Liberalism in it's traditional sense is something which should be promoted around the world. It leads to mental enlightenment and intellectual advancements. Look at the Islamic world for instance, it's the liberal thinkers (such as Raif Badawi and Malala Yousafzai) who are pushing for equality, freedom and education while the conservative establishment wishes to keep the people ignorant.
In these cases, I'm sure we can all agree that liberal politics should be supported.
However, the western world has recently seen a new type of liberalism which seems to be more about naive and often delusional student politics, than a sincere belief in the core values of liberal politics.
How far left is too far? And how can you stop it when you think it's going too far? I believe Orwell wrote the book 1984 about what can happen to a society when people keep going to the left for the "good" of the people...
Nineteen Eighty-Four-wiki
First edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four published in Britain, 1949.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (also 1984) [1] is a dystopian novel by George Orwell about the excesses of totalitarian regimes and specifically of Stalinist communism. The book's original title was The Last Man in Europe, but it was changed at the publisher's suggestion. [2]
Orwell was influenced by Jack London's novel The Iron Heel, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. The ideas of the American conservative James Burnham were especially influential in shaping the political situation described in the book.
Though Orwell was deeply critical of communism, 1984 was not intended as a condemnation of all forms of socialism, as evidenced by a quote from one of his essays:
"My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. ...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."[3]
The book is, at its heart, a condemnation of the ultra-liberal menace that arose in Europe at his time. The fictional Oceanic dictatorship is the logical extreme of the liberal attitude towards government Orwell saw creeping in around him, both at home and abroad. The breakdown and perversion of home and family ties, the eradication of religion to make room for secular cult worship, the manipulation of language and history to suit the agenda of the day, and the use of deliberate economic strangulation in order to ensure compliance in the population were all tactics that Orwell predicted would come into play should an ultra-liberal government arise. One need only examine the regimes of Stalin and Kim Jong Il to see examples of Orwell-type dictatorships; atheism and state-worship forcibly substituted for religion, the deliberate starvation of all but the most elite members of society, even Orwell's nightmarish vision of sons spying on their parents for the state came true in the Soviet Union, and still persists in North Korea. Thus he uses the book to attack the intrusiveness and arrogance of big government.
