DAILY BEAST: "Anti-Liberalism in America Is a Delusion of ‘Freedom’ That Will Only Lead to Violence"

From Bonnie Kristian's 1-17-23 DAILY BEAST article entitled "Anti-Liberalism in America Is a Delusion of ‘Freedom’ That Will Only Lead to Violence":

“Suppose the election was declared free and fair,” American diplomat Richard Holbrooke worried of Bosnia in 1996, but the winners are “racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed to [peace and reintegration]. That is the dilemma,” he said, in a decade when ascendant illiberalism was a relatively distant prospect, a problem for faraway places like Peru, Slovakia, and the Philippines.

And though that sentence could be pasted verbatim into any number of articles about former President Donald Trump from the last half-decade, I’m not so sure we have the same dilemma now, when illiberalism is rising on left and right alike here in the United States. Ideological anti-liberals—the sort of people who know what “David French-ism” means, who explicitly reject liberalism’s insistence on tolerance and want to fundamentally change how our government works—don’t have the numbers to sweep to power as Holbrooke’s comment anticipated.

That means their plan to overhaul American politics depends, at best, on a delusional belief that if we toss out liberalism, their party will somehow come out on top. At worst, however, it depends on something much darker: forcible subjugation of the many Americans who haven’t embraced their vision for a post-liberal United States. And that’s a plan which could only appeal to those who have forgotten the centuries of horrific violence that led the West to liberalism [...].

So how do these illiberal groups expect to win? Let’s take the blasphemy law crowd—Christian nationalists—as a case study. Writing to self-proclaimed Christian nationalists in the pages of World Magazine, a conservative Christian outlet, Southern Baptist ethicist Andrew T. Walker raised the key question: “Tell me,” he said, “how are you going to achieve sufficient enough majorities in a nation where Christianity is in decline?”

Realistically, they won’t. Christian nationalism isn’t a decades-long evangelism program. It’s an illiberal politics supported by a minority of a minority of a shrinking demographic. The answer to Walker’s question, then, isn’t conversion and persuasion. It’s delusion—or force.

Like other advocates of illiberalism, Christian nationalists typically don’t spell this part out. They don’t acknowledge the comparative unpopularity of their cause, and they certainly don’t openly endorse a return to the ideological violence that fueled demand for liberalism in the first place. Let’s get back to creed wars is not an attractive message to anyone who knows that history.

To read the entire article, click HERE.