Why I Turned My Back on Liberalism, Feminism, and Socialism
When I was in high school and university I was a die-hard feminist. I believed in liberal ideals. I voted N.D.P. I even voted for Svend Robinson and Hedy Fry. I believed that feminism was about equality whereas traditional "patriarchal" society was about oppressing women. I believed that liberalism was about acceptance and tolerance, while conservatism and Christianity were about narrow-mindedness and prejudice. I believed that socialism was about caring for people, while fiscal conservatism was about valuing money over human life.
I never much trusted men through school. I saw them as trying to protect their traditional turf and hold women down, whereas all women wanted was a chance to show that they could succeed in business and in other traditionally male pursuits. I looked around and saw old boys' clubs (both literally and figuratively), all-male sports teams, and all-male gyms. I saw Archie Bunkers everywhere. I saw church-going people as prejudiced, narrow, and petty. I saw businesspeople as selfish, cold-hearted, and greedy.
I saw women as the good people in society, and I sought their company as friends. I stayed away from other men, unless they too believed in feminism, liberalism, and the new wave of goodness that was going to sweep the world.
Truth be told, I also held out selfish hope. I've never been much of an entrepreneur, a go-getter. I looked at the traditional female role and saw a lot of advantages: not having to do the gut-wrenching work of asking women out on dates; being able to stay home and look after the kids as the wife pursued her career. I thought of what a great world it would be when I could choose to play a more passive, peaceful role and nobody would think it was weird, when it would actually work. Too bad it didn't turn out like that.
School children think that they're already thinking critically about life. University students think that they're sociological geniuses and know how the world ought to be run. It's only after you've been working a while, I find, that you start to really look around and question not just what other people believe, but what you believe. Call it mid-life crisis if you like, but that's when it started to hit me. I looked around and saw that this great philosophy I was following, this great vision for the future, was a bust. The emperor had no clothes.
Here in Canada, socialism went hand-in-hand with feminism and liberalism. When I was in university, I saw fiscal conservatism as the triumph of greed over compassion. Socialists wanted to help people; conservatives wanted to keep their money. I remember seeing a Conservative Party lawn sign in front of one large house and thinking that the sign really translated into, "I'm rich and I want to stay that way."
After eight years of socialism here in British Columbia, I can safely say that socialism comes with its own set of special problems. Socialists, despite their goody-two-shoes image are quite happy to help out their political allies after being elected. The only difference is that instead of big corporations they're helping out big unions. Since I have an interest in neither of these kinds of organizations, it's all sleaze to me. The socialists also spend money like it's water, the end result being that social programs improve but are ultimately unsustainable. Which is more compassionate? Refusing to help more people because you don't have the money or putting it all on MasterCard until you ultimately go broke and can't help anyone? I don't have a good answer to that question, but it helped me realize that conservatives and socialists are equally corrupt, equally well meaning, and equally problematic. Only their methods differ.
I used to despise men in power. I used to see these men as looking after only their own interests and those of their (male) friends. I used to think that women were discriminated against because it was white men controlling everything. Now, thirty years later, I see plenty of women in power and they're exactly the same in the flesh as the picture they painted of men. With a couple of exceptions, women in power do things for the benefit of women only. When men go to their female representatives and complain of unfair treatment, even when the inequity is blatant, they are laughed off or shouted down. The new women with power, who were going to be fair and even-handed, are fair to everyone but men.
As well, I look back on male political history and see that it wasn't all that bad. Most of the male politicians in my lifetime have been helping out their political allies, but as well they had a built-in urge to protect women and children. Most programs to help women and children and give them both special status were and still are voted into existence by men. Perhaps the "paternalistic" flavour of some government actions wasn't ideal, but one can't claim that men were doing all of these things for only their own benefit. In fact, if anything male politicians tend to treat "men's issues" with far more scorn than they treat "women's issues," just like their female counterparts.
So are female politicians worse? I don't know if they are, but they don't seem to be any better. True, they lack some of the problems shown by male politicians, but then they also come with a whole new set of problems. Either way, they're hardly ushering in the new age of political enlightenment, honesty, and grace that was supposed to accompany an increase in female political power. For all their claims of moral superiority, they're screwing things up just as badly as their male counterparts, if only in different ways.
I used to rail against prejudice. My father liked to make comments about Chinese and Sikhs (about 10% of the people in Vancouver list their ancestry as Asian) and I hated it. I would jump on men for making cracks about women. I wanted a world in which everyone was accepted for who they were.
After 30 years I now see the liberals and feminists getting their licks in too, except this time it's white people and males taking the beating. Men have screwed up society. All men are "potential rapists." All men are violent. I get a particular kick out of visible minorities who bang on about how prejudiced white people are, not realizing that they are themselves being racist and promulgating stereotypes by saying so. These days the most prejudiced, venomous, downright nasty people I've heard are feminists and liberals.
Are the liberals and feminists worse than the Archie Bunkers of yesteryear? Are the Annie Bunkers of today any more offensive or narrow-minded than the male stereotypes that they complain about? Probably not, but then neither are they an improvement. These people were—and are—the literati, the educated. They were going to be more enlightened and more tolerant, free from prejudice. So much for the new, enlightened, tolerant society.
I turned away from the church because they were dogmatic and inflexible. The churchgoers I knew just believed; it seemed to me as though they barely engaged their brains. Feminists and liberals were thinkers. They asked the tough questions. They put church people on the spot and shredded their arguments. The narrow, dogmatic religious folk were yelling commandments but nobody was listening anymore. The brave, iconoclastic newcomers were going to create a wonderful new world of reason and compassion, and I was going to be part of it.
Now I see these same feminists and liberals manipulating figures, ignoring facts, twisting studies, and just plain making shit up, all to protect their precious ideology. They claim to be doing science, studying society, and analyzing meaning, but most of it is sheer fakery. As a result, bit by bit people are shrugging off science and becoming skeptical of universities. When even a quarter of it is bullshit it becomes too much work to sort the truth from the fiction. In the name of feminism and liberalism they have rendered science impotent.
Feminism and liberalism now have their own sacred cows, and conservatives everywhere are having a grand time skewering them and tearing down the pathetic mush that passes for liberal "arguments" these days. So much for the dawn of reason and truth.
On a personal level, I believed in women more than in men. Men were at best crude and cruel. At worst they were brutish, violent, and frightening. Women were kind, gentle, and intelligent. In school I even believed that the "gang chicks" were really softies underneath and would respond to kindness with kindness. I believed the feminist propaganda: women were universally good; the best men could hope to be was not as bad as other men.
Now in the middle of my life I feel profoundly cheated. People are still surprised by how nasty and vicious women can be. A newspaper describes a case in which a woman tried to poison her husband and then abducted their child and fled to Mexico, as "bizarre." Why is this "bizarre"? I recently saw a pocketbook entitled "She-Devils" discussing women who murdered their husbands and/or children. The author seemed surprised that any woman could do such a thing. I wondered why. Most women are good, if complex, people but I no longer have illusions about their sex's superiority. Women can be vicious, selfish, calculating, and just as violent as men. They may employ different methods, but evil is evil, no matter how you dress it up. The only difference is that evil women have a host of excuses such as PMS, PPD, and battered wife syndrome to blame for their actions.
As well, I started to see that men had many noble qualities. Good men are very different from their female counterparts, but no less valuable. Because I had avoided men I had missed out on ways of acting and coping with the world that I had never seen in women. Only in the last five years have I begun to realize that the traditional behaviours of women and men are pretty much equal when it comes to kindness, generosity, wisdom, violence, hatred, and evil. Far from being irrelevant, I now see men as making a critical contribution to shaping society and raising children. I think that without this influence society is doomed, just as it would be doomed without female influence.
Too bad my old compatriots, the feminists, don't see things that way. Their world is far simpler: men are bad; women are good. So much for kindness, gentleness, and intelligence.
So now I'm what feminists and liberals like to refer to as a "conservative" or a "backlasher." What they don't understand slinging those words around is that I and many of the people who think as I do didn't get to where we are through mindless dogma, self-interest, or a desire for power. We got here because the feminists and liberals aren't making any damned sense any more and haven't been for a decade. Like all overly successful movements before them, they failed to reign in their uncritical, radical, and psychotic elements and ultimately fell victim to those elements, leaving the rest of us unhappy with the old establishment and unhappy with the new liberal establishment.
There is no brave new world, and there never will be one. Liberalism is now captained by moral bankrupts like Bill Clinton who invent new "principles" and "values" to fit whatever they feel like doing at the moment. Selfishness has become a liberal virtue. Feminism is headed by psychotics and sociopaths like Patricia Ireland, Catherine MacKinnon and Marilyn French, women who spew hatred and bigotry and whose relationship with anything one might call "normal" or "progressive" is cursory at best.
So where does that leave me? I'm going back to explore a lot of the things I abandoned twenty-five years ago. I don't like everything that I see. In fact, I see a lot of the old prejudices and shibboleths that I hated before. However, in the last two decades the religious and conservative folks have taken some of the criticism and smartened up. They're surprisingly open-minded and accepting.
In the end, liberals and feminists with all of their talk of moral superiority and a brave new world have taught me one important lesson: they're no better or worse than the conservatives and traditionalists that they rail against. They have become the very things that they hated thirty years ago, and they can't see it.
