The Liberal is disturbed by grass.

That sounds ridiculous but rings true when you think about it. I am coming to the end of James Burnham’s Suicide of the West, and it’s clear that the Liberal is plagued by his inability to detach from the abstract, theoretical world he’s surrounded by. Burnham attributes this quality to guilt, the loss of religion, etc. However, I think that these are a symptom of the cause. I think, psychologically speaking, they are neurotic.

When I say the Liberal is neurotic, I am speaking generally. As Burnham also notes, the Liberal could be a “Fox”; a term he acquires from Pareto, and whose work I will have to explore more in the future. It’s not clear if the foxes are mentally ill, but they suffer from a similar ailment; they think in the short term. Long-term, intergenerational consequences are hardly a secondary concern for the fox if they’re a concern at all. As long as the fox can raid the chicken coop, he's happy. Their tendency to engage in short-term thinking and the rarity of long-term thinking for the Liberal could be caused by their aversion to the physical world. Burnham notes that Liberals, more often than not, find themselves in positions suited for verbalists. The world of the verbalist is a world of linguistic abstractions. These abstracted, wordy worlds, orderly and predictable as wordy worlds are, are less messy than the physical world and may give the verbalists some comfort, i.e., subdue the negative feelings caused by their high neuroticism. Thinking in the long term may require the verbalist to consider matters that cannot be ordered or systematized easily – i.e., do not fit nicely within the logical, wordy worlds they create and reside within. Thus, when they have to step outside of these kinds of wordy, logical worlds, and when they cannot easily systematize or order matters, they become distressed, experience negative emotions, and retreat into their wordy worlds. The Fox's inability to act like a lion could be rooted in this fear of living in the real world. They can only feed off the lion, which naturally lives in the real world.

Fascinatingly, this seems to conflict with many people's conception of a contemporary Liberal. A contemporary Liberal or Progressive, if one were to characterize such a creature, would be a blue-haired woman with a humanities degree that works in some managerial position funded by the government. In other words, the Liberal is very seldomly considered good at systematizing. Yet, I think the contemporary liberal or progressive is a natural product of Liberalism.

Toward the end of his book, Burnham discusses the ascendancy of the Liberal order post-WWII. He also briefly reviews how America (before the establishment of the post-WWII order), like all nations that preceded it, was defined by a common goal. Before WWI, Manifest Destiny defined America. America had the West laid open before him for the taking, and take it he did. In many ways, this act defined the American identity. Burnham also notes that the United States (especially post-WWII) can be seen as a representation of the West (as a civilizational category) and the ultimate embodiment of the West.  He makes this claim by noting that, after WWII, no other power (save Great Britain) could genuinely be considered the dominant Western power. The United States had the resources, military capability, and global positioning to rule the world. However, America was too immature to understand this profound and grave fact. Other, older nations of the West may have had a better chance at grasping this reality. Yet, America, being a relative infant compared to the likes of Great Britain, was too imprudent an actor to have such power. Yet, she had it, and with it, she was to act.

As a result of her position and her imprudence, America acted foolishly. Its aims were an amalgam of three goals: the defeat of Communism and the preservation of the West, the Containment of the Communists (typically through appeasement), and helping the Third World defeat its colonial "oppressors" so that it may ascend. These goals contradicted each other; in fact, the latter two directly contradict the former. Since the goal of a nation is necessary for it to remain unified, and the United States did not have a unifying goal, Burnham declared that she would eventually disintegrate. The contemporary Liberal is a product of these contradicting goals. Thus, her disarray is a product of her inability to reconcile with the contradictions of her past.

Earlier in the Suicide of the West, Burnham talks about how the Liberal, who may see a news headline about the destruction of some factory in South America, goes out of his way to tell you what the conditions of that South American nation and factory town are like; how the people are oppressed; how the protest and riot is a natural outgrowth of oppressive conditions; and why you should support the protest if you’re against oppression (and all “reasonable” people are). Burnham also notes that this model Liberal knows very little about that South American nation, the political forces acting within that nation, how they interact with each other, and the effect of those political forces, such as communist agitators from Cuba. The Liberal has, for all intents and purposes, not touched the grass of the nation he feels empowered to talk about. The Liberal is provided an input, which he processes through his ideological software, generates an output, and is rewarded for parroting the Liberal line. He doesn’t need to engage in counterfactual thinking. He doesn’t need to gather the facts as they stand to confirm the story he’s been fed. His cultural milieu reinforces his output; if it fits the narrative, he gets rewarded. Thus, he has no incentive to touch the grass, get the facts on the ground, or experience (first-hand), what it’s like to be in that South American country.

Burnham notes that it is farmers, or people of the land, who seldomly adopt the Liberal or Progressive mindset. They live in a real and sensible world. They touch grass. They deal with the facts as they stand. The Liberal does not, and not only doesn’t he, but he also has an aversion to doing so. If there are people who adopt the progressive weltanschauung who do work with their hands (so to speak) – for example, men of the Labor Unions – they often adopt the progressive mask as a political tool to get what they need. Do they genuinely hold Liberal values and ideals? Burnham doubts they do.

The Liberal, because he’s too neurotic to experience the world first-hand, also is exceptionally naïve. I do not think there can be a better example of this than his association with Third Worlders. The Third Worlders, recognizing the contractions of the West, are happy to take advantage of the Liberal’s self-hate. They act like a victim and get benefits from the West. The guilt-ridden Liberal (a symptom of their neurotic tendencies) is compelled to provide a helping hand. The Liberal (as an egregore of the West) has a pistol. The Third Worlder, a baseball bat. The Third World breaks into the home of the Liberal, and the Liberal finds the Third Worlder stealing her stuff. However, because the Liberal believes in the power of dialogue and conversation (after all, all men are capable of reason and essentially good), she decides to converse with the Third Worlder. The Third Worlder tells the Liberal that he's only robbing her because of his "socioeconomic status."  Then, he assures the Liberal that he will put down his bat if the Liberal will put down her gun; he didn’t mean to cause her any trouble. The Liberal, because she trusts the Third Worlder and wishes to prove her willingness to help him, turns her back to the Third Worlder and puts her gun down. The Third Worlder, now the only one armed, bashes the Liberal’s head in. One can only hope that the Liberal, in her final moments, can feel like her property is going to someone more deserving. We wouldn’t want her to feel guilty as she bleeds to death.

It is this kind of naivete that the Third World has used to acquire power from the West. It is also this naivete that emboldened, for quite some time, the Soviet Union. Free from punishment, the Soviet Union (not Russia) brutalized Eastern Europe, for instance, Hungarians. At least the U.S. verbally scolded the Soviet Union. The question: why is the Liberal like this? Is it just because she feels guilty for her privilege and the power and position afforded her due to her forefather’s resilience and determination? She does despise her forefathers for that resilience and determination; she regards them as the producers of that exploitation and oppression. Still, in some sense, I think she creates her bubble because she intuitively knows that the world outside that bubble isn’t safe. She may rationalize these unsafe conditions as a product of her forefather’s oppressive and exploitative tendencies (a natural blowback caused by his evil), but regardless, she recognizes it. She is overwhelmed by the world outside her bubble, which causes her distress, and so she retreats into the abstract ideals of the Liberal fantasy realm. In this ideal Liberal world, she can solve the essential problems of the human condition. Being in a bubble too long, she forgets what the outside world is like, and by chance, she invites in the snake who kills her. The snake, after all, casts itself as the victim in the world she’s created to save herself from that snake. How ironic!

When the Liberal can interact with the real world (when she touches grass), the contradictions of her philosophy are made evident. Nature reminds her of her limitations. She can no longer believe in the purely existential sans the essential. She must acknowledge some essential reality if she’s to survive. If she does not, she dies, and life goes on without her. Still, the Liberal’s fear of grass, her neuroticism, cast as guilt through Burnham’s lens, is a bulwark against any realization of the essential. She would rather live in her world of Liberal fantasy than feel the pain of the real world, for just a moment. She’s unwilling to entertain the thought that her forefather was justified. Her limits cause her distress, but she avoids those distressful limits because they cause negative emotions, and thus she forgets her limits. Her limits are "out of her sight" and, thus, "out of her mind."

Like America without a constituting goal, the Liberal without limits will eventually disintegrate. Her fantasy realm can hold out for only so long as the real gets closer. Cast as the Snake, the Real finally reasserts itself the only way it can for the Liberal in denial: as Death.

Of course, you cannot ply the delusional Liberal with such imagery; she’ll naturally turn away from it. But, eventually, it will greet her. Unfortunately, because this is a social delusion rather than an individual delusion, we are not dealing with an individual that must experience death, but a society. Like a malignant tumor or fungal parasite, Liberalism and Liberals have spread throughout the West. They have led it on a path of self-annihilation. Yet, I’m not sure that this is a mere battle of ideas; I do not think the ideas of Liberalism are the cause of Liberals. For the parasite (Liberalism) to attach to a host, the host (the Liberal) must be susceptible to that parasite. The Liberal parasite wouldn’t have affected the West if Westerners weren’t susceptible to it. I think, in some way, this means the West, like a Phoenix, must figuratively self-immolate. It must be willing to die or face its mortality to overcome Liberalism. If that society will not acknowledge the real and essential limitations of its existence (while acting within and through those limits or limes), if it genuinely thinks it can conquer death with reason and knowledge, if it is unwilling to face its mortality and embrace death, Death will inevitably remind the liberal of her limitations.

What I’m trying to communicate is that Death can be virtuous. This suggests we have a duty to die. Like the Liberal, we could build a fantasy world to harbor us from the (necessary) pangs of existence, while putting off the inevitable at great cost to those around us. However, we can also unthinkingly thrust ourselves into a precarious situation and die needlessly. The virtuous death is the middle way and can overcome itself. Liberalism, as Burnham noted, is a lullaby for the West as it plunges into the abyss because it denies itself the use of appropriate force, destroying the good its forefathers wrought. Because it sees its power and capacity to use appropriate force as a product of its exploitative and oppressive past, while also wanting to reconcile that alleged exploitative and oppressive past, it will abdicate its power, kill itself, and leave a vacuum for someone else (China, Russia) to take its place. This is no virtuous death, mind you. The West’s suicide is a needless product of its unwillingness to accept the nature of things for the soft fantasy Liberalism provides. It is an inglorious death.

In the end, we all have a game of chess to play. Perhaps we should do so in the park.