March 5, 2024

When I was a young man (a long time ago) I decided to be a political liberal, and this for two overlapping reasons.

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For one, I approved of the political values of liberals. They were pro-civil liberties (free speech, free press, etc.). They were pro-labor union. They were pro-equality for Blacks (Negroes as they were called in those days). And so was I.

For another, liberals seemed to me to be intellectually and morally superior to political conservatives, who struck me as being, on average, rather stupid and rather morally insensitive. I wanted to belong to the class of people who were smart and good. If I were to become one of them, I too would be smart and good.

I admired the intellect of liberals. They were broadminded, not narrow-minded like conservatives. Their minds were subtle and nuanced and complex, not simplistic like conservative minds. They were highly educated, well-informed. And they had good taste in music, painting, and literature. There was nothing boorish about them.

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The only really smart conservative I knew of was William F. Buckley; smart in the sense that he had a high IQ. But Buckley, as I saw things, used his ample brains to defend bad causes — rather like John C. Calhoun defending slavery. Buckley, I thought, was little more than a clever sophist.

When it came to the question of moral goodness, I confess that I had some doubts as to the wisdom of liberalism’s tolerance of sexual freedom. Perhaps I had some intuitive understanding that the pending sexual revolution would end in catastrophe, which of course it has.

But that was a small blemish. It was as nothing in comparison to liberalism’s admirable sympathy and support for society’s underdogs, especially blue-collar workers and, even more, Negroes, especially those of the racially segregated South.

And so I became a liberal, and I was very pleased with myself. I was now a member of a culturally elite minority — for that’s what liberals were in those days, an elite minority. Due to the disproportionate influence that liberals had in the Democratic Party ever since FDR and the New Deal, vast numbers of ordinary Democrats gave support to certain liberal causes. But true liberals — persons who were deeply liberal in mind and heart and spirit, liberal down to the very marrow of their bones — were relatively rare.

It is not so nowadays. If the typical liberal of my youth was in some real sense a superior person, the typical liberal today is just the opposite, a person of moral and intellectual inferiority — at least so I judge. I am still as vain as I was in my youth; which is to say, I still wish to think of myself as a morally and intellectually superior person. In the old days that wish drew me to the then-current liberalism; today it drives me away from now-current liberalism.

It commonly happens that a superior elite deteriorates in average quality when the doors of the elite are opened and the masses come rushing in.