by Robert Henderson
Like all organisms the liberal bigot is an evolved
creature, although the character traits which made him –
hypocrisy, the wish to create the world in one’s own
image, paternalism, a sense of moral superiority, a desire
to gratuitously interfere with the lives of others, false
humility, self- indulgent masochism and a pathological
refusal to accept evidence which contradicts emotionally
based beliefs – are as old as civilised man. Those who
know their history will readily recognise the basic
personality of the liberal bigot for it is that of the
Puritan.
Very primitive types existed in the ancient world –
Plato’s Socrates has much of the Liberal Bigot’s smugness
and ability to ignore the facts of human nature – but it
was not until eighteenth century that creatures displaying
most of the modern Liberal Bigot’s general features
emerged in the shape of men such as William Wilberforce
and Jeremy Bentham.
But Wilberforce and Bentham still had some moral sense
and it is Shelley who perhaps first displays the peculiar
humbugging amorality of the modern liberal bigot with his
continual prating about his love for “mankind”, whilst
behaving abominably to all and sundry.
The nineteen thirties saw the first indubitably modern
liberal bigot described by Friedrich Hayek when he had
found one called Harold Laski at the LSE. To be sure Laski
did not have certain of the detailed traits associated
with the liberal bigot of our time, for example the hatred
of academic success in the working class, nor did he
possess the instinct to dissemble his paternalism, but he
had that quintessential quality of the fully developed
Liberal Bigot, an intellectualised pseudo-morality or, to
put it more exactly, ethical rules without moral context.
Since the discovery of Laski, liberal bigots have
become increasingly common and they are now a very widely
spread pest. They are particularly fond of habitats such
as politics, the arts, universities, the media and the
social services. The liberal bigot can be found in all
western societies, but nowhere does the creature have such
success as within the precincts of the Anglo-Saxon world,
where they have captured political control of their
societies.
The liberal bigot’s ideological and psychological
starting point is the fantasy, which he maintains in the
face of all the evidence, that man is a generally
malleable creature who can be changed by social
engineering to create a world fit for Liberal Bigots,
although in so thinking the liberal bigot misunderstands
his own psychology for he would find such a place
supremely uncongenial. No more would he be able to posture
in the public eye because there would be no matters
occasioning expressions of liberal bigot moral outrage or
excuses for paternalistic action. Even more alarmingly, in
a realised liberal bigot society, the liberal bigot might
be forced to match his behaviour to his words. However,
the liberal bigot may rest easy in his bed for such a
world is but fit for dreams.
The liberal bigot has but one general principle but
what a principle it is, being so all embracing that no
other is needed. The liberal bigot holds as an article of
faith that no discrimination should be made between human
beings regardless of man’s natural inclinations and
Nature’s distinction by sex, sexual inclination, race,
colour, culture, class, talent, intelligence, education,
personality,
physical condition and age, unless, of course, the
person judged is female, homosexual, non-Caucasian, poor,
stupid, uneducated, old or crippled. Then the liberal
bigot may discriminate to his heart’s content, although in
the weasel wording manner of Lenin’s ‘democratic
centralism’ he calls it ’positive discrimination and
thinks it not in the least ”judgemental”. This he has
institutionalised in a totalitarian system called
political correctness.
Above all things the liberal bigot delights in what he
calls racism, which in practice means the white man
defending his own interests or extolling his own culture.
This the liberal bigot has raised to the status of the
great modern blasphemy. Just as once the Holy Office
caused men to be burned for denying the literal truth of
transubstantiation, so just as surely does the liberal
bigot wish to immolate those who distinguish amongst their
fellows on the most natural grounds of all, a sense of
kinship, of shared culture and experience. So central is
this tenet to modern liberal bigotry that the liberal
bigot has moved in the past forty years from believing
that racial discrimination is bad to asserting that
multiracial societies are a positive good.
The fact that such societies always experience
considerable friction between their various racial
components is not, of course, taken as evidence by the
liberal bigot that he is wrong, but as ammunition for
promoting more restrictions on the white population and
further reason for indulging in positive orgies of
European cultural denigration.
At some level the liberal bigot realises that his creed
is at odds with reality. So, following in the footsteps of
religious intellectuals such as Acquinas and political
theorists such as Marx, he creates an elaborate fictional
world which is baldly represented as “natural” or “right”,
and reality ”unnatural” and ”wrong”, even though
intellectually the liberal bigot would deny any objective
morality or measure of cultural worth. Like all those who
adopt intellectually indefensible ideologies, the liberal
bigot makes disbelief a heresy and punishes it with a
gamut of sanctions which range from exclusion from public
life through simple expressions of distaste to the passing
of laws threatening fines and imprisonment for those who
express the “wrong” opinions.
Morality exercises a peculiar difficulty for the
liberal bigot for he is caught between believing in moral
relativism and a desire to impose his own standards on the
world, for which he cannot, necessarily, have any absolute
sanction. This dilemma is partially solved by the
development of an amoral personality and by using
doublethink to hide the intellectual contradiction.
The liberal bigot decries “nationalism” but he is also
a firm advocate of cultural expression provided, of
course, the people concerned are within his approved
ideological circle of deserving causes. That a sense of
cultural worth and identity is practically
indistinguishable from nationalism the liberal bigot
cannot accept so he represents the two as opposites. When
pressed with disloyalty, he often makes a spurious
distinction between patriotism and nationalism and says he
is “proud” of such things as Britain’s history of
providing sanctuary for refugees, which trait, when
translated to the nature and level of modern population
movements, is of course of the greatest possible
disadvantage to the receiving country. If he is in the
media he will crudely mock the idea of national feeling by
being absurdly jingoistic in trivial matters as in the
statement
“The space shuttle took off today. The plastic wrappers
for the food were British.” His hysterical laughter at any
suggestion that Churchill or Wellington might be worthy of
respect changes to a childlike reverence when his thoughts
turn to such vicious charlatans as Che Guevara.
The liberal bigot wishes to enjoy the material wealth,
physical security and intellectual tolerance of the
advanced civilisation in which they live, whilst decrying
all the institutions and habits which have produced this
happy state. He publicly laments such things as poverty,
but he reacts most strongly to suggestions that his
personal wealth should be expended on those causes
supposedly dear to his heart – it is to the public purse
that the liberal bigot looks, first, second and last. He
extols the virtues of “working class” or ”ethnic” customs
and values, but takes good care to avoid contact with
unreconstructed members of such groups by living well away
from or cocooning himself within a gentrified part of
their areas.
In truth, the liberal bigot has little knowledge of the
groups whom he purports to champion. Loving humanity in
the mass, he finds their individual reality at odds with
his ideology and personal inclinations. Even worse he
cannot but suspect that the downtrodden prole or black
does not take him seriously, that in some curious way he
is patronised by the very people he imagines desperately
need his help. Now if there is one thing which enrages the
liberal bigot above all others it is not being taken
seriously. While uttering a great deal of cant about how
much he is against snobbery, how he is just a common man
no different from anyone else in the street, the liberal
bigot is mortally offended when he is taken at his word.
The liberal bigot decries privilege but excepts it
eagerly when the beneficiary is himself or other liberal
bigots. How cleverly he creates jobs and status for those
of a like mind. He is always pushing for more , and better
paid, Social Workers, teachers and Race Relations
operatives, whom he constantly refers to as
“professionals”. Indeed, on the question of formal status
he can be decidedly touchy. For one who supposedly
embraces egalitarianism this is rather strange, but then
not so odd when the Liberal Bigot’s propensity for
hypocrisy is considered for there is nothing he likes so
much as having his cake and eating it.
The liberal bigot is the enemy of social opportunity
for all but his likeminded fellows. The happy recipient of
social and educational opportunities which permit him to
enter the magic circle of Liberal Bigotry, his voice is
always to be heard berating the value of such things for
what he calls “The underprivileged” . To this end he
speaks of the worth of ”working class” and “ethnic”
cultures which, of course, cannot be preserved if “middle
class” values are foisted upon their members. And this is
scarcely to be wondered at for the liberal bigot is
essentially undemocratic. A politically sophisticated and
educated working class capable of effectively challenging
liberal bigot ideas is the last thing the liberal bigot
wants. Besides, without them who would he have to
patronise so superbly?
The self-conscious masochism of the liberal bigot knows
no bounds. Like the medieval Christian who cried “I am the
humblest of men”, he commits the sin of pride in a
peculiarly distasteful manner as he seeks approbation
under the guise of self-denigration. How diligently he
vies with others to prove that his society is the
guiltiest of colonial and cultural oppression; how
relentlessly he denigrates his own people’s cultural and
intellectual achievements.
What will be the future of the Liberal Bigot? Like the
nautilus with its ever increasing spiral, the liberal
bigot continues to evolve regardless of specific
advantage. He acknowledges no sense of belonging or
cultural indebtedness, whilst exhibiting a truly
unthinking arrogance in his belief that no matter what he
does or what cause he supports, his own person will be
inviolate, both intellectually and materially. In fact,
the liberal bigot exhibits the classic behaviour of the
parasite. He enjoys benefits gained at the expense of the
host, in this case Anglo-Saxon society. But parasites can
only be successful in the long run if they do not so
weaken the host that it is eventually unable to support
them. Consequently, the liberal bigot is unlikely to
survive in his present form for very long because he shows
no capacity for controlling his voracious appetite for
incontinent abuse of his environment.
