Umair Haque and the liberal love affair with “modernity”

People in the Ozarks who have little experience with liberalism — after all, around here even most of our local Democrats are fairly conservative by national standards — sometimes ask me how liberals can possibly believe such strange and odd things. They know I’ve lived in many other parts of America where pickup trucks, y’alls, and coveralls are not the norm. When local people watch reports on Fox News of radical demonstrations and calls by members of Congress for mob action against members of the Cabinet, they wonder how “those strange city folk” think.

That’s a reasonable question. Just as people who have never owned a gun and have never known anyone who would admit to owning a gun may wonder why anyone would want to defend the “antiquated” Second Amendment that allows “dangerous devices” to remain in the hands of private individuals rather than being limited to properly trained police, people who rarely run into liberals may wonder why they would think the way they do.

I often tell them that the only way to truly understand liberals is to live in places where liberalism is the norm. Liberalism is less a set of coherent ideas than a way of looking at the world and the role of government.

Here’s a link to an article which is a good example, written at a layman level, of a liberal worldview: https://eand.co/why-didnt-america-become-part-of-the-modern-world-dac6d65e9015?winst=1531427985279&of=0

The title of the article by umair haque is provocative: “Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?”

The title says much about a liberal worldview.

In a liberal worldview, being “modern” almost automatically means being good. If something is “new,” it’s more likely to be better than something “old.”

That’s turning a conservative principle upside down.

Most conservatives believe that new ideas may be good, or they may be bad, and they need to be tested carefully before being accepted. New isn’t necessarily good and old isn’t necessarily bad. However, ideas that have stood the test of time — the United States Constitution, for example — are more likely to be right. That doesn’t mean “old” is automatically good, but it does mean the burden of proof is on people proposing change.

When we hear liberals talking about being on the “right side of history,” we need to understand what they mean by this…