When I was a young man (a long time ago) I decided to be a political liberal, and this for two overlapping reasons.

For one, I approved of the political values of liberals. They were pro-civil liberties (free speech, free press, etc.). They were pro-labor union. They were pro-equality for Blacks (Negroes as they were called in those days). And so was I.

For another, liberals seemed to me to be intellectually and morally superior to political conservatives, who struck me as being, on average, rather stupid and rather morally insensitive. I wanted to belong to the class of people who were smart and good. If I were to become one of them, I too would be smart and good.

I admired the intellect of liberals. They were broadminded, not narrow-minded like conservatives. Their minds were subtle and nuanced and complex, not simplistic like conservative minds. They were highly educated, well-informed. And they had good taste in music, painting, and literature. There was nothing boorish about them.

The only really smart conservative I knew of was William F. Buckley; smart in the sense that he had a high IQ. But Buckley, as I saw things, used his ample brains to defend bad causes -- rather like John C. Calhoun defending slavery. Buckley, I thought, was little more than a clever sophist.

When it came to the question of moral goodness, I confess that I had some doubts as to the wisdom of liberalism’s tolerance of sexual freedom. Perhaps I had some intuitive understanding that the pending sexual revolution would end in catastrophe, which of course it has.

But that was a small blemish. It was as nothing in comparison to liberalism’s admirable sympathy and support for society’s underdogs, especially blue-collar workers and, even more, Negroes, especially those of the racially segregated South.

And so I became a liberal, and I was very pleased with myself. I was now a member of a culturally elite minority -- for that’s what liberals were in those days, an elite minority. Due to the disproportionate influence that liberals had in the Democratic Party ever since FDR and the New Deal, vast numbers of ordinary Democrats gave support to certain liberal causes. But true liberals -- persons who were deeply liberal in mind and heart and spirit, liberal down to the very marrow of their bones -- were relatively rare.

It is not so nowadays. If the typical liberal of my youth was in some real sense a superior person, the typical liberal today is just the opposite, a person of moral and intellectual inferiority -- at least so I judge. I am still as vain as I was in my youth; which is to say, I still wish to think of myself as a morally and intellectually superior person. In the old days that wish drew me to the then-current liberalism; today it drives me away from now-current liberalism.

It commonly happens that a superior elite deteriorates in average quality when the doors of the elite are opened and the masses come rushing in.

It happened, for instance, with the value of a high-school diploma. In the 1870s, when only a small fraction of all boys and girls graduated from high school, the average diploma indicated that the holder of the diploma was a rather well-educated human being. Today the average high-school diploma tells us nothing like that.

In the Roman Empire prior to the coming of Constantine, the average Christian, who was the member of a disapproved-of and often-persecuted religion, was a person of superior quality. Once Constantine legalized Christianity and made it respectable and a thing advantageous to belong to, the masses rushed in -- and the quality of the average Christian went downhill.

In reaction to this vulgarization (so to speak) of Christianity, monasticism began rapidly to spread, as if the monks and nuns were advertising to those who wished to be genuine Christians: “Now that living a true Christian life is becoming nearly impossible in the secular world, come join us in our cloisters. Here you can be a true Christian.”

Analogous to this is the present-day phenomenon of parents pulling their kids out of deficient public schools and educating them instead via either home-schooling or private schools.

One more example. Prior to the revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war in Russia, the Bolsheviks (later renamed Communists) were, at least when measured by revolutionary standards, a superior elite. They were passionately dedicated to their cause; they conscientiously studied Marx and Lenin; they co-operated, often quite unselfishly, with their fellow Bolsheviks; they willingly served terms of exile in Siberia; and they were in some real sense idealists, believing that their sufferings and crimes would lead eventually to a greatly improved human race.

But once the Communists were securely in power, now the established authority of the Soviet Union, in control of almost everything in that vast empire -- once this happened, membership in the party was opened up. And who came rushing in? The inevitable crowd: opportunists, time-servers, careerists, bullies, sadists, scoundrels, thieves, etc., plus no doubt some well-intentioned people. The average quality of the Russian Communist slid rapidly downhill.

This decline is illustrated in Arthur Koestler’s great novel, Darkness at Noon. Rubashov’s first interrogator is an old Bolshevik, with some of the humanity that marked the old pre-revolutionary members of the party. Rubashov’s second interrogator is a neo-Communist, much closer to a mere brute.

In any case, people are still doing what I did many decades ago, becoming liberals in order to make themselves feel that they are morally and intellectually superior persons (which entitles them, among other things, to despise Trump and his fans). At least I had some excuse for this in the old days. Today’s liberals have no excuse. You have to be (in my not-so-humble opinion) rather an imbecile to imagine that your present-day liberalism makes you a superior person.

Image: FreeRange Stock/Ed Gregory