“We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers,” Bill Maher protested after his televised argument with Ben Affleck about Islam.
“We are not bigoted people. On the contrary, we’re trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism!” Maher added. “I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority.”
But despite Maher’s protests, the majority of liberals would agree with Affleck that criticizing Islam is racist. Liberals claim that the Islamic State is Un-Islamic. It would be more accurate to state that liberals are illiberal. Liberalism, even the form that was in common usage not too long ago, is as dead as Lenin.
Ben Affleck isn’t a liberal. He’s an enthusiast of revisionist Communist historian Howard Zinn. The modern liberal of today is uninterested in identifying “illiberalism” since he is an illiberal man of the left. The most significant difference between the two is not simply political, but psychological. Liberals used to think about issues. Leftists respond to ideological cues while operating on a purely tribal wavelength.
Affleck’s assertion that criticizing Islam is racist is impossible to argue with. It’s completely wrong on multiple levels, but it’s not an argument. It’s a denunciation. It doesn’t advance an argument; it rejects the argument and the arguer as illegitimate. And it’s an ideological cue telling everyone else to follow.
Leftists don’t debate issues. That would be a liberal thing to do. Instead they seek to affirm a consensus. The consensus is reinforced by in-group flattery which convinces members that they are empathetic and enlightened people, while those outside the consensus are subjected to constant contempt and abuse. The denunciation places the target outside the consensus. Calling Maher a “racist” makes him a Tea Party member no matter how much he clings to a liberal identification. It makes him an outsider.