CAPITOL IDEAS: The Decline of the Liberal Faith
Bethel!, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL The Decline of the Liberal Faith IBERALISM, AMERICAN-STYLE, iS dying on the vine. I refer to the faith of liberalism—the belief in "the redemptive transformation of...
...Human nature was on the verge of transformation...
...in fact, TOM BETHELL marginal tax rates were already way too high...
...They had blithely assumed that government finances were immune from the laws of supply and demand, and taxes, no matter how high, would have no effect on behavior...
...Current and future beneficiaries have the power to decide not merely who their representatives are but how they are expected to vote...
...The world would certainly be a nicer, safer, and more comfortable place if this mission were to succeed...
...Meanwhile the American goal in Iraq would seem to be nothing less than the introduction of Enlightenment values into the Arab world...
...There is one thing that can be safely predicted, however...
...But as a faith, liberalism is set to decline in the years ahead...
...At its core, it 4 was based on the idea that religious belief would give way to Enlightenment values...
...The air is toxic, the water filled with lead, the globe cooling (or warming), species becoming extinct (even as subspecies multiply...
...March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37...
...People could be improved by "legislation alone," to quote the 18th-centuryphi/osophe Claude Helvetius...
...Today, the freedom to launch new social-engineering schemes—being "generous" with other people's money—is severely constrained by these realities and will remain so indefinitely...
...Those who seek an expanded government in the future will more and more depend on finding or contriving emergencies...
...Like Communism, liberalism was put into practice...
...And the result will be...
...Just guessing, but doesn't it seem likely that our own domestic politics will drive us out of the neighborhood before those good things can happen...
...Neighborhoods menaced by young men without fathers, their mothers financed by the state, should by now have disillusioned even the most progressive minded...
...Christianity has indeed declined, especially in its self-confidence...
...The contrivance of crisis has of course been a speciality of the environmentalists...
...Nineteenth-century thinkers really believed that people would soon be so good that the boundaries of property would no longer be required...
...Faith would succumb to reason...
...But as anyone who has lived within a mile of a government-housing project will know, real-life liberalism is a menacing thing—anti-utopia...
...You might say that we are all capitalists now...
...I will never forget the rage of the liberals at that moment...
...And in see-saw response to the Christian decline, Islam has risen up after a long dormancy...
...Think tsunamianthrax-AIDS-in-Africa...
...What is left of it is filled with darkness and pessimism: sex, abortion, euthanasia, and death...
...Shorn of superstition, the human race would make its stately progress toward a brighter future...
...Communism openly so, liberalism more obscurely...
...So should inner-city state schools, where parents play little or no role, and perhaps don't even know where the school is...
...I refer to the faith of liberalism—the belief in "the redemptive transformation of human 4. society through political means," as William 1 Pfaff puts it in his new book, The Bullet's Song...
...Islam has been around for a long time, and it is not going to retreat into the Arabian sukhs any time soon...
...It has gone on for too long and the world is changing...
...Plekhanov, who befriended Lenin in Zurich...
...New agencies must be set up without delay...
...The world would certainly be a nicer, safer, and more comfortable place if this mission were to succeed...
...Better for the idealists if it had remained a dream...
...Success, if it is to come, will take a long time...
...The reversal of attitude today is most conspicuous in the environmentalists, whose rise coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union...
...This is the great and largely unforeseen toll that a transfer society exacts...
...Liberalism and Communism both regarded egalitarianism as an ideal and both were godless...
...It is already doing so, perhaps more swiftly than we know...
...With his prescription drug benefit, Bush only intensified the problem...
...It took the rest of us a generation to figure out that these scares, which continue in a steady stream, were not to be trusted: generated by activists, publicized by journalists with the same agenda, and quickly adopted and made permanent by government.1 IBERALISM IS DYING OF OLD AGE...
...Journalists have lost count of the times the Pope has apologized for the history of the Catholic Church...
...Go back and take a look at one of those inner-city schools or housing projects if you don't believe me...
...In fact, the massive transfer programs of the federal government have become millstones for liberals, too, because they are squeezing out every last drop of tax revenue that might otherwise have been available for new programs...
...Both were based on extravagant optimism—admittedly an unwarranted optimism...
...The liberal faith fell with Communism...
...The great re-education of liberals began early in President Reagan's first term, when supply-siders publicized the idea that the "price" of government could not be raised indefinitely...
...So it may be that we will end up absorbing a lesson or two from them...
...Those who receive benefits from the state have more influence with their representatives than the taxpayers themselves...
...An unwritten principle of the liberal faith has been that government must expand to whatever extent is needed to get the job done...
...Man now is widely perceived as a despoiler and menace to the planet...
...No liberal has ever been heard to say that the government has grown too large, or should be reduced...
...The logic of representative government ensures that transfer programs to the elderly will keep right on expanding...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...The hazard of government overreaching was recognized by President Clinton ("The era of big government is over"), and to give him his due, Clinton took more care to control federal spending than President Bush has done...
...Programmatic liberalism—Social Security, Medicare, government schooling, government science, and the like—will continue, and on an expansionist path...
...Perhaps a revival of Christianity is in the cards...
...Such crises will be said to require an immediate response, with fiscal prudence sacrificed to humanitarianism...
...At all levels, federal, state, and local, government now disposes of at least one-third of GDP...
...Although its adherents don't like to discuss the point, the liberal faith has much in common with Communism, including shared roots in the Enlightenment...
...The costs of further government expansion are slowly sinking in...
...Democracy admittedly distinguished between them, but the liberal admiration for an ideological judiciary shows that they, too, would like nothing more than a 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 government that is free to impose its will by fiat (provided it is run by the right people...
...Well, that hasn't worked out...
...Who knows, maybe it will...
...September 11, although a genuine tragedy, was treated as just such an opportunity by our big-government conservatives, or neoconservatives (ex-liberals, in many cases...
...More and more voters have retirement accounts that rise and fall with the stock market and the details of public finance are of growing concern to the middle class, not just to actuaries and budget analysts...
...The liberals will fight to keep their "gains," of course, and with the major programs they won't have to fight very hard...
...Influenced by John Locke, he was in turn studied by the founder of Russian Marxism, G.V...
...Not just elections but freedom of speech and toleration and a reformed education system and a role for women and equality before the law must be transferred to Mesopotamia and beyond...
...Enlightenment ideas have not taken root in the Arab world over the last 250 years—a period when the West was more self-confident than it is now...
...FDR boasted in the 1930s that "no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program," and he was right about that...
...If it does not succeed, then we will face an energized and inflamed Islam...
...I recall a line from one of C. Northcote Parkinson's books, this one about the Muslim world: "The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another...
...But reality imposes its own discipline...
...In European countries it is closer to half, and even some liberal journalists are beginning to accept that therein lies the explanation for the slow or non-existent growth in countries like Germany...
...Human nature, philosophers once believed, could be remade in the classroom...
Vol. 38 • March 2005 • No. 2
