A World on the Dole

If there is one fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals, it's that conservatives believes in self-sufficiency while liberals prefer government control and social management. While many conservatives recognize this phenomenon on the individual and community level, fewer realize that this is the case on the national and global level.

The conservative vision of the world is rooted in the democratic stability of a prosperous middle class. The political worldview of liberals is by contrast rooted in an impoverished world, the world of the deprived and the oppressed. The fundamental split in the second half of the 20th century between liberals and conservatives is rooted in the liberal rejection of a democratic society's ability to address social inequities. The fundamental liberal mantra that has inspired every form of government social control through legislation is the belief that Western societies are fundamentally unjust and incapable of reforming their racist, sexist and oppressive tendencies without government intervention.

This worldview underpins the Anti-Americanism of American Liberals as well as the anti-nationalistic sentiments of liberals in many Western countries. By rejecting democracy, liberals also rejected faith in the character of those nations. The inevitable result of such an attitude is the accompanying rejection of the nation as a whole and eventually a growing distaste and even hatred for the country itself.

By the 19th century the growing secularism of liberal Christian churches had led many to equate morality and social justice as an absolute equation. By the late 20th century, both among liberal Jewish and Christian denominations and their secular counterparts, morality had virtually ceased to exist apart from social justice. As social justice became the sum total of morality and ethics, political correctness became the dogma and scripture of liberal societies. When confronted with the test of historical adherence to standards of social justice, Western nations inevitably failed the test and in liberal eyes emerged as immoral systems that had to be reformed or rejected.

The morality of social justice differs from conventional morals and ethics by its single minded search to identify the oppressor and the oppressed in any given issue. Hard core political correctness breaks down every issue by locating an oppressed party, a member of an officially oppressed group, and the oppressor, typically economically prosperous and successful. Such a single minded approach has functioned like a stopped clock, right on occasion but quite often deeply wrong. Devoid of any larger ethical structure, this purely situational morality allows liberals to compartmentalize their reactions to any issue allowing them to support both gay rights and Iran which executes gays.

Devoid of faith in a nation's ability to care for its own and reform its own errors, Liberals view a free society as fundamentally exploitative and see the purpose of government as being the defense of those oppressed by the free market. The modern Nanny State is the child of a mindset that does not see a thriving middle class in Western nations but the impoverished masses perpetually in peril of being enslaved by the greed of the rich. That same mindset replicated on a global level sees Western nations in the role of the greedy rich and the third world in the place of the impoverished masses.

The more prosperity Western nations achieved and the better off the poor became, the more liberalism felt the driving need to play out that same role, not on a national level but on a global scale. Class warfare, so fundamental to Marxism and Socialism, became no longer defined as taking place within a nation but globally. Globalism became the new Capitalism and the terrorists of the third world took the place of the anarchists and Marxist terrorists who had come before. Time and time again we are told that the rioters in Paris, Brussels and Malmo, the Jihadis in Pakistan, Cairo and London and the terrorists in Riyadh, Gaza and Mogadishu are all motivated by poverty, oppression and racism. We are told that the problem can be resolved in the same way that it was resolved domestically in the 19th and 20th centuries, with an expanded government and expanded government giveaways, no longer only at home but now also abroad.

As a result of this we have gone from a nation on the dole to a world on the dole. Billions are pumped annually into failing third world dictatorships and medical clinics are being built and maintained across the Middle East, at taxpayer expense. While this is presented as charity, in actuality it is socialism on a global scale. Whether it is the UN or the EU, liberals have more faith in global organizations to resolve social problems than the old "discredited" nation states. The result is a decay of national sovereignty and individual rights and the embrace of multilateralism and international alliances.

The dreadful bill of a world on the dole coming due is the same one as that of any socialistic solution to social problems, impoverishment followed by anarchy or tyranny. By projecting class warfare on a global scale, liberals have determinedly ignored the real threat in favor of the same old prescription, global socialism. The problem however is not one of social or economic inequity but of a threat aimed at the Western nations themselves. But the liberal worldview that has rejected those same Western nations as immoral and the cause of the world's problems is incapable of making the great ideological leap, that has only been made by a handful of those on the left such as Christopher Hitchens or Nick Cohen, that the bully is actually the victim and the victims they have been coddling are the new bullies of the world.

-------------------This article previously appeared at the Canada Free Press ----------------