A prominent intellectual in the Solidarity movement during the '80s, Ryszard Legutko has served in various positions in both the Polish government and the European Union since Solidarity's triumph. This has not been an altogether positive experience. Even before the fall of communism, Legutko noticed the affinity between Western elites and their Warsaw Pact counterparts - a sympathetic understanding which did not extend to anti-communist dissidents. According to Legutko, he and his fellow members of Solidarity, in common with their dissident counterparts in other countries, did not seek a primarily individual freedom, but freedom for their religion and their nation. After 1989, however, they were instructed that religions and nations were both obsolete and must be abandoned in the name of modernity. The functionaries in Brussels are just as hostile to tradition as the functionaries in Moscow had been, and nearly as intolerant, though far less violent.
It is Legutko's argument that, when liberal democracy ceased to view tolerance, equality, and pluralism as goods alongside other goods and began to exalt them as supreme goods, then the proponents of liberal democracy came to see dissenters as hopelessly wicked, and their repression as justified. Liberal democracy being identified with tolerance and equality, dissenters are by definition racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and so on. Anything that partakes of hierarchy or absolute truth claims - patriotism, art, religion, the family - must be abolished according to the logic of this intolerant anticulturalism. As a result of its ideological rejection of the best of the past in favor of modern mediocrity, Legutko warns, the West is marching towards the dystopia of the hollow men.
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