Always trying to nail down what makes a liberal a liberal, what motivates, contours their view of things which to an uber sceptic like myself seems so misbegotten and divorced from reality - I think Golderbeg [and the author he's referencing] in this fine essay concisely locks it down:
… Bottum argues that today’s liberal elites are the same liberal elites that we’ve always had. They come from the ranks of mainline Protestants that have run this country for generations (with some fellow-travelling Jews and Catholics, to be sure). But there’s a hitch. They champion a "... social gospel, without the gospel. For all of them, the sole proof of redemption is the holding of a proper sense of social ills. The only available confidence about their salvation, as something superadded to experience, is the self-esteem that comes with feeling they oppose the social evils of bigotry and power and the groupthink of the mob..."
This strikes me as pretty close to exactly right. They’re still elitist moralizers but without the religious doctrine. In place of religious experience, they take their spiritual sustenance from self-satisfaction, often smug self-satisfaction.He then says this:
There’s a second problem with political religions, though. When reality stops cooperating with the faith, someone must get the blame, and it can never be the faith itself. And this is where the hunt for heretics within and without begins.That's pretty close to something I said not long ago about liberalism's problematic relationship with reality and how if facts don't comport with the things they so badly want to believe, the facts get marched in front of a firing squad. The progressives need to see themselves in a particular way, as oh so enlightened and open minded and washed pure of the imagined evils of conservatism, paradoxically encourages a closed system of ideological confirmation where enlightenment necessarily becomes imposed orthodoxy and toleration an intolerant grace granted only to those who accept and bow down before that orthodoxy.
