Liberalism as naked reaction.

I’ve tended to look at liberals (apart from the crazed AntiFa left) as people who fervently pursue their favorite social and political causes but have an inexplicable blindness to the consequences of ever more power ceded to the government. The lessons of the Gulag and all manner of totalitarian excess in the 20th century inexplicably fail to resonate with liberals and their indifferent is maddening.

My most cherished political hope is that people will have the maximum freedom from government control in their lives and I am alert to every voluntary or involuntary ceding of power to government. Phenomena like the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Killing Fields are like the appearance of a massive second sun in the sky – something that simply can’t fail to get one’s attention.

Liberals, however, are different. Not once, not ever have I known a liberal to speak of Stalinism or Maoism as a danger to be avoided. Not once have I ever heard a liberal demonstrate the least concern for the huge political controls that were imposed on us during and after the New Deal or for the Supreme Court’s betrayal that gave us the New Commerce Clause that laid waste to any remnant of meaningful federalism. Nor have I ever heard a liberal voice the least bit of anger or concern over the communist presence in the government. Van Jones in the White House? A trifle!

No. What liberals want is the victory of a particular political, scientific, economic, or social programs. They want some specific thing to happen and embrace whatever tool of government is required to force that result on others. The increase or decrease of personal liberty involved is irrelevant. (Abortion is a limited exception to this. It applies directly to or is understood personally by women but there is no understanding that spills over to others who are called upon to submit to controls that deprive them of their rights.)

The liberal is thus an ever ready and willing opponent of the constitutional order based on popular sovereignty whose requirements must yield in all cases to whatever plan is on the drawing board at the moment. The Van Joneses and crazed left want immediate and total revolution, change on steroids, but the liberal wants it on the installment plan.

For the right cause, what’s a little coercion applied to the ignorant, the superstitious, and the fearful?

Not Jefferson or Madison.

In the liberal mind there’s an odd mental lacuna where the history of 20th century totalitarianism is concerned. They didn’t just skip class on the day the Gulag was discussed or just happen to have the misfortune to live in times where Hollywood focused its persuasive powers almost exclusively on the horrors of the Third Reich, and never to associate them with the left that the Hollywood so adores. (Just now, the odd documentary about the Soviet Union or Mao aside, I can think of only three feature films that dealt with non-Nazi totalitarian excess.) Nor are they just complacent and bored with the duties of attending to the health of this republic. They're hypervigilant and ever so well informed about government when it concerns them.

No, Greenberg sees liberals as being in lock step with the starkest forms of reactionary politics with its positive disdain for the one truly progressive and modern idea of the modern age:

While the Tea Party protesters are fighting for a fundamentally progressive cause, the right of individuals to lead their lives as they see fit, liberals are fighting for a reactionary cause to impose an overriding government on the people against their will. And there can hardly be anything more reactionary than the tyrannical belief that the will of the people must be subservient to the will of their rulers.

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The denial of the individual is the great liberal reactionary crime against the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, against a form of government specifically constructed to restrict government authority and to liberate the individual from the legislative chains of its authority. Liberalism and socialism are an old form of tyranny in flashy new clothes.

"Why Liberalism is a Reactionary Ideology." By Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish, 1/6/10 (emphasis added).