Guide to deciphering American liberals, part 1: Everyone is a friend, no one is an enemy

Americans do not know what is a friend or what is an enemy. These are related. A certain kind of liberalism could be defined as the denial that anyone is not a friend or can be an enemy. This is because of the way liberals understand the totalizing character of the modern state. There are only fellow citizens who are officially all of the same status. The concept of the friend and enemy as pertinent to individuals is a relic of the Renaissance. If you appeal to any such concept, liberals will use it against you in their harassment. American liberals will harass people who seem too tied to the notion of their own importance as individuals. That is because liberals do not believe anyone is very important. The one thing they really do believe is the totalizing power of the state. You may not take an understanding of good and evil into your own hands, they suppose.

A related quality of liberalism is to act as if the government and law and all forms of social authority do not exist. This is the better to enable them to pronounce all kinds of truths, apparent to them, about what is true and what are a person's rights and obligations. They will speak of these kinds of things as if their existence somehow mysteriously belongs to the air they breathe or something like it. They are characteristics of the way things are, but not as imposed or enforced by any social agents. The traditional name for this is "metaphysics." When it can be tied to particular institutions and their contingent demands, then it is demystified and can be called ideology. Liberals tend to like metaphysical thinking, even if it they are not philosophers and do not think of these things or anything else very explicitly. I have noticed as a student at my university that many such people seemed to congregate in its management apparatus.