In total contrast to the conservative outlook, liberal and radical ideologies are about desire and determinate futures.
The first principle of the Left is the principle of politically constructing a “better world.” Of course, such a future must be consciously designed by enlightened intelligence. It is thus an essential characteristic of progressivism that it proposes a sharp break with the experience of the past; that its visions entail a rejection of existing social contracts. That is why not only radicals, but even those who call themselves liberals, are instinctively intolerant towards the conservative opposition.
For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a moral choice and to achieve that socially just future requires only that enough people decide to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for progressives to consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened, while dismissing their opponents as immoral, ignorant, racist or insane.
Liberals and radical ideologies are about desired and therefore determinate futures. Throughout the modern era, progressives have proposed a contract which guarantees that all of society’s members will be made equal in their economic and social conditions or, at the very least, in their starting points. Futures based on this contract are designated “socially just.”
While liberals and radicals may differ among themselves about the degree of equality that might be achieved in the name of social justice, or the means acceptable for achieving such a state, the differences are confined to differences of degree in the desired results, and then to the means by which these results may be obtained. It is this shared utopian agenda that makes it appropriate to refer to both liberalism and radicalism as ideologies of the Left.
Since ideologies of the Left derive from commitments to an imagined future, to question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response. To demur from a commitment to the progressive viewpoint is thus not a failure to assess the relevant data, but an unwillingness to embrace the liberated future. It is to will the imperfections of the present order. In the current political cant of the Left, it is to be called racist, sexists, homophobic, or a defender of the oppressive status quo.
For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences, it is a moral choice. And to achieve the socially just future requires only that enough people decide to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for progressives to consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened, while dismissing their opponents as immoral, ignorant or insane.
The history of the social experiments of the last 200 years describes the stark implications of the Socialist agenda and the terrible price that was paid. The regime of social justice is a regime that by its very nature must crush individual freedom. It is not a question of choosing the right, while avoiding the wrong, political means in order to achieve the desired ends. The means are contained in the ends. The Leftist revolution must crush freedom in order to achieve the “social justice” that it seeks. This is the totalitarian circle that cannot be squared. Socialism is not bread without freedom; it is neither freedom nor bread. The shades of the victims in the endless cemetery of 20th Century revolutions, cry out from their still fresh graves: the liberated future is a destructive illusion. To heed this cry is the beginning of a conservative point of view.
The idea of social justice is a chimera that incorporates a totalitarian idea. For social justice to have meaning, there must be an entity “society” that can be held responsible for perceived injustices like the unequal distribution of wealth. But there is no such entity. The unequal distribution of wealth flows from the free choices of individuals in the economic market. The only remedy for “social injustice” is for a state to abrogate individual freedoms and organize the social order to correspond to its conception of what is morally right. In short, the demand for “social justice” is the demand for a command economy ruled by a totalitarian state. This quest for social justice inevitably leads to social division and group conflict, whether the conflict be one of race, gender or class.
The individual constrained by a government of laws; government limited by negative liberties and the consent of the governed is the formula of our constitutional founding. It is wisdom reaffirmed by the failures of the Left, of those who rejected this framework as a bourgeois concept and a mask for privilege, from the Jacobin Terror to the 20th Century gulags that Marxists built.
Post-Communist progressives are in denial of precisely the lesson that 20th Century revolutions teach; that economic redistribution and affirmative rights, which form the basis of the socialist project, are inherently anti-democratic and lead to the destruction of prosperity, justice and liberty, for all.
In his book Constitutional Faith, radical law professor Sanford Levinson viewed the Constitutional framework as merely a “discourse,” a “Linguistic system” in which virtually any social agenda could be expressed. Radical Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, in his book The Future of Liberal Revolution, proposed a way of reading the Constitution so that a redistributionist agenda can be incorporated into its text. Expanding on Ackerman’s logic, law professor Mark Tushnet of Georgetown argued that one can employ what he called “constitution-talk” to implement a program of affirmative rights and, indeed, the entire socialist agenda.
Finding a radical flexibility in the constitutional text is the precondition for securing the Left’s endorsement of it because the Constitution was clearly written as a conservative foundation with property as the basis of liberty; the autonomy of the individual and private enterprise defended against the claims of the state.
The ultimate goal is not social justice for those in need or those oppressed. The goal is power and globalism, the ultimate social justice for the ruling elite.
“There are many faces of globalism and it comes with many names, but in all cases the goal of globalism is to erase national borders, eliminate national sovereignty, reduce national identities, and move toward global governance through the United Nations. The European Union is the prime example of the results of globalism, where once-proud nations have erased their borders and buried their cultures to be led by a Union of Socialists with loyalty to nothing but the drive for more and more power.” Tom DeWeese
source: A Conservative Hope by David Horowitz
