Why People Are Abandoning The Great Liberal Dream
A funny thing happened on the way to the third millennium. The great wave of liberalism that swept the United States and Canada in the 1960's started to lose steam.
Don't get me wrong: the wave is still strong. There are more liberal feminists in positions of power than ever before, and they're flexing their muscles, passing laws, changing school curriculum, and deciding custody cases. Nonetheless, the wave is getting smaller, not bigger. Liberals know why this is: it's those evil conservatives. The money-pinching, nasty-grinch conservatives staged a sneak attack on the forces of light.
The only problem with this is that they're wrong. Conservatives didn't have to attack liberals. It's unnecessary to attack someone holding a revolver who keeps shooting themselves; all you have to do is wait.
In order to understand the rise of conservatism in the year 2000, one must go back and look at the rise of liberalism in the 1960's. Both ideologies gained strength for the same reasons, and both crumbled from their dominant positions for the same reasons.
Liberalism grew at conservatism's expense forty years ago because conservatism was clinging to cherished beliefs that were more and more becoming lies. Fighting to protect "The American Way" made sense in the First and Second World Wars but made no sense in Vietnam and Korea. Nonetheless, conservatives who believed in the principle couldn't bring themselves to condemn the specific instances. So a whole generation made themselves look stupid by supporting something clearly unsupportable for reasons of ideology. Conservatism in the 1950's had reached the peak of inflexibility. Reality had taken a back seat to blind faith.
For example, we still talk about Senator Joe McCarthy. In his day, communism was evil. It didn't matter what benefits communism might offer or that for some people in some countries communism might be their best hope; the whole thing was pernicious and had to be stamped out. So, conservatives threw the baby out with the bath water and made themselves look foolish in the process. Women working outside the home, pot smoking, protest marches, public health care, women's rights, homosexuality, and war.... On all of these topics conservatives gave predictable, knee-jerk responses that showed no sign of deep consideration.
As a result, the most intelligent people began rejecting conservatism. They became the hippies and the freaks, the pinkos and the feminists. In turn, their message reached the population because they were the only ones making sense, the only ones carefully considering the issues. Their crazy schemes and revolutionary ideas didn't have much initial impact because the lingering conservatives sentiments kept them in check. Only in the late 1960's and 1970's, when conservatism was clearly being beaten, could the really loony liberals come out of the woodwork. By then the movement gathered enough momentum to carry it through to the 1980's because in those early years liberals and liberal ideas made sense, while conservatives and conservative dogma did not.
Forty years later, liberals haven't learned a thing from history. Of course, they were unlikely to have learned: the teenagers of the 1960's have always believed that they discovered liberal ideas for the very first time, and that they were the first people in history to see the light. As such they didn't study any history, including their own history, and it has been their downfall.
Now it is liberals who don't examine issues. It is liberals who preach dogma. It is liberals who believe patently wrong things, all in the name of protecting liberalism. It is liberals who no longer make any sense.
The liberal take on the aforementioned Joe McCarthy has always been that he was a nut case. He was a patriarchal control freak who was in power because he was a patriarchal control freak, a part of a country gone mad. The problem is that as much as he looked like a buffoon, Joe McCarthy was not far from the truth. The United States and Canada were being infiltrated by communists. Technology was being spirited out of the country and domestic organizations were being infiltrated and influenced, all to support a regime that was murdering hundreds of thousands of people. We know that now; we have the records to prove it. And yet, forty years later, liberals who regularly freak out over Nazism can't really get themselves excited about an equally evil regime with which they once allied themselves. When it comes to the sins of communism liberals are doing now what conservatives did for years regarding South American dictators: looking the other way.
Feminism, the golden calf of liberals, is committing atrocious sins against men everywhere, particularly against fathers. These are both sins of omission, such as ignoring the fact that men can be abused by women, and sins of commission, such as creating laws or agitating for laws that stiff fathers involved in custody battles. In all of these cases liberals fall silent. Although there is compelling evidence that feminism has done damage to society even as it has done good, feminists and liberals ignore statistics, selectively omit information, and even fabricate results to support their cherished ideology.
Liberals believe that any criticism of liberalism or feminism is a blow that will destroy everything they have gained. Conservatives believed the same thing in the 1950's, and it led to their downfall. Now liberalism is headed in the same direction.
Of course, liberalism won't fizzle out any time soon, and it certainly won't die. If you want to see the future, just look at the past.
The ranks of the public service, schools, and particularly universities swell with dogmatic liberals. Our society will continue to pass patently ridiculous laws or enforce the current laws with a liberal slant well into the future. As the abuses become more flagrant, the resentment will grow, and conservatism will grow with it. After a decade, perhaps more, liberalism will be declared dead. Conservatism will reign supreme. Then conservatism will begin crusting over. It will adopt an inflexible attitude. It will stop questioning itself. It will stop making sense, yet again. And yet again liberalism will reinvent itself and rise up to sweep away the cobwebs. Of course, it won't be the same liberalism that rose up in the 1960's. It will be in many ways different, having learned something from the past.
