Well, in keeping with my attempt to peel "liberal" and "conservative" back to basics -- William F. Buckley, the Father of Modern American Conservatism, defined liberals as people who want to immanentize the eschaton.
The eschaton is the end of the world, the Last Thing, but as I understand Buckley, he was talking about everybody living in peace and harmony, the Second Coming, as it were, when the lion lies down with the lamb and so forth.
And immanentize means to force it to happen in the here and now, instead of waiting for the Sweet Bye and Bye.
I guess this definition derives mostly from Marxism, from whence comes the phrase, "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," which means, "you can't have the Worker's Paradise without killing the bosses."
We all want to live in peace and prosperity and harmony and equality and all of those good things. We all want social justice. But some of us think it's ok to kill people to get there, and some of us think you need to use the ballot box.
Go back to the history of the French Revolution, when some sat on the left side of the assembly and some sat on the right.
There are many here among us who would tell you that the right wing includes libertarians and those who espouse the free market, and that if you believe in the free market, that makes you, ipso facto, an oppressor.
But in the Ancien Regime, that put you on the Left of the assembly.
Peeling "liberal" and "conservative" back to basics isn't easy. |
