Liberalism: a pathology

By Robert Harrington

Something that has fascinated me ever since I became politically aware is attempting to understand the philosophical basis of modern liberalism. One reason this is fascinating is that liberals habitually refuse to acknowledge the axioms of their faith, even to themselves.

There was much commentary about the Gilroy city council "turning to the right" in the recent election here. Right-left orientation probably doesn't actually count for much in a local election, but I believe it is still important. As William Buckley said, "Politicians aren’t philosophers, and in that sense expedience is, so to speak, what they do. But it is disorienting to lose all contact with the illumination of philosophy."

The left and right differ not only in principle, but they can't even agree on the rules for debate. The conservative tries to discern underlying principles in order to try to find basics that can be agreed upon or not. Meanwhile the liberal does all he can to avoid basics because he denies that his argument is based on any assumptions at all.

Steven Goldberg, professor of sociology at CUNY makes this point, in his book, When Wish Replaces Thought. Goldberg is an empiricist and maintains that his writing is neither conservative nor liberal, but based only on logic. After mentioning in the introduction that conservatives will welcome his conclusions more than liberals, he says:

Possibly because the roots of conservatism, both historical and contemporary, are often embedded in religious soil, the conservative feels at home with arguments that are clearly based on assumptions that are, from a logical and scientific point of view, arbitrary and subjective (i.e., founded on values).

The liberal, whose positions are, in reality, no less and no more subjectively anchored than are those of the conservative…has been far more greatly affected by the empiricism that stresses the distinction between the scientific and the moral-political. The liberal is far more often loathe to acknowledge the subjective nature of his argument because he feels in his bones that, once…[that] is exposed, no one will feel compelled to accept his argument.

A prime example of liberals' denial of the moral basis of their prescriptions is their fulminations about people who, as they put it, "are attempting to impose their morality on the rest." This stratagem arises sooner or later in almost all left-right debates, and the supreme irony is that they are invariably simultaneously doing precisely that which they attribute to their adversaries.

From each side, the other tends to be viewed not just as a syndrome but as a pathology. As a conservative, I focus on the study of liberalism, the pathology of the Left.

Robert Bork treats this at some length in his book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and traces the evolution of liberalism from the Enlightenment to the modern day. Modern liberalism is a sort of parody of classical liberalism, according to Bork, where the ideas of liberty and equality have been carried to the extremes of what he calls radical individualism and radical egalitarianism.

Radical individualism is the idea that each person should be free to do anything that does not harm others. This idea sounds harmless, but in the extreme it leads to an atomistic conception of society and has become an engine for denigration of family, church, and private associations. As Robert Nisbet put it, "a liberal is the knee-jerk adversary of all moral authority." This accounts for the tendency of liberals to be tolerant of so-called victimless crimes, sexual freedom, homosexuality, drugs, and pornography.

Radical egalitarianism demands equality of outcome, not just opportunity. The outstanding contemporary example is affirmative action, where group rights trump individual rights.

This diminution of individual rights that springs from the egalitarian impulse is a contradiction which liberals are hard put to explain. Nisbet called it a "blatantly schizoid condition," but of course, liberty and equality are inherently contradictory and the tension between the two is in a sense the central problem of political philosophy.

Bork wrote that in their final stages, radical egalitarianism and radical individualism descend into tyranny and hedonism, the modern equivalents of bread and circus. Bork thinks, with considerable justification that we are well on our way to those ends.

One of the defining characteristics of modern liberalism is love of power, especially in a central government. As Nisbet put it, "Liberals are first and most important the ardent advocates of the kind of power that is resident in the national state. They are never so happy as when something in the private economic or social sector is being brought within the purview of the federal bureaucracy. When they see something big and private, they lust for its nationalization."

In case any feel I'm selectively quoting only conservatives, let me quote a well-known liberal, Katha Pollitt, on that point: "Liberalism is the idea that the good people close to power can solve the problems of those beneath them in the social order." (The Nation, 9/2/96)

The greatest experiment of the Left was socialism, and the greatest political fact of the twentieth century is socialism's complete and utter failure. To assume that this has deterred the Left from its basic mission would be quite mistaken, however. It has largely given up on the project of direct ownership of the means of production, but there are many ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and the power and influence of the Left has hardly diminished, at least in the United States. When you consider that government expenditure accounts for something like 40 percent of the GNP, it is evident that liberals find plenty of traction for pursuing their goals.

An increasingly favorite device for wielding power without ownership is the unfunded mandate. This takes many forms, but let me cite one small example: President Clinton recently displayed his "compassion" for mothers by declaring that there should be a law requiring insurance companies to pay for more than one day in the hospital after a woman gives birth. Now, I have no expertise in maternity care, but I doubt if there's any medical necessity for this in the majority of cases. The young woman who gave birth in a rest room, tossed the baby in a trash bin, and went back to her senior prom certainly didn't need two days in a hospital, at least not from the physical strain of giving birth.

The most likely effect of the President's proposal, along with innumerable others which spring from the sanctimonious "compassion" that liberals spin out interminably, will be to increase the cost of medical insurance, adding fuel to the fire for the campaign to nationalize health care for the ostensible purpose of reducing its cost. One result of that will be to assign even more medical decisions to bureaucrats called gatekeepers, who are probably responsible for eliminating the extra day in a hospital for birth mothers in the first place. In any case, true compassion in any nationalized system will get short shrift in the face of pressure to control cost, despite which an accelerating rise in costs can be forecast with the certainty of the axioms of mathematics.

Among other active projects of modern liberalism are multiculturalism, environmentalism, and a relatively new one being developed: victimhood and sanctification of homosexuality. All of these naturally require the heavy hand of government and provide generous scope to those whose greatest joy in life is ordering the rest of us around.

(Remarks prepared for private get-together of columnists and letter writers for the Gilroy Dispatch)