By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ
Media
Today’s liberalism is about as liberal as the Hellenistic world
was Hellenic — a glossy veneer over a rotten core.
In the old days, liberalism was about the means to an end, not the
end itself. Since the days of Socrates, liberalism enshrined free inquiry,
guided by inductive thinking and empirical use of data. Its enemies were not necessary
organized religion — some of the Church fathers sought to find their salvation
through the means of neo-Platonic cosmology and Aristotelian logic — or
government or traditional custom and practice, but rather deductive thinking
anywhere it was found.
Yet today liberalism itself is deductive. It has descended into a
constructed end that requires any means necessary to achieve it. Take any
hot-button liberal issue: censorship, abortion, global warming, affirmative
action, or illegal immigration. Note the liberal reaction.
I don’t like most of the assigned readings that now pass for the
university’s seminal texts of the liberal arts. But on the other hand, I don’t
believe in triggers to warn students of what is inside a book. Otherwise, I
might insist that universities put a warning on Rigoberta Menchú’s or Barack
Obama’s autobiographies: “Trigger Warning: these are fictive accounts that rely on
occasional invention and adaption and so do not, as the authors have claimed,
reflect actual events.” Nor would I want a written trigger for the book flap of Doris
Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, along the following lines: “Trigger
Warning: Ms. Goodwin has admitted past plagiarism in her works, a fact that
may be necessary to weigh when evaluating her present history.” Readers
can determine for themselves to what degree past confessions of plagiarism
should guide their own studies.
Nor do I favor yanking Bill Maher off television — in Paula Deen
or Duck Dynasty fashion — for his serial
profane and misogynist attacks on Sarah Palin and other conservative women. Nor
do I want a running Trigger Warning on the bottom of the screen, as Maher
talks: “Trigger Warning: We do not endorse Mr. Maher’s sometime
misogynistic and reactionary use of slurs against prominent women with whom he
disagrees.”
Nor do I think MSNBC must dump Al Sharpton for his past homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist rants
that have on occasion contributed to fatal violence. If they wish to put a
buffoon who cannot read a teleprompted script on the
air, then it is their market decision to do so, and we are adult enough to make
the necessary channel selections. Nor do I think Chris Rock should apologize
for calling the 4th of July “white people’s day,” or for that matter Jamie
Foxx making a crude joke about the joy of killing white people as an actor in
the latest Tarantino film. Free speech assumes that much of free speech is
crude and vulgar.
Nor would I object if Hillsdale College, Pepperdine University, or
any other traditional school chose to invite a Democratic or liberal graduation
speaker whose views I oppose. I once attended a Pepperdine graduate school
graduation address given by a liberal Los Angeles politician that was little
more than an unhinged rant against George W. Bush — and politely clapped
through her pathetic rambling.
All that is not today’s liberalism, which instead believes
in pursuance of race, class, and gender equality by any means of intimidation
and censorship necessary.
If science now allows a premature child to live outside the womb
at 20 weeks, that knowledge must remain an irrelevant fact. Champions of
abortion who used to insist that fetuses were not viable outside the womb
simply have dropped that argument altogether. They are not interested any more
in the issue of when life begins, but rather wedded deductively to the notion
of terminating a pregnancy at almost anytime the mother might wish to do so.
The unexamined career of Dr. Gosnell was not the aberration, but the logical fruition of contemporary
liberalism’s unquestioned embrace of abortion.
I don’t have the expertise to know exactly to what degree, if any,
man-caused carbon releases since the Industrial Revolution have heated up the
planet, or whether the supposed heating is deleterious to the human condition,
or whether the deleteriousness can be addressed by global statutes that are
equitably enforced around the world without causing greater impoverishment and
suffering.
But I do know something about philology and the historical
circumstances behind both euphemism and the constant shifting of vocabulary.
Thus why did “global warming” begat “climate change” that sometimes begat
“climate chaos”?
And why, at this time of history’s greatest carbon releases, has
the planet not warmed in the last 17 years? Why was data massaged to create the
so-called “hockey stick” paradigm? Why sue satirist Mark Steyn for an
inconvenient truth, or denigrate opponents as “deniers” as if they were some sort of
Holocaust deniers, if the data is unimpeachable and speaks for itself?
Add in the Climategate email scandals and the green hucksterism of an Al Gore or the
crony capitalism that leads to a Solyndra scandal, and there are liberal
grounds for skepticism and ongoing debate. As for settled science, I once was
told as teenager to take Vitamin C but avoid D, and now to take D but avoid C,
in the manner that the PSA test was once the touchstone to diagnosing prostate
cancer and now not so much, and then again in the future perhaps again
essential to an early diagnosis. What most directly leads to heart disease —
fatty foods, too much meat, too many carbohydrates, inflammation, or high
cholesterol? Do we know yet the precise factors responsible for coronary
disease when collating weight, genetics, exercise, and food intake? We know
that the sedentary obese are at higher risk, but does science yet tell us why the
thin with low cholesterol sometimes drop dead at 60?
So when I hear the president state the science is “settled” and
that he is prepared to act, he sounds like a Grand Inquisitioner who won’t
tolerate heresies such as a round Earth or heliocentric solar system. No
science is ever quite settled, as more data is constantly gathered and theories
of exegesis rebound off each other.
When Eric Holder announces an endless affirmative action and
leaves it at that, I want a classically liberal defense along the lines of
something like the following: “We believe that preferences must be accorded to
those of particular ethnic and racial backgrounds to compensate for past
discrimination, whose legacy still makes it difficult even in the present age
for particular groups to be treated equitably. And more importantly, we in the
government have the ability to ascertain which groups are deserving of such
preferences and which not, and also know how to determine which individuals
meet precise criteria that earn them official minority status.” Instead, we get
something tantamount to “either support something nebulous called affirmative
action or you’re a racist.”
Then there is illegal immigration. Again, examine the philology,
always the tip-off to an Orwellian rewrite. First we had illegal alien, then
illegal immigrant, then undocumented immigrant, and now just immigrant. Such
linguistic hocus pocus is necessary given the the present indefensible system
of not enforcing the border, ignoring immigration law, and peddling the untruth
that almost all illegal aliens fit the DREAM Act categories. Language must
accomplish what reality cannot.
But modern-day liberalism is still stranger than all that: after
crafting a system of open borders and de facto amnesty that has allowed millions
of impoverished from central Mexico to reside in California, the architects of
such a system then shut down almost all means to provide illegal aliens a
livelihood: water diversions from agriculture, the near extinction of the
timber and mining industries, taboos against fracking and horizontal drilling,
a virtual shut-down of new housing construction, and on and on.
The result is that the Bay Area liberal looking down from his
cupola has pulled up the stairway to his perch. He has essentially decreed that
the impoverished will have very little livelihood in an overregulated state
other than welfare and entry-level government jobs, and will live an apartheid
existence in the Central Valley and L.A. basin, shut out from the coastal
corridor where new housing is permanently on hold to any other than the top 2%
of the state population.
We should not use the word “progressive” or “liberal,” given that
on issues like abortion, affirmative action, the environment, illegal
immigration, censorship, and a host of others, the left is reactionary to the
core.
In the spirit of changing words to reflect reality, I suggest that
we call today’s liberals “regressives” — fundamentalists who are wedded to self-serving deductive doctrines that cannot
sustain empirical scrutiny and exist mostly as fossilized theologies of the
1960s.
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