Roots of the Liberal Complacency

That today’s Liberal is marked by complacency will appear to some a paradoxical charge. Most Liberals may shrug it off as something which, in the nature of things, cannot be imputed to them. Does not the Liberal creed make criticism of any and all matters a cardinal point? Does it not invite the free competition of ideas in the market place? Has not the Liberal set up a kind of eternal restlessness of the mind as the only enlightened condition?

Until fairly recently one’s answer to all of these might have been yes. But the question today is whether the Liberal has not succumbed to certain fallacies of unwarranted assumption, which is the father of complacency. It is not an unknown thing to have the very vices one is opposing slip up on one from the rear in some pleasant disguise. This the Liberal has done, it seems to me, by not being truly circumspect, and by giving in to certain weaknesses which may be in themselves neither liberal nor radical nor conservative, but are human. A fault cutting across all of these is graver than any a mere political ism can remove. This means, if true, that the Liberal is now beyond the ministrations of anything save logic and ethics.

RW

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Richard M. Weaver

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That today’s Liberal is marked by complacency will appear to some a paradoxical charge. Most Liberals may shrug it off as something which, in the nature of things, cannot be imputed to them. Does not the Liberal creed make criticism of any and all matters a cardinal point? Does it not invite the free competition of ideas in the market place? Has not the Liberal set up a kind of eternal restlessness of the mind as the only enlightened condition?

Until fairly recently one’s answer to all of these might have been yes. But the question today is whether the Liberal has not succumbed to certain fallacies of unwarranted assumption, which is the father of complacency. It is not an unknown thing to have the very vices one is opposing slip up on one from the rear in some pleasant disguise. This the Liberal has done, it seems to me, by not being truly circumspect, and by giving in to certain weaknesses which may be in themselves neither liberal nor radical nor conservative, but are human. A fault cutting across all of these is graver than any a mere political ism can remove. This means, if true, that the Liberal is now beyond the ministrations of anything save logic and ethics.