re: #3 Obdicut

What are they so damn scared of?

It’s not so simple as many of the other answers given to your question.

They’re afraid of a general move in public folkways toward dropping all the old standards and habits.

They’re afraid of Bertrand Russell.

Russell had an incredibly deep and penetrating mind. But his ideas on how to organize human society, even in his own personal life, were nonetheless impractical. They ran afoul of some aspects of human nature that are normally mercifully not much in evidence, because our current customs tend to keep those aspects in check.

Read “Logicomix” for an entertaining presentation of some of that.

They’re afraid of becoming like Britain.

Read “Our culture, or what’s left of it”, [rough version of the title] by Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels, for an account of life amongst the [just so you don’t get the wrong idea, white] underclass of Britain. Item: he notes that the people whose homes he visited in the line of duty subsisted entirely on junk food. They simply didn’t cook. At all. Ever. As a result, they were both overweight and malnourished, and their cost of living was much higher than it need have been.

They’re afraid that their relatives and descendants will be drawn into a Weimar Republic lifestyle. Their antidote to this is a strict and uncompromising code. So it is, also, with fundamentalist Muslims. This “Weimar” lifestyle is tempting. Go ahead. Drink. Chase the ladies, or the lads, as the case may be. Live for the moment.

Fundamentalists of all stripes feel the pull of this. But they don’t see how a political liberal can partake of this in great moderation and then get back to the grindstone. They just cannot fathom how a man can not be a fundamentalist, and yet live a frugal, industrious, life of fidelity and purpose. They see much more than mere race through the lens of the one drop rule.

And so, faced with this false dichotomy, they fear that any little step away from their own strict code leads to the other end of the scale. And they see that in fact, millions of people have been drawn in to lives of anarchy and despair, chasing after the pleasures of the moment, or lapsing into a desperate and angry boredom and ennui.

The left, and the rationalist center, has a task it’s not well addressed: how does one arrange society so that these hazards are reduced, without adopting overly strict codes? Little things such as Michelle Obama’s attempt to promote exercise for children seem like a step in that direction, but a journey of miles requires thousands of steps. We’ve got a very long way to go.