THE NEVER-ENDING STRUGGLE

...THE NEVER-ENDING STRUGGLE Why Progressivism Won’t Die By Michael Nyilis In an interview with Japanese journalists in 1995, Fidel Castro had harsh words for the conservative American legislators he holds responsible for Cuba’s economic misery...

...It goes by many names—liberalism, progressivism, a Third Way, the New Middle—and none dare call the idea for what it is: socialism...

...Who will win...

...The list of conservative grievances would consume an entire page...

...Even in his current troubles, the president hasn’t fallen quite to the level of citing his support by Communist dictators...

...And yet, at the same time, the liberals who have lived through the Reagan-Bush years and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 are equally convinced that they are losing the war...

...There has been a threehundred- year dispute between the socialist way and what we now call the American way, and the results are in...

...The first thing to be discovered, or rediscovered, is a different label...

...Most modern progressives would argue, of course, that these oppositions are not real, that social justice and the rule of law, for example, are not incompatible...

...So struck was he by the similarities between the Nazis and the Communists— and their shared hatred for the American system of government— that he decided a single philosophy lies behind all socialisms, a philosophy utterly opposed to America’s founding principles...

...Human nature is a hard thing to conquer (although that does not stop progressives and other socialists from trying), so one has to think that the American way will triumph in the end...

...The Franco-Germanic idea which has endeavored to penetrate the English- speaking world for three centuries did not succeed in finding a home in America until the 1960s, but now it is commonly accepted by the vast majority of those in the academic, news, and entertainment worlds...

...Property is either guaranteed or it’s not, and there is no basis in the Constitution for the redistribution of wealth—indeed, the overwhelming majority of Americans would have rejected the idea outright until just after the turn of this century...

...Even though Lenin used the term “progressive” frequently, it was good Michael Nyilis is a Republican speechwriter on Capitol Hill...

...In a 1993 essay entitled “My Cold War,” Irving Kristol declared “the fundamental assumptions of contemporary liberalism” the real enemy...

...The Anglo-American view accepts limitations on what can be achieved and has no final goal in its conception of government...

...Vazsonyi has allies, of course...

...The real political conflict of modernity is between what he labels the Franco-Germanic worldview and the Anglo-American...

...enough for Theodore Roosevelt, and it was an almost magical epithet for the intellectual followers of Herbert Croly, author of the 1909 Promise of American Life and the 1914 Progressive Democracy...

...Balint Vazsonyi’s new study, America’s Thirty Years War, is a devastating indictment of that agenda and the evils that will follow if it is ever allowed to triumph...

...Two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S...

...Liberals seem to get their way even when the Republicans are in charge, and anyway, they have been able to get what they want through the courts and through regulation since the 1930s...

...Thomas Sowell’s 1995 Vision of the Anointed contrasted the intellectuals still fascinated by the promise of the Enlightenment with those who accept the tragic limitations of the human condition...

...But he praised President Clinton for being a “progressive” and a man deeply committed to “social justice...

...It is perhaps only with respect to his fourth proposition, a common identity versus a multicultural America, that liberals and conservatives would agree that Vazsonyi’s America’s Thirty Years War has accurately defined their division...

...The progressive agenda of Croly’s present-day heirs may look suspiciously similar to their agenda back when they all still believed that socialism was morally superior to the free market...

...Vazsonyi defines the battle as one that began in the 1960s, and he has no doubt who is winning: “For the past thirty years, all aspects of our lives— and all of our institutions—have been moving in one direction: away from America’s founding principles...

...Conservatives notice that electoral trends do not seem to make any difference...

...The choices offered by the opposing worldviews are clear: the rule of law versus the search for social justice, individual rights versus group rights, property rights versus entitlements, and a common national identity versus multiculturalism...

...Those “extremist” Republicans of 1994 raised the minimum wage, increased federal spending by more than $50 billion every year, and created the brand-new entitlement of “Kid Care...

...Even among conservatives, hope springs eternal...

...In an insightful piece in Dissent in 1997, the thoughtful liberal Michael Walzer was among the first to observe this curious phenomenon, in which each side thinks the other is winning...

...He left his native Hungary in 1956 at the age of twenty-two, but not before experiencing national socialism under the German occupiers and the Soviet kind under the Hungarian Communists...

...The acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Bill Lann Lee, would surely deny that he favors group rights (just so long as we get the “right” racial outcomes...

...But Vazsonyi makes a powerful argument that, in each of these cases, the choice between the alternatives is absolute...

...The failure of socialism around the world—most spectacularly in the Soviet Union—presents a serious problem for old-fashioned liberals: They know that socialism doesn’t work (although in the back of their minds they’re not entirely convinced it’s ever really been tried), but the free-market alternative is too frightening to contemplate...

...On this last point Vazsonyi is emphatic...

...And James Kurth responded in 1994 to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order with a provocative and brilliant essay that pinpointed a clash within the West as the real clash—the multicultural project that holds Western values in contempt and has undisguised scorn for America...

...Liberals look at electoral trends and do not take comfort...

...One can assume, however, that he would be proud to be labeled a progressive and considered a man deeply committed to social justice...

...After all, Clinton called E. J. Dionne’s They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era the “best political book of 1996...

...He comes to the firm conclusion that “socialism in all its forms placed unlimited power in the hands of persons who were contemptuous of other humans and whose basest instincts were unleashed in the process...

...Surely there must be a third way that progressives can rally around...

...The overwhelming sense of conservatives is that the country is on the wrong track (76 percent of Republicans, in one major poll), and most would point to the four key issues spelled out in America’s Thirty Years War as the reason for so much of what Bork calls “gloom on the right...

...For such figures as Robert Bork, for instance, it’s obvious that conservatives are losing the war...

...The Republican National Committee’s official magazine, Rising Tide, recently put Balint Vazsonyi on its cover, and America’s Thirty Years War was recently featured on C-SPAN’s Booknotes...

...It turns out that they were not all that different...

...But, in fact, this new, post-socialist progressive agenda may be even more threatening than the old one—precisely because it goes far beyond the redistribution of wealth in pursuit of social justice...

...economy is on the right track, while two-thirds of Americans also believe that morally and culturally America is on the wrong track...

...This is a compelling conclusion, and one that consumes both liberals and conservatives who work on Capitol Hill...

...Indeed, “progressive” is the new buzzword for those liberals who recognize that “liberal” is nowadays mostly a term of scorn and ridicule...

...Vazsonyi’s analysis of the fight is full of useful observations, and the broad context in which he places them is new, although he is not the first to define these battlelines...

...Given its proven record of failure, its survival depends on deception...

...Similarly, with deadly wit and a relentless dissection of liberalism’s track record, Vazsonyi demonstrates the intellectual bad faith of those who claim to support both group rights and individual rights...

...Similarly, all Democrats and nearly all Republicans are in favor of some entitlements to go along with property rights...

...Vazsonyi is qualified to pass judgment on alternatives to the free market and democratic rule...

...Sowell, Kristol, and Kurth would all agree with Vazsonyi’s carefully argued thesis that America’s founding principles are under attack, sometimes openly, often not...

...Franco-Germanic philosophy is informed by the belief that human reason has an unlimited capacity to realize objectives in human affairs, and it has social justice as its ultimate goal...

...After the debacles of 1984, 1988, and 1994, when liberals witnessed the successful demonization of their political heroes who dared to call themselves liberal, most of them are careful to call themselves progressive...