Blind, bossy liberalism afflicts America
By George C. Leef
America has a serious, possibly terminal illness. The illness is liberalism, and in his new book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork argues we are faced with deep and threatening cultural decay owing to liberal dominance of our institutions.
The author is the same Robert Bork whose 1987 nomination to the SupremeCourt was defeated by liberal attacks of unprecedented fury and intellectual dishonesty. His book will leave even hardened, veteran observers of the American political scene thinking, "Things are worse than I thought."
Others, of course, will dismiss the book with ad hominem arguments, claiming Judge Bork is just bitter over the loss of a Supreme Court seat. Responses like this demonstrate one of his implicit themes - that liberals are so sure they're right and good and their critics wrong and evil that they never listen to, much less respond to, evidence that their pet programs and beliefs are harmful. Liberalism has dominated U.S. politics for over sixty years, but can anyone name one instance where liberals have repealed a law because it was shown to be counterproductive?
Bork contends that the "defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification)". We can thank the former for, among other things, quotas in hiring, a precipitous decline in the quality of education, and numerous pathologies arising from the welfare system. We can thank the latter for, among other things, abortion on demand, gangsta rap, and the drug culture.
I think Judge Bork is half right. Liberalism is radically egalitarian, mindlessly condemning as "social injustice" almost every kind of inequality except legal inequality. As Bork recounts, liberalism's mania for making people equal through state coercion has given us laws, regulations and court decisions mandating equal pay, equal access, equal treatment and so on. No person sets his own goals with a desire to be "equal" in mind, but liberals have a tremendous passion for engineering society so that millions of people unknown to them will be made more equal - and less free. And Bork astutely observes that liberals almost never see the harmful consequences of their meddling.
Affirmative action is an excellent example. Back in the early 1960s, there were numerous official barriers, such as licensing, to blacks' economic success. Sadly, liberals weren't interested in abolishing them. Instead, they lavished energy and resources on political action to force equality through "anti-discrimination" laws.
These laws have turned inexorably into mandated hiring quotas. Bork shows the enormous socio-economic damage of these policies and notes that the political logic of preferential treatment means there can be no stopping point. His point is similar to that of Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, who explained how efforts to make people equal create a "self-accelerating tendency" toward tyranny.
Bork's other complaint against liberalism is that it is "radically individualistic," but here I am not convinced. Liberalism is selectively individualistic. Most liberals want no restraints on pornography, but would be delighted to ban gun ownership; most want no restraints on abortion, but will tell you in detail what you may or may not do with your property. The trouble with liberals isn't that they are so radically individualistic, but that they are so preternaturally bossy.
Bork links our cultural decay largely to liberals' excessive tolerance and proceeds to argue for censorship. I think a better argument can be made that the cultural decay he laments has its origins in coercive liberal meddling. Vast numbers of children, for instance, are receiving miserable educations, have no homework and receive little parental guidance - all unintended consequences of liberal policies. Bored, ignorant, present-oriented youth will cause trouble whether gangsta rap is available or not. The roots of this problem lie not in excessive tolerance, but in policies that have unwittingly undermined education and the family.
Furthermore, Bork's call for censorship is a serious mistake. The "War on Drugs" produces plenty of violence, but it doesn't stop drug use.Why believe that a war on pornography would be any more successful? Bork also assumes censorship statutes will be used only for purposes he favors. Evidently he thinks we can have a censorship statute that just gets rid of Snoop Doggy Dogg.
But liberals will look at the same statute, no matter how it is worded, and see a chance to get rid of Rush Limbaugh. If this suggestion seems far-fetched, recall Hubert Humphrey's guarantee that the Civil Rights Act could never lead to hiring quotas. Bork often shows a keen awareness of the "slippery slope" dangers that coercion inevitably breeds, but that awareness deserts him here.
Despite this weakness, Slouching Towards Gomorrah is a powerful indictment of the liberal syndrome. Judge Bork will be in Warren at the Royalty House tomorrow; his comments should spark a good many debates. The debates are long overdue.
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