Nevertheless, I persevered until I got to this reference:

Kay Hymowitz examines in this important—and fascinating—City Journal piece, “The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies”

to which it links. It’s longer than usual, and very very interesting. From 2005.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html

I’m happy to hear that. And you strike me as sufficiently honest — with us, and more importantly with yourself — that I will choose to trust your word on that matter (that the folks in question are in fact liberals).

Sorry if I was overly suspicious before. In this day-and-age, it takes a bit of effort for me to overcome the suspicion that, for every open leftist ready to drive dissenters off campuses or out of tech companies, there are a half-dozen “liberals” who’re too well-salaried and middle-aged to bother mobbing and milkshaking the opposition, but who’re perfectly comfortable cheering on the ones who do.

I’m happy to hear that the folks you describe as liberal really are. I guess that means that if they could only learn about how their side of the aisle is really behaving, and how many of the news stories about right-wing misbehavior are blatant hoaxes, they’d start speaking up in opposition to it. I gather that, in your view, the problem is epistemological: They just don’t know.

How, then, can one “raise their awareness?”

(I hate even asking that question. Most people who’re “raising awareness” — about breast cancer, about kidney disease, about childhood poverty — are either profit-seeking Concern Pimps or busy Mau-Mauing various Flak-Catchers. But in this case I’m not talking about manipulating emotions, but about actually penetrating a propaganda wall with thus-far suppressed information.)

What do you think it would take for a standard liberal to conclude that their world-picture is incomplete in important ways, and start looking seriously at what they could learn from the other side of the aisle?

I know that 9/11 got the change rolling for you, Neo. (But, reading your old “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, it seems to me you’d had a tickle or two of cognitive dissonance, as far back as the late 80’s, which 9/11 triggered into fuller activity.)

I hope that the liberals you know are similarly aware that there are gaps in their worldview, and merely underestimate their importance. Perhaps some future events, or even current ones, might stimulate a cascade of mind-changing?

(I just hope it won’t always take an act of war and thousands of tragic deaths.)

The intelligentsia in the ’20s and ’30s were enamored of the Soviet ‘experiment’ with Marxism, beginning with John Reed, and that ideology has, under the guise of Social Justice a hundred years later, permeated much of American society, from academia to most of the Ruling Class and virtually all Democrats. “Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. . . The poor are victims. . .violence and war are never justified. . .” Who could gainsay such self-evident truths? They are now conventional ‘wisdom’.

It has come to the point that the principles of Freedom and the Dignity of the Individual that underlay the foundation of our Republic are no longer being taught in the schools, and are denigrated in polite company as quaint and outmoded ideas that have no place in the ‘modern’ world. Social Justice for Victim Groups has no room for individuals, not to mention private property or free enterprise.

It is as if the Bolshevik Revolution has eclipsed the American one, even to the point where conservatives who espouse the values of the Founding are hounded from college campuses and the public square by masked, black-shirted thugs. This development is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s in Europe, when totalitarian statists of different persuasions (Communists, Fascists) battled in the streets. Is this what we are heading for?

By chance I watched a film that harked back to that sad time, called “Watch on the Rhine.” I hoped it was not a sign of things to come, but I took it as a warning. See here if you’re interested:
https://walkingcreekworld.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/shaking-the-magnolias-an-independence-day-warning/

Hah! Just ask Mandelstam, Sakarov, Solzhenitsyn, and all the Chinese professors and teachers who were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution how that worked out.

Academia turned out to have almost no defense against Stalinist attacks and now professors are overwhelmingly liberal, leftist or radical. The few remaining conservative professors know to keep their heads down.

The West was already headed in those directions without the KGB’s help. That the KGB chose to exacerbate those tendencies is interesting and no doubt contributed to the West’s movement towards self-destruction, but that doesn’t make the KGB diabolical masterminds who pinpointed our weaknesses and with their super meme-ster powers set us upon the path of our ultimate destruction.

I am 100% sure.

I know some leftists, and I know a great many liberals—and what’s more, I know the difference.

Most of the liberals I know are not all that politically oriented. They read and watch some of the news, but they don’t explore things in depth, and they know what the Times, NPR, and their friends tell them.

I’m not even knocking them for that. I never used to be especially interested in politics, and that description in the last paragraph could have described me through the end of the 20th century. I was busy with other things, and my politics had been formed years earlier and I thought they were pretty set. I wasn’t poorly informed but I wasn’t well informed either, and a great deal of what I thought I knew wasn’t true.

I was never never a leftist or even close to it.

That is the description of most of my friends.

I’ve written several posts on this subject, although I don’t have time to look for them at the moment.

When I wrote, “Anyway, Neo, it’s important to call things by your proper names,” I meant to say “…their proper names.” Not sure why I wrote “your,” which makes no sense.

Homer nods.

Are you sure you know a great many “liberals?”

Are you sure you don’t, in fact, know a great many leftists who self-identify as “liberals?”

Alan Dershowitz is a liberal. Dave Rubin is a liberal. Tim Pool is a liberal. Bret Weinstein is a left-liberal, but still a liberal because he’s careful not to espouse oppressive use of centralized power against those who dissent from his views. Bill Maher likes to identify as a libertarian when convenient; but more realistically he straddles the line between leftism and liberalism, because he despises Christians sufficiently strongly that he doesn’t much care if they get stomped on a little bit. Still, he usually leaves one toe inside the leftmost boundary of liberalism and is willing to hate on leftists when they get violent.

Now, if the folks you know have swallowed all that Gramscian damage with no pushback, it’s hard to see how they could be liberal any longer.

Ideas matter, after all, and even a person who is constitutionally unsuited to helping Robespierre build guillotines is still likely to cheer for Robespierre’s ascendancy as long as the latter mouths the platitudes of the revolution. Having cheered Robespierre on, they’ll stay comfortably out of the way while Robespierre’s armed faction does the dirty work of killing any “traitors to the revolution.” My guess is that most “liberals” these days fall into that “supportive, but not directly involved” category: Ideologically Leftist, but leaving the day-to-day oppressing up to others.

Of course, in America, it won’t look as bad as it did in revolutionary France. People who aren’t approved-of by the Left won’t get simply shot, any time soon. Only rarely will they be clubbed to death, under cover of street-level Antifa action. But they’ll be denied equal protection under law as a punishment for opposing the Left’s causes. They’ll be ineligible to work in certain professions (e.g., counselling and psychiatry, which is currently closed to Christians who publicly profess traditional Christian sexual morality). Rules in the armed forces will gradually exclude them from promotion if they don’t keep quiet. (Also a current reality.)

Anyway, Neo, it’s important to call things by your proper names. Liberalism means something having to do with liberty, which implies at minimum a right to fly your own freak-flag without being compelled to pledge allegiance to the ideological programme of the ruling elites.

If your friends are still liberals, good for them: Liberalism has its problems, but it’s a cleaner and humbler creed than leftism.

But I kind of doubt they are. They’ll know they’re still liberals if the leftist “liberals” around them start excluding and shunning them, the way they exclude and shun Rubin, Pool, etc.

When they start to fear to express their non-leftist inclination to “live-and-let-live” vis-a-vis conservatives, then they’ll know they’re on the “liberal” side of the dividing line. And when they overcome that fear and actually say “live-and-let-live,” and suffer whatever social consequences the Left imposes, then they’ll have earned the right to call themselves “liberals.”