OPINION: The vanity of liberal wishes

Assuming he maintained his neutrality, he might observe that contemporary liberalism is as reactionary as it accuses its adversaries to be. This is because the modern American liberal reacts, sometimes vehemently, against the natural, the orderly, and the way things are. Our observer might further notice that this reaction is focused on three particular existences which the contemporary left desperately laments ever coming into being:

•The Peace of Westphalia, which, in 1648, ended the Thirty Years War and introduced the concept of the modern nation-state. But sovereignty and nationalism are difficult things for the left to embrace because they promote differences. And differences being what they are, they necessarily promote inequality. Some nations are powerful. Some are dangerous. Some are weak. Some are popular. Some are historically significant, militarily, politically, literarily. Others …well Shakespeare never wrote about Switzerland’s brightest shining star. If only the Thirty Years War had never ended, or ended differently, and if the modern nation state had never come into existence, the oceans would have never needed to recede.

•Women. Conservatives often make the mistake of embracing feminine virtue, while liberals, with women occasionally as inexplicable cohorts, insist on rewriting the female existence, creating a gender-neutral society. That there are distinct sexes, as there are distinct nations and cultures, torpedoes the sameness that the modern left wants to invent. Since the male form was first, it follows that the contemporary left regrets the creation, or, in their terms, the evolution of womankind. What other conclusion can be drawn?

•Meaning. The modern American liberal, ironically enough, necessarily regrets a truism that it once heralded, circa 2008, via the Presidential campaign of a then-one-term Senator. Words, the Senator would smugly preach, have meaning; words matter. And indeed, they do. Words like “marriage” have a particular meaning. Words like “illegal,” as in illegal immigration, and words like “process,” as in due process, necessarily mean something other than the meanings the left typically imports. “Conservative” denotes something specific, too; and yet the modern left, without fail, accuses the most unconservative of adversaries of being conservative, as if one radical could not possibly oppose another radical on further radical grounds (see Beck, Palin, et al.). But, in fact, like elsewhere, modern liberals are successfully redefining words that have fixed definitions. This is because definitions – and things that simply are – tend to get in the way of liberals’ utopian follies.

Recently a new Prime Minster was elected in the United Kingdom. A year earlier, the President presented Her Majesty, and Her Majesty’s Government, with gifts so thoughtless, the entire non-adolescent world recoiled in their tackiness – an iPod downloaded with the President’s speeches (or was it just one speech, or, does that really matter?); a collection of DVD’s. Perhaps the new Prime Minster, if he weren’t such an incredible embarrassment to the Conservative legacy there in Britain, would care to present his new counterpart with a gift in turn: I should think that a copy of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language would seem appropriate; surely there must be an edition lying around in one of those many, mahogany-lined, awe-inspiring libraries that adorn the Royal palaces. I know a few words that should be highlighted, words, and their real definitions, that the contemporary liberal, in his vanity, would wish away.

— The Vanity of Human Wishes was a poem by Dr. Samuel Johnson, published in 1749
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Stephen B. Tippins Jr. is a Madison County resident and a staff attorney in Jefferson for the Superior Court of the Piedmont Circuit.