At war: the two meanings of “liberal”
According to Peter Burrows at Business Week, Stanford law professor Joseph Grundfest remarked, when Brenan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, “This is a particularly fascinating situation, because it involves an illiberal reaction from a very liberal community.”
The “very liberal community” of which Grundfest was speaking was either the Silicon Valley computer industry or the gay activist movement, or possibly both. But his use of the word “liberal” in this context betrays a misunderstanding of the double meaning of the term. Yes, these communities call themselves “liberal” or even “progressive.” But their liberalism breaks down into two opposing groups: one that espouses PC thought and considers conformity to it necessary for right liberal thinking, and one that values individual liberty above those concerns.
The first group was in the forefront of the anti-Eich forces. The second includes those who embraced and promoted the legalization of gay marriage and yet were made uneasy by the Eich witchhunt and its success. They do exist; I saw them on discussion boards back when the Eich controversy was at its height. However, modern liberalism, sadly, seems to contain far more of the former group than the latter, and there is hardly anything so illiberal as a “liberal” bent on stomping out opposing thought.
How could Grundfest have made such as error (and perhaps he didn’t; I’ve not been able to locate his quote in fuller context)? After all, he’s a member of the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, and ought to understand full well what what so many “liberals” are about.
Curiously, this short article from 1989 identifies Grundfest as a “conservative Democrat.” That phrase alone should tell us how profoundly times have changed since then; the appellation “conservative Democrat” would be oxymoronic today.
The polarity of meanings continues apace. Anther great advance courtesy the Frankfurt School.
Ein Volk, ein Wortschatz, zwei Bedeutungen.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the State-socialist Left realized that the word “socialism” scared most Americans, so they repackaged their statism under the warmer, fuzzier term “liberal.” Now it essentially means, “tax-happy, coercion-addicted State-shtupper.”
“I remember when ‘liberal” meant being generous with your own money.”–Will Rogers.
Nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, nothing without the state.
Communism->Socialism->Social Democracy->Progressive Liberalism->Totalitarian Liberal Fascism
It’s some kind of ourobos loop of evil.
As for liberals, that depends on what they are liberal for or on. Liberal economic and liberal individual freedom can only go so far, if people who want to be liberals make the choice of being quiet or supportive of totalitarian regimes. There’s a certain point when the choice is already made and the phase transition shifts a person from A to B.
Every person will be a given choice. And that choice will be tallied.
I watch Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and the other progressives on MSNBC and I always think they are uneducated and naive children. No clue and living in a bubble.
MSNBC by definition, is its own circular circle dance.
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The term Liberal has been as corrupted as the term Gay.
It is a very useful tactic if you can modify the meaning of words, so that benign or positive terms are applied totally different meanings.
I continue to wage what feels like a lonely war against the corruption of language because I think that this is a tactic to undercut traditional society.
Thus, I refuse to use terms such as: “gay”, “pro-choice” or “liberal”. There are traditional terms that are quite serviceable, and much more descriptive; e.g., “homosexual”, “pro-abortion”, and “Statist”, “doctrinaire” or “controlling”.
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So he falls into the minority group, the civil liberties faction, which seems befitting of a conservative Democrat and Stanford Law professor.
I believe it’s nevertheless useful to point out the disconnect because many in the PC group can still be reached on on individual level.
At War: Two Meanings of the word “Liberal.”
Ha! yes, that title reminds me of the time this one woman told me that she was a bleeding-heart liberal because she had, after all, a “Liberal” Arts education.
Which we can see educated her very well!?