A sign of hope

David Broder reaffirms for me that, perhaps, some liberals might have some humility to acknowledge that perhaps, just perhaps, liberals sometimes have illiberal insticts too.

A Victory for Free Speech

The Roberts Supreme Court decision validating Wisconsin Right To Life's right to engage in public discourse about a policy issue they care about was a fine decision and an important rebuke to the illiberal instincts of liberals, these days, when it comes to speech from people they don't like or from sources they find tainted with money or influence they are unduly afraid of.

I don't know if I trust, yet, or not, that liberals or conservatives in established or non-established circles will ever acknowledge their hypocrisies on so many such issues of free speech and issues of freedom, generally.

I do have faith they will do so long after I'm dead. Because it's obvious to anyone not trying to defend those hypocrisies that most political folks have people they identify with whose freedoms they often defend to the ends of the earth and others who they don't identify with for whom they will advocate incursions on their freedoms often seemingly without end.

And it's pretty plain to me, at this point, that the only consistent way out of both this mess of hypocrisy and authority that people have trouble trusting because of the hypocrisy and the many lines of rationalization that it offers illiberal folks - terrorists, despots, secular or religious autocrats, those with theocratic impulses here or abroad - for their illiberal ways - the single most important rationalization for terrorism is that it is a more "committed" - read: stubbornly homocidal - form of political pressure that folks in liberal societies are just too pussy and cowardly to engage in.

And, sadly, many cowardly people in liberal societies think this about themselves, so they romanticize the "courage" of radicals of all stripes who act out murderous plans in the name of political ends. It's all fairly sordid, really, since those who claim the strongest religious or ideologically pure affiliations also often give the strongest support to radicals of various stripes - socialist radicals, pro-life activists who murder abortion doctors, militant environmentalists, Islamic radicals, radicals and militants of every shape and color.

How people who rationalize murder could ever consider themselves moral or right or decent in any way, shape, or form is completely beyond me. But, sadly, it happens all over the political spectrum, in the name of so many different causes.

But the source of so many of their rationalizations is that their more moderate brethren in more established circles are persistently rationalizing more illiberal efforts to deal with difficult issues - pressure politics, the ugliest of political attacks and cynical power politics, the use of radical pressure to warrant "moderate" ends, hyperventalating rhetoric that shuts out more reasonable debate and discussion. Radicals reason that they just have the balls to do what moderates don't have the balls to do. And, too often, moderates will hang their heads in shame at what cowards they are afraid that they are for not joining their more illiberal brethren.

It is the most important dynamic that drives Middle East terrorism, I believe. And it is the explanation for terrorism that is the most overlooked, I think: power. Terrorists want power. Such an explanation would have all of us looking at ourselves in the mirror, which might be why we are so late coming to it.

I've been a more conventional liberal in my life. I've never really rationalized radicalism, because I was quite aware and disgusted with all of the violence and ugliness and murder it wrought in the 1960's and 1970's in America (and long after; the 1992 L.A. riots were a symptom of similar sympathies for revolution and mayhem running under the surface of political life in Los Angeles, I think). But I've known the frustration of wanting a political end so badly - even one that may turn out to be a case of "be careful of what you wish for," since many of the ends in my more conventionally liberal days I am far from enamoured of today, knowing better the limitations of those ideas and liberalism and conservativism and any ideology).

So I know what it's like to rationalize just about anything in the name of being the right ideology with all of the right thinking on any particular issue. And I know what it's like to root for my guys at every point and to root against the other guys at ever point.

I just know from much experience and reflection and thought and engagement with others, today, that it's bullshit, largely because it avoids difficult, thoughtful, engaged discussion of important issues that might resolve problems with more integrity to all people involved. And I want nothing to do with that self-righteous bullshit except to encourage people to come down from their high horses and take some time to take an honest look at so much of the destruction that it has wrought today and over the centuries.

I want us to stop.

And little signs like David's column, today, give me heart that perhaps, one day, it will.

I wonder aloud, all the time, why I still choose to do work that has not really lined my pockets and created plenty of problems for me when I feel so unsure of how quickly people in liberal cultures, nevertheless people in illiberal cultures, will give up all this nonsense.

And the answer I always come back to is that if I had to choose a life where I was rich and famous and had all kind of luxury and celebrity-hob-knobbing available to me and a life where maybe I could contribute some thinking that might help end so much if not all of the needless violence and bloodshed and murder and even the needless incursions on peoples' freedoms, which I think offer all of us the best hope of being responsible for our lives, not because we will do so without making mistakes but because freedom is, in my study and experience, the much more likely route by which people will take responsibility for their lives, and, in doing so, open up visions and opportunities and dreams that can become realities for themselves that could make this world that much better for everyone, well then, I'd rather have a life where, perhaps, we could lessen and maybe remove altogether the sources of the most dangerous and bloody and illiberal rationalizations in the world.

I need financial and personal security in my life, as well, obviously. We all do, when we're not taking for granted what we have available to us.

But my strongest commitment is to a world where my children and my grandchildren will ask me, more, "Why did we all behave like that?" rather than "Why do people continue to behave like that?"

I'm tired of radicalism and the violence and bloodshed and illiberal impositions on the lives of good people that go with it getting truck in Western societies. I'm tired of terrorism and illiberal revolution having supporters that give it political oxygen. I'm tired of self-righteous politics, religion, even philosophy under the auspices of scholarship, dominating and being destructive of so much that is good and needs our appreciation and support rather than our ugly impositions in the liberal democratic world.

And freedom is the most important of these values, because it makes all of the rest of our values available to us, for real, and not just abstractions that we rationalize our basest instincts in the name of. Freedom and liberal values allow us to be more honest with one another, and, more importantly, more honest with ourselves, about who are and who we've been. And, out of that, to acknowledge our failures in our efforts to be better people. And our ability to acknowledge those failures is critical to working toward doing and being better.

Perhaps we will inch forward towards a world where that will be more possible.

Love,
Ben