'Liberal chic' is mindless conformity

By Don Tontiplaphol

"Are you liberal or conservative?"

This question is posed to me somewhat often, and each time I answer with nothing but equivocation. Equivocation, or downright evasion—each response determined by the level of trust I give the listener to understand what exactly I mean. And I am not feeling very trusting these days.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

I answer the question anxiously because I think it deserves a good deal of anxiety, something of a rare commodity now. Too many people today answer the question with little hesitation. Or none at all. They know, of course, just where they stand, and more often it happens to be "liberal." But it doesn't really matter on which side of the fence they happen to fall—what I fear is the way in which the question is answered, not the answer itself. If I use generalizations that annoy the reader, forgive me: they come from experience. Anyway, terms must be exaggerated since one needs to magnify the infection in order to see just what kind of corruption has taken hold.

Self-proclaiming liberals seem to push the envelope in their answer. It becomes a proud declaration. Saying that one is liberal doesn't go far enough; one must be "very liberal." The answer usually comes as a kind of knowing consolation: "Of course, I'm very liberal." A nod and a wink, a kind of secret handshake. Perhaps the respondent is thoroughly left-leaning on a bevy of political, philosophical, and social issues, but I doubt that such a stance was arrived at by critical deliberation. If it were, the answer would be given with more complexity. If the path to the answer were as tough as the question itself, one would not say anything without a certain shyness. But one need not be shy about something that is plainly obvious to all. Of course I am liberal—what else could I be? The secret handshake is the signal for a confession that needs no penitence. "Yeah, dude, cry on my shoulder. I'm cool with that. I'm cool with everything."

The just and the good have been conflated with the chic and the cool. We are all liberals now—who wouldn't want to be cool? Being liberal is a mark of fashion and style, not of thought and meditation. We can look to the most powerful cultural icons and see just what kind of politics are evoked. Decadent music stars are cool; the Pope is not. Or if the Holy Father is, he is only comic relief. The political advocacy of movie stars is almost always apparent and certainly of the same stripe. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have become the conscience of us all; we don't need one of our own. It all becomes a kind of celebrity, and all of us want to be famous, even if we can't all be rich.

Governments oppress; guns kill; banks rob; churches brainwash. Just as obvious is the abortion controversy—even then, we have Rock For Choice to rally behind. Pro-lifers have the Christian rock movement and the woeful perception of being uptight religious nuts. Little else in this world can be worse than being called "uptight." Being "religious" just nails the coffin shut. These truths come to us as readily as the fashion of being liberal, since the pendulum of social pressure has swung to the left and colluded with popular art and culture in the process. There is little need for critical thought in either direction in what has become, to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot, "a society like ours worm-eaten with Liberalism." The key evil in that sentiment is not the Liberalism, but allowing our minds to get worm-eaten, mindlessly conforming, and smugly self-satisfied.

Eliot declared that he was a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion." This might seem like the kind of proud and reflexive declaration I am attacking, but Eliot was not speaking on behalf of some silent social force. He was declaring war on a silence that had already won too much. He wanted to open a debate, not end one. Eliot's remark caused a stir then, and it would cause an even greater stir now. How could an artist of the greatest magnitude think such thoughts? How could he be so uptight? We of course know better. We are blessed with the security of the chic.

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