by Chris Black
It’s the same thing that remained after COVID happened and faded from memory, after Trump happened and faded, after Nuremberg happened and faded into the background.
A social order runs on authoritarianism.
Liberals can’t meaningfully oppose the pro-Palestine protests being held across the West by non-Westerners.
These people have human rights after all.
But they are not autonomous individuals—they are a tribe, a little state within a state that doesn’t give a damn about human rights, just naked tribal self-assertion.
Liberals then fly to the paradox of tolerance—”we must be intolerant of intolerance”—to put down this threat to the social order.
At the end of the day, the liberal still has to lean on the decision of a sovereign (“national security exception”) to suspend the rules (“tolerance”) in order to save the rules.
In the end, liberalism is no less absolutist than Stalin or Louis XIV was, and probably more so.
The backbone of every society is total authority which is accountable to no one save nature or nature’s god.
The tactical political alliances on all sides of this conflict are significant and worth discussing.
But they pale in significance before this one truth.
If there is one thing to be taken from the conflict, it is this.
And we will repeat it tirelessly until we are made to stop:
There has never been a liberal society, will never be a liberal society, can never be a liberal society.
There is only a society built on a foundation of force and decision.
The choice is not liberal vs. illiberal, but dishonest vs. forthright.