in the simple foundation | Fredrik deBoer

“My many unhappy debates with liberals have demonstrated to me that, for every one of them that is motivated by a sincere desire to help everyone, another is motivated by the base instinct to place him or herself above others on the hierarchy of righteousness. American liberalism has become so deeply habituated to the practice of ceaseless and totalizing moral judgment that it seems incapable of expressing itself with any other kind of vocabulary. And the inevitable outcome of a politics of personal righteousness is an ideology made up only of commissars, an army of inquisitors who must by necessity believe in a vast throng of sinners and a small band of saints, with themselves standing as the greatest among this latter group.”