The Sword and the Olive Branch

When I’m looking for perspective, it often helps to take a step away from the political fray.  Despite all the politically minded bellowing, there is no debate today about contemporary issues such as health care reform, Keynesian economics, or the tea party protestors.  Instead, what we call debate today is actually a vehicle for belittling our opponents and posing as their moral and intellectual superiors.  Partially because it seems to work on the masses, the search for knowledge has been usurped by the desire to validate our prejudices.  Maybe it’s always been like this.  Either way, I would like to look at things as they were a few years ago, to use a perspective refreshingly liberated from the present’s intoxicating sense of urgency.    

With the exception of the occasional edit, the bulk of this essay was written in 2006.  Here I argue that the politicization of America, spurred by 9-11’s unfortunate placement in America’s generational cycle, may be fueling a split in our country as severe as the ones it withstood during the Civil War and the liberal revolution of the 1960s.  Enjoy.  

1,000 points of Hate 

I know it’s easier said than done, but Americans should stop ignoring the politicization of their nation.  Whether or not it’s been invited into the U.S., it will play a major role in shaping the next era of domestic politics.  In many ways, today’s United Sates resembles its 1960’s counterpart.  That’s not a good thing.  On the political right, this century’s first decade has seen a creepily European decline in the philosophy of limited governance, coupled with an undeniably challenging and American endeavor to replace foreign dictatorship with democracy.  On the left, even the appearance of political moderation is ridiculed as irresponsible, and democrats who don’t follow the hard-left orthodoxy to the letter are purged from their own party.  Take Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s Vice Presidential running mate in 2000.  Throughout his career, Lieberman tried to inflate fundamentally dubious hate crime statistics by including homosexuals in them, voted against drilling for domestic oil in ANWR, and voted against a Partial Birth Abortion ban half-a-dozen times.  The same Joe Lieberman, the man who won’t outlaw abortions where a hole is punctured into the baby’s skull, and then the brain tissue is vacuumed out through a tube until the skull collapses, was derided as George Bush’s “Love child” for supporting the War in Iraq.  On all questions political, humanity has been taken out of the equation. 

To put it mildly, the legacy of the 60’s has been overblown.  Far from being a terrestrial heaven for minorities, women, and young idealists, it was an era where the violence of a few motivated political animals sucked an entire nation into their storm.  Both JFK and MLK Jr. were assassinated during this era.  Balkanization and identity politics took permanent root in American soil.  Riots, both spontaneous and staged (Chicago’s “Days of Rage”) dominated the headlines.  In 1970, three left-wing radicals: Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton, and Ted Gold, accidentally killed themselves while building a bomb they planned on setting off at an army dance in Fort Dix, earning themselves a permanent spot in my very own Darwin Awards hall of fame (the premise of the Darwin Awards being the some members of the human race improve our gene pool by weeding themselves out).  These tragedies weren’t natural the way hurricanes, earthquakes, and Rahm Emmanuel are out of control—they were products of a politically charged environment. 

The United Sates started traveling down the radical road as far back as 2004, where five employees of John Kerry’s Presidential campaign slashed the tires of Republican get out the vote vans (To his credit, Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Seth Boffeli responded “This is not something we engage in, or encourage”).  That same year, windows were shot out of a George Bush campaign office near Knoxville, Tennessee area.  While protesting against MTV’s partisan “get out the vote campaign” in 2004, former California College Republican State Chairman Michael Davidson was told “I hope your wife gets raped and can’t get an abortion” by an alleged MTV worker, as if the worst part about sexual assault is the responsibility of pregnancy.  All the while I hear liberals constantly complaining that they’re “too nice” to conservatives.  Some liberals seem to think they have a right, perhaps even an obligation, to treat conservatives this way.  Thoughtless activism breeds hatred. 

In the Pacific Northwest in November 2007, anti-war activists poured cement over train tracks in an attempt to block shipments presumably tied to the Iraq war. In addition to their stunt with the train tracks, the Port Olympia protestors jumped in front of traffic, disobeyed police orders to stop harassing people, and even used children to help block military equipment from leaving the port!   Things got so bad that a local editorial sympathetic to the anti-war cause condemned the protestors for their “abhorrent behavior.”

Imagine if in Tiananmen Square in 1989, instead of a single protestor risking his life to stand in front of a tank, a few dozen protestors and their children huddled in the middle of the road.  Imagine how much that would degrade humanity as a whole.  Instead of remembering an act of bravery on par with that of a father running into his burning home to rescue his children, Tiananmen Square would be remembered as an obvious political stunt which put children in harm’s way.  This is what happens when activism becomes an end to itself.

But wait, there’s more!  Today, presidential elections in North America don’t end with a vote, but with the first runner-up’s litigious refusal to accept losing.  Fringe leftists are still complaining that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election.  When Lopez Obrador, candidate for Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Party, lost the 2006 Mexican presidential election by a margin of less than 0.6%, he cried “fraud,” and demanded a full recount.  Apparently blind to the distinction between throwing a temper tantrum and demanding justice, one of Obrador’s followers proclaimed “We’ll march again and again, as many times as it takes, until Lopez Obrador sits in the President’s seat.”  Far from advocating a peaceful withdrawal from a misguided conflict, Obrador assured his troops, “We can be here for years, if that’s what the circumstances merit.”  In November 2006, Obrador (who, I repeat, did not win the election) held an unofficial swearing-in ceremony, proclaiming the launch of his “parallel government.”

Even popular culture, which mirrors society’s imagination (read: the sensibilities of a select few artists) has exhibited symptoms of rampant politicization.  Its fans are loathe to admit it, but Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is an meretricious metaphor centered around the liberal perception of the Bush administration.  In the movie, The Republic has waged war with a separatist movement.  Palpatine, the big bad Chancellor of the Republic, uses this threat of this war to consolidate his power until there are no checks and balances to interrupt the building of his empire.  A painfully pouty Princess Padme (one of the film’s several unsympathetic good guys) witnesses this and mopes “So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause.”  In the movie’s final light-saber duel, a newly christened Darth Vader tells Obi-Wan Kenobi “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.”  This awkward dialogue directly mocks G.W. Bush’s infamous statement: “either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists.”   

The Nation, the left’s closest equivalent to National Review, noted that back in the days of Sigourney Weaver’s Alien films, Padme’s ceaseless moping would have looked laughably retrograde.  Maybe it’s just Natalie Portman.  Right around the time Episode III was released, another science-fiction flick of hers, V for Vendetta, was also dramatizing infantile left-wing conspiracy theories.  In this film, a right-wing government that used war to come to power controls all aspects of the media.  You can tell they’re right-wing because they’re nationalistic, old, white men who congregate in dark rooms and discuss how not to lose their power.  Perhaps the most outlandish part of the movie is that Muslims and homosexuals are imprisoned by a rightist British government simply for being Muslim or homosexual.  For Christ’s sake, there’s even flag in the movie which is a juxtaposition of Old Glory, the Union Jack, and a swastika—all under the slogan “coalition of the willing.”

Anyway, in “P for pretentious” (as one conservative review put it) Natalie Portman plays Evey, an unremarkable young woman living an unremarkable life working for a state-run TV station.  One night, as she’s cornered outside by a couple of would-be rapists, she is saved by “V,” a terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask.  Kudos to V for stopping a fictitious rape, but calling him a terrorist is not an overstatement.  Just like Tim McVeigh, V bombs government buildings to draw attention to his cause.  His aversion to sexual violence may be laudable, but it’s not a moral offset—it doesn’t give him any more right to terrorize than if he would have helped hold Evey down for the predators—but I digress.

To make a long story short, Evey develops a relationship with V, helping him battle left-wing bogeymen like pedophile Bishops and jingoistic radio hosts.  Then, Evey’s mad-cap adventures with V are abruptly postponed as she’s captured, imprisoned, and tortured for an undisclosed amount of time.  Evey’s captors keep telling her that she’ll be killed if she doesn’t give them information about V.  I know it’s a boring plot (Few things are more mundane than a fiction writer’s apocalyptic tales about right-wing theocracies) but bear with me—this is the best part.  After lots of grisly prison scenes, it turns out that Evey wasn’t imprisoned by a fascist government, but by “V” himself.  Wikipedia’s sympathetic plot synopsis describes it like this:

“By forcing Evey to endure something similar to what he had endured at Larkhill detention center (V was held there and experimented on by the Government) V hoped that Evey would understand that “integrity,” “the very last inch of us,” is more important than our lives.  Evey initially hates V for what he has done, but comes to realize that the experience allows life without fear and for her to return to a normal life in London.”

It doesn’t take a feminist to be bothered by the idea of locking a woman up in a cold cell until she comes around to some psycho’s point of view.  Let’s hope that the screenwriters don’t move on to romantic comedies.  After Evey is released, she helps V overthrow the government and blow up the British parliament, but not after he dies like a good terrorist martyr.  

These aren’t obscure independent films, which only appeal to clove-smoking cinema majors.  Neither are these documentaries, which don’t shock anyone when they turn out partisan.  These are big budget, mass media events which reach into every corner of America.  Movies like this only attract popular support in cultures which are dazzled by mindless politic commentary.  Polemics and parody, Michael Moore and Saturday Night Live, reflect the tone of American political discourse.  This would be fine if Americans could find a place to hide from it, but increasingly there is little refuge from amateur political commentary. 

Some people applaud this trend, because a politicized atmosphere casts seemingly every aspect of life in a political light.  In a hyper-sensitive culture, the otherwise trivial decision whether or not to shop at Wal-mart has less to do with good customer service than with the retail chain’s willingness to work with unions.  This is often driven by presumption that political activism in itself is a high ideal.  If everyone is “involved,” the logic stands, then Americans will find it more difficult to ignore the way their elected leaders shape the world.  With more political consciousness, citizens will recognize wrongs more easily, and thus be more equipped to stop evildoing while it’s being committed.  Right?

Wrong.  Political activism for its own sake degrades people.  If everyone eligible to vote in America actually voted, this nation’s elections would be shaped by the same mindless trends that compel the populace to buy Beanie Babies en masse one Christmas and scooters the next.  The only change political activism guarantees is a scarcity of escape from the pettiness and resentment that political debate inevitably unearths.  Political apathy isn’t a virtue, but activism alone creates a lot of emotional politics which aren’t tempered by thought.  It produces employees who don’t mind alienating some of their co-workers and customers by exclaiming how much they hate organized religion.  Thoughtless activism produces college students who concern themselves more with protest than with intellectual growth.  Worst of all, it makes a country ripe for radicalism.  Well-meaning advocates of universal activism forget that radicalism finds its easiest adherents in a politicized environment.  Nazism, Communism, and Middle Eastern terrorism could never have harvested popular support if the Stalins of the world could not have cultivated a certain political “consciousness” within their followers. 

Apathy can hurt a populace, but not because it prevents people from being “politically conscious.”  In the best section out of his somewhat over-the-top 1973 book, The Liberal Middle Class: Maker of Radicals, the Child Psychologist Richard Cutler explains how apathy really feeds tyranny.  It happens when supposedly responsible people fail to confront the unreasonable demands radicals tend to make.  The example he gives involves a small group of students who wish to abolish all defense-related research at their school.  They begin by taking their case to professors who don’t have the capacity and/or the will to explain the benefits of defense-related research.  The student’s argument is then elevated to the dean, who likely won’t have the inclination or the time to educate another group of closed-minded activists.  The argument is then taken to the college’s vice president.  Each time a radical’s inherently silly demands are recognized by a higher authority, those demands are legitimized, which gives their radical tactics momentum.  Just as teaching a four-year manners is much easier than teaching a fifteen year-old courtesy for the first time on their life, the longer the student’s arguments go unchallenged, the more difficult it becomes to deal with their intimidation and pressure tactics. 

The V.P., looking to avoid that kind of attention, passes the buck to the university president.  The President may attempt a half-hearted compromise with the radicals, but doesn’t make a serious attempt because frustrating the appetites of political radicals may compromise his status.  The process then moves outside the college, where conservatives in the public sphere are the only people with enough backbone to confront the radicals in a meaningful way.  Sooner or later activist journalists will give sympathetic coverage of the antagonistic radicals, sucking the public into an unnecessary debate.  By the time it reaches this stage, bored, affluent Americans looking to make a difference in the world will have internalized these radical resentments, ingraining their petty absolutism into American culture. 

Scenarios like these could be avoided if somewhere along their intellectual development someone took the time to educate the students on just how irrational the emotive approach to politics is. 

I’m not claiming that activism is inherently bad. Discussing which candidates will and won’t raise property taxes can help one discern who to vote for and perhaps where to live.  The American Revolution preserved the United State’s independence, which allowed it to grow into a proud and successful country.  Nevertheless, not all revolutions advance humankind, and hundreds and millions of people have been cruelly abused in the name of making the world a better place (often without any help from religion). 

Not that long ago, America was a pleasant place to live; politics were contained to its appropriate sphere.  Social conservatives may not have enjoyed the rise in grunge music, gangsta rap, and violent movies such as “Pulp Fiction,” but overall, the 1990’s allowed Americans to pursue their dreams without being disturbed by unsolicited political commentary.  Maybe I’m being romantic; after all, the 90’s were the decade of Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, and the Gulf War.  Certainly television shows such as Murphy Brown would occasionally bore Americans with some vapid message about single motherhood, but the cynicism of the time, rather than compromising the happiness of American citizens, handicapped anger’s ability to energize the populace.  The 90’s saw the rise of libertarian feminism, ala Camille Paglia.  Bill Clinton’s Democratic presidency asserted individual responsibility to Americans through welfare reform.  The same president once said during a State of the union Address, “The era of big government is over.”  If it could be measured, faith in revolution and quaint “We are the world” expressions of compassion would have registered at a 20^th century low during its last decade. 

Nothing remotely close to the liberal revolution of the 1960’s could have occurred during the 1990’s.  While the sixties might be discussed until the end of history, the Republican rout of 1994 is only referenced by political junkies.  When Bill Clinton obviously cheated on his wife while President, the politically reserved American middle class couldn’t get outraged by his immorality.  Clinton’s charisma didn’t save him as much as his country’s cultural atmosphere.  For a short while, Americans had come to terms with human imperfection.  While traditionalists correctly derided Clinton’s lack of respect for his wife and his office, as well as his ignorance of responsibility when it came to owning up to his affair, people were primarily concerned with their own lives.  They married their own spouses to worry about.  Perhaps America had fallen asleep at the wheel, especially concerning a fermenting Middle East, but on the domestic front, everything was set in its place.  Not even the controversial Florida recount in 2000 could derail the American dream of freedom and economic self-sufficiency. 

Then terrorists struck America on September 11^th, 2001.  Clearly the murder of almost 3,000 American civilians ranks as the worst thing about 9-11.  No one should come away with the impression that those deaths are anything but tragic and unnecessary.   But the politicization of America falls second (a distant second, but second nevertheless).  9-11 relegated Americans to at least a generation choke full of the widespread political strife we see now.  The economic fallout of 9-11 had slowly, but surely been recouped through sound enterprise.  The cultural fallout has proven much more difficult to recover from.  America’s economy recovered from 9-11 (that is, until the housing market collapsed) but this country still hasn’t recovered all the cultural capital it lost during the 60’s—such as an intelligent, tempered respect for tradition.  The 1960’s were when the flag-waving left was annexed by the flag-burning left.  Piling the domestic aftermath of 9/11 on top of that might turn out to be too much for even powerful America to handle.

So why is America so politically uncivil right now?  How is 9-11 the catalyst?  The short answer is that baby boomers are in charge.  In their book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe map a generational cycle in America.  To greatly simplify it, the cycle starts with an idealist generation, which produces a lot of rhetorically skilled, creative, but moralizing narcissists, who always gravitate towards the latest cause.  Imagine a generational plurality of people like Natalie Maines and Rob Reiner.  Now try doing it without contemplating suicide.  The Baby Boomers (born in between 1943 and 1960) are obviously Idealist.  An individualistic reactive generation follows, rebelling against the excesses of their parents.  To no one’s surprise, Generation X (b. 1961-1981, “The Thirteenth Generation” as labeled by Strauss and Howe) meets those requirements. 

Following a moody reactive generation, an upbeat civic generation comes of age.  Watching their elders, they’re able to distinguish a middle ground between idealistic, cloudy activism and reactive, knee-jerk irony.  The civic generation blesses America with community-minded, competent institution-builders.  Civics organize the ideals previous generations fought over and build institutions around them.  An adaptive generation completes the circuit.  Adaptives inundate America with comfortable, but sheltered youths who grow up to be sensitive elders.  They preserve institutions, without standing out too much as a collective whole.  As of 2008, America’s last complete adaptive generation, the Silent Generation (b. 1925-1942) has produced no United States Presidents (John McCain may have been his generation’s last chance).  Adaptives go on to breed an idealist generation of children which rebel against their parent’s complacency, starting the cycle all over again. 

DISCLAIMER: I’ll be the first to say that cyclical interpretations tend to oversimplify history.  But they can serve a purpose, if their limitations are kept in mind.  It should go without saying that there are exceptions to the broad generational designations set down by Strauss and Howe.  But just in case not everyone understands, I should spell this out.  When I say “Baby Boomers are idealistic,” I don’t mean all Baby Boomers; I mean that a dominant, observable trend towards idealism surfaced during this generation.  Many born into an idealist generation will be anything but idealistic.  Likewise, not all members of an adaptive generation will be timid.  When discussing groups of people, especially one as varied as a generation of Americans, it must be assumed that generalizations will be used, and that must be accounted for when interpreting the discussion.  If that’s too much to ask, please click off of this page and retry at least your first two years of college before visiting this link again. 

Anyway, this generational cycle recurs uninterrupted in American history, unless the country fails to resolve its secular crises, the internal struggles to reshape public norms and institutions, with what Strauss and Howe consider “reasonable success.”  Examples of secular crises include the American Revolution and World War II/The Great Depression.  Remarkably, these crises appear periodically (around every 90 years) and in sync with the generational cycle.  Historically, Americans have dealt with secular crises while an elderly generation of idealists provided guidance (Samuel Adams during the American Revolution, FDR during the depression and World War II).  Middle-aged, reactive individualists took charge and mitigated that elder guidance with ingenious pragmatism (Dwight Eisenhower, George Washington).  A civic generation full of young adults organized the struggle for their reactive leaders (JFK, Thomas Jefferson) while the adaptive generation was too young to get in the way. 

To give one example in greater detail, America’s dreadful twin crises of the Great Depression and World War II hit when the idealist generation (this one labeled the “Missionary Generation” by Strauss and Howe) was elderly.  Much like other self-important collections of people, “the Missionary mental approach remained a general constant: a fierce desire to make the world perfect according to standards that welled up from within” (my emphasis).  Thankfully, a generation cited for “symbolic acts of violence” in their youth had aged into wine and not vinegar.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Marshall contributed most by reminding us that we can succeed against impossible odds, if only we have the courage to do so.  “Nothing to fear but fear itself,” and all that jazz.

Being idealist, FDR’s generation promoted social purity, manifested then through acts such as prohibition.  Being reactive, the seceding “Lost Generation” held purity in contempt.  One could predict how unhappy they would feel coming back from WWI only to see governmental suppression of alcohol, pornography and politics (such as when the government led a roundup of suspected communists with the Palmer Raids).  Offended by the overbearing arrogance of their parents, the Lost Generation “never stopped using what they called their ‘revolution of the word’ to…express their incorrigible aversion to grandiosity.”  Thankfully, they had enough agency to disregard the Missionary Generation’s callous zeal when the time came.  By the time World War II came around, the Lost Generation served as generals with “unpretentious composure,” invaluable in such a large-scale conflict.

Finally, the soldiers following in WW II were predominantly part of the civic-minded G.I. Generation. This generation is often called the “Greatest Generation” due to their general optimism and willingness to set aside personal and ideological grudges in times of trouble, such as Pearl Harbor.  As one might expect generations classified as “civic” to be, the G.I.’s “had a strong collectivist reflex.”  This didn’t stand in the way of them fighting for individualistic American ideals, in fact, it made them a perfect generation for upholding those traditions.  Make all the soldiers of WW II idealistic or reactive, and infighting will keep them from accomplishing anything as a whole.  The civic G.I.’s weren’t intimidated by ideological differences; they didn’t even consider them important.

America came out of WW II stronger than we had when it started, in spite of the death toll.  This happened because of a fortunate generational cycle.  Every generation’s characteristics served the country well.  The idealists generated grand ideas; the reactives edited them for the real world, and the civics put them into action.  Americans weren’t so fortunate the first time the cycle was interrupted, during the Civil War. 

Looking at it through a cyclical perspective, the horrors of the North/South conflict started about ten to fifteen years too early for Americans to handle.  During the build-up to the war, the role of the sage didn’t fall in the hands of an idealist generation, like it usually does during secular crises.  Instead, it fell upon an adaptive, elderly generation which was already full of passive compromisers in youth, uncertain to a fault.  Nobody paid any attention to these moral wallflowers.  At that time, the idealist generation was still young enough (40 to 69) to dominate the nation with its hard-headed crusaders.  The Idealists of the civil war era were often plantation owners who refused to give up slavery on any terms, and moralizing abolitionists.  Rhetorical firebrands such as William Lloyd Garrison said things such as: “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.”  A recipe for disagreement this potent couldn’t be concocted along Israel’s borders.  The Transcendental Generation, as these Idealists are called, “split not just into two competing factions, but into two self-contained, mutually exclusive societies,” the North and the South.  The Civil War swiftly followed. 

Members of the reactive Gilded Generation, which were aged between 19 and 39 then, were generally unprepared to fight a long war.  At that point in their lives, it involved too much personal sacrifice on their part; they still felt collectively out of place in America.  Also, the Civil War also put the reactive generation’s lives in the hands of idealist generals, a strident generation reactives didn’t have reason to trust and didn’t have the agency to overrule.  If this is starting to sound like today’s United States, I’m making my point.  It took approximately 620,000 deaths spread over ten years, plus the destruction of the south, to come to a contentious resolution on the issues of state’s rights and slavery. 

Much like the civil war, 9-11 occurred at the wrong time for America.  The response to 9-11 became a partisan issue because the debate was framed by an inherently partisan generation.  Our most elderly Americans, the president-less Silent Generation, didn’t inspire anyone to listen to them.  In 2001, Baby Boomers (aged 41-68) were still smoking pot, preaching everywhere, and picketing everything.  With them in charge, it’s no coincidence that soon after 9-11, terms such as red state and blue state, usually reserved for television anchors on election night, became part of America’s popular lexicon. 

While Al Qaeda took down the World Trade Center, Generation X (20-40) hadn’t come to terms with its alienation from its own country.  Gen Xers distrust anything that comes out of George W. Bush’s mouth, and are generally incapable of relating to him.  Even many young conservatives distance themselves from the President.  Liberal leaders are held in equal disdain.  So far, the only way to win the Gen-X vote is to be less contemptible then one’s opponent (see: 2008 Presidential election). 

The oldest members of the Millennial Generation (Born 1982-2003) were spending college trying to deduce exactly why all the adults were panicking.  Watching their grandparents, parents, and older siblings split ranks and defend issues split strictly along party lines, Millenials didn’t see any role models they want to emulate.  To this day, their contributions to the corpus of political knowledge include little more than drinking chocolate coffee and watching The Daily Show. 

If Strauss and Howe are correct, a terrorist attack on 9/11/2015 would likely produce a much more cohesive reaction from Americans.  The baby boomers (who will be 56 to 83 years old in 2015) will presumably be too old and disempowered to hijack the event for ideological gains.  A grown up Generation X (35-55) will have hopefully matured and turned its angst into savvy, helping wage a tenacious, but far more practical war on Middle Eastern terrorists.  The Millenials will be mature enough to help their leaders organize the war.

But it’s not 2015, and Americans are frivolously spending a lot of time trying to steer this country in diametrically opposing directions.  Wasting environmental resources, Harry Belafonte, Neil Young, and scores of other artists no one under 20 cares about have produced new protest albums, giving Muslims at least two more reasons to hate western culture.  The baby boomers, hard-leftists and big-government rightists alike, are leading this country into its most difficult internal struggle since the civil war.  This includes the civil rights era, where those who sought equal rights under the law for minorities held a clear moral high ground which Americans generally recognized, even if they didn’t always like it.  There is no similar high ground today; the very idea of morality stirs controversy in today’s America. 

Today, Generation X has unfortunately solved their problem of cultural isolation by relating to America through politics.  Before 9-11, our Kurt Cobains were looking for purpose in a generally wealthy era of peace (especially compared with the rest of the world).  The movie Fight Club sums up the mood of young American men before 9-11, as Tyler Durden, the movie’s anti-hero states:  “We are the middle children of history, no purpose or place.  We have no great war, no great depression.  Our great war is a spiritual war.  Our great depression is our lives.”  After the Twin Towers were collapsed by political radicals, a generation once mocked for its apathy was given a cause.  Generation X leapt at the chance to place massive amounts of emotional stock in America’s often facile right/left debate, giving new life to the polarized terms “liberal” and “conservative.”  More than any legislation signed under George W. Bush’s watch, that’s the domestic aftermath of 9-11.

A generation born to level the excesses of their elders has now become as collectively myopic as their parents.  What used to be monotonous cynicism has morphed into absolute distrust of everything liberal (if one is conservative), or vice versa.  Self-loathing has morphed into external malice. “I hate myself and want to die” has turned into “Sweet Jesus I hate Bill O’ Reilly.”  I seriously doubt that Al Qaeda had the cross-cultural capacity to grasp America’s generation cycles, but they hit at the perfect time to shake this country internally.  While there’s no guarantee of another cultural revolution, 9-11 tore this country at the seams: It’s neither the fault of a aggravatingly proud George Bush nor preternaturally frustrated liberals; with Idealists still in charge of this country’s most powerful institutions, America’s polarization is part of a cycle. 

Regardless of its unconscious foundation, the stage is set for political radicalism, perhaps more fervent and intractable than the radicalism of the 1960’s, and potentially as destructive as the radicalism that fueled the civil war, to rise again in America.  The entire nation is being politicized, and it’s making our quality of life more than a little miserable.  Without empowering a police state, conservatives should ponder how to stop the institutionalization of resentment, along with the unhinged animosity that follows it, before it spreads like a wildfire, too large and fierce to douse before it destroys whole chunks of America.

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Read parts one, two, and three

Part four: Purposeful Confusion

Eric Alterman has a bad habit of confusing the meanings of terms which are as plain as day to neutral observers.  It’s a pattern that has sustained his entire career.  In the past he’s bent over backwards to read the worst in Ann Coulter’s glib quips.  It continues in Why We’re Liberals as he professes not to understand what conservatives mean by “liberal elitism.”  Yet nowhere is his seemingly purposeful confusion more apparent than his denial of liberal judicial activism. 

In a short chapter on the subject, Alterman follows what has emerged as a common rhetorical formula for him.  He claims to misunderstand his opponent’s dialectal approach, denies that it can be understood, and then fills the void he created with a meaning that buttresses his argument.  In the case of “judicial activism,” he purports not to understand what it means, and then claims it “has rarely if ever been defined.”  Here Alterman is using an articulate version of the passive-aggressive “I don’t even know what you mean,” in response to slogans one doesn’t like.  It’s safe to presume that Alterman’s misunderstanding is a rhetorical technique, because it isn’t followed up by even a token attempt to grasp the term as it’s used. 

Reading fiction often requires a voluntary suspension of disbelief.  One can’t enjoy a story about dragons, wizards, or totalitarian conservative governments without the ability to ignore the fact these things just don’t exist (which isn’t to say there aren’t corrupt conservative regimes).  We need to use the same technique to follow Alterman’s logic on judicial activism.  After the professor decides that judicial activism is a meaningless term, he defines it in a way that supports his general anti-conservatism, but unfortunately has no bearing on how the term is actually used.  First he cites a study that defines judicial activism as a tendency to strike down legislation as unconstitutional—in other words, for judges doing their job.  The study suggests that conservative judges are the most activistic.

The problem with a lot of serious political science research, partly out of the need to limit difficult variables, is that it tends to saddle complex political terms with simplistic definitions.  Outside of political newbies, no one reduces political conservatism to a mere resistance to change as much as the engineers of political science studies.  Hence the simplistic equation of activism with finding laws unconstitutional.  Even if it wasn’t obvious in the first study Alterman uses, the first clue that something reeks about the whole thing is it’s dubious conclusion.  Because of a sloppy definition of judicial activism, anyone taking the study at face value is led to believe that Clarence Thomas is more than twice as activistic as Stephen Breyer.  The equivalent would be a carefully plotted, five-year long survey undertaken by graduate students which concluded that Rush Limbaugh was twice as liberal as Keith Olbermann.  Should I be more inclined to buy into the “proof” that Rush is actually more liberal, or should I wonder if the grad students are using a definition of liberal no one else uses? 

The second flawed study Alterman cites isn’t truly an alternative to the first.  It just measures judicial activism by a tendency to strike down executive acts instead of legislation.  Predictably, small-government conservatives find more executive acts unconstitutional than statist liberals do.  In both cases, Alterman is conflating activity with activism. 

Alterman’s clever chapter is disturbing because it doesn’t take much effort to understand what conservatives generally mean by “judicial activism.”  Loosely, it means judges interpreting the Constitution in ways that correspond more with prevailing trends than with established principles. This doesn’t mean there isn’t any debate over the meaning of “original intent,” the importance of statutory laws in relation to constitutional law, or whatever keeping with the “spirit of the Constitution” entails.  Conservative opponents of judicial activism are chiefly concerned with keeping judges from arbitrarily imposing their views on others.  Even conservative novices know this—which means that Alterman, too smart and intellectually curious to simply overlook something central to his argument, has purposefully went out of his way to avoid understanding what he’s talking about.  At least here, the author is demonstrably more ideological than intellectual. 

Conclusion

So what general impressions does one come away with after reading Why We’re Liberals?” 

Firstly, liberals are capable of self-criticism.  It may come sandwiched in between layers of anti-conservative vitriol, but it’s there.  Alterman is no shill for communism.  His take on affirmative action is to approach it through class instead of race, which is at least one step up from the lowest rung of identity politics.  Alterman is individualistic enough that I imagine that I could have a good faith dialogue with him; he doesn’t share President Obama’s habit of talking past conservatives, recycling academic talking points as if he’s still on the campaign trail. 

Secondly, even the most educated liberals are dismissive and uncurious about conservative ideas. This happens because the left’s problem isn’t the absence of a moral code or education; it generally has plenty of both.  No, what the left needs more than anything is humility.  Liberals look down on those who aren’t liberal.  Blanket claims that liberals are smarter, kinder, and more sacrificial than conservatives are not uncommon even among the most cultivated progressive minds.  This arrogance has kept them from learning any lessons from the conservative movement. 

This won’t change anytime soon.  Until a dominant segment of America comes to understand that political alignment doesn’t dictate character, liberals and conservatives will jockey for moral superiority.  In the meantime, conservatives should remind the left that being liberal doesn’t mean you’re smarter, more caring, more tolerant or less capable of pettiness and crime than anyone else.  It just makes you liberal, that’s all.  Until this sinks in, Americans will keep using liberalism as a status symbol, something to signify that they’re well-educated, thoughtful citizens (think PBS license plate frames). 

This is one of the most important fronts in the culture war.  Not until the veneer is stripped off of liberalism and all of its subsets will American politics even have a chance to become an intellectual endeavor, as opposed to a vehicle people use to feel good about themselves. 

Finally, liberals are insecure about their beliefs.  Alterman’s worst moments don’t come when he strays to the far left, but when he’s inappropriately lashing out against the right.  When he carelessly tosses around accusations of bigotry, it betrays an insecurity which belies his aptitude and relative affluence.  Liberals wouldn’t feel such a strong urge to lie or call their opponents hate mongers if they were truly convinced they had the intellectual high ground.  Confident people argue with ideas; insecure people embellish anecdotes.  This suggests that liberals can be persuaded if they would actually listen to conservative arguments.  Thus, the most difficult left-wingers to talk to aren’t necessarily the furthest to the left, but the most defensive and uncommunicative.

So in the face of liberal intellectualism, don’t be intimidated.  Eric Alterman is one of the most intelligent liberal authors I’ve read, and his philosophical soft spots aren’t much different than Sean Penn’s.  If you find yourself debating a liberal egghead, don’t feel as if you need to be clever or conniving.  Just make your case as if you were sharing ideas with anyone else.  Obviously there will be a lot of disagreement, but you’ll be surprised at the things smart liberals concede.  Open up to them, empathize with them, and if they get too full of themselves, give them a good rhetorical smacking. 

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Follow the links to parts one and two

Part three: Elitism

Some of the most important battles in politics are waged over the meanings of words.  Responding to the rhetorical question “Why are liberals so damn elitist?” Eric Alterman writes that it’s difficult to know exactly what conservatives mean when they say “elitism.”  He then proceeds to describe exactly what conservatives mean by noting “the crime is apparently one of the mind,” and that the right judges elitism “on the basis of attitude, rather than income.”  Curiously, Alterman claims conservatives shout “elitism” to beat back liberals instead of arguing with them.  He thinks it’s used to preempt and dismiss liberal perspectives.  This is actually a mirror image of Ann Coulter’s premise that liberals use “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” and “stupid” to avoid arguing ideas with right-wingers.  Like many of Alterman’s arguments, this one is intuitively wrong, but needs explaining to refute. 

Elitism is indeed an attitudinal trait.  While Alterman disagrees with this, he also perfectly understands that this is how conservatives have used it.  He’s being sarcastic in the following example, but I couldn’t describe elitism better than he did: “It’s not about where you live, how much money you have, how many security guards you regularly employ, where you summer, what you drive, what you drive when you’re driving whatever else you drive when you’re not driving that, where you went to school, or where you think people should have gone to school.”  Exactly, Professor Alterman.

Elitism isn’t necessarily about class; it’s about looking down on others.  Certainly there are wealthy elitists, but not all wealthy people are elitist.  Elitism is not contingent on class, education, or any other demographic category.  Bill Gates owns multiple cars, likely employs his own security guards, summers wherever he wants, and doesn’t have to work another minute of his life if he doesn’t want to, but nothing I know about him suggests that he’s elitist.  Yet even the poorest, white-trash leftist who looks down on Christian conservatives for not being sufficiently critical of their personal faith is displaying an elitist attitude. 

So if elitism is a shallow tendency to look down of groups of people for having demographic characteristics one doesn’t admire, then it follows that liberal elitism is the presumption that liberals are superior to conservatives solely based on political alignment.  While anyone who identifies themselves as liberal or conservative will naturally hold their ideals in higher esteem than others, what would make ideological particularism elitist is an arrogant, personal tone.  Ironically enough, Eric Alterman provides more than a few examples of liberal elitism. 

My first exhibit of Alterman’s snobbishness is his common claim that conservatives frame issues in simple “black and white” dichotomies, while liberals perceive “shades of grey.”  His strongest evidence is a study which suggests that liberals are more willing to accept new ideas, but that could signify a lack of conviction as much as it implies a capacity for nuance.  Either way, these contentions are demonstrably false.  No matter how morally ambivalent liberalism may or may not be, conservatism cannot be reduced to simplistic, reactionary protest.  

The American right has always been a predominantly literary movement, rooted and nurtured by words and ideas.  Conservatism would be unrecognizable without its literary column.  If American fascists had censored the publication of Whittaker Chamber’s Witness or Frederic Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, anti-communism may never have never caught on and induced the birth of American conservatism.  Take away Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and what we now call conservatism might have a different name.  If the National Review had never been published, conservative ideas probably would not have been able to spread the way they did in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Moving away from literature, right-wing audiences dominate talk radio, and I won’t be the first to tell you that there are far more entertaining choices of media than explicitly issue-driven commentary.  It takes more than watching syndicated episodes of The West Wing to understand conservatism. 

I don’t doubt the intelligence of liberals, but on the surface, conservative perspectives on several issues are clearly more nuanced than liberal ones.  For example, conservatives tend to believe that tax cuts across the board help stimulate the economy by allowing businesses to keep more capital to invest in more opportunities, often resulting in the hiring of new employees.  Contrast this counter-intuitive concept with the anti-intellectual left-wing mantra “tax cuts for the rich,” which insultingly implies that the rich are the only people conservatives intend to benefit with tax cuts.

Immigration is another issue which liberals frame in “black and white” terms while conservatives wrestle with its moral ambiguity.  Conservatives recognize that illegal immigration is a cultural and economic issue whose ethnic implications are incidental.  If white people with a general tendency to resist assimilation started illegally residing in America, immigration would still be a serious issue to conservatives.  A sure way to undermine American culture would be to introduce a large population of immigrants who are ignorant of, and even hostile to it.  Contrast this argument against illegal immigration with liberal protests, where poster-board advertises inanities such as “no human being is illegal;” as if that breaks the conversation wide open. 

The ideas that conservatives see things in simplistic terms is in part an unfortunate by-product of the fact that liberals tend to be self-styled moral relativists, while conservatives believe in a transcendent moral authority.  Classical conservative dogma states that matters of right and wrong lie on a plane untouched by humanity’s ability to recognize evil.  This is not the extreme moralizing position one might expect.  Even liberals generally agree that crimes such as pederasty are wrong no matter what reasons are invented to excuse them-yet this argument depends on the existence of absolute morality, even if it’s narrowly defined.  Even if one doesn’t agree with my reasoning, it’s obvious that even the most maligned conservative doctrine, absolute morality, is cerebral, and not a dippy general attachment to authority.   

Just as irritatingly condescending is Alterman’s corresponding claim that liberalism is more demanding than conservatism, which if true, would mean liberals are more self-sacrificial.  While it’s undeniable that leftists spend more time picketing and protesting than rightists, is that really a sacrifice?  The unmatched standard for mass protest happened at Woodstock, and it’s difficult to argue that attending a self-congratulatory, drug-fueled concert for days on end is more of a sacrifice than a lively vacation.  Even today’s protests are social events that aren’t exactly inhospitable to its participants.  If marching against the Iraq war was truly a sacrifice, it would have been rare, and not a predictable phenomena on college campuses and outside big party conventions the past seven years.  At its root, activism is simply the combination of belligerence and direction.  It’s not necessarily something to frown upon, but getting yourself arrested for sitting on the white house lawn isn’t nearly as sacrificial as opposing a left-wing monster, communism, by standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.

This begs the question: what exactly is it about liberalism that makes it more demanding?  No one in America is punished by the government for simply being a left-wing activist.  I could stand on a soap box all day and shout anti-conservative speeches through a megaphone and the most I’ll be accused of is disturbing the peace.  Perhaps being on constant vigil for political transgressions, i.e., always being “conscious,” can take a psychological toll on someone, but conservatives have a much clearer case that their political doctrine is more demanding.  

The absolute moral authority so important to conservative thought is just that: absolute.  It makes claims on us whether we like it or not.  For example, in the conservative mind, there are no good reasons to cheat on a spouse.  The fact that not all rightists live up to their professed ideals only speaks to how difficult they can be to uphold.  The liberal theory of moral relativism necessarily dictates that cheating is o.k. in certain circumstances.  Considering mankind’s ability to justify even the worst crimes (Al-Qaeda released videotapes with measured, if ultimately wrong reasons for attacking the United States on 9-11), that’s not anywhere near the vicinity of sacrificial.  Making excuses for stealing (my family needed the food) cheating (my wife ignores me) and lying (Republicans did it first!) is always easier than not doing those things in the first place. 

Perhaps the most glaring example of liberal elitism comes before the table of contents in Why We’re Liberals.  One of the opening quotes in it is from John Stuart Mill, “…stupid people are generally conservative.  I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”  For Christ’s sake.  Everything I’ve written up to this paragraph is unnecessary.  Mill’s arrogant proclamation describes everything conservatives mean by liberal elitism. 

Next week: conclusion-purposeful confusion  

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

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Part one can be found here.

Part two: Obligatory Identity Politics

Why we’re liberals begins with a predictable but thoughtful (at least in this case) premise that liberalism has been maligned by conservatives and the mainstream media (Alterman’s breakthrough hit, What liberal media?, makes a comprehensive argument that the mainstream media is conservative).  It’s followed by a short account of recent trends in liberal history.  He focuses on reasons liberalism isn’t as popular as it was in the early 20th century, including the prevalence of welfare payments “that appeared to reward sloth,” the “permissive social morality” advocated by the left, “the use of courts, rather than the electoral process, to achieve liberal aims,” and many more.  While no serious person could mistake Alterman for anything but a leftist, his description of liberalism’s fall from grace is critical and informative. 

Alterman then paints an impressive portrait of what a liberal society looks like by describing the most progressive aspects of Europe: free health care and the European Union’s abolition of the death penalty come to mind.  He claims that health care costs Europe less than half of what it costs America, and that Europe’s infant mortality rate is lower than the United States’.  He advertises Europe’s recognition of gay marriage and mandatory paid vacation for all workers.  Yet he doesn’t mention how dominantly liberal the political atmospheres of American hellholes such as Detroit (consistently recognized as the most liberal city in America, according to voting patterns), and Oakland are.  He only mentions Europe’s problems with unemployment (fueled in no small part by the expensive mandates the EU imposes on businesses) and immigration as an aside.  No group in America intimidates its citizens like politicized Muslims bully Europeans.  Groups of unassimilated immigrants don’t light up America’s streets like a Christmas tree.  These same people will remain unassimilated because the only alternatives to cowardly, balkanizing multiculturalism Europeans seem to conjure up have more than a whiff of racism. 

All the Europhilia in the world couldn’t derail Alterman’s defense of American liberalism.  But his unabashed declaration of Europe’s cultural superiority does foreshadow his most problematic arguments, the reasons he believes that America doesn’t embrace the left today.  When attempting to describe America’s reluctance to become liberal, Alterman cycles through the usual excuses: He argues that liberals by their very nature don’t get as angry as conservatives do, so they’re not as forceful.  He argues (falsely) that the conservative base is much wealthier.  He claims that liberals are handicapped by their dedication to good government.  He peevishly complains about the Electoral College, and so on and so forth.  In contrast with the book’s promising opening, Alterman serves the reader, among other gruel, boiler-plate proclamations of moral superiority more appropriate for the street-fighting blogosphere than a serious ongoing debate. 

Perhaps the most inappropriate section in Why We’re Liberals blames liberalism’s unpopularity on conservative’s “purposeful exploitation of racial fear and loathing.”  While this is disappointing to read from the pen of an intellectual, it’s not a surprise.  No sympathetic summary of left-wing viewpoints would be complete without irresponsible accusations of America’s most taboo crimes: racism, sexism, and “homophobia.”  Earlier in his book, Alterman accuses Glenn Beck of “racist rants” without attribution.  He accuses the New York Daily News of “homophobia,” for describing former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson in feminine terms, such as calling his voice “fruity.”  Even the word “hatred” is loosely wielded by Alterman, as calling Cindy Sheehan a “crackpot” is apparently an example of it.  

His loose definition of fear mongering includes a deeply flawed analysis of a 2006 political ad the RNC ran against the African-American Harold Ford during a Tennessee Senatorial race. The ad begins with a young white woman proclaiming “I met Harold at a Playboy Party!”  To support the contention that the ad was racist, Alterman cites a writer who doesn’t understand the simple southern term “he ain’t right,” and instead makes a logical leap and concludes that it really means “he’s just not white.”  This is the same logic Alterman himself employs when he claims that attacks on the New York Times have an undercurrent of anti-Semitism because supposedly average Americans associate New York with Judaism. 

This all leads up to Alterman’s most inflammatory claim, that “blacks are demonized by conservatives so they might more effectively exploit the fears of white Americans.”  Really?  It’s the left, not the right, which insists on framing the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad as a racial appeal, not an argument about the dangers of letting prisoners loose on weekend furlongs.  It’s Democrats, not Republicans, who in practice preserve racial resentment by refusing to reject the anti-intellectual tendency to attribute racially ambiguous phenomena, such as opposition to Barack Obama, to racism.  Aside from sex crimes, racism may be America’s most stigmatizing offense, so charges as serious as racism must be backed up by something more substantial than subjective rhetoric.  Otherwise we risk unfairly branding people to the point no American wants to hear what they actually have to say.  But I suspect Alterman already knows that. 

Our ancestor’s past racial crimes cast such a long shadow over America today that I fear that my discussion about Alterman’s book has been drowned out.  But precisely because racism is so inescapable, any discussion of America’s dominant political schools cannot help but to broach it.  There’s a reason Americans are still arguing over two decade-old advertisements.  So I will end this section with a few important words on race, while acknowledging that truly addressing the topic would take much more than a personal essay.

Anyone who comprehends the American right knows that racism is incompatible with conservative doctrine.  Conservatism insists that people be judged by their actions, which obviously cannot include their ethnic makeup.  Race does not dictate character.  This isn’t to say there aren’t any self-identified conservatives who are racist, but their racism is a deviation from conservative ideology, not a natural manifestation of it.  Additionally, none of the right’s most influential figures, including Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan, and G.W. Bush are bigots, nor do they promote bigotry.  The closest any of them come is Ann Coulter’s stupid use of the term “raghead,” to taunt Muslim terrorists. 

Again, a lot more needs to be said, but it would engulf my original message.  The point is that Mr. Alterman’s accusations of bigotry are clearly polemical, intended to vilify, not inform.  Remember that this is Professor Eric Alterman, a well educated, level-headed representative for the entire American left, not some glazed-eyed neophyte, intoxicated by the opportunity to feel important through politics.  His rhetorical excess just proves that intellect alone does not prevent even the smartest people from overstating their opponent’s crimes. 

Next week:  Elitism

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Part 1   Part 2    Part 3   Part 4

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WHY WE’RE LIBERALS

A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America

By Eric Alterman

402 pages. The Viking Press. 2008.

The Arrogance of the Intellectual Left.

While I was browsing through the Social Sciences section of the small airport bookstore the other day, something caught my eye. It wasn’t a new polemic by Ann Coulter. Nor was it a judicious Dinesh D’Souza tome. It wasn’t the instant classic Liberal Fascism, I already owned that one. No, what grabbed my imagination was a book by the leftist intellectual Eric Alterman, titled Why We’re Liberals. After some internal dialogue with my inner demons, I agreed with them that I would buy the book on the condition that I buy a conservative title as well—a sort of a self-imposed tax on bad behavior. That and I like seeing the look on certain stranger’s faces when they spot the smiling face of Ronald Reagan on my prominently displayed book cover. It’s more effective than wearing a t-shirt that says “eff you.”

Anyway, the conservative book isn’t anything I hadn’t read before, but Alterman’s book has proven to be a valuable addition to my collection. It’s an intelligent, well-written insight into the minds of liberals. The title effectively conveys the book’s content, a broad description of liberal values. This isn’t as common on the left as one might think. Because conservatives tend to be self-conscious about their place on the political spectrum, right-wing accounts of American conservatism’s short history come a dime a dozen. In contrast, the left tends to deny their intellectual heritage, so finding a good book written by a liberal who has actually acknowledged the simple nature of his politics excited me.

Another plus is that it was written by Eric Alterman, a formidable thinker. It would be easy to refute or even dismiss a long attempt to defend liberalism if it were written by one of the left’s worst elements. It’s easy to sit back and laugh at the arguments posited by attention-starved perpetrators of fake hate crimes, the underdeveloped personalities who insist that 9-11 was an inside job, and eagerly fascistic animal rights activists who commit everything from vandalism to arson to get their point across. But just because these types of people can be found on the left doesn’t mean they represent it, much less the best liberalism has to offer. Conversely, Professor Alterman is smart, articulate, and most importantly not prone to emotionalism or counterintuitive conspiracy theories. In short, he’s an excellent representative for the left. Because he’s “normal,” the flaws in his argument will more likely reflect flaws in liberal philosophy, as opposed to his character.

Whether or not it ever catches on with the public, Alterman’s 2008 book is a definitive work. It’s an intelligent exposition of the modern liberal mind, warts and all. As much as any all-encompassing right-wing handbook, Why We’re Liberals directly communicates the logic behind the left’s ideals. Rarely are political writers as forthcoming about their motives without descending into boorish polemics. So without any further adieu, let’s see those gears turning.

Part I: The Definition of Liberalism.

Before discussing a book whose central theme is liberalism, one must understand what the word actually means. But for all that is holy, don’t ask a liberal that. If he doesn’t bedevil you with a laborious speech about labels, he’ll lazily pronounce that liberalism is too philosophically broad to be identified. Others will be even worse, self-righteously proclaiming that liberalism means caring about minorities and poor people. Often they suggest substituting the word “liberal” with “progressive.” This is fine, but it ignores the fact that “progressive” has more stridently left-wing connotations than “liberal.” Joseph Stalin was definitively not a liberal, but he just as certainly was progressive. In general, liberals don’t seem to like conceding that they’re part of a recognizable group. Like someone running from a police officer for no apparent reason, they curiously evade the word that describes them as if it were a pejorative.

In Why We’re Liberals, Alterman spends a good part of the introduction giving a bare-bones description of the roots of liberalism, while eventually defining it as a pragmatic quest for justice, a definition I imagine most left-leaning intellectuals wouldn’t take issue with. But a desire to achieve justice through reason isn’t a philosophy as much as it’s a vague mission statement. Neither pragmatism nor a sense of justice is exclusively liberal.

To put it another way, I could describe conservatism as a quest to preserve life, liberty, and property, but that’s not a school of thought, that’s a wish that can be interpreted countless ways. To greatly simplify the right’s core philosophy, conservatism is a blend of libertarian individualism tempered by traditional morality. It’s not a definition that sits well with all self-identified conservatives, but it does describe in one sentence the foundation of the right. Finding a liberal correlation to that would give Americans a much needed toe-hold on the meaning of liberalism.

Fortunately, Alterman provides something close to that. He describes liberalism as roughly a combination of “rights-based” liberalism and communitarianism. “Classical liberalism” might be a better term than “rights-based liberalism,” but they both connote the same thing: an ideology which stresses freedom from coercion. The ideals which inform the classical left include, among others, an emphasis on limited government, a deep respect for private property, and an animus toward the welfare state. Whenever Benito Mussolini or Mao Tse Tung decried liberalism, this is what they were combating.

In contrast, communitarianism stresses positive rights, rights to things such as education or health care. Often positive rights are alluded to as “agency,” or “power.” From a communitarian perspective, the right to pursue happiness uninhibited by the state is less important than ensuring that everyone is being provided the means to do so. The communitarian side of liberalism has defined the modern era. From the New Deal on, the right to something has been emphasized far more successfully on the left than individual autonomy. This isn’t to say at all that liberals don’t respect individual rights. Self-styled individualists of all kinds have found refuge in liberalism (Nat Hentoff is a voracious defender of free speech) they’re just not as persuasive as the advocates for positive rights.

While faithful conservative philosophy tends to oppose governmental intervention as a rule, the communitarian-dominated left tends to hold political power in high esteem. This leads to one of the most fundamental differences between the left and the right; conservatives deplore government-sponsored injustice in the name of human rights (the Iraq War being a radical exception) while liberals usually consider the price of governmental intervention worth paying to sate an always changing sense of justice. Affirmative action is a great example of this. Conservatives believe the concept of state-sponsored racial distinctions is too harmful to accept, while liberals are much more concerned with the steps toward healing racial injustice AA represents that any of its potential abuses.

A plethora of similar examples can be used to illustrate this dichotomy, including the distinct right-left splits over sexual harassment law, environmentalism, and health care. But conservatism and liberalism are not irreconcilable. I’ve been guilty in the past of positing liberalism and conservatism on opposite poles, but I’ve learned that the left and right indeed converge on the axis of free will. Like puzzle pieces, the libertarian side of conservatism snugly interlocks with “rights-based” classical liberalism.

Human beings share a universal aversion to coercion; Citizens on both sides of the middle intuitively know that dignity cannot exist without free will. This manifests itself on the right as a naked distrust of the overbearing state, and on the left as a rebellion against traditional norms. Both of these are libertarian impulses. In fact, freedom from hectoring do-gooders, whether they represent a government or a community, makes up the core of libertarianism. This explains why libertarian publications such as Reason magazine reliably criticize both the left and the right. America’s true political spectrum doesn’t have Ronald Reagan at one end and FDR at the other. Instead it has traditional morality on the far right and progressive communitarianism on the far left, with libertarianism as the median. The average American falls somewhere in between Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich.

But all of this distracts from the main debate, the meaning of liberalism. Plainly put, what is it? What distinguishes a liberal from everyone else? What one definition encompasses the political left and all of its many factions, while leaving out everything else?

At the risk of sounding glib, the foundation of liberalism is quite simple: an attachment to comprehensive social engineering. To explain what I mean, mandatory sensitivity classes are liberal in nature; they’re attempts to turn callous individuals into conscientious citizens. Global warming treaties intended to preserve planet Earth from nebulous threats by nothing less than remaking how all industries relate to the environment are liberal in nature. So are campus speech codes which are meant to preserve a right to a peaceful academic environment (a positive right). So is using the classroom to make a world a better place through political activism. So are Canadian and European laws which effectively make it illegal to criticize Islam, as seen most publically in cases brought against Maclean’s magazine in Canada and Oriana Fallaci in Italy. While few liberals support each of these efforts (as well as similar ones) none will eschew them all. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe liberalism as an injudicious desire for change, but the solemn conviction that something needs to change can be found in all leftist ideas.

Here we come to the important realization that justifying government intervention for the greater good is perfectly compatible with liberalism. If the left is about anything, it’s about using the state to correct injustice. A liberal solution to high gas prices may involve nationalizing the oil industry. One liberal remedy for conservative dominance of talk radio would be to reconsider the fairness doctrine. While liberalism isn’t inherently in favor of an overbearing state, it certainly recognizes that courts and laws have an unmatched ability to affect change. To the left, the state is neither good nor bad; it’s just a powerful tool that can be used to achieve social justice.

Objections to liberalism often come from confusion over its intended scope. Since “justice” has never been responsibly and consistently defined, its boundaries are always in flux. Take America’s albatross of racial conflict. What constitutes justice for America’s past crimes of slavery and institutional discrimination? Is justice equality? If so, what kind of equality? Equality of status? Equality of opportunity? Equality under the law? What about reparations? Is affirmative action a step towards or away from justice? These often uneasy questions have never been settled, making it difficult for Americans to discern between appropriate and inappropriate resentment towards liberal social policies.

This confusion touches issues much less flammable than racism. As the left-wing emphasis on justice is applied to gender equality, poverty, and a slew of other topics, it shows that the left is mired in a hopeless metaphysical debate over the meaning of “justice.” This quagmire not only affects what justice is purported to entail, but who for. Feminists, who by their political nature insist that more attention be given to women’s grievances, won’t necessarily be concerned with the Hamas’ objectives. Likewise, the militants in Hamas, deeply concerned with bringing Israel to “justice,” may not care at all about women’s rights. On top of that, civil rights leaders may or may not take up the mantle for either of these causes, but will always be focused most on racial justice. After taking into account the influence of environmentalists, animal rights activists, anti-war activists, and a slew of other groups, I now understand why liberals don’t think they’re a definable class. That doesn’t mean feminists, Palestinian rights organizations, civil rights groups and all two thousand of their other cousins aren’t leftist in nature.

Liberalism is a collage. Ideologies such as feminism are distinct from but not alternative to liberalism. For better or worse, all left-wing groups propose giving more power to the state to bring about a just society. Feminism, as one can observe how easily feminists pick up the picket signs for environmentalists, animal rights activists, and seemingly all other left-wing groups, is just gynocentric liberalism. Communitarian minority-rights movements are just ethnocentric forms of liberalism, and so on. Their similar foundations explain why victims rights movements collapse together so easily on the left.

Yet the left’s sense of justice has a single prerequisite: they will only support a victim of injustice if that victim can claim some sort of underdog status. For reasons that may be psychological or personal or simply out of the scope of this essay, liberalism cannot bring itself to defend anything but an underdog. When’s the last time you got the impression that defending America against the international community was a priority for liberals? The left wing narrative insists that Americans and certain demographic groups within America are bullies, and deserve a taste of their own medicine. Conservatives, who are seen as powerful, rich, elitists to liberals, will never find camaraderie on the left no matter how much evidence of media or academic bias they collect.

Even individual conflicts, such as the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial, are framed by the hard left as group conflicts—a fearful white establishment dedicated to ruining a successful black man. This explains the left’s insistence that our group identity is so integral to our overall character. Without group distinctions, there are no classes of “victims” and “oppressors.” Take away the “us versus them” dichotomy, and injustice becomes a much more evasive and frustrating opponent, one that is too elusive to rally strangers against.

So now we have come, practically via osmosis, to a definition of liberalism: A rational quest for justice for a group or individual perceived to be disadvantaged (heavy emphasis on “perceived”). In this context, “rational” means unbound by tradition; the freedom to go with any social program that works, ala FDR. What makes liberalism diverse isn’t a mythical inclusiveness that defies all meaning, but discernable variations of degree and focus within left-wing activism. Every single left-winger wants to rectify a perceived wrong, but countless definitions of justice proliferate among the left’s coalition of the handicapped and their spokesmen.

By the way, the animal rights movement fits in this framework thorough the personification of inhuman entities. If cattle, dogs, and all other animals occupy the same moral plane as humans, our treatment of them would certainly count as unjust. Environmentalism finds a niche on the left by correctly claiming that whatever threatens the earth threatens all humanity. This weds environmental justice to social justice—anyone who abuses the Earth is abusing the community.

Finally, with this under our belt, we can move on to Professor Alterman’s book.

Part 1   Part 2    Part 3   Part 4

Tags: alterman, liberalism
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