Capitol Ideas/ The New Comintern
Bethell, Tom
The New Comintern by Tom Bethell L ast month I noted what a bizarre movement American-style liberalism has become. Since then, the feminist-dominated conference on population in Cairo brings us...
...Ugly American" was one...
...Oh, so that's it...
...The left, which in its various guises and disguises has for some reason been the predominant political force for change for the last century or more, thereby experienced a great setback and disappointment...
...But the collapse of socialism also brought with it a more fundamental disenchantment for the left...
...What a silly man we do have as vice president...
...One might say that this vision imbued the left with hope from 1789 to 1989...
...Morally superior...
...Barbara Mikulski of Maryland hoped that, if only the Vatican hadn't intervened, the conference would "plan the status of women around the world...
...He never seems to suspect that the dire news his staff feeds him serves a political end...
...to fix up the natives with condoms, spermicides, and jellies...
...We are still rich enough to buy countries with foreign aid, and to propagandize our contraceptive vision, but as we're barely reproducing ourselves that window of pedagogy will inevitably close...
...The conventional Beltway wisdom is good enough for him...
...And above these heights new peaks will rise...
...In fact, they still seem to be as potent as ever, which is remarkable in view of their prolonged reign of error...
...New Soviet Man nonetheless failed to appear...
...Don't expect them to stop there...
...Not without abandoning our most cherished beliefs...
...Your country right or wrong, remember...
...Not only did socialism fail to produce the goods, it also failed to produce better people...
...The evidence is by now overwhelming that capitalism brings not only prosperity but also something close to zero population growth in its wake...
...The "overdeveloped," rich countries will have to find ways to curb their wasteful consumption, not encourage others to emulate them...
...Nonetheless, with the collapse of the socialist vision, the left has largely lost interest in economic matters...
...We can't have thembulldozing habitat, driving around on freeways, and living in air-conditioned apartments...
...One thing this tells us is that modern-day liberalism is driven by global ambition...
...So get with the program...
...It's the very idea of rights, for men or women, that still hasn't caught on in most parts of the world...
...Remembering to say "she or he" and installing women in the military will not change the way we are made...
...Women's rights being neglected in the Third World...
...If the human breed is to persist in its greedy, despoiling ways, then let Mother Earth not be sullied by it...
...Off to Cairo he goes, there to chide the world...
...and to send Bella Abzug and Jane Fonda abroad as missionaries for the American Way...
...In that respect liberalism resembles the Catholic Church, with which it is ever more conspicuously at odds...
...The conference brought to mind a couple of old left-wing phrases...
...The Soviet Union and its satellites became laboratories for its fulfillment...
...We can't level up...
...Another worldwide crisis...
...Ehrlich believes, incidentally, that the present population "has already exceeded Earth's carrying capacity...
...Another crisis averted...
...An anti-Catholic ex-priest —"Father Aristide" as the New York Times so reverently calls him—has become our 18 The American Spectator November 1994 emissary...
...It is remarkable, incidentally, how difficult it is to find anywhere in print a candid acknowledgment of this disappointment, whichmust be widespread...
...He will set off down the corridors of power and round up the votes to save the planet...
...For a long time, then, the progressive vision, although utterly utopian and improbable, was one of hope: People would be better in the future...
...The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx," Trotsky wrote in 1923...
...We have to level down...
...Under Clinton, we seek to export the latest left-wing notions to the world...
...But first a few reflections on Cairo...
...Mankind's disappointing failure to evolve on schedule accounts for the great shift to environmentalism as the focal point of progressive aspiration, and for the new messianic zeal for population control, which is rather more aggressive than the old, defensive stratagems of the Population Council...
...The great sea-change is that hope has been replaced by the predominant emotion of disgust: Disgust with the human race that failed to rise to new peaks, failed to evolve, failed to transcend its "selfishness...
...I said above that Aristide is anti-American, but Hillary Clinton could make out a case that he's pro-American, and that I'm the one who's living in the past...
...T oday it's all far more ideological...
...Gullible scientists, World Bankers, and liberal Republicans thought the Malthusian calculus was reliable (although it was refuted by British census data while Malthus was still alive),and guilt-edged heirs worried that the hungry hordes might one day come ashore at Montauk and Greenwich...
...Another was "Yankee imperialism...
...The conference bore the convenient "U.N...
...It's worth noting that the new American emissaries and world-chiders have become disenchanted with the idea of economic development...
...Most of those who have bothered to look at the data know that calories per capita are increasing and that the "crisis" is as remote and unreal as ever...
...But such an acknowledgment would also constitute a kind of defeat, and the progressive forces haven't given up yet...
...This notion appears fully fledged in the writings of William Godwin, Shelley's father-in-law, and can be traced through John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, the Fabians, Alfred Marshall, and on into the twentieth century...
...T he Progressive Forces bear the scars of their disappointment nonetheless...
...Notice that President Clinton hasn't hesitated to expend vast political capital on behalf of undermining traditional morality, putting women in combat, expanding the role of the state, and so on...
...T he real complaint is not that world population is getting too big, but that the rest of the world is ignoring our antinatalist lead...
...He's the liberals' pet wind-up pol...
...T he problem is seen this way: If the rest of the world were to go capitalist, its people would end up consuming resources as avidly as we do now, thereby accelerating the ruin of the environment...
...Oh, I know, they haven't given up on re-education yet, and there are some poor souls who think that New Sensitive Male will be a suitable stand-in for New Soviet Man...
...They would rather go right to the business of setting up abortion clinics and skip the capitalist phase...
...Here is a depressing change that we should ponder...
...Exemplar of Democracy...
...Perhaps this is how the New Age should be construed: If we are to be denied a Utopian future with perfected people, then let us go back to a preEdenic past with no people at all...
...It also explains the change from the old Scientific Planning to the new Paganism—retrograde and Earth-worshipping...
...It's the whole world that must be reached—before it's too late...
...Yeah, I've heard that 'development is the best contraceptive' for twenty years," Al Gore said, when William Safire reminded him that as nations get richer, families get smaller...
...Even if capitalism does have the side effect of suppressing population, it's still not something they want to preach to the world...
...Paul Ehrlich, doomsaying ecologist at Stanford, said the other day that the one way to "guarantee the destruction of civilization would be to try to achieve equity in material consumption globally by leveling up consumption from the bottom...
...to "empower" the women...
...It was guilty of a "willful refusal to take responsibility" for its population growth, he said...
...One or two delegates were even heard to mutter the word "genocide...
...At odds with the Vatican, he's the soulmate of every alienated intellectual who disapproves of the way God made the world...
...Wait, now there's a population explosion...
...The idea that America might be less than popular when it tries to foist the latest progressive notions onto the world is something that the New York Times, for one, will play down...
...All this talk about the lack of women's rights in the Third World is off target, incidentally...
...I realize that belief in a looming population crisis antedates modern liberalism...
...In the resulting polities of power, women are inevitably at the mercy of men...
...By the 1950s, population was on the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller family agenda...
...Does one detect a certain disenchantment in Gore's reply...
...Recall that in their more extreme scenarios, some of the population controllers openly proclaim that their goal is to reduce the present population of the world down to about half its size...
...What had the world done now...
...Since then, the feminist-dominated conference on population in Cairo brings us more evidence...
...In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, it was the Soviet Union that carried the ball for the progressive cause, bringing the good news of collectivism unto the Third World and duly enrolling converts in Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University...
...As FDR said of Trujillo, he may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch...
...Global warming, did someone say...
...No conservative politician—with the possible exception of Margaret Thatcher—has worked half as hard to shrink the state as Clinton has to expand it...
...put these signs of native restlessness in the headlines...
...But for obvious reasons the American news media didn't Tom Bethell, The American Spectator's Washington correspondent, is a visiting media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...So, for that matter, does the Clinton administration's desire to install an anti-American defrocked priest as president of Haiti...
...In fact, the evidence is so strong that the Vatican's lack of enthusiasm for capitalism should be reexamined in that light...
...The United States is a mere sliver of its concern...
...The notion that there may be such a thing as politicized science hasn't yet crossed his mind...
...No doubt this message was long ago delivered to Gore & Co., but for public consumption it is rarely put so bluntly...
...According to the Wall Street Journal's summary, Vice President Gore "chided the world" on the opening day of the conference...
...But this was more naïveté than ideology...
...They know good Yankee imperialism when they see it...
...Now America is the missionary, preaching a politics of "change," with a license to annihilate imperfection...
...But there, too, new peaks will fail to rise, and disappointment awaits...
...CI 20 The American Spectator November 1994...
...It is now more cynically viewed as an opportunity: a pretext to break down traditional customs and mores...
...Given the increasingly skewed demographics, with Third World growth masking our shrinkage, it's unlikely that the West will be able to sustain its hegemony for more than another generation...
...This month I'll try to examine in a little more detail the ideas that animate contemporary liberalism...
...Since the French Revolution, their hope has been that, once human institutions were reformed—in particular, once private property was abolished—human nature itself would be transformed...
...fig leaf, but this increasingly disguises the goals of American leftists...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
