By Alan Caruba
“Liberalism has become an ugly blend
of sanctimony, self-interest, and social connections,” writes Fred Seigel whose
credentials include being a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He has
written “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle
Class”, but you won’t be able to read it until it is published in January. As a
reviewer, I received an advance copy from Encounter
Books.
It hardly needs to be said that
today’s liberals and conservatives loath one another, nor that the nation is as
sharply divided politically as in the days before the Civil War. Politically,
America has swung back and forth between liberal and conservative
administrations as evidenced by the elections of the previous century and this
new one.
Moreover, many have noticed that there
is often scant distance between Democrat and Republican administrations. Both
have been led by patricians, often the graduates of Harvard and Yale. Seigel
refers to them as the “clerisy” defined as educated people being a class unto
themselves.
“Liberalism has been a very expensive
failure,” says Seigel and points to the Obama administration as an example of
“the apparent disdain for the copybook maxims of faith, family, and hard work.”
When liberals go to court to force schools to remove a daily prayer or a pledge
of allegiance to start the day, support abortion on demand and gay marriage,
seek to expand so-called “entitlement programs” and put as many people as
possible on some form of government dole, this should be obvious to anyone.
The seizure of one-sixth of the
nation’s economy in the form of Obamacare is yet another example and the failure
of this program, passed near midnight by a straight party vote by Democratic
legislators who had no idea what was in the bill, demonstrates the liberal
preference for a massive central government.
“Liberalism has been dedicated to
preserving the problems for which it presents itself as the solution.”
Seigel traces the beginnings of
liberalism in America. “American liberals don’t like to compare themselves with
other twentieth-century ideologues. But, like all ideologies that emerged in the
early twentieth century—from communism and fascism to socialism, social
democracy, and its first cousin, British Fabianism—liberalism was created by
intellectuals and writers who were rebelling against the failings of the rising
middle class.”
Among the intellectuals who advanced
liberalism was Herbert Croly, the editor and co-founder of The New Republic
whose 1909 book, “The Promise of American Life”, was the first manifesto of
modern American liberalism. Croly “rejected American tradition with its faith in
the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts.” This reeks of the
intellectual snobbery that has dominated liberal thinking for more than a
century at this point.
A distinguishing element of liberalism
has been its admiration of autocratic leaders and this explains its embrace of
dictators from the likes of the German Kaiser, Lenin and Stalin, through to men
like Fidel Castro and his murderous sidekick, Ernesto “Che” Guevera. The appeal
of communism has always played a large role in the ideology of
liberalism.
What distinguishes liberalism today in
the minds of conservatives is its rejection of the utter failure of communism
and its cousin, socialism. One need only look to Russia and Europe for evidence
of this, but it is manifest in America as it struggles to deal with the costs of
New Deal creations such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, absorbing
and redistributing some sixty percent of the national budget. The liberal belief
in Keynesian economics whereby the government maintains the economy through
massive expenditures has left America today with the largest debt in his
history.
Liberalism has been driven by its
disdain for America’s middle class that emerged from the large wave of
immigration in the early 19th
century and the success it has had in the business sector, entering the
professions, and raising incomes. Liberalism has a deep distrust of “the masses”
while claiming to represent them.
Liberal ideology produced Lyndon
Johnson’s failed “War on Poverty” and embraced environmentalism with its
doomsday predictions, none of which has come true. It explains President Obama’s
rejection of American exceptionalism. “Liberal interests never reexamined their
assumptions, even when faced with social and political failure. They never asked
why, despite the vast sums expended, poverty had become worse rather than
better.”
At the same time, in the latter half
of the last century, liberals invented a laundry list of “rights” you will not
find in the Constitution such as women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights
and even the Gaia concept of the Earth’s right to be protected against human
activity.
“It was attitude and intentions—not
outcomes—that matter to liberals,” says Seigel.
Liberalism is the ideology of
intellectuals who looked down on the masses that became America’s middle class
and produced the greatest economy the world had ever known. Now they exist to
live parasitically off of it.
The great frustration of conservatives
is the inability to have a rational debate or discussion with liberals. They
don’t make sense. It is the curse of liberalism.
© Alan Caruba,
2013
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