Deogulwulf: Liberalism 'Classical' and 'Late-Stage' Varieties

https://curmudgeonjoy.blogspot.com/2010/03/liberalism-old-and-new.html

There is no essential difference between advanced liberalism in America and that in Europe. Liberalism is essentially the same evil it always was. Liberalism, unsurprisingly, has no tolerance for things not conducive to its own dominion, one which means a clearing-out of all bonds, strictures, and particularities which hinder the efficiency of the market and its bureau-technocratic regime. (The market serves to keep satisfied the man-pigs that liberalism has created.) The supposed neutrality, fair-mindedness, and magnanimity of liberalism are great deceits. If your values, traditions, customs, beliefs, religion, racial, ethnic and social ties, etc, do not matter, then it “tolerates” you; for it wishes to make the public sphere “neutral” (i.e., in total accordance with its principles) and free of the imposition of values (except its own). If your values, traditions, customs, identity, and so forth do matter against the smooth levelling of society, then it persecutes you as a bigot and so forth. Presently it seeks the destruction of the major oppositional factors in the societies over which it dominates, and thus allows — nay, “celebrates” — the minor factors which are rivals thereto. But, eventually, it will act against them too, if it survives.

Classical liberalism is what liberalism looks like when it is still in opposition to ruling nonliberal regimes: it seeks to limit them, battles against them, “rains murders”, as Metternich put it, and makes a putative virtue of limiting all regimes. But it sees no limit for its own regimes. Advanced liberalism is what liberalism looks like when it dominates: when it has greatly weakened or effectively destroyed nonliberalistic factors — institutions, communities, kin-ties, traditional morality, religion, etc, independent of it, right down to personal identities — thus enabling itself to govern a homogenised mass with the greatest ease and efficiency and with the least effective opposition.

Classical liberalism is its weak phase, but men like Karl Ernst von Haller, Karl Ernst Jarcke, and Adam Müller, for instance, were not in any doubt about the implications of its advanced dominion: the totalitarian-bureaucratic regime which would stand as “neutral” adjudicator to all values and particularities, eventually levelling or destroying the same as intolerable, nonliberal attitudes. The regimes we see today are no betrayal of “classical” liberalism, but the near-fulfilment of liberalism simpliciter.

Liberalism is the most insidious, destructive, genocidal, and effective of all the modern political ideologies with which it shares an origin. The others, by being crude in suppression and still bearing the marks of visible authority, as well as nonliberal and non-“neutral” values, engender opposition by populations gripped by the liberal ideology. Liberalism can destroy a nation or ruin an ancient culture more thoroughly than Marxism, and do so with hardly a shot fired against their “happy” masses, and all done with the sweetest smiles and the strongest claims to utmost tolerance.

Liberalism is a sublime totalitarian ideology which, by all the means and techniques of sophisticated propaganda, “education”, and bureau-technocratic process, would dominate every aspect of life and thought and destroy all particularities that stand apart from it. We are now dominated by the greatest totalitarian regimes yet seen. (Totalitarianism is not authoritarianism.) And they can even get their minions to declare themselves proudly the “freest men in history”! Liberalism certainly has liberated their basest passions and desires: and the liberal regimes, through technological and commercial means, can satisfy them like a great mother-sow. Men ruled by their liberated passions are the most easily debased and dominated. One just needs to pull the right strings.