In Martin Luther King’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? he dedicates considerable space to the problem of the Black Power Movement.

King demonstrates understanding of a principle to which Progressivism is oblivious: Power and Love are not enemies, but partners in marriage. It is only when the two are divorced that they become enemies:

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral persuasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

It has become fashionable and a mark of superior wisdom to condescendingly dismiss King as a man who meant well and was helpful in his own time, but that we have outgrown. According to these evolved thinkers, King was naive, and out of touch with the realities of race. But if you read King himself, instead of uncritically believing his critics, you will learn that this “evolved” thinking was around in his own time. They said all the same things today’s black racists say. And King answered them.

This rejection of King is part of a comprehensive dismissal of liberalism in general among today’s clever degree-holding elite who believe themselves educated. Liberalism is either naive, or cynically preys on the naive.

But it is the dismissers of liberalism who are naive. Worse, are arrogantly naive, and thus entirely closed to detecting their naivety.

Of course, there is a simple word for this: fools.

The wise are aware of their ignorance, and — more importantly — prepared practically to respond to ignorance. To theoretically acknowledge the possibility of being wrong or the impossibility of omniscience is a necessary condition of wisdom , but it is far from sufficient. Wisdom knows what to do in response to the ineradicable omnipresence of ignorance.

Fools, on the other hand, assume if they don’t already comprehend something, that something is incomprehensible. If something is inconceivable, it cannot be. If something doesn’t make sense, it is nonsense. If “I cannot understand why” there is no why, and whoever claims to know or feel why is delusional. It is what Socratics call “double ignorance”. Here we can see exactly how foolish is opposed to wise. If Socrates was, as the oracle said, the wisest man in Athens for knowing that he did not know, fools do not know they do not know and imagine themselves wise in their knowingness.

So returning to liberalism, every illiberal I know, whether a Progressivist or Alt-righter, is a demonstrable fool with respect to liberalism. Every time I try to engage one of these them in liberal interaction, they crap out. They say all kinds of dismissive words about liberalism. They say lots of words about how the world really is and how it actually ought to be. They say a lot of words about words and the limits of words.

But when the time comes where liberalism is most needed, they cannot do liberalism.

And the know-what theory of liberalism is useless if it is not married to the practical know-how of doing liberalism.

Ward Farnsworth on double ignorance:

Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general.

People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance— the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

…

Double ignorance has practical consequences. Being wrong isn’t a terrible problem if you know it’s a risk and account for it. But when people are wrong but feel unshakably right it takes away their will to learn and eventually involves them in disaster. And if they are put in charge of anything, their double ignorance produces disaster for everyone else, too. Most political calamities can be seen that way.