What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Another polemic against Liberalism

Conservatism has undoubtedly taken it on the nose lately, but it is instructive now and then to recall the calamitous successive failures of Liberalism, and reflect on how being a Liberal seems to mean never having to say you’re sorry. Consider, to take a salient example, the ruinous incompetence of the Liberals who handled American-Iranian relations on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. Some excerpts from Steven F. Hayward’s engaging study The Age of Reagan:

One reason the CIA and DIA offered such poor intelligence work is that the post-Watergate reforms to protect against the excesses of the 1960s and early 1970s made it difficult for the United States to conduct intelligence operations in Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East [this came back to haunt us again, of course, and even more terribly, on September 11] . . . The CIA, it later turned out, not only hadn’t read any of Khomeini’s writings, but didn’t even have copies of Khomeini’s writings. . . . “Whoever took religion seriously?” a State Department official later asked. . . . Neither the State Department nor the intelligence community [did], while American scholars on Iran deprecated the idea that the clergy would participate directly in forming or running a government. [Some] went as far as to recommend that the United States support Khomeini and the revolution, arguing that Khomeini would be a progressive force for human rights. . . . Typical the self-delusion of American liberals was the case of [a] Princeton University professor [who] wrote that Khomeini’s circle was “uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals” who shared “a notable record of concern for human rights.” . . . A few human rights activists in the State Department compared Khomeini to Gandhi, arguing that, like Gandhi, Khomeini would turn out to be a moral leader who would leave actual administration to a democratically elected government. . . . [UN Ambassador] Andrew Young even suggested that Khomeini would someday be considered “some kind of saint.” (p. 554-7)

It was, of course, many of the same Liberal generation who: (1) sowed (or at least greatly exacerbated preexisting) ruin in our inner cities with their Great Society welfare policies; (2) prosecuted a war to defend an ally in Southeast Asia with little notion of how to win it, then (2a) abandoned that essentially noble venture, deserting a dependent ally and handing over the region to the tender mercies of Communism; and (3) cravenly capitulated to a bunch of scraggly radicals, hucksters and mau-mauing thugs in a cultural revolution which overthrew the ideal of liberal education and replaced it with tedious identity politics, self-righteous narcissism, and a general collapse of academic standards.

Quite a resume for a generation. But what’s most remarkable about it is that we all have to endure its regular effusions of self-congratulation, and who knows how long the spectacle will go on.

Comments (67)

The world must be a veritable trip through the fun house for persons who imagine that history began with FDR and ended with Ronald Reagan.
If you're now done with your one-dimensional burlesque of the Boomers, I hope that you will go back to treat similarly of the several generations of pre-WWII conservatives who gave us Robber Barons, Jim Crow, the Great Depression and Hoovervilles, followed up by the hysterical Red Scare (which has now been replaced by al Qaeda "sleeper cells" in the unvigilant hearts of Iowa and North Dakota, one must presume).
No generation is perfect, nor ever will be; but I don't see any of the negative issues you raise being more effectively addressed in so-called Red States than they are in the Blue ones. I thought you could do it--nay insisted upon doing it--without the interference of the feds. States' rights, uber alles! What's holding you back?

Thanks for that opening insult, big guy. Last week we were ready to bring back the Crusades, which came when? -- Roosevelt's second term or Reagan's first?

Nor is anyone who still thinks the Red Scare "hysterical" in any position to lecture the rest of us on our history. The demonstration of the depth of Soviet penetration of American institutions in the 1930s and 40s was accomplished five years ago. Emory's Harvey Klehr is the man to read on that.

And there, indeed, is yet another strike against the postwar Liberals: their studied negligence in estimating the true wickedness and menace of Communism. Pulitzers for journalists who fawned over Stalin. "Liberals in a hurry" whose treason set up the lunatic doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. Entertainers, politicians, historians, polemicists -- all tainted forever by their fawning over the most murderous system ever devised by man. It's only a matter of time and objective distance before the full complicity of the Left and the Communist enterprise will deliver yet another savage blow to the precious "idealism" of Liberalism.

Red States, Blue States, say what? I suppose in Rodak's world, Georgia ought to have formulated its own Vietnam war policy, in defiance of McNamara and his whiz kids?

Of course, the specific difference of the generation that effected all of these transformations is that they possessed the unutterable and insufferable superciliousness to rail against The Machine, only to become The Machine themselves - first, in the low, dishonest Me Decade, then in Reagan's America by embracing the credo of Greed is Good, and, finally, in the Nineties, another low and dishonest decade, when they assumed the reins of power and squandered the patrimony of the nation in a thousand ways, ranging from immigration policy to absurdist fantasias on the subject of globalization. Of one thing one can be certain, namely, that everything has always been about Them: first, their rage, then their self-indulgence, their attempts to "find themselves", and finally, their cupidity and appetites for power, or should I say, their sense of entitlement to the perquisites of political and economic power and the alacrity with which they set about misusing it all. This is not to indict the entire denotative set of the Boomers; rather, it is to characterize that percentage of them which transmogrified our society into something alien and unrecognizable, save to ideological taxonomists and accomplished spiritual seers.

Although, for the record, the generations that effectuated the collapse of urban America and capitulated to the worst rabble among the Boomers were the Greatest Generation and the one immediately preceding that WWII generation. The Boomers, obviously, were still losing all semblance of self-possession at the sound of the Beatles when the Great Society was aborning, and were still conducting experiments in the alteration of consciousness when the establishment was making a hash of foreign policy in SE Asia. No, the bill of indictment for the Boomers includes scruffy Sixties radicalism, yes, but really majors on the post-Cold War era of American history. Clintonism and globalist agitprop like Who Stole My Cheese? are the legacies of that generation, along with the elevation of "privatized profits/cost benefits, socialized costs" to the level of a new American metaphysic. (Just try to take away their cheap nannies and landscapers. Try it.) On top of that, someone should inform all of the anti-Iraq-war Boomers that their own crapulence is a significant factor motivating the foreign policy they claim to deplore. Whoops! Forgot the New American Metaphysic! The benefits are theirs, but the costs fall to someone else, meaning that they aren't really responsible.

As for the spiritual and cultural abyss of the Boomer generation, well, blame the preceding generations, for they had dabbled in radicalism themselves, and built the consumerist Brave New World that taught the boomers, from infancy (From their youth up, many passions have been cultivated as the means of personal liberation.), that the meaning of life lay in the discovery and satisfaction of desire, with therapy available for those who still felt queasy about the whole thing.

On behalf of us Boomers, I'd just like to say that I'm still "conducting experiments in the alteration of consciousness." It comes in a bottle from either Germany or Czechoslovakia. Sometimes from Britain.

Just try to take away their cheap nannies and landscapers

And I mow my own yard, after which I conduct experiments in altering my consciousness.

Quite a resume for a generation.

Are you talking about Boomers (generation) or Liberals (mental confusion)?

Oldest Boomers were born in 1946, they were in high school when MBAs tried their hand on war.

several generations of pre-WWII conservatives who gave us Robber Barons, Jim Crow, the Great Depression and Hoovervilles

I'm dying to learn how conservatives gave us Great Depr. Kindly explain in a few sentenses using vocabulary of a High School junior.

...cravenly capitulated to a bunch of scraggly radicals, hucksters and mau-mauing thugs in a cultural revolution which overthrew the ideal of liberal education and replaced it with tedious identity politics, self-righteous narcissism, and a general collapse of academic standards.

Therein lies the slap in the face to the Boomers, whose dubious honor I will hotly defend. An insult for an insult; Old Testament justice.
When I said that history began with FDR, I was acknowledging the role of liberal members of "the Greatest Generation" in spawning and nurturing the pampered boomers, only a minority of whom comprised the radical cohort of the 'Sixties, and many of whom put their actual, flesh and blood butts on the line, btw, both in Vietnam, and in Mississippi. What has Generation X done for you lately?

Red States, Blue States, say what? I suppose in Rodak's world, Georgia ought to have formulated its own Vietnam war policy, in defiance of McNamara and his whiz kids?

I was responding there to: (1) sowed (or at least greatly exacerbated preexisting) ruin in our inner cities with their Great Society welfare policies.

What have subsequent conservative administrations, whether federal, state, or local done to correct the exacerbated ruin in our inner cities, even in Red States, like Ohio, when conservatives controlled every governmental level from the White House through the office of Justice of the Peace in the one traffic light rural hamlet? They pointed fingers, moved to gated communities, and watched the Market reports from the safety of the exurbs.

"As for the spiritual and cultural abyss of the Boomer generation, well, blame the preceding generations, for they had dabbled in radicalism themselves, and built the consumerist Brave New World that taught the boomers, from infancy (From their youth up, many passions have been cultivated as the means of personal liberation.), that the meaning of life lay in the discovery and satisfaction of desire, with therapy available for those who still felt queasy about the whole thing."

With this, as I sit here today looking at what has become of my generation, I have to agree. I will point out that at least some of the scraggly rabble recognized the emptiness of a consumer-driven life and tried to find alternatives to it. We got our butts kicked. And a large part of that dismal failure was bred into us (we were spoiled); and part of that dismal failure was our own fault (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll); but, at least we tried to find a way out of the Madison Avenue contructed American Way, while the Young Republican set, chanting "Nixon's the One" and "Four More Years" bought into it all, hook-line-and-sinker. And they did nothing, btw, for anybody other than themselves. I didn't see them marching against Jim Crow laws, or being jailed to end the pointless slaughter in S.E. Asia. (The commies won; but you can also get a Big Mac in Ho Chi Minh City, so I hear.)
Maybe the generation being called "the Millennials"--our children--will be able to learn from the mistakes of their parents and grandparents and find a better way. Where there's life, there's hope.



Yeah, gentlemen, I admit that I was rather muddled in identifying generations. Really what I had in mind was a succession of Liberal generations which together constituted the postwar ruling class in this country. I apologize for my sloppy polemics.

An insult for an insult; Old Testament justice.

Right. Because of course when I attacked the Boomer generation, I knew with certainty that ol' Rodak is a Boomer, and even had him in mind? Huh? Perhaps the notion of personal insult is obscure to you.

I will grant credit where it is due: the Liberals did the Lord's work in the Civil Rights movement. But they never did it alone. The great statutes that shattered Jim Crow, for instance, were passed with more Republican than Democratic votes. And once the Sixties radicals had taken control of the movement, the whole thing was derailed. MLK was getting booed as often as cheered near the end of his life, mostly because he resisted the budding ideology of identity politics.

One need only briefly peruse back issues of National Review to discover the falsehood of this statement: "while the Young Republican set, chanting 'Nixon's the One' and 'Four More Years' bought into it all, hook-line-and-sinker." Conservatives hadn't been enamored with Nixon since the HUAC years, when he was doing the Lord's work. And Nixon pretty much wrote off his own party in 1972, which is why his landslide victory over McGovern never carried over to congressional gains.

As for the slaughter in Southeast Asia, well, it was considerable during the war, but it was unspeakable during the "peace" that followed the US bug-out. It still amazes me how the "idealists" of the anti-war movement have escaped the odium that is their just due for the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese reeducation camps. More people were slaughtered in the first year of Communist "peace" than in the entire history of the war.

But I guess that's all water under the bridge, since, as Ron Paul put it in the last debate, we now trade with Vietnam. Trade, by golly!

Finally, plenty of good work has been done since the Great Society to address the misery and squalor produced by welfarism. Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin was a leader and innovator in welfare reform. A number of cities, including New York, have been blessed with fine leaders who made real progress (NYC may not reach 500 murders this year, as compared to almost 2300 in 1990). But the sad fact is, it is immeasurably easier to undermine and obliterate social order than it is to restore it.

Just to reiterate, for Bill's sake, I wasn't indicting all Boomers without exception, merely observing that those Boomers who preferred good beer to hard drugs and, later, mowing their own lawns to hiring illegal labour, weren't - alas - the ones who set the tone for the generation, the ones who reshaped the culture.

Analogously, when people think of Generation X, they think of slackers and Kurt Cobain types, no? I'm hard pressed to think of the comprehensive ruination that may be laid at the feet of my generation - though I'm sure someone else will come up with it - but I'm hardly lauding my own cohort. Our public image is of slackers, who also more or less ruined rock music - which was possible, even if one accepted the Allan Bloom position, according to which rock music was the disordered music of Dionysian rebellion. It's a long way from the Who down to Nirvana.

There was, of course, within the ferment of the Sixties, a critique of consumerist nonsense, bigness, concentration, and regimentation - a defense, in short, of the proliferating variety of healthy existence. Unfortunately, what was positive in the period was conjoined with what was negative, at least in a cultural sense, and was quickly forgotten by most of its advocates. American society cast off what was valuable in that cultural ferment, and kept only what was dross - and most of the Boomers themselves did so as well. Heck, the transition - the selling-out process - is even visible in the music of the era, what with the emergence of treacly, almost therapeutic music in the mid-to-late Seventies. The Me Generation discovered itself, and its tapestry of sentiments and desires, and, to foreshorten a tedious tale, Bill Clinton became the archetype, the symbol of their accession to the heights of the establishment. Feh.

It still amazes me how the "idealists" of the anti-war movement have escaped the odium that is their just due for the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese reeducation camps. More people were slaughtered in the first year of Communist "peace" than in the entire history of the war.

Don't they always, though? I mean, escape the obloquy that is their due?

Anyway, a lowlight in a low-down, dirty, dishonest decade.

"Perhaps the notion of personal insult is obscure to you."

I don't really see where I insulted you personally, either. Is to scoff at the idea to scoff at the man?

"...were passed with more Republican than Democratic votes."

I get so sick and tired of hearing that disingenous "fact" pronounced whenever the subject of civil rights comes up. As if there had been no Dixie-crats (who later almost all became Republicans, btw, as you well know, but don't say); as if there had been, in those days, no liberal Republicans of the Rockefeller/Javitts variety; and as if there were not many more Republican moderates whose hearts were in the right place than there are today. It wasn't a Republic v. Democrat issue. It was a liberal v. conservative issue. It was the Good Guys v. the Reactionaries.

"Trade, by golly!"

Didn't we go in there in the first place to keep Asian markets open to capitalist ventures, after the French fudged the job? There might never have been anything like the post-U.S. blood bath, if we had just let Ho Chi Minh have his victory over the French colonialists and set up shop. At any rate, there would have been no blood on American hands.

"...the misery and squalor produced by welfarism."

Now, see--there you go again. Putting the cart before the horse. It had been my understanding (having been brought up in a benighted liberal household) that welfare came into being in order to address preexisting misery and squalor. But it turns out that welfare was offered to self-supporting people, who were lured away from their jobs by the dole and immediately all picked up crack pipes and traded their food stamps for drug money. What we should do is give them their jobs back, no?
I've known a couple of people who were on welfare, and quite a few people who were on unemployment, and not one of them would have stayed on either type of relief if a job had become available that would improve their situation. On welfare, you just about get by. It is nothing like having a good job, either in terms of material things, or in terms of self-respect. FDR had the right idea; where there are no jobs, there are always sidewalks repave, and potholes to fill.

What boggles my mind by reading all this (the original post), is what does "liberalism" have to do with anything?

If I incorporate the definition of "liberalism" from this blog to mean, "political philosophy extrapolated from the rejection of God", then I am more confused. (note, if there is a different definition of "liberalism" I should be using to understand this essay, please let me know).

But throughout the examples listed here, the journalistic supporters of Lenin/Stalin through the Iranian Revolution, that covers quite a few decades. In that time, the American political pendulum (needless to say, the world's as well) swung to vast extremes. In that time, Christian political philosophy also swung and hence, whichever side was "rejecting God" wasn't quite clear. Just compare what the Christian political party (i.e. socialists) did in Germany with what the Christian mainstream did or wanted to do in America (if we use the Republican party to represent the "Christian mainstream.")

It seems to me, that throughout the last century, "liberal" or not (or whatever that means anyway), governments and people make mistakes. Period. The emphasis shouldn't be to cast blame on vast groups of people with imaginary labels, but look at what where people did good and where they failed, and learn from their experiences.

Y'all are getting along great without me, and I have little useful to add, so I will just say a loud "Amen" to the indictment here:

cravenly capitulated to a bunch of scraggly radicals, hucksters and mau-mauing thugs in a cultural revolution which overthrew the ideal of liberal education and replaced it with tedious identity politics, self-righteous narcissism, and a general collapse of academic standards.

Yikes. My building was hit with a fire alarm just as I was finishing up my screed. In my haste to conclude and evacuate the premises as required, I messed up the tagging. My apologies for any resultant confusion.

"...and a general collapse of academic standards."

Lydia--
That is one indictment of my generation that I will go along with without reservation: academic standards are in the toilet since my university days. No doubt about it.

Fixed, Rodak.

And you ought to read FDR on putting people on the dole. He was a full-blooded conservative on the dangers of welfarism. Too bad the inheritors of his party did not listen.

The emphasis shouldn't be to cast blame on vast groups of people with imaginary labels, but look at what where people did good and where they failed, and learn from their experiences.

Royale, this Liberal label is not imaginary, and my point is that the failures of postwar Liberalism must be accounted properly before we can learn for their experiences. They did one great thing (Civil Rights) and probably some other good (though I can't think of any at the moment), but on other huge issues (chiefly the character of Communism), they went from bad to worse, and haven't really had to answer for it.

"but on other huge issues (chiefly the character of Communism), they went from bad to worse..."

And that brings up my point. The envelope of "liberal" throughout the decades changed, which is why their response to Communism changed.

But all that aside - I think the Vietnam War was a bit more complicated than to blame America's loss on hippies on the home front. You're absolutely right that America went into it not knowing how to win, but the blame for that should be cast very widely, including at MacNamera and the military leadership.

I'm curious though, were you able to see the true nature of the Communist threat and hence, did you fight in Vietnam?

I certainly include McNamara in my anathema against Liberalism. He was the quintessential "technocratic" liberal.

Vietnam ended several years before I was born, but I have always detested Communism. I once horrified some lefty friends in college when one asked, "will you teach your children to fear Communism?" and I answered, "Fear it? I'll teach them to hate it." I was much impressed by another friend who claims that he has taught his two-year-old to spit whenever she hears the word.

Royale--
I was a Conscientious Objector. I did two years of alternate service. I had friends who went. I had friends who died. I had friends who went underground. I had friends who deliberately failed their physicals (I passed mine). I had friends who enlisted in the Air Force or Navy before they got drafted. I had no friends whose lives were not completely disrupted, except for those who stayed in school. Personally, I dropped out of graduate school to fight the draft board, rather than taking the academic deferment, which I felt was an unprincipled thing to do. I was never in the draft lottery. I was drafted a few months before it was instituted.

The envelope of "liberal" throughout the decades changed, which is why their response to Communism changed.

Well, yes. To some extent the "envelope" encompassing any transcendent ideological entity like liberalism or Christianity or traditionalism or whatever will change over time. I'm not sure that rather trite observation does the work necessary to reduce liberalism to a nominalist non-category though. Liberalism is the presumptive implicit foundational basis of all modern/postmodern political discourse: emancipated-from-history equal supermen self-created through reason and will; the transcendent or tradition carrying authority only when mediated through the free choices of the superman (e.g. through democratic elections); accidents of birth must not form the basis for discrimination in the community of supermen; etc etc. The usual crap. I don't know why people pretend that it is all that baffling. Put Jefferson, Marx, Roosevelt, Rawls, GW Bush, Shawn Hannity, Michael Kinsley, and some other exemplars in a room: the political propositions they would all sign up to are what is meant by liberalism. The main difference between Marx and Jefferson was merely tactical: Marx saw private property as a feudal holdover and impediment to the freedom and equality of the new man, while Jefferson saw it as a necessary precondition to the freedom and equality of the new man. Hell, even Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler would sign up to most of it, the main difference being that they were practicing rulers and their regimes faced (or perceived themselves to face) existential threats so they had to clear the way for the new man by exterminating some untermenschen.

"I was much impressed by another friend who claims that he has taught his two-year-old to spit whenever she hears the word."

Indeed. One has to acknowledge a certain Pavlovian charm in that. The kid must be a hoot at cocktail parties.

"Put Jefferson, Marx, Roosevelt, Rawls, GW Bush, Shawn Hannity, Michael Kinsley, and some other exemplars in a room: the political propositions they would all sign up to are what is meant by liberalism."

In what specifics do you personally differ from the notables on the above liberal roster? I take it that you would eliminate politics completely, since you've pretty much got the whole spectrum tarred with the liberal brush. How would you propose that society conduct the business of society?

What boggles my mind is not the abstract definition of "liberalism," but connecting it to the concrete world we live in. That long string of "liberal" icons presented here leaves me even more confused as I see little commonality between them.

In what specifics do you personally differ from the notables on the above liberal roster?

I don't believe in a free and equal new man emancipated from history. I don't believe that the authority of the transcendent and tradition is or should be strictly limited by its mediation through the choices of the emancipated superman (who I don't believe in). I don't believe that discrimination amongst the free and equal supermen (who I don't believe in) by accident of birth is immoral. I think "equal rights" is equivocal, either trivially and tautologically supervening over "just treatment under the law" on the one hand or being an actual self-contradictory requirement for nondiscriminatory rules of discrimination on the other; I think this equivocal notion of "equal rights" is responsible for a great deal of mischief. Etc, etc.

Basically I think liberalism is a big load of hooey.

How would you propose that society conduct the business of society?

As a formal matter? As republics, ideally monarchical or at least hereditary-aristocratic republics reflecting natural heirarchy and subsidiarity, I suppose. But I'm not deeply attached to particular structures. I don't think things can be settled once and for all by choosing the right structure. Reality doesn't work that way. It isn't just that I criticize but don't propose an alternative to liberlism: it is that liberalism is fundamentally incoherent and inhuman, so the request for an alternative to it isn't really answerable in the way liberals want an answer to exist.

"...so the request for an alternative to it isn't really answerable in the way liberals want an answer to exist."

Spoken like Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men".

"And you ought to read FDR on putting people on the dole. He was a full-blooded conservative on the dangers of welfarism."

Paul--
I completely agree that programs like the WPA are much preferable to straight welfare. Giving people real work to do, work that needs to be done and benefits the community, is the way to go. It provides both a paycheck and a modicum of self-respect. I am old enough to remember that many of the sidewalks in Ann Arbor when I was growing up were laid by the WPA and stamped to show that.

(And thanks for fixing that botched comment for me!)

Zippy notes:

it is that liberalism is fundamentally incoherent and inhuman, so the request for an alternative to it isn't really answerable in the way liberals want an answer to exist.

While it is no doubt true that the advent of Big Universal Plans for Society™ cannot be countered merely by the forceful application of Equal and Opposite Big Plans for Society™, one may note that we have somehow gotten from somewhere, somewhen (more humane societies generally) to here and now. All of which does suggest the existence of policy preferences, and, even if not totalizing in scope, general principles that inform such preferences.

Which leads me to ask (as a member of the choir more or less): When you apply the conservative impulse to real politics, i.e., that which is achievable by those means, what does it end up looking like? The problem seems to me to be that the genuine conservative ends up looking and sounding an awful lot like the doctrinaire libertarian, who may be many things, but immune to large totalizing plans is not one of them.

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot." - Mark Twain

Zippy,
For the sake of clarification, are you disagreeing with Paul about the civil rights movement being a worthy liberal project or not?

When you apply the conservative impulse to real politics, i.e., that which is achievable by those means, what does it end up looking like?

Being a conservative movement or motion, I don't think that a growing apostasy from the insanity called liberalism means large and wholesale immediate changes. Life goes on. Abortion becomes illegal. Immigration policy becomes more sane and humane. Federal power dissipates more to local communities. The franchise starts to become more restricted. Inheritance taxes and other structures hostile to continuity of family interests start to erode. Foreign policy becomes more modest in its goals and expectations. Christ and Mass come back to Christmas. "No fault divorce" becomes a subject for study in history classes. Heresies begin to be suppressed at the level of mass media just as they are now, but we are forthright about what we are doing and why we are doing it, and the heresies which are suppressed are the right ones. The Jihad Sedition law is passed. Authority takes its rightful place alongside freedom as a necessary component of human flourishing. Utopian dreams of material and formal kinds of equality are abandoned, while the humanity of all persons - since not dependent on some material sense or formal expression of equality - grows in respect. The fundamentally Christian constitution of the West is publicly acknowledged, and nobody is under the illusion that this has no effect on policy. Mostly there are a lot of small incremental recoveries of the good, the true, the beautiful.

Now and then writer Jim Kalb posts on the "what to do" question from a conservative or reactionary/counterrevolutionary antiliberal perspective, and it is always worthwhile reading his reflections on the subject.

Step2, I'll go out on a limb and answer that I consider the 1964 Civil Rights Act a mistake for several different reasons--prudential and constitutional reasons being just two of these. So if we are to regard the federal Civil Rights Act as the major achievement of the Civil Rights Movement, then I have to register dissent from the opinion that the Civil Rights Movement was a great thing.

For the sake of clarification, are you disagreeing with Paul about the civil rights movement being a worthy liberal project or not?

There are clearly many worthy things about it. The way Blacks have been treated both pre- and post-slavery in this country has been in many ways morally despicable and in desperate need of correction, and the Civil Rights movement to some extent provided some of that correction. And there is no doubt that it was a project driven by liberals and fueled by liberalism. Still, as a practical matter the project's results have been mixed, to say the least, and I think to some extent that is a function of its liberal foundations.

And of course simultaneous to this liberalism was busily dehumanizing unborn children and initiating the Planned Parenthood holocaust, destroying motherhood and family, etc.

There are very few political bodies or movements about which we can say nothing good whatsoever. Mussolini, trains, and all that.

Zippy, I wouldn't disagree with any of those policy prescriptions (err... I might waffle a bit on the supression of heresies, but I suppose it would depend on how far the supression went...), and yet... of all of them, the only ones that receive voice, any voice to say nothing of a strong voice, among our elected representatives today are the ones that align pretty much with Libertarianism (viz., elimination of the estate tax, reduction of federal power, modest foreign policy)... And the reason of course is that these happen to line up reasonably well with that peculiar expression of liberalism... which is to say the Libertarians get quite a few things right, if even for all the wrong reasons.

My suspicion is that creeping centralization, growth of the nanny state/empire, increasing technocratic management, &c. are endemic to any liberal democracy: Maintenance of political power has its earthly benefits; maintenance of political power requires the giving away of goodies to voters or (more likely) lobbying groups; voters and lobbying groups demand an ever-increasing share of what is manufactured to appear to be an ever-increasing pie. Before you know it, you get the Federal Department of Labor or the Carter Doctrine or CAFE Standards or "No Child Left Behind" or Universal Health Insurance. And if the children cannot pay the bill, well the grandchildren can, or their children and so on. Of course it is unsustainable, especially given the birthrates that naturally result from such a state of affairs. But at the same time I'm not convinced there is a political way out. For the political way out would involve someone, probably a large number of someones, getting elected while simultaneously telling people (and lobbying groups) precisely what they don't want to hear... which seems to become less and less likely with each passing 2 year cycle. In other words, liberal democracy is inherently unstable, i.e., inherently self-defeating.

The only solution, at least for the pessimist, may well be to simply ride out the storm and wait for the dust to clear.

And I second (or third) the recommendation of Jim Kalb.

Just to reiterate, for Bill's sake, I wasn't indicting all Boomers without exception, merely observing that those Boomers who preferred good beer to hard drugs and, later, mowing their own lawns to hiring illegal labour, weren't - alas - the ones who set the tone for the generation, the ones who reshaped the culture.

Well, in the course of having fun, I've been a little disingenuous. I wasn't always of the former stripe, but was first of the latter. It was indeed my generation that brought a strain of liberalism to its place of ruinous prominence which, I suppose, found its most publicly admirable apotheosis in the person of the philandering, perjuring, pot-smoking, draft-dodging William Jefferson Clinton. We made drug use respectable. We made education universal and ideological. We made lust (not love) "free" and children an annoyance. We liberated women by giving them endless opportunity, after first enslaving them to birth control and opening their wombs to the executioner's blade. We fulfilled the promise of free speech by rendering religion irrelevant in the "marketplace" of ideas. We loved peace to the point of pacifism, and the founding ideals of our country so much that we never tired of exercising the right to hate it. There's an essay to be written about it all, but it's a very long one. In the meantime, I compensate by condemning in others what I most despise in my own past. :~)

Zippy--
I see that you have at last provided some of the specifics of your vision of society in the post-Liberal Age. When I asked you for the same earlier, I got short shrift. Ah, well; I guess I'll write that down to a case of "Four legs good, two legs better" and soldier on.
With reference to this provision, "Inheritance taxes and other structures hostile to continuity of family interests start to erode", I'm wondering how that is reconcilable to this provision: "The fundamentally Christian constitution of the West is publicly acknowledged". It would seem that the impulse demonstrated by an aversion to an inheritance tax, and an emphasis on wealth as the glue of family cohesian, uncovers an attachment to money that goes against the Gospel teaching.
As I remember, for instance, Andrew Carnegie disinherited his children and willed his great wealth to various charitable concerns. I think that he did this in defense of their souls. It seems to me that bedrock conservative values, if one digs down to them, always turn out to have been established in defense of hoarding, rather than rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

Great comments from Zippy and Bill. Both should be expanded into full essays.

Andrew Carnegie disinherited his children and willed his great wealth to various charitable concerns. I think that he did this in defense of their souls.

Bully for him. And in typical liberal fashion, you seems to elide the difference between a voluntary decision by an individual, and a coercive mandate for all people. All wealthy men should disinherit their children . . . for the health of their souls of course.

I'm prepared to tolerate some "hoarding" in order to preserve the principle of private property, which I regard as more precious (and biblical, for that matter) than even the free market principle. That some old family farms might be broken up (or sold to big corporations) in order to meet inheritance tax obligations is enough to condemn the whole principle of inheritance tax, in my view.

It seems to me that bedrock conservative values, if one digs down to them, always turn out to have been established in defense of hoarding, rather than rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

That's an asinine statement. Zippy laid out about a dozen policy proposals, preciously one of which can actually be (tendentiously) traced to avarice. Tell me, sir, how does the jihad-sedition law, or the abolition of no-fault divorce, reduce to a defense of hoarding?

When I asked you for the same earlier, I got short shrift.

You asked a very different question, actually. (If that isn't obvious already, I'm not sure how to make it so).

It would seem that the impulse demonstrated by an aversion to an inheritance tax, and an emphasis on wealth as the glue of family cohesian, uncovers an attachment to money that goes against the Gospel teaching.

Thank you, King John, for reminding us of Your Majesty's sublime duty as a Christian Monarch to confiscate the manors, wives, and daughters of Your Majesty's vassals for their own Christian good. Perhaps Your Majesty will indulge us in a conference at Runnymede to discuss the details.

"Tell me, sir, how does the jihad-sedition law, or the abolition of no-fault divorce, reduce to a defense of hoarding?"

A Jihad-sedition law would not fundamental to conservatism. That is something that would be contingent upon prevailing historical conditions. Nobody was calling for a jihad-sedition law pre-9/11.
As for no-fault divorce, that is very much about money and property. It eliminates the necessity of hiring lawyers, going to court, and squabbling over the family assets.
As for private property being biblical, take a look at the Acts of the Apostles, and you will see that when St. Peter was alive, the early Christians divested themselves of private property and turned the proceeds over to the Apostles who distributed it as needed. Clearly, things concerning property went back to "normal" after the age of the Apostles. But I would maintain that St. Peter was well aware of how Jesus would have wanted it.

"you seems to elide the difference between a voluntary decision by an individual, and a coercive mandate for all people"

And you seem to ignore that Jesus was being asked if it was permissable to pay taxes to the government when He gave His render unto Caesar teaching. He said "Yes." He didn't qualify it in any way. To my way of thinking He was saying in effect "Money is not important. Your soul is important. If Caesar wants your money, don't waste your time resisting that. Give him what he asks for, and turn to God." Jesus has not one good thing to say for money. Acts makes it explicit that the first Christians, as led by St. Peter, took literally the admonition to "sell all you have and distribute it to the poor, if you want to be my disciple."

If the family farm gets broken up, that's one more cross to bear, I guess. If you are not attached to worldly goods, you have no problem.

Ah yes, the old "apostolic communism" argument. One wonders what other parts of the Acts of the Apostles our dear liberal reader would embrace as a basis for public policy. Or is it just the (again voluntary) socialism that excites him?

And whoever argued that it was impermissible to pay taxes? Of course it is permissible, and indeed obligatory. But the devil's in the details. Many taxes are perfectly legitimate, but others are, in my view, indefensible -- including property and progressive income taxes. The latter was manifestly a Marxist innovation in political economy. Nevertheless, as good citizens (which is what the "render under Caesar" statement really calls us to be), we ought to pay them anyway, and work for reform.

re: property a la Bibla

I always found this to be quite socialistic and hence promoted a welfare state ideology.


"When you enter your neighbor's standing grain, then you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not wield a sickle in your neighbor's standing grain." Deut. 23:25

"As for no-fault divorce, that is very much about money and property. It eliminates the necessity of hiring lawyers, going to court, and squabbling over the family assets."

Whoa. I cry foul, on the grounds of egregious and pernicious nonsense. Rodak is telling us, if I understand him correctly, that allowing a man to divorce his wife and break up his home unilaterally and against her will (or a woman to do the same to her husband) is a _good_ and a _Christian_ law, because it teaches the reluctant party not to be greedy over property.

If you think about it, and especially if you've known someone to whom this has happened, that's pretty sickening.

Steve Nicoloso:

Just to make an explicit meta-point about our discussion, my silence with respect to your comment of December 4, 2007 10:51 PM reflects neither ambivalence nor disagreement, but rather a level of agreement which renders further comment on my part superfluous.

re: no-fault divorce

Rodak's point is well-received.

When my parents divorced, I'm glad it was fast, and they didn't squabble over the assets.

"Ah yes, the old "apostolic communism" argument."

Actually, there was a discussion of just this recently in a thread on my blog. It was decided that "communism" was not an appropriate term with reference to Acts, since the early Christians did not form a political polity. Therefore, "communalism" was chosen as the more appropriate term.
Be that as it may, they did what they did. If the argument is old, it's because it won't, and can't, ever just go away. It seems to be the real-life implementation of sayings of Jesus that we are taught now to understand as metaphorical, or irrelevant.

Lydia--
I don't think that a no-fault divorce can be obtained unilaterally. It is a mutual decision to divide jointly-owned property privately, without the intervention of lawyers.

Lydia: Rodak, backed into a corner, will in my experience always appeal to the notion that anyone who disagrees with him can only possibly do so out of base personal motives, typically greed. This is so typical of the Left generally that I tend to think they actually believe it.

I don't think that a no-fault divorce can be obtained unilaterally.

Oh yes it can be. And usually is. No-fault divorce means the legal right to divorce a spouse unilaterally whether or not that spouse has done anything wrong.

Are you saying that we ought to give all out assets to our churches, or to the Church? Most of us here (I wager) affirm the obligation to tithe. That's insufficient?

As you say, the Apostles did what they did. And their example stands for all time. What galls is the ease with which a certain specifically applicable aspect of that example is exaggerated at the expense of other aspects. For instance, Acts records that the early church prayed -- and prayed corporately, as a whole church -- basically before they did anything. It's been a long time since any American politician advised us to imitate that.

Lydia--
I have to take back my last comment. My experience of no-fault divorce has been in New York State, where it is apparently more difficult to obtain than in most states.
Having briefly read up on it via Wikipedia, I have to do a 180-degree turn-about, and agree with you that it sucks. Despite the fact that it can work well for couples who are parting amicably, I see that it can be most unfair, and destructive. I was wrong.

"It's been a long time since any American politician advised us to imitate that."

Don't harbor the idea that I have any particular respect for American politicians.

With regard to the rest, I am in agreement with G.K. Chesterton, when he says in Orthodoxy:

Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world.

Alas, we'll never know if Chesterton was right.

Lydia: Rodak, backed into a corner, will in my experience always appeal to the notion that anyone who disagrees with him can only possibly do so out of base personal motives, typically greed.

Differing views concerning the sanctity of property rights does tend to be the bone of contention in the end. But I am not typically the one playing defense in that regard.

Re: progressive taxes. For American society, with 10 being the designation of poverty level, a simplified quintile breakdown of incomes would have A earn 10, B earn 20, C earn 40, D earn 60, and E earn 200. A basic progressive tax would tax B 2, C 6, D 12, and E 60. To achieve the same revenue, a flat tax would tax B 5, C 10, D 15, and E 50. So in order to give the top quintile a tax break, all other groups must pay more and the group closest to the poverty level has its tax burden more than doubled. Keep in mind also that for the top quintile, interest and capital gains compose around 25 percent of their total income.

Rodak, I accept your 180 degree turn. That's a good thing. Yes, New York is one of the only (perhaps the only) state in which it is still theoretically possible for a spouse to resist divorce. There are people who want to change this. I have read an unabashed op-ed in a newspaper arguing expressly that New York State must "fix" this last aspect of its divorce law so that fully unilateral divorce is permitted. I doubt many spouses do resist. There are plenty of ways to pressure and manipulate a spouse who doesn't want to divorce, including threats of court costs. ("Now just you give in quietly, and this won't hurt so much.") And even before fully unilateral divorce was made formal, the definition of "cruelty" was so greatly broadened by some state courts--and this may be so in New York--as to make it unlikely that a resisting spouse would be able truly to prevent the divorce. But it's obviously a worse thing for the laws to formalize unilateral divorce, as most do.

Rodak, I accept your 180 degree turn.

I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy! ;-)

Paul, if this conversation isn't dead, then I'm curious - you seemed to suggest that your belief in property rights is Biblically based.

Is that a correct assertion?

If so, how do you derive that? I've never heard that one explained.

Royale--
Since Paul doesn't seem to be around, and since I find your question interesting, let me suggest that you could base a Christian orientation towards "property rights" on a couple of the Ten Commandments. But, that said, I think that Paul misses the whole point. Selling all you have and giving the proceeds to the poor is not based on the principle that you have no right to the things that you own. In fact, if you didn't own things, you would be doing nothing virtuous in selling them. The virtue that the early Christians saw in divesting themselves of their wealth by donating their assets to the Church for redistribution, is clearly to be found in freely allowing brother-love and charity to trump one's "rights," and, in so doing, allowing humility to trump one's pride of ownership. It's not that one has no right to own, but that attachment to what one owns is a stumbling block to saintliness. I repeat here that Jesus has nothing good to say about material wealth; quite the contrary. There is a veritable cognitive dissonance in the conservative mind which disables it in such a way that it cannot see the obvious conflict between the conservative's fierce and utter attachment to material things, and Christianity. They can't know what St. Peter knew simultaneously with what, say, Reaganism stands for.

Rodak: you so often start such promising posts. If you'd ended your comment three or even merely two sentences earlier it would have been a telling point; but as it is it brings to mind a great movie with a bad sequel, or a book which starts off wonderfully but ends in self-obsession.

Zippy--
If I had ended my post three sentences earlier, I would have wasted my time presenting an easy-to-swallow platitude.

Better a politicized soundbite than a Christian platitude, I guess, to Rodak's way of thinking.

Lydia--
The part of my comment that Zippy didn't like is the explanation of why Paul didn't understand the point being made with reference to property, as explained to Royale in the part of my comment that Zippy did, apparently, approve of.
So, why not both the politics and the platitude, where the politics (hardly, in this case a "sound bite", btw) is accounted for by the platitude?

It may come as a surprise, Rodak, but I do agree that there is a tension between Conservatism and Christianity on the question of wealth, to the extent that the former overemphasizes the free market principle at the expense of other human goods. Contemporary Conservatism has fallen into just that overemphasis, and if you peruse the archives of this very site (pay particular attention to Maximos' posts), you will find ample critiques of contemporary Conservatism on that count.

But I think your own formulation of Christianity errs in the other direction: on the one hand by denigrating the material world, which God declared good, and on the other by denigrating the noble creativity at the root of Free Enterprise, a creativity derived from the original grant of Divine Creativity to mankind.

Royale: the traditional doctrine of Dominion, extracted from the Genesis story of the grant of stewardship over the resources of the earth by God to Man, is the origin of my view that private property is biblical, while Free Enterprise is more derivative.

The part of my comment that Zippy didn't like...

It isn't that I didn't like it, it is that you started off saying something profound and important and then made yourself look like a self-obsessed partisan hack with your ending sentences. I really don't know why you so frequently do that.

Paul: But I think your own formulation of Christianity errs in the other direction: on the one hand by denigrating the material world, ...

Many times have Rodak's Manichean tendencies been pointed out on other blogs.

Zippy--
I have no inhibition against presenting myself as a "self-obsessed partisan hack" on a thread with the title this one has. I'm not sure, though, why "self-obsessed?" I don't recall writing about myself above.

"...the noble creativity at the root of Free Enterprise, a creativity derived from the original grant of Divine Creativity to mankind."

Paul--
You'll need to show me the basis for understanding that one.
As for the idea that I've "denigrated the material world"...I don't think so. I've denigrated attachment to property, especially money. To me, neither of those things stands as representative of the material world, which also includes bluebirds and buttercups, along with sunsets and the Milky Way. But one can't buy and sell any of those things.
My attitude toward money is pretty much that of St. Paul in tent-maker mode: You learn how to do something that you can sell to "the world" in order to be self-sufficient only, and spend the bulk of your God-given creativity repaying that loan to God. Adam Smith's ,em>Invisible Hand is not the hand depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel with reference to that other Adam.

Darn. I screwed up the tagging again. Sorry.

"...the traditional doctrine of Dominion, extracted from the Genesis story of the grant of stewardship over the resources of the earth by God to Man, is the origin of my view that private property is biblical..."

Paul--
There is no reference to "private property" in that. In fact, if it refers to property at all, it says that everything is held in common by Man(upper case "M"), rather than by individual men.

"Many times have Rodak's Manichean tendencies been pointed out on other blogs."

And many times I've replied that my dualistic tendencies are Platonic, rather than Manichaean.

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