Alex at Ammo.com uncorks another meat-y, beat-y, big, and bouncy essay.

Cultural Superiority isn’t Racism: Why Western Values Underpin the World’s Best Countries
Whether or not Western values are “superior” to other value systems is entirely reliant upon what one considers to be the ideal results for a society. Honest and good people have disagreements on this topic. However, we believe that in the West, there is a general, broad agreement on what constitutes a “good” result for society best summed up by two principles: freedom and fairness.

Freedom and fairness are, in fact, two ideas that are in tension with one another because they are often mutually contradictory. What makes one man free might be unfair in a meaningful sense to another. Indeed, the left-right spectrum in the United States and the Anglosphere might be described as the Party of Freedom (for example, the Republicans) versus the Party of Fairness (in this case, the Democrats).

Both of these values are important to everyone to varying degrees. The resolution of this tension – drawing the line at some point between fairness and freedom – is effectively what our entire civilization is about. It is about maximizing results for the greatest number of people, creating a society that is as fair as it can possibly be while minimally infringing on the rights of individuals.

In a word, Western values can be described as “liberalism” in the sense that John Stuart Mill and John Locke would have understood the term. While there are coherent and important arguments about the limitations of liberalism on both the left and the right, both sides of the political spectrum have thus far failed to offer an alternative to classical liberalism that provides the same degree of generalized prosperity and individual liberty that Western civilization has provided using classical liberalism as its de facto political ideology.

If one believes that freedom and fairness are not important, this doesn’t mean much. However, most Americans and most Westerners believe, whether they are aware of this specific description or not, that freedom and fairness are important and perhaps the most important values that a society can aspire to.

What’s more, we believe that these values are directly responsible for the material prosperity and plenty that characterizes these societies. Individuals are able to pursue happiness in their own way and, for the most part, retain the fruits of their labor. This creates motivation for innovations that raise the standard of living across the board, from top to bottom.

Has there ever in all of history been another belief system that took so much for granted, while offering little or nothing of value for counterpoint, than modern Left/liberalism?