Wisdom From James Kalb, Esq.

“To all appearances, liberalism empowers the individual by letting him choose what he wants and get what he chooses. However, choice is useless unless distinctions make a difference, and ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ mean that distinctions must be treated as interchangeable matters of purely private taste. As a result, advanced liberalism becomes freedom to make choices that are not permitted to matter. The glitter of unlimited choice dissipates when we find that nothing significant has changed because equality had deprived all changes of meaning….Liberalism attempts to destroy the effect of basic social aspects of identity – sex, religion, historical community, particular culture and connections. Such things no longer have a legitimate social role: who a man is can have no relevance to how life is for him or to social relations that matter. If identity can have no effect, though, it is not identity….Equal respect becomes an equality of compulsory irrelevance indistinguishable from equal contempt…For all its desire to give us what we want, advanced liberalism in fact imposes on us the greatest possible deprivation – the loss of what we are. If we can be whatever we want we can be nothing in particular. What, after all, am I? A man, someone with definite connections, history, and moral character, a member of this family and that people, an adherent of some system of ultimate understandings that defines the world and my place in it. A liberal regime recognizes me as a good citizen only to the extent that I agree that none of those things matter. I am allowed to give them whatever private significance I want, but the permission is all but meaningless since equal freedom requires the effect of such private preferences to be reduced to the vanishing point.” -James Kalb