Why Political Liberalism Capitulated to Cultural Liberalism

Son of a union organizer, I still consider myself moderately liberal on most issues: climate, guns, dignity for immigrants, a sturdy safety net, health care for all, etc. As an observant Catholic, however, I am fiercely opposed to Cultural Liberalism and have puzzled: What happened 50 years ago to the decent, Catholic-friendly, family-supporting, wholesome liberalism of the Great Generation? In 1965 if you had predicted that within 10 years one of the two parties would surrender to sexual license, abortion, deconstruction of gender and a malignant individualism I would have replied: Clearly that would the party of wealth, privilege, greed and selfishness; not the party of the working man, Civil Rights for blacks, and care for the poor. My answer: at the core of political liberalism, nothwithstanding its honorable history and residual elements of goodness, is a moral structure similar to that of the sexual revolution: resentment, dependency, envy, entitlement. Psychoanalytically, what is operative in both is regression to infantile comfort, to enclosure in the arms and at the breast of mother. To be clear: I write now as a male, not a generic or neutered individual. The male psyche and trajectory is distinctive: it involves early on a break from mother, a journey of loneliness, hopefull a compensatory bonding with father and brothers. Women do not experience this; it is for a woman to interpret female liberalism (perhaps maternal nurture combined with suspicion of and rage at the male?). As the passage to virility never goes perfectly there remains ever in the masculine soul a yearning to return to comfort, enclosure, and intimacy of the infant; and to flee the stress, conflict, demands and loneliness of manly existence. We see this regression in: - The young man who consumes pornography and masturbates. - The young man who cohabitates, contracepts and avoids commitment, marriage and fertility. - The Black Lives Matter allegation of vicimization and demand for special measures of protection. - The entire LGBTQ narrative of self-pity and rage at moral disapproval of sexual acts that are again neither fruitful nor spousally unitive but narcississtic and infantile. - The compulsion to seek salvation always from the Mother State: medical care, education, how much soda to drink, etc. We identify, here, the reason why political liberalism in its entirety...unions, civil rights organizations, the Catholic academy...capitulated to cultural liberalism. It is the dark side...the "anima" in Jungian terms...of liberalism: pusillanimity, cowardice, entitlement, dependency, resentment and envy.