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

The prison of utopian style.

James Bowman has an interesting essay in the current New Atlantis. Its general theme the replacement in our culture of heroism by utopianism, and it is well worth a read; but I want to focus on one point near the end of the essay.

It has long been a puzzle to me why the Liberals give President Bush no credit, none, for grounding his foreign policy on Liberal principles. Few public men have ever embraced democracy with a much enthusiasm as George W. Bush; few have spoken more highly of the spread of freedom by American might; few have appealed more frequently to the liberty-loving part of man, or depended more confidently on its power to overcome other aspects of his character. This is Liberalism through and through; indeed, I will say it is the best of Liberalism. And yet Liberals hate him. Why?

Bowman offers a subtle answer I have not heard before, and I am inclined to think there something to it. Discussing a popular play which dramatizes the lives and dreams of some European utopian socialists of the mid-nineteenth century, he notes the “routine swipe” of a reviewer at Bush. He writes,

The point is not to build something, but merely to care passionately about the idea of building something. It’s this which lifts the failed or frustrated utopians onto a higher moral plane than, say, “the American government.” Yet the routine swipe at the Bush administration should not be allowed to pass without noting that its supposedly “destructive ineptitude” is really just the liberal utopia of passionate carers translated into political and military reality. How is President Bush materially different from those “complex, articulated characters, doing their imperfect best to solve the hardest problems with which existence confronts us”? He is at least partly, and to the extent that he believes a democratic government can be imposed on the Iraqis, a victim of the great modernist paradox, which is that we don’t want the utopias themselves anymore, but we want the utopian style. And we want it because it is a self-validation. It shows that we believe in the right things — in peace, in progress, in compassion for life’s victims, and in universal principles — even though we no longer have any intellectually coherent program for institutionalizing them among men. [. . .]

We may have lost confidence in the ability of those engineers to design a perfect system, or even to live up to their own high expectations of humanity, but it is easier to go on clinging to their fantasies as if we believed them to be real than to submit to the despair of admitting to ourselves that life is still for us what it was to our great-grandfathers who believed — or at least pretended to believe — that there was nothing in it more important than being good.

Ah, yes. There is something to this indeed. “We don’t want the utopias themselves anymore, but we want the utopian style.” All our utopian dreams have been shattered in practice, their failure disclosed by fire and slaughter, by death camp and gulag, by mountains of corpses and the bloodiest century in history; yet we cannot abandon the pretense of utopian passion and idealism. We don’t want a return to plain old virtue — “being good.” We want good intention to still count. We still repeat the old clichés. If you’re not a liberal when you’re young you than have no heart, etc. We still like the roguish unreliable young intellectual, with dreams of a better world. We still fall for the dissipated idealist.

And for us “idealism” can never embrace the heroic virtue of living a good life.

Comments (10)

Liberals live in a surprisingly abstract world: the future is all mansions and the past all hovels. The present and its mixed state of good and bad, they have little use for. They are Manichaeans, at best.

I would guess that if G.W. Bush were instead William Jefferson Clinton *and* took us to war in Iraq exactly as Bush has done, for exactly the same reasons, they would actually love all this attempt to build a democracy and would parrot it all over the web. My rather brutal analysis is that liberals hate Bush because he gave at least lip service and some concrete service to domestic conservative agenda items, because he is a Republican, and because he was elected by the red state conservatives whom they hate. Hence, to the liberal mind, any war he enters must be evil, he must be a horrible monster battening upon dead Iraqi civilians, and so forth. Idealism, theoretical or practical, only counts for anything to them if it comes from the right (read, "left") people.

No doubt there is alot of truth to that, Lydia. But it seems to me there must be something more. What of all the committed Wilsonians in the Democratic Party. What about the real enthusiasts for democracy? Why no credit whatsoever? I think part of it is this dynamic Bowman touches on.

It's just a trope for them, and incantation. The utopia is a style.

Insightful post: perhaps reduction to a "style" is what happens when positivist utopianism goes postmodern, because it simultaneously must give up utopianism and at the same time willfully refuses to do so.

What about the real enthusiasts for democracy? Why no credit whatsoever?

If I thought that it was a conscious thing I might suggest that it is a matter of putting a stake in the ground with Bush already farther to the right than what is considered socially acceptable. Therefore by implication only discourse to the left of Bush (who is already very liberal) is treated as acceptable: this is part of banishing racist sexist homophobic xenophobic conservatism to the outer darkness forever. And that may well be one of the effects. But it doesn't seem conscious: it seems more visceral, perhaps the leftist-utopian equivalent of metrosexual "conservatism" more comfortable with the company of the known-to-be-deluded than the rational.

Anyway, again, interesting post.

I agree with Lydia's and Zippy's comments. I'd also like to add a few more observations, having been on the Left myself not so many years ago.

The deep suspicion of Bush on the Left extends to his motives as well. He's always believed (not so unreasonably, sometimes) to have an ulterior motive that is "imperialistic" in one way or another. Most often that motive is thought to be connected with oil, or at least with the domination of foreign economies in general by American companies and their products (economic or cultural imperialism). These beliefs are often a holdover from the Cold War, when liberals suspected ulterior motives in American support for repressive regimes to stop communism.

The fact that Bush is thought to be destroying democracy at home (which, to some extent, is true) also calls into question whether he believes what he says about spreading democracy. If Bush is not for democracy at home, leftists ask, how can he be for it abroad? The growth of the security state plays into liberals' doubt about Bush's enthusiasm for democracy, as it does for many traditional conservatives. And of course, as Zippy says, leftists believe Bush to be far-right on social issues, which in their minds indicates that he himself doesn't believe in "democracy", which for them includes "equal rights" for homosexuals.

I think I need hardly mention that many on the Left are not "liberal" in any meaningful sense, and think we ought to leave the "noble savages" alone; I take it that Paul is not talking about these people. And many of those on the Left who are, in fact, liberal universalists, support the main ideas of Bush's transformation of the Middle East, as we can see from Daniel Larison's posts on Barack Obama, for instance.

In short, everyone tends to not give credit to those suspected of bad motives. It's easy to suspect Bush of bad motives, especially given his incompetence at carrying out what he has suggested a desire to achieve.

If Bush is not for democracy at home, leftists ask, how can he be for it abroad?

Give me a break.

Give me a break.

I didn't take John Savage to be justifying the statement as rational or whatever. I took him to be explaining how things really, actually do work in the asylum, if you will. And on that basis I think it is a reasonable point: even though Bush is quite demonstrably very liberal by any objective measure as compared to liberals of history including even recent history, he is enough of a heretic from the standpoint of the Left (e.g. in his rejection of the central liberal sacrament of abortion) that they take his liberalism to be disingenuous.

I didn't take John Savage to be justifying the statement as rational or whatever. I took him to be explaining how things really, actually do work in the asylum

I agree with everything you have said. Bush is not only a Republican, but a pro-life Republican who supports tax cuts "for the rich" and traditional marriage. I remember some protests a while back that express exactly how the Left feels about George Bush: "racist, sexist, anti-gay, George Bush go away".

The reason I said "give me a break" is because prior to the sentence I quoted, John stated, "The fact that Bush is thought to be destroying democracy at home (which, to some extent, is true)." To what extent could it possibly be true? While he was pointing out how things work in the asylum, he also agreed with it to some extent.

Just to clarify, when I said Bush was destroying democracy at home, I was speaking of his disdain for popular opinion on a lot of matters. As Steve Sailer put it, "Invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world." Now if you want to say that Bush is just carrying out the will of the people on all these issues, go ahead; I don't care to make an issue out of that. But merely suggesting that Bush has ruled with little concern for public opinion does not make one a leftist.

The leftists would justify the assertion that Bush is anti-democratic in a whole different way than would I, of course. But he is a globalist, and there are things that anti-globalists of Left and Right can agree on.

Just to clarify, when I said Bush was destroying democracy at home, I was speaking of his disdain for popular opinion on a lot of matters...

Now that you have clarified, I think your point makes sense. I took "Bush is destroying democracy" to be a much stronger statement than "Bush has disdian for popular opinion". Whether it is always good for a leader to follow the whims of public opinion is another question all together.

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