America and its cast iron, 5,000-year warranty.

Not ever have I heard a liberal talk about liberty or, God forbid, its mechanisms and levers or its maintenance and preservation. Duty to the Republic or personal sacrifice for it are similarly ideas that will never – ever – be a subject of discussion at those tasteful tea parties with Peruvian wheat biscuits and Alaska moose cheese.

What will be discussed is the most expedient way in which to realize some new plan along the lines of, in the words of Dickens's Bleak House, "hav[ing] from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy [British] families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger."

Dickens's portrait of Mrs. Jellyby is instructive: grandiose and lame schemes to unfold far away, disaster and neglect immediately at hand.

Lawrence Auster takes the point one step further. Mrs. Jellyby's neglect was remediable and she might have acknowledged it after some persistent remonstration by her guests, but Auster writes of neglect that takes the culture and the polity past the tipping point and for which no tocsin has hitherto sounded persuasively enough to puncture liberal/socialist/statists' vaporous grandiosity.

That which exists today in the United States is, in short, to liberals, etc., eternal, maintenance-free, and covered by that costless extended warranty. If ever we make a wrong policy turn, why we can just always call customer service or hit the "Reset" button and it will all go back together just like we like it. All the foreigners and domestic subversives who enjoy the deterioration of America's strength and vitality or who have a stake in hamstringing the forces of cultural coherence will cheerfully step aside as we rewind the tape to the part where we had the rule of law and were ruled by people who navigated by the compass we inherited from our ancestors.

To liberals, our social order, our national wealth, our country itself, simply exist, part of the cosmic order, like trees and stars. They can't be threatened, and nothing needs to be done by us to maintain them. In fact we can mess with them any way we like and they will still be there, waiting for us to rearrange and redistribute them as we please. And anyone who thinks they can be threatened is a mountebank playing despicable scare tactics.

Many, many years ago, I read a supposed quote of an American manufacturer to the effect that the ability of American rivers to absorb pollution was one of the great natural resources of the country. Any capitalist making a similar statement today would cause a mass riot in Guy Noir's hometown. But, a liberal's indifference to the pollution of the American body politic will never deny him an honored place in the liberal pantheon. As Auster points out, he won't even understand the idea of pollution.

"How a conservative and a liberal see things." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 5/7/08.