Liberalism has a dark side.

Liberalism has a dark side. No wait, I am a liberal. I believe in liberalism. It’s just I think we deny the polarity inherent within us all and project it entirely onto others. Not simply in terms of social issues but also economic ones.





We are no less racist than the right. We are no less sexist either. Socialism is an ideal but socialists are no less bourgeois and will always be. The difference is we are willing to suffer to learn. I feel sometimes within any political movement there is an unspoken code. The fight in pro-choice is lead by white women. I saw once a speech given a black feminist called Loveness in Dublin. It was brave it was emotional and it was right. But the reaction to it by people was fear. Why? She is more vulnerable to being undermined. The ‘tone’ didn’t obey liberal ‘code’. This is code is make sure white polite men and women are seeing you as equally polite. Make sure men are seeing you as someone they respect. That means not complaining that they never really will respect you nor admit you have or should have self defined freedom to be you as they do. Black women and men should have the freedom to be themselves within the liberal movement. There is an unspoken fear amongst people as individuals and the movement as a whole that individuals will not have personal ambition realized if they do so and further more that the movement’s goals will be unrealized. Then there is the fear worse still ‘we will be seen as radicals’. But wait didn’t the left as a whole start off as rather radical ideas that when you think about it, are not radical? You don’t have to suppress your sexuality and become the straightest most inoffensive LGBT member you can be, if you don’t want to. Although we don’t admit they might get to the top quicker.



The interaction of the world around us is filled with and engendered by the interaction of opposites and everything in between. There has been a false paradigm pervasive in the USA that the opposite of black rights is rights for white people. This is a false polarity. It’s like saying the opposite of feminism is the men’s rights movement. However it would be true to say rights exclusively for whites is the opposite of human rights and therefore self negating for all. I thought about this when I read recently that a significant portion of white people in America felt they were discriminated against on a racial basis. I have to admit I was stunned. I was always told in any metaphysics class rather jokingly the litmus test is ‘reality bites’, if it bites it’s real. I have never felt the sting of the perception of my own skin colour. I just haven’t. I have felt the sting of injustice. It bites. The opposite of rights for minorities is not rights for the majority, because the opposite of injustice is justice. Justice is fair. It is the essence of fairness. The opposite of minority rights is racism it’s not fairness for white people. It’s exclusion of minorities or a gender or LGBT people from the defining of human rights. And when you think about it it’s excluding them from defining what it is to be human. I personally think that is unjust for those people. It’s an insufferable injustice. But the hard painful journey of learning is something we should be willing to suffer, because it’s freedom.



The same is true for economic injustice. The rich cannot rise up with the poor. I don’t really think capitalism needs more justice. I think humans; particularly impoverished humans need more protections and equalizers without judgement. Business men do not need protection from unions and employment law. There already is an inequality between the rich and poor sewn into law and society. The poor need justice. This journey is not an injustice for the rich. Nor can the rich lead the way. They are the students. The concept of a pristine positive world or society is as comforting for middle class leftists as the concept of polarized good/bad one is for the right. You could term this as a polarized view of success/failure. I don’t accept such ideas. You will never be a perfect capitalist nor a perfect socialist. I have heard capitalists say we forget our own hypocrisies. I don’t think this is true. I think they forget that despite the fact that capitalists benefit from help in society that they are the ones with full bellies at the end of the day. They are the hypocrite in a warm bed with a new car and vast wealth. If both are equally hypocritical the rich and the poor we have to remember one ends up far more vulnerable than the other. The rich don’t make it on their own effort alone, they get govt aid and policy and perceptive bias in a way we probably don’t understand yet. The poor have as messy a life as do the rich. Capitalists should STOP fighting their corner at all. You don’t need it. Laws do not need to be written to protect corporations or employers, you are pretty protected. I would rather fight for the hypocrite not living in a mansion.

Yes we have a dark side. All people do. The problem is when you stop admitting this. Perfection isn’t a goal it’s process. It’s the same with a liberal society. We have our own ‘Trumpness’ we will always have it. And we undermine our own people using the same ‘Trumpness’, when they should be our leaders in helping us learn to be better. We should be able to trust our teachers in this social journey. Yes liberalism has a dark side. But that shouldn’t scare us off. It should be obvious that any lesson in life for a political movement starts off with ‘this is your shit deal with it’. But we fear it I think more than anything. We fear our intersectionality and not being able to remain united. We will remain united for who liberalism is right for. Also we need to trust minorities and women as leaders and teachers, we are the students. It’s not the easy road we never expected it to be but we are willing to work and suffer to learn. That journey is the left road and it’s less taken. The journey never ends. Don’t be afraid of the darkness, it’s how we have to come understand. And by facing it this is how we stand with pathos. Liberalism is still pretty homogeneous and classist but let’s take the journey.