Liberalism and the uncompleted revolution of our time

Liberalism wants to defend everyone from the possible abuses of power, but believes their possibility is universal.

Original sin is an idea of political liberalism. The political theory that goes with it is an affirmation of the totality and universal scope of state power together with a suspicion of everyone. Liberals often suspect the state, but it is only individuals and not a social apparatus that can be sanctioned, and it is only sanctioning (by state authority or one of its analogues) that enables any form of power to be opposed.

Liberalism calls "violence" any will to power that is not presumed legitimate because it corresponds to that of the total state.

Liberalism politically always targets individual sinners. It then appeals to state authority, or some analogue of it that invokes it implicitly, to punish them. Every systemic or structural injustice can only be opposed by them in this way.

Liberalism is suspicious of individuals who might sin, and it suspects injustice in social systems, tendencies, or institutions in the guise of individual sin.

There is therefore no liberal social criticism properly speaking.

This is why liberals often make arguments using news stories. An official who accuses you of something and, in the systems of administrative governance that are now almost total -- juridical systems permitting individual defenses and regimes of constitutional liberty permitting freedom of speech or action are small excrescences in this system only -- may point to an article in yesterday's newspaper about some crime or injustice somewhere. They are implying that that may be a possibility of you. That's what they worry about. In fact, they read these news stories in order to firm up their own conscience, and are trying to convince themselves that they are among the Saved and the Just. The news story need not have any relevance to you. What is important is what the liberals are trying to accomplish through a complex of advertised information and actions designed to appeal to the same God to which they think it belongs.

Liberals get angry if you criticize their nation's government. They are invariably patriotic. This can show itself in uncanny ways.

The identity political ad hominem politics of liberals means that you fail to manage situations with them if you fail to see that the things they say are often only minimally about what they are referencing and talking about. Much of liberal public discourse instead is about the question, "What kind of person are you? I am a virtuous citizen who honors the Gods of the republic, are you? Maybe you are not, because someone is not, and so you might not be."

So when a liberal denounces some artist or intellectual for their sins, which is most often done with those who seem to be on the left, not the right, and perhaps in some way allowing for ambiguities and uncertainties, as any thinking in the sciences or arts that is experimental almost always does, -- it is important to understand that the person is not really talking about Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Heidegger, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, or whoever else can be criticized.

They are talking about everyday morals, not ideas. Ideas do not interest them except as reflecting everyday morals. Their speech is not framed by any kind of inquiry. It is framed only by the question, "Who is a good citizen?" or "Who is or is not in the wrong here?" The question of what is justice, or what should be done or not done in the instance, is not usually asked. The true ideas that drive the morals to be enforced are known, and all that remains is enforcement.

American democracy is modeled less on the New England Town Hall that developed in the period leading up to the Revolution, than the Salem Witch Hunt, and the imaginary Western town of Hollywood film lore, where the good guys face off against the bad guys, with the people of the town functioning as Chorus in what is not a tragedy or comedy but a Morality Play. The message is just this:

The Chorus, which is the republic's replacement for a monarchy with a rubber stamp parliament, is always right; the individual will always be found wrong.

So be afraid of the public terror that accompanies the managerial state with its moralistic pretensions. Capitalist democracy is pseudo-revolutionary terror enforcing citizens' virtue but without transforming the form or basis of the state's power. Terror without revolution.

Beware of the pseudo-political.

The age of aristocrats should not have been followed by that of elected ones who come from the people. What logically supersedes aristocracy is rule of thinking. Statements matter more than the persons who utter them or are named by them. The object of politics is simply the world we live in today and what it is like, not who is guilty and wrong. A revolution is not a legal proceeding, not even a popular trial.

What repression is the opposite of is creativity. Every form of repression separates individuals from the potentialities of their own being that they affirm. It throws them back on invocations of their persons. Persons can be called guilty or not guilty (in a rational and modern legal system, not in a general way -- which was Christianity's "damnation" or condemnation of persons, the other side of its "salvation" of them, which justified them by "faith" in what was always an analogue of a monarchical state power -- but with regard to specific actions. Persons can be expected to do or not do certain things, and they could be encouraged or permitted to do things that they have not been commanded by state authorities to do or not do. (The latter is where the more interesting potentialities lie.). But objects in the world of ideas and aesthetic forms are not guilty or innocent, only more or less interesting.

(Conservative art criticism effectively reduces judgment about art works to that of persons, a judgment that includes not only persons portrayed by the virtue of the artist and the enjoyment of his excellence and its objects and manifestations by the audience. Thus, most of our criticism in the arts is still aristocratic and not republican and democratic. This is because:

Conservative regimes reduce ethics (and politics and aesthetics) to morals. In so doing, they reduce people's potentialities to those to be avoided or sanctioned only; that is, to sin. A conservative, monarchical and aristocratic society, regulates and sanctions sins. It is much less interested to offer people anything. It is rule of those believed to be "the best" (aristoi). The issue is not whether they are virtuous or not, and so rightly judged aristoi and excercizing aristocratic privileges through the republican notion of virtue. Ethics differs from morality in that morality is legal: it specifies what one is required to do or not do. Ethics is not about justice but happiness. Ethics asks the question of the good life, either generally as in philosophy ("what is the good life?") or particularly ("What should we or I do here and now?"). The latter is normally determined by morals and governmentality, but never with any closure, because in the modern world there is no center and no closure; the objects and forms available to minds and persons, thinking and being in the world, are infinite in number, and new possibilities can always be invented or discovered (in-venire: come upon, found). Because ethics comes upon new possibilities, it can be a mode of search or inquiry. The question, "Where are you (or we), and what are you (or we) doing?" must be differentiated out so that a new question, "What is to be done?" can be asked. This might turn not on knowledge (moral knowledge would be simply the set of statements held at any time to be true giving what people should do and not do) so much as imagination, and with it, not a having but a making.

There was a single modern revolutionary movement taking various forms. Its object was a society of liberty and equality. This movement has enjoyed partial successes. All of its positive achievements, including in the United States, did not go far enough.