy Trinity of evil for liberals: racism, sexism and classism. The oppression of nonwhites by whites, the oppression of females by males and the oppression of the poor by the rich. What more obvious examples of evil could there be?
A rich white male is just wrong. He has a lot of repenting to do as he breathlessly but humbly and selfrighteously supports a new world of multicultural harmony, feminist liberation and economic justice. Hello George Soros, John Kerry, etc.
The four other pillars of the ideology unfold from the first three. The evils of the rich white male unfold in his nation-state based colonialism, his dogmatic Christianity, his violently militarist armies and police forces, and his greedy earth-reaping consumerism. Transnational cooperation, openminded secularism, visionary pacifism, and post-speciesist green environmentalism are the cures for those evils.
Trouble is, none of these panaceas happen without coercion. Old style crusading liberals tried education and persuasion. New style liberals make rules, using the power of the state, both legislative and judicial (the latter where the former fails to cooperate) and of corporate entities like the university to force us all into a wonderful world of peace and justice.
For our own good, of course. And The One, now that he is going to be President, will show us how.
I wonder: is the strange sympathetic affinity that liberals have for Islam, despite its gross contradiction of liberalism's feminism, pacifism, secularism, etc. is that it too is a totalizing form of regulatory justice?
1 comment:
When (as I pray nightly you do) you read your Karl Popper, you will see that 'liberal' meant something different in England in decades past. Something I think you might feel more sympathy toward. But Popper, even then, was careful to divorce himself from other kinds of liberalism.
The words (liberal, etc.) don't matter - you can't define a thing into or out of existence - but thought you might like to know.
- Trevor Blake
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