“Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.”
Matthew, 16:6.
In the baker’s art, leaven is an augmentation that progressively changes the original shape of dough. The metaphorical leaven against which Jesus warned is doctrinal augmentation that likewise progressively changes—in fact corrupts and distorts—the original shape of God’s truth. The beauty of the leaven metaphor is that it reminds us how small and innocuous a false teaching at first appears. When leaven is first stirred into the mixing bowl, it disappears into the dough without a trace; but in two hours’ time, owing to leaven, that same dough is bloated and bubbling with gas.
Leo Tolstoy tells us that leaven changes men as well as doctrine. The leaven of God’s truth perfects men; the leaven of error corrupts and distorts them. Here again the action is progressive: apparently innocuous at first, appalling some hours later.
“Leaven—the leaven of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians—completely changes a man, transposes for him what is good and what is bad, and makes the good appear bad, and the bad good.”*
* * * * *
A growing number of men and women are today recoiling from liberal lunacy. The first great challenge for these newborn reactionaries is to rid themselves of liberal leaven. And this is a very serious challenge because: (1) they hope to remain respectable by retaining a conspicuous dollop of liberal leaven, (2) leaven always grows.
And, as an old English proverb put it,
“It’s hard to get the leaven out of the dough.”**
* * * * *
William Briggs discusses the liberal leaven problem this morning in an excellent post entitled
“If We Cannot Reject Woke Premises (Like Equality), We Must Suffer Their Logical Conclusions.”
This could as well have been titled,
“You Must Rid Yourself of Liberal Leaven, Every Last Damn Dollop Of The Filthy Stuff (Or Prepare To Bloated And Bubbling With Gas).
Briggs’ example is a woman who is recoiling from liberal lunacy but hopes to remain respectable by retaining a conspicuous dollop of liberal leaven. The woman is appalled by the “queering” of medicine but feels it “crucial to clarify that I am a steadfast supporter of LGBT civil rights.” Briggs explains that she cannot have it both ways. She must either accept the liberal lunacy or get the liberal leaven out.
Briggs links to another excellent post by Charles Haywood at The Worthy House, which I’ve been meaning to mention here. Haywood’s post is a review of Patrick Deenen’s Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future; Haywood’s criticism is that Deenen smuggles a whole lot of liberal leaven into his “post liberal” future. As Haywood concludes,
“Deneen could have been a contender. Instead, he pulled his punches, probably deathly afraid of being cast as too right-wing. After all, the Left’s chief command to the catamite Right is to always police its rightward boundary, and Deneen’s reaction to criticism of his book from the Right has, sadly, confirmed his drift towards that camp.”
In other words, (1) Deneen hoped to remain respectable by retaining a conspicuous dollop of liberal leaven, (2) leaven always grows.
*) Leo Tolstoy, The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated, trans. Leo Wiener (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1904), p. 195.
**) C.H. Spurgeon, Salt Cellars: Being a Collection of Proverbs, Together with Homely Notes Thereon (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1889), p. 287.
The Orthosphere 
I completely agree with your core point – I have sometimes termed this phenomenon Residual Unresolved Leftism (a term I adapted from Owen Barfield, where it referred to Positivism rather than Leftism) .
But I believe that ‘liberalism’/ Leftism runs much broader and deeper than most people realize – after all, the entirety of mainstream social institutions and discourse is liberal/ Left in major motivations and language.
For example, democracy/ voting, bureaucracy, and the mass media are all liberal/ leftist by nature and in tendency – and these underpin most of what happens nowadays.
To put it bluntly; I don’t believe that liberalism/ leftism can be removed from our society without destroying it altogether.
Now, of course, our civilization is destroying itself – both passively and (increasingly) actively – so collapse will happen anyway. But we are now far, Far beyond the point at which abandoning the worst lunacies and implementing a few common sense reforms could ‘save’ things.
And then there is the problem that – as The West actually is now, and as it wants to be and wants to behave – ‘we’ don’t deserve to be saved! And indeed probably need to be put down like the rabid dogs ‘we’ have become*.
(*Or, we are our-selves not among the rabid dogs; the mass majority are at least compliant and self-blinded servants and apologists for the rabid dogs.)
We are all more or less riddled with the leaven of liberalism, or leftism, because liberalism/leftism is the ideology we were fed with our mothers’ milk. And we are still subject to the shaming and socializing pressures of a liberal/leftist society. Apostasy is a process that in most cases takes more than one lifetime. I’d say the apostasy of a complete post-Christian probably began with his grandfather. Conscious effort can accelerate the process, though
200 years ago, the winners of revolutions in America and France enshrined two absurdities as self-evident truths and the higher goods. These absurdities are liberty and equality. This is the leaven and modernity is the logical development of these BS notions: their reductio ad absurdum.
Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal”. Who are you going to believe: the declaration or your lying eyes?
So if Jack wants to be called Karen, this is liberty. He must have equality with biological women. The leaven has been growing for two centuries and has created a monster.
This is why conservatives always lose. They accept the absurd premise and 100 insane conclusions that are old, but they pretend to reject the 101-th insane conclusion until they get used to it. After that, they will defend it as a part of the conservative creed.
In drier language, this is as much as to say that liberalism is not a set of propositions unified into a set of ideas. It is rather a dynamic principle that actuates any number of different schemata. Thus both Marx, Smith, and Filmer are all liberals, despite the fact that modern liberals would put the first two at the limits of opposition, and recoil in horror at the mere mention of the third.
I’m not sure about Filmer, but you are correct. It can be actualized in different schemata, but it is also progressive and protean. It has an entelechy and is fulfilled in its telos. Progressivism announces this in its very name, but many on the right are still to dim to see that progressivism itself evolves.
Apologies for the double post, but this also shows how facile it is to look at what a political proposal consists of and judge it as liberal or otherwise. Instead, you must look at why that proposal has been made and how it is proposed to function.
Modern socialist governments, high Stalinist communism, Louis IX’s France, and even British industrial capitalism all had intricate systems for the support of the poor through distributions of subsidies of both labour and goods. Yet three of those systems are liberal and one is not (while proponents of the first three are all at each others’ throats, often over this very example).
I think we must also ask what a political principal is going to do as it develops and ramifies into every aspect of society. I learned this principle reading about heresies, which are not simply errors, but are rather errors that will grow into worse and more destructive errors.
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