Liberal Progressivism is evidently an infectious “meme” throughout Anglophone culture. In the wake of the rioting in Great Britain last month (often perpetrated by “children” raised by the welfare state), Melanie Phillips offers her diagnosis of the etiology of this “meme” and a prognosis for how to deal with it:

The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by Left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism.

These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children); and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’.

And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense.

From this side of The Pond, what Phillips says sounds awfully familiar:

[Everything] was compounded still further by the disaster of multiculturalism — the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was ‘racist’.

That meant children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture.

So not only were they left in ignorance of their own society, but any attachment to a shared and over-arching culture was deliberately shattered.

Instead of forging social bonds, multiculturalism dissolved them — and introduced instead a primitive war of all against all, in which the strongest groups would destroy the weak.

Closely related to this was ‘victim culture’, in which all minority groups were regarded as victims of the majority. So any bad behaviour by them was excused and blamed on the majority.

In similar vein, all criminal wrongdoing was excused on the basis that the criminal couldn’t help himself, as he was the victim of circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, or as yet illusory cuts in public spending. The human rights of the criminal became seen as more important than the safety and security of his victims. Punishment became a dirty word.

. . . . Once, children would have been rescued from their disadvantaged backgrounds by schools which gave them not just an education but structure and purpose to their lives.

But the liberal intelligentsia destroyed that escape route, too. For its onslaught upon marriage — the bedrock institution of society — with a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work, was replicated by an onslaught upon the understanding and very identity of that society.

Instead of transmitting knowledge to children, teaching was deemed to be an attack upon a child’s autonomy and self-esteem.

Thus it was that teachers adopted the ‘child-centred’ approach, which expected children not only to learn for themselves but also to decide for themselves about behaviour such as sexual morality or drug-taking.

Britain’s welfare state, more highly evolved than in America, has also bred generations of narcissists:

Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences.

And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves.

One solution, according to Phillips, lies in a return to the shared morality Britain (and, by extension, the United States) once enjoyed:

Repairing this terrible damage also means, dare I say it, a return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality.

But she reposes little confidence in the current generation of cultural guardians:

When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.

You can read Phillips’s entire article — “Britain’s Liberal Intelligentsia Has Smashed Virtually Every Social Value” — on the Daily Mail Online here.