Reply #64: The "Mistakes" of liberalism

[JHB]

From Avedon Carol's blog The Sideshow, prompted by Ducker Carlson's turn on the war, claiming he'd been supported it by believing someone "smarter than him".

http://www.sideshow.idps.co.uk/smay04.htm#131730

You know, a lot of people seemed "smarter" precisely because they were promoting a theory that was blatantly counterintuitive, that went against everything we'd all learned throughout our lives: That war doesn't usually make things better and can generally be expected to make things worse. Plus, you know, it kills people. (And didn't these people ever read Catch-22? Didn't they see that it was a whole lot more than jokes?) It's that whole "thinking outside the box" thing that's really no more than reinventing the wheel by people who simply can't figure out that wheels actually work. And there are always going to be tyros coming along who think we're all too old and diminished to take their daring path, because they don't get it that we don't go "outside the box" because we already know what's out there. (Hey, we were young and foolish once, too, you know.)

This is really how the whole "conservative" Thing works - simply dismiss what is known, write off all of the lessons of the past, dump all empirical evidence, run right back to the stone age and pretend that thousands of years worth of civilization that brought us out of the caves and into the light was just a silly liberal mistake.

That's right:

It's a mistake to try to bring prosperity to as much of the populace as possible.
It's a mistake to coordinate the infrastructure of a city, a society, out of the community treasury, so that the rich and poor alike are protected from plague and misery that affects everyone.
It's a mistake to invest in the future of your community, your country, as a whole.
It's a mistake to bind the powerful to the rule of law and thus prevent successful villains from immiserating the populace.
It's a mistake to try to educate, feed, and house the children.
It's a mistake not to leave your old people on ice floes.
It's a mistake to create space in society for artists and thinkers whose strength is not in their economic or physical muscle but in their ability to provide intellectual pleasure and ferment.
It's a mistake to respect the honest labor of ordinary working people.
It's a mistake to try to help everyone become productive members of society.
It's a mistake to recognize that greed, ambition, and ruthlessness are not necessarily virtues.
It's a mistake to cut people a little slack and give them a chance to redeem themselves from their own errors of the past.
It's a mistake to refrain from invading other countries or from provoking other nations into unnecessary wars that make them and the rest of their neighbors eager to rise up against you.
But those things were by no means mistakes. They were the intelligent, reasoned response to barbarity, to wide-scale misery.
And liberalism is the understanding that those things are not mistakes. We argue that poverty hurts us all, that peace is better than war, because we do understand them. The surprise we are seeing now from those who supported the invasion is a result of the fact that they did not.