Steven Erlanger reporting from London in The New York Times here, conflating post-war liberal values with Judeo-Christian ones:
"THE West is suddenly suffused with self-doubt. ... Are Western values, essentially Judeo-Christian ones, truly universal?
"The history of the last decade is a bracing antidote to such easy thinking. The rise of authoritarian capitalism has been a blow to assumptions, made popular by Francis Fukuyama, that liberal democracy has proved to be the most reliable and lasting political system. ... The fight over values is not limited to democracy . . . with radical disagreements over the proper place of women and the rights of homosexuals. In its rejection of Western liberal values of sexual equality and choice, conservative Russia finds common cause with many in Africa and with the religious teachings of Islam, the Vatican, fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews."
It's as if liberalism were a frightened little child, running to hide behind her mother's skirt after having gone too far with some opponent, maybe the dog. Judeo-Christian values, the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.
Historically speaking, Judeo-Christian values produced what was a relatively quiescent American republican mercantilism until the dawn of the 20th century, not the worldwide crusade for democracy and unfettered capitalism we have come to see thereafter, but sixty years of lousy public education has a way of making people forget such things.
Amnesia also exists about traditional values, which gave us their easy imprimatur for social relations organized around the family and children, with a long and storied history until recent times. The pipe dream has been egalitarian individualism and its various licenses for perversion, which are still fringe arrangements for most people, even for those who purchased them. Regret is everywhere. Such things are the specialties of liberalism, which does indeed look like it's coming undone, but the truly universal things like religion and the family and the arrangements they inspire continue to suggest themselves by nature to billions.
Only a liberal could fail to see them everywhere, as if they were the exception, not he.
