I agree with you very much. Your last statement, however, leaves me wondering what you mean. I do not think we should stress the warts of western liberalism to the point of hiding the wonderful advantages this system of governing offers, but neither do I think it wise to ignore those faults and pretend they don’t exist. Honesty and clarity are two values present in democratic systems and I think we should be honest with ourselves.
You are right that we are agreeing. The relative conservatism and liberalism of western democracies are two sides of the same coin. We really ought to be fighting for the same system, toward the same goal.
It is methodology that is the point of contention.
…
But, it is not pretending that the warts don’t exist. It is being clear that whatever the faults of our western democracies, the faults of totalitarian system are a thousand fold worse.
It is not a question of being dishonest or unclear that we stress that people choosing totalitarian systems are not doing so on account of the warts of liberal democracies. Clearly those warts exist, but by comparison the same warts in totalitarian systems have reached the size of festering tumors. Moreover, we in free countries take steps to clear up these warts. We see the ugliness.
Totalitarian systems either deny or even celebrate their tumors as things of real beauty.
What is happening is that people of our twentieth century are actively choosing totalitarian systems for a variety of psychological reasons. Qutb, the founder of Islamism, for example, found the vagaries and uncertainties and choices of modern life schizophrenically disconcerting, and therefore much preferred the total submission involved in his own vision of Islam.
"Death comes to all, but for him there is martyrdom. He will proceed to the Garden, while his conquerors go to the fire", is how Sayid Qutb defined the ideals that now deliver Islamic masses to the nihilism of totalitarianism. As so many pathological mass movements of the twentieth century have gone before, so now goes Islam into the twenty-first.
But this is their vision. It is not American bigotry and racism that the totalitarians protest. It is the very existence and success of American liberalism that offends them.
Not the warts of America, but the liberal personhood of America herself is the overt, stated reason for the hatred.
Not our failings, but our successes are the source of all the totalitarians resentments.
It is the ‘schizophrenia of secular life’, the separation of life into the spheres of God and Caesar, of work and family, church and club; the uncertainty, liberal or conservative, atheist or godly—all these nerve-wracking choices that continually nag at us— this is what the totalitarian finds intolerable, and submission into the One so alluring…
In this war of ideas, alluding to the weaknesses of liberalism as a response to matryrdom operations against liberalism merely gives them more reason to feel contemptuous.
This is not clarity. This is not honesty. This is our own liberal form of nihilism that cannot believe in just how extraordinarily **exceptional **our liberal way of life really is.
Our liberties are something of great value and worth, that merits our belief, without apology or surrender.
