Unfortunately Jonah Goldberg, for the life of him, cannot
think of anything good to say
about Teddy Roosevelt and the original Progressives. This
is a serious ( major ) limitation
in his political philosophy. However, this said, the man
knows how to punch holes
in the insipid arguments made by all-too-many on the Left.
I just wish that he would
do more to offer criticisms of the Right than an occasional
tip-of-the-hat to the effect
that, "yes, conservatives also have their problems."
Anyway, here is his latest blast
and it is persuasive.
Top five cliches that liberals use to
avoid real arguments
By Jonah Goldberg
April 27, 2012
One of the great differences between conservatives and
liberals is that conservatives will freely admit that they
have an ideology. We’re kind of dorks that way, squabbling
over old texts like Dungeons and Dragons geeks, wearing ties
with pictures of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke on them.
But mainstream liberals from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack
Obama — and the intellectuals and journalists who love
them — often assert that they are simply dispassionate
slaves to the facts; they are realists, pragmatists,
empiricists. Liberals insist that they live right downtown
in the “reality-based community,†and if only their
Republican opponents weren’t so blinded by ideology and
stupidity, then they could work with them.
This has been a theme of Obama’s presidency from the
start. A couple of days before his inauguration,Obama proclaimed: “What is
required is a new declaration of independence, not just in
our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small
thinking, prejudice and bigotry†(an odd pronouncement,
given that “bigoted†America had just elected its first
black president).
In his inaugural address, he explained
that “the stale political arguments that have consumed us
for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is
not whether our government is too big or too small, but
whether it works.â€
Whether the president who had to learn, in his own words,
that there’s “no such thing†as shovel-ready
projects — after blowing billions of stimulus
dollars on them — is truly focused on “what works†is
a subject for another day. But the phrase is a perfect
example of the way liberals speak in code when they want to
make an ideological argument without conceding that that is
what they are doing. They hide ideological claims in
rhetorical Trojan horses, hoping to conquer terrain unearned
by real debate.
Of course, Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats when
it comes to reducing arguments to bumper stickers. (Rep.
Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has written that “the president’s
economic experiment has failed. It is time to get back to
what we know works.â€) But the vast majority of
Republicans, Ryan included, will at least acknowledge their
ideological first principles — free markets, limited
government, property rights. Liberals are terribly reluctant
to do likewise. Instead, they often speak in seemingly
harmless cliches that they hope will penetrate our mental
defenses.
Here are some of the most egregious examples:
‘Diversity is strength’
Affirmative action used to be defended on the
grounds that certain groups, particularly African Americans,
are entitled to extra help because of the horrible legacy of
slavery and institutionalized racism. Whatever objections
opponents may raise to that claim, it’s a legitimate moral
argument.
But that argument has been abandoned in recent years and
replaced with a far less plausible and far more ideological
claim: that enforced diversity is a permanent necessity. Lee
Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, famously
declared: “Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to
a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the
Middle Ages, of international politics and of
Shakespeare.â€
It’s a nice thought. But consider some of the great minds
of human history, and it’s striking how few were educated
in a diverse environment. Newton, Galileo and Einstein had
little exposure to Asians or Africans. The genius of
Aristotle, Socrates and Plato cannot be easily correlated
with the number of non-Greeks with whom they chatted in the
town square. If diversity is essential to education, let us
get to work dismantling historically black and women’s
colleges. When I visit campuses, it’s common to see black
and white students eating, studying and socializing
separately. This is rounding out everyone’s education?
Similarly, we’re constantly told that communities are
strengthened by diversity, but liberal Harvard sociologist
Robert Putnam has found the opposite. In a survey that
included interviews with more than 30,000 people, Putnam
discovered that as a community becomes more ethnically and
socially varied, social trust and civic engagement plummet.
Perhaps forced diversity makes sense, but liberals make
little effort to prove it.
‘Violence never solved anything’
It’s a nice idea, but it’s manifestly
absurd. If violence never solved anything, police would not
have guns or nightsticks. Obama helped solve the problem of
Moammar Gaddafi with violence, and FDR helped solve the
problem — far too late — of the Holocaust and Hitler
with violence. Invariably, the slogan (or its close cousin
“War is not the answerâ€) is invoked not as a blanket
exhortation against violence, but as a narrow injunction
against the United States, NATO or Republican presidents
from trying to solve threats of violence with violence.
‘The living Constitution’
It is dogma among liberals that sophisticated
people understand that the Constitution is a “living,
breathing document.†The idea was largely introduced into
the political bloodstream by Woodrow Wilson and his allies,
who were desperate to be free of the constraints of the
founders’ vision. Wilson explained that he preferred an
evolving, “organic,†“Darwinian†Constitution that
empowered progressives to breathe whatever meaning they
wished into it. It is a wildly ideological view of the
nature of our political system.
It is also a font of unending hypocrisy. After the attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, conservatives argued that the country
needed to adapt to a new asymmetrical warfare against
non-state actors who posed an existential threat. They
believed they were working within the bounds of the
Constitution. But even if they were stretching things, why
shouldn’t that be acceptable — if our Constitution is
supposed to evolve with the times?
Yet acolytes of the living Constitution immediately started
quoting the wisdom of the founders and the sanctity of the
Constitution. Apparently the document is alive when the
Supreme Court finds novel rationalizations for abortion
rights, but when we need to figure out how to deal with
terrorists, suddenly nothing should pry original meaning
from the Constitution’s cold, dead hands.
By the way, conservatives do not believe that the
Constitution should not change; they just believe that it
should change constitutionally — through the amendment
process.
‘Social Darwinism’
Obama this month denounced the Republican
House budget as nothing more than “thinly veiled social Darwinism.†Liberals
have been trotting out this Medusa’s head to petrify the
public for generations. It does sound scary. (After all,
didn’t Hitler believe in something called “social
Darwinism� Maybe he did.) But no matter how popular the
line, these liberal attacks have little relation to the
ideas that the “robber barons†and such intellectuals as
Herbert Spencer — the “father†of social Darwinism —
actually followed.
Spencer’s sin was that he was a soaked-to-the-bone
libertarian who championed private charity and limited
government (along with women’s suffrage and
anti-imperialism). The “reform Darwinists†— namely
the early-20th-century Progressives — loathed such
classical liberalism because they wanted to tinker with the
economy, and humanity itself, at the most basic level.
More vexing for liberals: There was no intellectual
movement in the United States called “social Darwinismâ€
in the first place. Spencer, a 19th-century British
philosopher, didn’t use the term and wasn’t even a
Darwinist (he had a different theory of evolution).
Liberals misapplied the label from the outset to demonize
ideas they didn’t like. They’ve never stopped.
‘Better 10 guilty men go free . . .’
At least until George Zimmerman was in
the dock, this was a reflexive liberal refrain. The
legendary English jurist William Blackstone — the fons et
origo of much of our common law — said, “Better that 10
guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.†In
fact, this 10 to 1 formula has become known as the
“Blackstone ratio†or “Blackstone’s formulation.â€
In a brilliant study, “n Guilty Men,†legal
scholar Alexander Volokh traced the idea that it is better
to let a certain number of guilty men go free — from
Abraham’s argument with God in Genesis over the fate of
Sodom, to the writings of the Roman emperor Trajan, to the
legal writings of Moses Maimonides, to Geraldo Rivera.
As a truism, it’s a laudable and correct sentiment that
no reasonable person can find fault with. But that’s the
problem: No reasonable person disagrees with it. There’s
nothing wrong with saying it, but it’s not an argument —
it’s an uncontroversial declarative statement. And yet
people say it as if it settles arguments. It doesn’t do
anything of the sort. The hard thinking comes when you have
to deal with the “and therefore what?†part. Where do we
draw the lines? If it were an absolute principle, we
wouldn’t put anyone in prison, lest we punish an innocent
in the process. Indeed, if punishing the innocent is so
terrible, why 10? Why not two? Or, for that matter, 200? Or
2,000?
Taken literally, the phrase is absurd. Letting 10 rapists
and murderers go free will almost surely result in far more
harm to society than putting one poor innocent sap in jail.
When you hear any of these cliches — along with “I may
disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death
your right to say it,†which is another personal favorite
— understand that the people uttering them are not trying
to have an argument. They’re trying to win an argument
without having it at all.
