Political & Elections

I reject his stark dichotomy.
It is not a choice between extremes but among varying degrees of freedom vs. security.

Of course this does not fit the simplistic mindset of "us vs. them", "you are with us or against us", "black and white", "good or evil".

Life and politics are so much simplier when one can choose once and then never think again.

The thinking exhibited in this quote is muddled and wrongheaded, for at least three reasons.

1) The rejection of the stark dichotomy is a rejection of the truth of the world that we live in in favor of a naïve, Rodney King style “can’t we all get along” fantasy.

Compromise is acceptable on some issues and not acceptable on others. With rare exceptions, liberalism fails to make this distinction.

For example, this, from David Mamet:

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed.

Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.

People have differing needs. The notion that an honest exchange of views will solve all problems is an article of faith; which, like many other, is suspended in our daily lives.

It is fine for the uninvolved to say of everything, “The truth must lie somewhere in between,” but who on the Left says so, for example, of abortion? The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all. I do not see where there is a middle ground.

The divorcing husband would like to retain some money and visiting rights to his children, the betrayed wife would like him dead; anyone ever involved in a fight or a lawsuit knows that some conflicts cannot be settled peaceably. The Liberal attitude to our war with Radical Islam is a preference for that action which would end the conflict immediately, and without rancor. That action, unfortunately, is surrender.

2) It misconstrues the choice we face. The choice you named – between freedom and security – though awkwardly stated, is essentially the definition of liberty.

So important is the concept that English – unlike any other language – has two words to describe it: liberty as well as freedom. We tend to use the term freedom more nowadays, for it has a powerful and evocative right to it. But the words are often used interchangeably, as when the patriotic hymn sings of “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” and at the same time proclaims, “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” The Founders preferred and widely used the word liberty.

There is a difference between these two terms that helps us understand the Founders’ concept of the principle. Freedom is understood s more expansive, and suggests a general lack of restraint, especially a lack of political restraint, as when we speak of the United States as a “fee society.” It is often used to suggest a more open-ended sense of autonomy, meaning that we are free to do whatever we want. But from the Founders’ view, freedom must be understood within the context of constitutional and moral order, which meant reasonable limits and cultural bounds. Liberty means the rightful exercise of freedom, the balancing of rights and responsibilities.

Consider how we use the two words. All animals can be said to have freedom. Men can be free, but so can fish in the ocean or birds in the sky. But liberty is an inherently human word. While we say man has liberty or is at liberty to do something, we do not say the same of animals, because animals lack a rational capacity to choose their own actions. This distinction reflects a much larger and more significant point. In the American Tradition, liberty was never understood to mean anything and everything, but came with duties and obligations appropriate for human self-government.
- "We Still Hold These Truths, Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future," by Matthew Spalding.

So your supposed "choice" is really only a single thing, liberty, to which you offered no alternative. And everybody, I would venture, wants liberty. So this thing you call a "choice” is really no choice at all.

The real choice we face is not between liberty and……nothing, it is between liberty, rightly understood, and liberalism, where liberalism is little more than a euphemism for the much more insidious and therefore sinister disease of collectivism.

I choose Liberty.

I believe, that fascism (whatever softening name the age of euphemism chooses to call it by) is inherent in every collectivist form

And with astonishment I took my first hard look at the New Deal. This was the second effect of the Berle failure on me. It is surprising how little I knew about the New Deal, although it had been all around me during my years in Washington. But all the New Dealers I had known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends. I myself thought of the New Deal as a reform movement that, in social and labor legislation, was belatedly bringing the United States abreast of Britain and Scandinavia.

I had noted its obvious features – its coalition of divergent interests, some of them diametrically opposed to the others, its divided coundels, its makeshift strategy, its permanently shifting executive personnel whose sole consistency seemed to be that the more it changed, the more it remained the most incongruously headed hybrid since the hydra. Now with a curiosity newborn of Berle, I saw how misleading those surface manifestations were, and tactically how advantageous, for they concealed the inner drift of the great movement. That drift was prevailingly toward socialism, though the mass of those who, in part directed, in part were carried along by it, sincerely supposed that they were liberals.
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This political color blindness was all the more dogged because it was completely honest. For men who could not see that what they firmly believe was liberalism added up to socialism…

- Witness, by Whittaker Chambers


3) David Mamet, a die hard liberal for decades, who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-The-Plow, "The Verdict," and "Wag the Dog," who didn't even MEET a conservative until after he was 60 years old, who came to his senses in 2008 and wrote an article in "The Village Voice" entitled "Why I Am No Longer A Brain Dead Liberal," spends much of his new book "The Secret Knowledge On the Dismantling of American Culture," essentially defining liberalism as your statement that "Life and politics are so much simplier when one can choose once and then never think again."

Of course you reject that dichotomy.  Who knows which side you might fall on?

 

Some things in life are complicated.  Some are not.  The key is knowing into which category important matters should be placed.  The left often has trouble with that.

Just finished reading his book.  Truly excellent.

Socialist Europe is held up as a model of "just behavior"; but the Left forgets that for seventy-five years America defended Europe from the Communist threat, and bore the cost, which would have bankrupted Europe, and which, in the event, bankrupted Communism. The Left looks at the peace of Europe since World War II and forgets that it was not only ensured, but created by American military strength and determination. And now the Left has elected a President who thinks it is good to go to Europe and apologize for our "arrogance," who proclaims the benefits of appeaxement both at home and around the world.