Post-moral confusion

If you read nothing else today, go to Melanie Phillips' blog. She takes Andrew Sullivan and the Tories to task in "Our post-moral confusion".

Sullivan is all over the place on the war: a faint-heart who, while ostensibly still supporting it, has nevertheless succumbed to the absurd and irrational propaganda of the anti-war mob that says because no WMD have been found they never existed, and that Abu Ghraib destroyed America’s claim to moral superiority over terrorist rogue states. But the significance of his remarks extends beyond the immediate issue of the war. They reveal a moral equivalence that is fundamentally illiberal and unconservative. This is hardly surprising, given Sullivan’s well-known views as a passionate crusader for gay rights, and for the liberalisation of soft drugs on the basis that they do no harm to anyone (someone should show him the psychiatric wards full of people suffering from marijuana psychosis and other mental ailments that directly harm not only the drug users themselves but those who come into contact with them and indeed the wider society).

But the key point is that Sullivan defines himself as a conservative. And there are many within the British Conservative party who hold very similar views on both domestic and foreign issues. But these British Tories are not conservatives. Nor are they authentic liberals (not the same as the statist left, although in the US the terms are even more confusingly conflated). They are libertines, people who have gone with the contemporary cultural flow of destroying moral rules and boundaries. And it is these pseudo-conservatives who tend to be on that wing of the party that is having a fit of the vapours about nation-building and preventive action in the Middle East, and love instead the EU and the UN and John Kerry. They prefer the stability of tyranny and its world export, genocidal terrorism. They are, in short, appeasers and sometimes even fellow-travellers of wrong-doing, both at home and abroad.

Such people often think of themselves as liberals. But authentic liberalism is very different. For it was at its core a moral project, based on the desire to suppress the bad and promote the good in the belief that a better society could and should be built. What has happened in recent decades is that this moral core which upholds social norms and discriminates against values that threaten them has been replaced by a post-modern creed of the left, which has tried to destroy all external authority and moral norms and the institutions that uphold them, and replace them by an individualist, moral free-for-all the creed which has led to the moral relativism and denial of truth that lie at the core of the anti-war movement.

And,

Where Sullivan is absolutely right is to call Bush a liberal. For in repudiating the corrupted values of both the post-moral left and the reactionary appeasers of the right, Bush has indeed exhibited the classic liberal desire to build a better society, along with the characteristic liberal optimism that such a project can and must succeed.

And this is surely why Bush is so hated by the left. For this hatred wildly exceeds the normal dislike of a political opponent. It is as visceral and obsessive as it is irrational. At root, this is surely because Bush has got under the skin of the post-moral left in a way no true conservative ever would. And this is because he has stolen their own clothes and revealed them to be morally naked. He has exposed the falseness of their own claim to be liberal. He has revealed them instead to be reactionaries, who want both to preserve the despotic and terrorist status quo abroad and to go with the flow of social and moral collapse at home, instead of fighting all these deformities and building a better society.

Read it all.