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Liberalism, in theory and in practice, is easy. It is the prevailing simpleminded political doctrine (never to be confused with a philosophy) of weak-minded people suffering from a form of intellectual and moral laziness that produces a debilitating, and finally fatal, acquiescence, slackness, timidity, cowardice, nonresistance, and surrender in true believers and fellow travelers alike.
Liberalism amounts to the Politics of Easy. The problem for liberalism is that removing man from his divine pedestal takes him off the gold standard in respect of every human category: religious, moral, intellectual, artistic, social, and political. In this way, liberalism makes everything easy for the liberal: his agnosticism, his "ethics," his "thought," his "art," his antisocial behavior, and his ideological politics. It begins by chucking standards and proceeds from there to encourage dishonesty, fraud, self-delusion, and the spirit of untruth in all who succumb to its laziness, its sloppiness, and its lies.
Liberalism makes it easy to believe in nothing, learn nothing, and cave in to everything. Anyone who observes a widely exhibited modern painting or sculpture and has the inward, half-guilty, and self-doubting response that the work of supposed art in question required no skill or even intelligence is, more likely than not, exactly right. Liberalism makes all things easy, because it imposes no intellectual standards on them. [Ever ask yourself at college: Why are almost all the burnouts, stoners, deadbeats, protesters, loud-mouths, and the rest of the offensive losers, liberal?] I digress.
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Liberalism makes other things easy, too; all things, indeed. Nobody needs anymore to have what people used to call morals, meaning a code that demands some sacrifice on the part of whoever subscribes to it. In their place, liberalism offers "ethics," which require only that someone should hold a liberally specified attitude toward, or opinion about, something--on that costs him nothing while allowing him to congratulate himself on thinking rightly.
Liberal thinking comes easy too. It ensures that liberals need never fear disapproval or hostility of other liberals, who are the only people they associate with anyway--a friendship that further spares them the mental effort and social unpleasantness of having ever to defend an unpopular idea. Since, for liberals, the only behavior that really counts is thought behavior, social relations are easy, too. Dressing is easy--no need for formalities whether it is for work, travel, or funerals. MTV's Video Music Awards allows an exception to this rule. No need for constraining manners and other forms of civility, from which the authenticity of proletarian social norms has rescued us. Shout-out to those Baby Boomers! No need to bother with that old-school institution of marriage (excepting "gay marriage," for the sake of human equality and to make a political statement), and no need to work at marriage that can be terminated as easily as a pregnancy. [Note, too, that those who actually do decide to marry, marry for trivial reasons and get divorced for trivial reasons.]
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Finally, in the realm of theology, all liberal or liberalized religions, from Episcopalianism, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. to the faith of many megachurches, are religion made easy for everyone [e.g., "Repeat this prayer and accept Jesus into your heart."]. As for political theory and practice, they, too, have been reduced by liberalism to an easily expressed and easily understood trinity of identity and interest-group politics (read: Rev's Sharpton and Jackson and Wallis), entitlement, and rights, surrounded by the sheltering roof top of a paternalistic government.
"It is much harder to believe than not believe," said Flannery O'Connor. That is why liberals believe nothing, and know less.
I hope the news cycle offers more tomorrow.
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