Pretending by the Left

Multiculturalism is a philosophy built up of lies and self-deceits. And it is killing us as a nation both politically and socially. Andrew Claven (City-Journal.org) has a penetrating analysis of what the Left is willing to do in order to avoid the truth (Read "The Big White Lie").


The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to
lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to
declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to
say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions
are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is
a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that
depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and
hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their
gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility.
It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only
advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all.
From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and
multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family,
leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But
because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition
inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to
rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s
handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s
redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the
most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was
queen....

...And because we’ve allowed leftists to define the language of political
good manners—don’t say women are less scientific; don’t remark that black people
bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites; don’t point out that
the gunman was a Muslim, it’s not nice—the sort of person willing to speak the
truth isn’t always the sort of person you want to be seen with. It sometimes
takes, I mean, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity to withstand the obloquy
attached to stating the facts of the matter. If these people in their public
personae seem harsh to more genteel conservatives, it may be because it requires
that extra dollop of aggression to shatter the silence created by the Left’s
increasingly elaborate sensitivities.

Still, mannerly as we would rather be, truth-telling continues to be
both compelling and ultimately satisfying. There is, after all, something
greater than courtesy. “Firmness in the right,” Lincoln called it, “as God gives
us to see the right.” We find ourselves at a precarious moment in an endeavor of
great importance: namely, the preservation of Western rationalism and liberty.
It does mankind no good to allow so magnificent an enterprise to slip away
merely for fear of saying the wrong thing.