Elsewhere: Turnabout

"The people admire standards not based on desire, and respect loyalty to one’s people and their ways, while elites view such things as ignorance and bigotry. In contrast, elites insist that the supreme and indispensable virtue is equal acceptance of all ways of life consistent with the uncontested reign of bureaucracy and money. The people, depending on mood, may view that insistence either as comical because of its irrationality or as an attack on the value and coherence of their own identity and way of life because of its implicit and increasingly explicit tyranny."
- Jim Kalb, Why the classes and masses don't like each other.

"One problem for liberalism as a governing philosophy arises from the liberal rejection of authority not based on consent. When liberalism is acting as a critic of established power, that rejection may lead only to demands that government justify its rule by obtaining popular support. When liberals themselves are the authorities, however, their theory requires them to insist that the governed consent to their rule; otherwise their authority vanishes. In a liberal state, in which the preferences of those involved are the basis of all legitimate social relations, people who reject liberalism philosophically are felt to be an immediate threat to society because they have no evident reason for accepting the binding power of the law. As a result, liberals lay great stress on state indoctrination of the young, and tend to view violence as a necessary consequence of non-liberal views, for example those held by right-to-lifers and the traditionally religious. Once established, the liberal state thus becomes as intolerant as any theocracy, demanding assent to its principles as well as obedience to its laws, and — since its principles require it to treat all human beings as free and equal — tending to view those who refuse to give assent as not-quite-human. The liberal state is thus prone to politically-correct bigotry."
- Jim Kalb, PC and the Crisis of Liberalism.

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