Yesterday I suggested that the liberal aversion to casualties, based on anxiety and guilt over harming innocent victims (an ever expanding group composed of all those who are disadvantaged in life or have historic claims to past disadvantages), effectively removes the threat of force as an instrument of strategic policy.
There is an additional liberal inhibition to the use of force which also arises from the ideology that informs modern liberal thinking. This has everything to do with the enhanced narcissism which is an incubator of liberal ideology tendencies.
[It may actually be more accurate to refer to liberalism as a fuzzy, often self contradictory, set of tendencies rather than a coherent ideology; in this conception the ideology informing liberalism is traditional socialism, but in practice, the underlying socialism is typically obfuscated and applied while hidden under false labels. As an example, universal, government run health care is socialism, but it will be sold to the American people as simply a way to assure that the most unfortunate have access to health care. This is inaccurate on many levels, but will suffice for those who do not think too deeply about the implications of their desire to help the victims of our current system.]
Modern liberalism, which has only a passing resemblance to classical liberalism, is an artifact of our success and material comfort. The modern liberal has grown up in a world in which competition of all kinds have been muted. Many young liberals have been explicitly and implicitly taught that competition and aggression are "bad", if not the route to evil. They have grown up surrounded by people who have internalized much the same message. At the same time their material wealth and security have left them poorly able to understand true deprivation in a visceral fashion. Thus, poverty and deprivation can be, and have been, refined in ways that would be unrecognizable to anyone who lived in the pre-WWII ancient times.
Someone whose greatest source of anxeity has revovled aroudn getting the right toy for Christamas or Hannukah may conflate true existential concerns and trivial material desires.
For example, poverty in America has been redefined as the lack of a flat screen TV or cable television. When our poorest children often are wearing $150 sneakers, poverty in America has lost some of its meaning. The latest sign of poverty is lack of wide band Internet, a problem for which some liberals have suggested government intervention, paid for by those who are not so impoverished.
Furthermore, in the most dangerous excess of modern liberalism, in a sleight of hand verbal ju jitsu tour de force, the modern liberal has redefined human rights to include complete security and comfort; modern rights include the right to the kinds of comfort which is all they have ever been accustomed to.
Since comfort has now become established as a human right, the right not to be discomfited has become entrenched in modern liberal thinking.
The immediate attacks from the usual purveyors of the conventional wisdom upon anyone who mentions unmentionable truths is instructive.
This is most overt in terms of our war with Islamic extremism. Pointing out the violence and sadism celebrated by too many Muslims when the victims are Westerners, is guaranteed to bring up charges of Islamophobia, a nonsense term that has grown from its usage to attack anyone who is critical of Islamic excess to now include anyone who actually has the temerity to mention that an outrage has an Islamic pedigree. The height of lunacy is the British government's attempt to re-label Islamic terror as "anti-Islamic behavior." This would be silly if it weren't so serious.
We expect appeasement, gussied up as "resolution and wisdom", from old Europe. However, by all indications, Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton, have shown no inclination to buck the trend. It has become a liberal shibboleth that we must talk to our enemies. Further, we must respect their views since all points of view are equivalent under the doctrine of multiculturalism and moral equivalence. This leaves the Democratic candidates in the position of offering respect and carrots without much in the way of sticks. Negotiations in which one party accepts the burden of success and is inhibited from demanding any concessions in any meaningful way, are not actually negotiations but more closely resemble suing for terms.
We are rapidly approaching a time when the modern liberal prescription for dealing with enemies will be informed by an antipathy not only to forceful military action but to forceful words. We have gone from candidates insisting they will never tolerate Iran gaining nuclear weapons, albeit with the caveat that military action can never be considered an option, to candidates denying that Iran is a threat; after all, the NIE said they aren't actively building a nuclear weapon.
The worst outcome from liberal diffidence is the message such behavior conveys to our adversaries.
Ton Friedman once supported the war in Iraq. In his article on "Hama Rules", he pointed out that in the Middle East when in a confrontation it was necessary to convince the other side you were crazier than he was. He has not yet written, but must suspect, that convincing the opposition in the Middle East that you are nicer than he is, is unlikely to win many confrontations.
Where Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Walk softly and carry a big stick" we are now left with the prescription to "tiptoe carefully and carry a featherduster." When bullies are appeased, they become more aggressive. This is something that liberals should have learned in the school yard, but alas, since children are no longer allowed to solve their own problems, our children have grown up without understanding that there is no parent around to enforce comity in the international school yard. In fact, the United States military, scorned by the left and damned with faint praise by more modest liberals, is the closest thing to an adult that exists in the international playground. A modern liberal in charge of the US military is a troubling thought.
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