"I know its corners, its dark places, and the dreams darker still that it can conjure up in the minds of its adherents; and I have come to see in the liberal catechism a denial of both the limits of power and the truth of human reality," writes reality-mugged Benjamin of Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, a young man recounting his political journey -- under the tutelage of the 60's leftists who were his teachers and mentors in the mind-gated community just outside Boston where he grew up -- from reflexive utopianist to independent thinker:
I began to suspect that the entire formulation was ultimately nothing more than an expression of the will to power, that the first had been concocted merely to enable the second.
As surely as a monk who has suddenly found the arguments of atheism incontrovertible, and with an equal sense of cataclysm, it had become unalterably clear to me that, on a very fundamental level, there was no such thing as progress. In fact, it seemed to me, the most striking thing about history was how utterly uniform were the motivations and passions that drove war, politics, culture, trade, and all the other manifestations of humanity in action. How unchanging were the forces at play in history. Line maps might change, technology and mores might change, but mankind did not.
The demand for an absolute uniformity of thought and opinion; which I had experienced firsthand in the liberal surroundings in which I grew up and to which I had, at one point, wholeheartedly consented, struck me then, as it strikes me now, as little more than petty tyranny at best, and the wholesale annihilation of the human soul at worst.
How many of us had assaulted society's dysfunctions as a means of avoiding our own; or believed in the omnipotence of politics as a means of denying our own helplessness before personal forces over which we had no real control?
Benjamin perceptively identifies the liberal project with the intolerance of religious fanaticism. In their blind hatred of the West -- and particularly the Great Satan -- the Chomskyites and Islamic extremists are not far apart. Another former leftist -- commenting at Diary -- recounts his own conversion while attending an "elite" northeastern university, where he became "quickly disillusioned with the sort of narrow-mindedness, groupthink, and ignorance displayed by the leftists on campus. I started to drift away during my first three years" Then came 9/11:
And sure enough, within days, before any U.S. action to defend itself had taken place, these "progressives" were out on campus denouncing the U.S. There weren't many of them, but they were there, and it occurred to me at this point that these people were not driven by an ideology, even an extreme one, but some sort of a reflexive, nihilistic hatred.
[Via Roger L. Simon, himself a life-long liberal mugged by 9/11]
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