The funny thing about national unity is that both sides of the political spectrum implicitly agree on one thing: that keeping society unified is a good idea, and that the dissolution of political powers is a painful, cumbersome, and oftentimes violent process that’s worth avoiding (this is unless, of course, that radical is an anarchist or a separatist, but both of these groups are minorities of minorities).  The disagreement between Left and Right on social cohesion occurs because, just as with pleasure and peace and wealth, how you pursue unity defines whether or not you reside in the camp of good or evil.  But despite the fact that both sides have completely different approaches to unity, both sides claim the other violates civil liberties in the pursuit thereof, and reality will always attest that no two political stances offend liberty with perfect equality. As such, it is our duty to determine which pathway is more destructive to the cause of freedom.

While true liberalism demands that political unity must be attained through institutionally-based equality, those on the Right maintain that unity under a government should be pursued by a people with sense of cultural and theological belonging.  It is this, conservatives argue, which grants legitimacy to the democratic republic, with the people deciding who they are and why they belong together.  Anything else would be contrary to the very idea of liberty itself: just ask someone from a Soviet satellite republic.

Conservative philosopher [1] Roger Scruton said in an historic speech before Belgium’s [2] Vlaams Belang party, that “Every society depends on an experience of membership: a sense of who ‘we’ are, why we belong together, and what we share. This experience is pre-political: it precedes all political institutions, and provides our reason for accepting them. It unites left and right, blue-collar and white-collar, man and woman, parent and child. To threaten this ‘first-person plural’ is to open the way to atomisation, as people cease to recognize any general duty to their neighbours, and set out to pillage the accumulated resources while they can. Without membership we risk a new ‘[3] tragedy of the commons,’ as our inherited social assets are seized for present use.”

This directly contrasts the Liberal view that no particular culture should have any sort of dominance in a political setting.  It is because of the Left’s refusal to educate people to be Christian Americans that the Left is forced to seek another method of unification, and they find it in wealth redistribution.

Benjamin Barber, a renowned [4] best-selling Leftist author and professor at the University of Maryland, has frequently [5] made statements such that “Privatization–whether of education, housing, or Social Security–makes us less of a public. It diminishes the republic–the res publica, or public things that define our commonwealth. It turns the common ‘we’ into a collection of private ‘me’s.’” and “[Privatization] is a kind of reverse social contract: It dissolves the bonds that tie us together.”  Worth noting is that Barber conveniently neglects defining the point at which “me” deserves to exist, and whether or not “me” is for the purpose of the state or an individual.   Should you be visiting his Stalag after the collapse of the republic, it might be wise to tell him you enjoyed his book “Jihad vs. McWorld.“

Robert Kuttner, editor of The American Prospect ([6] which describes itself as a publication “of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics”), [7] would say that “In a democratic polity that also happens to be a highly unequal market economy, there is immense civic value to treating middle-class and poor people alike. A common social security program, or medical care program, or public school program, helps to create the kind of cohesion that Europe’s social democrats like to call “social solidarity”–a sense that basic humanity and citizenship in the political community require equal treatment in at least some areas of economic life. And by doing so it also creates a reliable constituency for the Democratic Party.”  

So if blatant multicultural globalism must be a goal in a liberal society, then social unity must be maintained from the top down, with the government keeping its borders secure through the redistribution of wealth, all under threat of its comparative advantage in violence (it must be noted that because of this, all philosophically consistent multicultural globalists are effectively socialists or communists).  Of course, there are those on the Left who argue that expression of cultural ethics through the state is also totalitarianism, but only a liar would suggest that the people’s culture or theology should have no bearing whatsoever upon the laws within a democratic republic.  Liberal laws to combat “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia” are a testament to nothing less than the cultural chauvanism of liberal legislators, who–denying God’s importance and a universal moral standard–somehow believe their cultural standards should dominate the others.

Thus, the liberal statement that economic liberties are sacrificed to maintain “rich” cultural diversity is false: when the state removes your foundation for cultural unity, you lose your economic freedoms as well as your social liberty.  Once liberals gain control over both, your freedom really just depends which social liberties are in vogue at the moment, and which ones they deem dangerous, intolerant, or antiquated.  But in all honesty, why should a people imprudent enough to discard cultural and theological legitimacy be worthy of liberty anyway?  For those living logically, theological castration can lead only to [8] a game of evolutionary domination. With religion in the picture, you have warring between sects; remove it, and the war begins in every aspect of existence… sans “pesky” religious stances on suffering and the sanctity on human life.

So if it must be that social cohesion requires some form of control, the only question is whether we want to empower the state to do our will, or have our will be subject to the state.  Unfortunately, it seems liberal America has chosen the immoral and dangerous latter.  May God protect us as they reap what they’ve sown.