There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
It flashed across my mind that there’s something exemplary here – the self-congratulatory tone that hums through a certain kind of liberalism says ‘Look, we experience our liberal beliefs as a sacrifice, for what we give up is this vulgar fascism that all of us feel and even perhaps know to be true. Our beliefs do not spring naturally from our soul, they are a constant and harrowing obligation! We suffer them like a punishment. How noble we are to resist our vulgar-fascist default setting. And the implicit warning: you’re lucky, and should be grateful, that we are so self-sacrificing, that we don’t give free reign to our obscene- superego voice.
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