How Liberals Think

Liberals tend to be Childish, Resentful, and Authoritarian

by Dr. William Pierce

Every few days I get a telephone call from a newspaper or television reporter wanting an interview. The things they want to talk about change from time to time: a couple of years ago they were interested in some of the videos the sponsor of American Dissident Voices, National Vanguard Books, distributes; last summer it was the Montana Freemen; right now it's domestic unrest and terrorism. They want to know why terrorism is on the rise, what do I think about the Oklahoma City bombing, was there a conspiracy behind that bombing, do I believe there will be more such bombings, do I think people should worry that there may be biological or chemical terror attacks in the future, what do I believe is the motivation of most terrorists, etc.

I never have pretended to be an expert on terrorism, and I tell the reporters that - but I also tell them, although no single act of terrorism is predictable, I am sure that, averaged over periods of two or three years, terrorism will continue to become more common. I tell them I am sure of this because the underlying causes of terrorism are on the rise.

Those underlying causes are growing hostility on the part of the government toward citizens, growing governmental intrusion into the lives of citizens, growing resentment against the government by the citizens, a growing sense of having been betrayed by the government. On top of all this is the growth of a more general sort of alienation, as reflected in the decline in citizen participation in elections, the growth in crime and the use of drugs, and the rise in the divorce and suicide rates.

I tell the reporters that there is no chance at all that the government will make the changes necessary to cure these problems. The government will respond to terrorism with counterterrorism, which will provoke more terrorism. The government certainly will not take the measures necessary to decrease citizen alienation, because the greatest single cause of citizen alienation is government-promoted "diversity".

Can you imagine the Clinton administration - or any administration, Republican or Democrat --saying, "Well, we made a mistake in pushing 'diversity.' We shouldn't have forced racial mixing in the schools, the workplaces, and neighborhoods. We shouldn't have let a flood of non-White immigrants into the country. We'll straighten things out and restore the citizens' faith in the government by separating the races, by sending the non-White immigrants back where they came from, and by taking other steps to clean up the mess we've made of things. And the first thing we’ll do is put on trial all of the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, including those responsible for the massacre at Waco.

„No, the government is locked into its present course of social and racial destruction. It does not have the will to change its fundamentally destructive policies. Nothing but a total revolution can bring about the changes necessary to minimize alienation, restore the faith of White citizens in the government, and eliminate terrorism. That's why I'm a revolutionary instead of a conservative or a reformer.

I tell the reporters all of these things, but it is clear to me in talking to them that they have no comprehension of what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to creatures from Mars as trying to explain to the average newspaper or television reporter the things that are wrong with American society today and why so many people are reacting badly to these things. To me, one of the more interesting aspects of these interviews is the opportunity to study the mentality of journalists. On the whole, they're not really stupid. In fact, they're probably a little brighter, on the average, than the population as a whole. But they really do have an almost identical mentality, as if they all had been cloned from a single ultra-liberal prototype.

They all understand, of course, that their Jewish bosses expect a certain slant on the reporting they do. They understand which side their bread is buttered on. They don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. But their liberal bias goes beyond just trying to please the Jewish media bosses who employ them.

I think it's clear that most journalists really don't understand why American society is coming unraveled. They really don't understand why alienation is growing, why divorce and suicide rates are up, why so many people hate and fear the government. They don't understand, and part of the reason may be a selection process in the journalism profession. It may be that students who major in journalism in college tend to be authoritarian types. It may be that they tend to be those who are only comfortable when they are marching in ideological lockstep with all the rest of their profession. And it may be that the journalism professors tend to weed out any students who show a streak of independence or who aren't trendy enough. That may be part of the explanation for why journalists are so uniformly liberal.

I think, though, that another part of the explanation may be found in the phenomenon of the1960s. The great bulk of the reporters I talk with today went through their formative period, their period of social imprinting, during the 1960s or 1970s. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of deliberately induced chaos, a period during which American society deliberately was turned upside down, a period during which all of our traditional values and standards were ridiculed relentlessly by Jewish critics and arbiters of fashion. Young people on our college campuses were told that everything which had come before was old-fashioned and outdated and had to be scrapped to make way for a new order. The old way was racist and sexist and homophobic and had to go.

And these young people were the first TV generation, the first generation to be exposed more to artificial social situations and social interactions constructed by television scriptwriters than to natural social situations and interactions in the real world. They were the first generation to be socialized by Jewish television, before we had had any opportunity to develop defense mechanisms against this sort of brainwashing. They also were a generation raised according to Dr. Spock, a generation in which permissiveness ruled. They were kids raised without corrective punishment and with a minimum of discipline, kids raised without any reality checks. They’ve been called the "me" generation because of their narcissistic tendencies, but there's really more to it than just selfishness and egoism.

You know, when the question of Nature versus nurture is debated, I'm nearly always to be found on the side of Mother Nature. But in trying to understand what has made today's journalists what they are, I believe that we must look very carefully into the way they were nurtured. Our ancestors spent thousands of generations learning how to raise children so that they had a reasonable chance to become valuable and effective adults. This process of learning wasn't done with books. It was a matter of trial and error, of failure and success, of life or death.

Communities or tribes which had correct ways of raising their young survived and prospered, on the average. Tribes which had faulty methods stagnated or perished.

Within the past century some very foolish people let themselves be sold on the idea that the old ways of raising children to adulthood no longer have any relevance, because we have made so many changes in our environment. What worked back in tribal days a thousand years ago is no longer any good under modern conditions we were told. Discipline and hardness and self-reliance and courage may have been necessary qualities to instill in young people back in the days when survival was much more difficult. But in the days of the welfare state and day-care centers and working mothers and MTV, permissiveness isn't so bad, we were told. The consequences of that theory are to be seen all around us today. Journalists as a class show the consequences a little more strongly, a little more clearly, than the rest of the "me" generation, because, I believe, those most corrupted by the new nurturing have been attracted to journalism. The corruption, however, has permeated much of our society today. Many others besides journalists have been infected.

I don't want to overemphasize the effects of nurture. It is clear that many of our personality traits are inborn. Even many of the worst traits that we see in journalists and other members of the „me" generation are inborn traits which merely have been strengthened and brought to the fore by the disastrous nurturing environment of the 1960s and 1970s. In a healthier nurturing environment healthier traits are brought to the fore and unhealthy traits are at least partially suppressed.

In trying to understand liberals we also should keep in mind the fact that most people cannot properly be classified as real liberals or real conservatives. Most people have no real ideology of any sort: they simply parrot whatever ideas are fashionable at the moment. When the fashions change, their ideas will change instantly, like a weathercock. But there are, unfortunately, plenty of real liberals, and I believe that their unwholesome abundance these days can best be explained as I have just outlined. And if we understand what has caused the current plague of liberals, I believe that we can understand better how their minds work - although that still is not an easy task.

In some ways it is unfortunate that I quit my university teaching when I did, in the mid-1960s. Liberalism was really starting to take hold on the campuses then, and if I had remained a physics professor for another ten years I might have been able to observe some of these psychological phenomena directly and figured things out much more quickly.

First, at the core of the liberal personality is an excessive degree of egoism, which in the worst cases amounts to narcissism. This excessive egoism is an infantile characteristic. Which is to say, it is a normal characteristic in infants, but in the case of healthy growth it recedes as the individual develops and matures. A permissive upbringing retards the normal process of maturing.

A second very important element in the liberal personality - an element closely related to the egoism - is resentment coupled with envy. That is why in the past liberalism has sometimes been called an ideology based on resentment. The liberal finds very distasteful the notion that some people are brighter than he is, better looking, more industrious, more righteous or moral, more cultured, more artistic, more capable, or more successful. And he regards these people who are better than he is - and because of being better, more powerful - as a threat, as an irksome constraint. This envy and resentment is in a way a carryover into adult life of the sort of resentment that a spoiled, self-indulgent child might feel toward a parent who won't let him do exactly what he wants to do, a parent who won't let him eat all the cookies in the cookie jar or torment an animal for his amusement or "play with himself," to use a familiar euphemism. It may express itself in infancy in the form of a tantrum. In adulthood it is expressed as a strong attraction to the ideology of egalitarianism: the idea that no one is better than anyone else.

If you believe that I'm on thin ice in tracing the adult liberal's egalitarianism back to an infantile resentment of parental restraint, let me remind you of a significant refrain in the Jews ‘indoctrination of young Gentiles during the 1960s and 1970s. The refrain was "kill your parents. „In most cases this incitement to parenticide was symbolic. It meant get rid of every restraint, everything which keeps you from spending all of your time doing exactly what you feel like doing, whether that be smoking dope, having sex, or whatever. In one of the more popular books on the campuses in those days, a book published in 1970 and titled Do It! by Jerry Rubin, one of the Jewish leaders of the Youth International Party, or the "Yippies" for short, the incitement is quite literal. Rubin wrote, "When we start playing with our private parts, our parents say, 'Don't do that.' The mother commits a crime against her child when she says, 'Don't do that.'

"The remainder of Rubin's book is a non-stop effort to build resentment in his infantile collegiate readers with a long recitation of the "crimes" their parents, their schools, and the rest of society have committed against them by restraining them in one way or another and of the need to end this parental oppression. And, of course, Rubin manages to bring the racial angle and the Communist angle into this ideology of resentment. Blacks, he tells the kids, are your natural allies against your parents, because they have been oppressed too. They are Black niggers, and we are White niggers, Rubin says. Blacks will help you overthrow society, so that you can have everything you want. And Rubin idolizes Fidel Castro, as someone who succeeded in killing his parents. And he holds up the Communist guerrilla Che Guevara as another idol who was fighting to end parental oppression.

Rubin winds up his book with a description on the last page of how wonderful life will be for everyone after young people have gotten rid of their parents, burned their schools, and killed all of the police. He writes, and I quote: "There will be no more jails, courts, or police. The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared. There will be no such crime as 'stealing' because everything will be free. People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon, and have sex whenever and wherever they want to.

„And there's more, but you get the picture. This is the image of the ideal life in an ideal world which the Jews were busy selling to young, White Americans during the 1960s and the 1970s. The ones who bought this image were the most infantile ones: that is the ones who had been raised most permissively and were most narcissistic. And the worst of these went into journalism.

Unfortunately, however, some of this Jewish poison was absorbed by millions of other young people during that period of deliberate chaos and confusion, when the old America was being trashed. That's how the current crop of liberals was created. Most of them are in their 30s and40s now; a few are in their 50s. Some of them went into business, some into education, some into the churches, some into government work. One couple, a man and wife, are in the White House now. Wherever they went, they continue the destruction, in a thousand ways.

It is in the journalists, though, where the poison has produced the most profound effects, that the phenomenon of liberalism is easiest to study and understand, I believe. When I explain to a reporter that terrorism is the consequence of a loss of a sense of belonging and identity - when I explain that a person who feels that he is no longer a part of the society around him, that it is no longer his family and he has no responsibility to it, may strike out violently at that society - when I explain this, the reporter may smile politely and take notes, but I can see the total lack of comprehension in his eyes. He lives in a different world, a different moral universe, where words like "responsibility" and "belonging" and "identity" have no meaning - or at least, they have a totally different meaning to him than they have to me. He lives in a universe shaped by egoism and resentment, a world in which the individual, the self, is everything, and anyone who tries to impose any constraints at all on the individual is an enemy. He cannot comprehend a world in which the individual is just one part in a complex and interrelated natural order, and that for that order to be healthy the individual needs to be able to find his proper place, the place where he can be useful, and that he has a responsibility to be useful. That's an alien concept to the journalist.

I hope that I haven't bored you with these comments on the way a journalist's mind works. I believe that it's important to try to understand these things. If we're to effectively carry out our responsibilities and make a future for our people, we have to overcome all of those who are now infected by liberalism, and then we have to restructure our society in a way which will prevent the production of a new crop of liberals - or at least, minimize the size and destructiveness of that crop. The more we know about them the more likely we are to succeed.