“Why do so many liberals despise Christianity?” Damon Linker asks at The Week, in response to Slate getting one of its periodic Margaret Dumont-style cases of the vapors over the prospect of, as Linker writes, “missionary doctors and nurses in Africa and their crucial role in treating those suffering from Ebola.” Linker also notices at least one Christian college losing its accreditation because of its opposition to gay marriage. After describing these incidents in detail, he asks:
What happened to a liberalism of skepticism, modesty, humility, and openness to conflicting notions of the highest good? What happened to a liberalism of pluralism that recognizes that when people are allowed to search for truth in freedom, they are liable to seek and find it in a multitude of values, beliefs, and traditions? What happened to a liberalism that sees this diversity as one of the finest flowers of a free society rather than a threat to the liberal democratic order?
I don’t have answers to these questions — and frankly, not a lot hinges on figuring out how we got here. What matters is that we acknowledge that something in the liberal mind has changed, and that we act to recover what has been lost.
Actually, the answers are all relatively simple: (1) they’re not “liberal” in any sense of the word; as Fred Siegel wrote earlier this year in The Revolt Against the Masses, the word “liberal” was a stolen base by leftists designed to distance themselves in the early 1920s from the failed policies of Woodrow Wilson, which made “Progressivism” a dirty word, one of several rebrandings that leftists have done over the last century. (2) Leftism is a holistic philosophy designed to supersede religion, with the motto that “the personal is political,” the English redubbing of the original Italian phrase, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.” (3) The world’s longest modified limited hangout, the pose that the left sustained that it was pro free speech, while it was making its long march through the institutions has now concluded.
Related: “America’s current revolutionary inspiration seems to derive more from Robespierre than Madison,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at NRO.
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