Is Liberalism Brain-dead?
At least that would explain why so many liberals appear to be a fan of Hayek's, or at least his essay, "Why I am not a conservative."
Aside from comments on liberal blogs praising the essay with no particular stated reason, these are some of the passages they quote:
Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it - or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism.
I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism
The only problem? From the same essay, I can quote this:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.[2] This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character.
In other words, when Hayek says "conservative", he explicitly means European conservative (which makes sense, given that Hayek is a European, not an American), the likes of which America has never seen.
So, perhaps it is a simple reflection on the failure of liberal education system (with their blatant disregard of core 3Rs) that liberals who read this essay cannot understand the distinction Hayek makes between the conservatives in the U.S.A. and the conservatives elsewhere.
"But," you may say, "every movement has its morons." Surely I can't call liberalism brain-dead because some liberals happen to be?
Well, idiocy can be cured. Sophistry such as this cannot:
Now there is a diplomatic quality to Hayek’s essay, which could lead you to miss the fact that he is, in fact, talking about American conservatives. Pragmatically, Hayek regards American conservatives as his allies, but only because he thinks they can serve as a counterweight to socialism, not because he agrees with them philosophically. He thinks they have ‘a somewhat odd character’. The essay is, in part, an attempt to tell American-style conservatives this without really rubbing their noses in it – more flies with honey and all that.
Really? So everything else Hayek says about American founding values (which conservatives place great importance on), such as (Hayek uses "liberal" to note "classical liberal", and the fact that he refers to Jefferson as "radical" and Hamilton, the noted statist among Founding Fathers, as "conservative" should alert you to the fact that his terms are somewhat non-standard compared to modern usage),
It was the ideals of the English Whigs that inspired what later came to be known as the liberal movement in the whole of Europe[15] and that provided the conceptions that the American colonists carried with them and which guided them in their struggle for independence and in the establishment of their constitution.[16]
...
It is the doctrine which is at the basis of the common tradition of the Anglo-Saxon countries. It is the doctrine from which Continental liberalism took what is valuable in it. It is the doctrine on which the American system of government is based. In its pure form it is represented in the United States, not by the radicalism of Jefferson, nor by the conservatism of Hamilton or even of John Adams, but by the ideas of James Madison, the "father of the Constitution."[18]
All of this means nothing to Mr. Holbo? If Hayek was indeed addressing American conservatives, then in lauding James Madison as representing the "pure form" of classical liberalism, he was not telling American conservatives to stop being conservative; he was telling them to remain conservatives, and defend the Constitution—which is important not just because it's American, but in its current form, it represents the ideals of classical liberalism—from enemies foreign and domestic. I would take "criticisms" like that any day.
Jonah Goldberg has explained this for years, and yet, Mr. Holbo simply refuses to listen—and he's not alone.
And this is why liberalism is brain-dead. Morons, we can educate. Sophists, on the other hand, as Socrates found out the hard way, cannot be persuaded through logic—after all, it's their job to make the weaker argument stronger by twisting logic. Liberalism is nothing but an empty shell without its sophistry, which means it has to be brain-dead.
Update: To be fair, some of Hayek's criticism of conservatives was and is valid for some of the American conservatives—but they are valid only for certain (influential) versions of American conservatism, not for the core principles of American conservatism, as outlined here.
h/t: Stok