The Death of Liberalism

Martin Peretz, one of the editors of the New Republic, recently held forth about the lack of ideas coming from the Left. Since I've believed this to be a fact myself, I didn't think it was news. But perhaps it is, when a hardened and well-respected liberal like Peretz actually admits it. A mere excerpt from his piece demonstrates the bankruptcy of thought on the left...

It's much easier, more comfortable, to do the old refrains. You can easily rouse a crowd when you get it to sing, "We Shall Overcome." One of the tropes that trips off the tongues of American liberals is the civil rights theme of the '60s. Another is that U.S. power is dangerous to others and dangerous to us. This is also a reprise from the '60s, the late '60s. Virtue returns, it seems, merely by mouthing the words.

One of the legacies of the '60s is liberal idealism about race. But that discussion has grown particularly outmoded in the Democratic Party. African Americans and Caribbean Americans (the differences between them another largely unspoken reality) have made tremendous strides in their education, in social mobility, in employment, in housing, and in politics as images and realities in the media.

...But, in the Democratic Party, among liberals, the usual hustlers are still cheered. Jesse Jackson is still paid off, mostly not to make trouble. The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. Early in the race, it was clear that he--like Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich--was not a serious candidate. Yet he was treated as if he just might take the oath of office at the Capitol on January 20. In the end, he won only a handful of delegates. But he was there, speaking in near-prime time to the Democratic convention. Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman.

This patronizing attitude is proof positive that, as deep as the social and economic gains have been among African Americans, many liberals prefer to maintain their own time-honored patronizing position vis-à-vis "the other," the needy. This is, frankly, in sharp contrast to President Bush, who seems not to be impeded by race difference (and gender difference) in his appointments and among his friends. Maybe it is just a generational thing, and, if it is that, it is also a good thing. But he may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias.

It is more than interesting that liberals have so much trouble recontextualizing race in the United States. It is, to move to the point, pathetic. And it leaves work undone. In Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (the Michigan affirmative action case), she wrote that the Court assumed that, in 25 years, there will no longer be a need for affirmative action. Unless things change quickly, she will be completely off the mark. Nearly two years have passed since that ruling and virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can't.

Peretz doesn't sound like he has much hope. The truly heartening thing is that the beliefs liberals have held as orthodox have not been accepted at the ballot box, as John Leo noted in discussing Peretz's comments...

Liberals have been slow to grasp the mainstream reaction to the no-values culture, chalking it up to Karl Rove, sinister fundamentalists, racism, or the stupidity of the American voter. Since November 2, the withering contempt of liberals for ordinary Americans has been astonishing. Voting for Bush gave "quite average Americans a chance to feel superior," said Andrew Hacker, a prominent liberal professor at Queens College. We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow. Liberals might one day conclude that while most Americans value autonomy, they do not want a procedural republic in which patriotism, religion, socialization, and traditional values are politically declared out of bounds. Many Americans notice that liberalism nowadays lacks a vocabulary of right and wrong, declines to discuss virtue except in snickering terms, and seems increasingly hostile to prevailing moral sentiments.

Here's the funny thing. I'm a conservative, and I value the idea of a strong healthy liberal presence in American culture, politics and life. I believe that my beliefs are correct, and I want other people to agree, so I share those beliefs with them in the hope that they come around to my point of view. But I'm not always going to be right (please, try not to be surprised) and even more important, the policy positions that I advocate should be vetted by a spirited and intelligent public debate.

Don't get me wrong -- there is a liberal culture out there. It's just not that healthy. And the left today certainly brings spirit to the debates. But they seem to lack the intellectual heft to debate the issues by proposing something other than reactionary positions. Generally, the liberal position today involves a spirited defense of a policy enacted during the Great Society or the New Deal (see the left's distaste for welfare reform in the 1990's and its current hysteria over making changes to Social Security) or a screeching insistence that more government spending be used to cure any number of problems, without specifically outlining how the increased spending would solve such problems. And that's before we enter the realm of social issues, where liberals refuse to make judgments and pitch the idea of moral relativism as faith, or foreign policy, where the guiding principle seems to be a suspicion -- if not outright hostility -- to any course of action pursued by the United States.

It would be better all around if the balanced liberals in American culture would take to task the more outlandish buffoons on their side, such as Michael Moore, rather than embrace them. But the problem for the people on the left who can partake in spirited discussion is the philosophy they currently espouse is inherently negative -- they're constantly against new ideas, rather than proposing new ideas. It's inherently difficult to consistently defend the status quo as the correct state of affairs; even though people are comfortable in a world without serious changes, they know such a world does not exist, and in today's society, they have come to accept it more and more.

In the end, the supposed top minds of liberalism are sitting around at universities in tenured positions, chattering amonst themselves with nary a voice of dissent around to challenge even their most idiotic ideas. By contrast, conservative voices face opposition in popular culture and must swim against the tide within the media and academia, the spots within our society from which political ideas and philosophies generally grow. As a result, conservative ideas are forced through a Darwinian process, while liberal ones face little challenge and therefore are not susceptible to surviving challenges.

I know conservative ideas will win out on most of the policy positions of the day. I just wish the opposition had a few good ideas of their own to help us build a better society.