hey say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  There is, I believe, a profound respect in which contemporary liberalism is an illustration of precisely this truth.  Not the contemporary liberalism of philosophers such as John Rawls, but the contemporary liberalism of actual political life. The ideal of contemporary liberalism in political life has, of course, been to free people from various sundry biases that diminished their humanity: from blacks to women to gays to transgendered people.  On the surface, that ideal would seem to be a very laudable ideal if only because surely no one is less of a person merely on account of skin color or sexual organs or sexual orientation.  What could possibly be wrong with the goal of complete freedom for all? 

This seemingly laudable ideal went awry because contemporary liberalism has made a point of privileging suffering.  If nothing else we are all victims.  The only exception, as far as I can tell, are straight white males.  Suffering has become such a badge of identity that people are often more interested in focusing upon their suffering than doing anything about it.  Indeed, just about every victim-group holds that everything is worse than it once was or, in any case, is as horrendous as it always was.  That is, contemporary liberalism has so privileged suffering that all sorts of folks barely acknowledge that any progress has been made. 

And the way people get around the utterly implausible claim that no progress has been made is by insisting that they “feel as if this or that difficulty is just like some horrendous thing of yesteryear”.  And contemporary liberalism privileges doing just that sort of thing—invoking the “it-feels-as-if” modality.  So a woman might say “What that man did to me, in putting his hand on my shoulder, made feel as if I had been raped”.  Or, a transgendered person might say “Having to choose between the female toilets and the male toilets makes me feel as if I am being persecuted for my sexual orientation”.  Finally, a black might say “The white professor who asked me to leave the room made me feel as if I was being lynched”. 

In other words, contemporary liberalism has legitimated hyperbole as a way of claiming that a wrong has been done.  It does not matter how silly the hyperbole gets.  Indeed, this is what happened with the Hill-TV affair at Syracuse University a few years ago.  Minority students carried on as if the Jim Crow era had suddenly resurrected its ugly head.  And Chancellor Nancy Cantor acted as if just about every white person on campus was a committed a racist.  Never mind that no one knew about the silliness of the 10 or students until it had been reported in The Daily Orange. 

Contemporary liberalism sanctifies equality by embracing hyperbole. It allows for the over dramatization of the least departure of whatever the perceived ideal of equality might be.  On the assumption that transgendered people are not new to the planet, I have wondered how has it turned out that having to choose between the female toilets and the male toilets has become such a wrenching matter.  I mean what on earth did such people do in the past when that very category was not even acknowledged?

If I am right about contemporary liberalism and its emphasis upon victimization, then what follows, rather interestingly, is that nothing is more of a problem for contemporary liberalism than contemporary liberalism itself.  That is, contemporary liberalism cannot be the solution that it would like to be to the problem of inequality precisely because it has made privileging victimization the cornerstone of its very raison d’être. 

Well, I have misspoken.  The intention of contemporary liberalism was not to make it the case that privileging victimization would become its cornerstone.  Rather, that happened because contemporary liberalism never came up with any other way to validate victims initially except through affirming their suffering.  Thus, affirming the suffering of victims became ontologically prior to rendering them equal.  Nowadays: Nothing makes a victim more of a person than being a victim.  Thus, having equality while all the while being a victim is optimal: the best of both worlds. 

Accordingly, never have so many with so much been the object of so much wrongdoing.  Victory celebrations are therefore extremely short-lived.  After all, the last thing any group wants to do is to give the impression that there is not much, much more suffering with which group must contend.  Acknowledging equality turns out to be bad strategy.  And therein lies contemporary liberalism’s biggest problem.  Precisely what no one is committed to acknowledging is success. 

For contemporary liberalism, equality has become an ever moving target; and there is always the need for more rather than fewer resources.  Thus, contemporary liberalism has transmogrified into a moral black hole that sucks the life out of ordinary citizens.  For there is always some wrong that someone has committed against some group or the other if only the person would be honest enough to acknowledge it.  Effectively, then, contemporary liberalism provides no rest for the weary precisely because the very idea of success that enables people to move on is not in its vocabulary.  By definition, anyone who says “Enough” is either sexist or racist or homophobic or ageist or whatever.  And so it is in perpetuity.  Not at all a formula for success.  This is because is necessarily tied to their being unmistakable markers of progress that we can all celebrate.