LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

I like James P.’s “pillage” description of the left — that the X’s need “equality” with the Y’s; therefore the Y’s must be attacked and pillaged, etc.

But I think he is leaving out a big part of the picture. He seems to visualize a left consisting only of hard-core activists who use equality as a pretext in order to pillage their targets. He misses the more moderate type of liberals, not activists but regular citizens, for whom equality is not a pretext, who really do believe in equality and think that equality is the highest moral good and who are not thinking in terms of pillage. Any account of liberalism that leaves out these relatively moderate, sincere liberals is incomplete.

Just as liberals are unwilling to grant good faith to any conservative, too many conservatives are unwilling to grant good faith to any liberal: liberals are evil or mad or both (which of  course is what liberals believe of conservatives). Unless we understand that many liberals, probably a majority, sincerely believe in liberalism, and why they sincerely believe in it, we will never be able to defeat liberalism, because we will be unable to address that part of people’s psyche where the belief in liberalism actually takes place. and to show them how that belief is wrong.

On another point, discussing how the Nazis were really liberals has got to be the biggest waste of intellectual energy ever conceived. Who cares whether the Nazis believed in equality among themselves? What’s important to the world about Nazis is not how Nazis regarded and behaved toward each other, but how they regarded and behaved toward non-Nazis. And in that area they were, it goes without saying, the ultimate supremacists, not liberals or leftists of any kind.

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