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The new-time religion: liberalism and its problems
National Review, May 23, 2005 by Jonah Goldberg
LIBERALISM today has two maladies; Howard Dean is both of them. Or, more accurately, he represents both of them. The first has received a remarkable amount of attention among liberals themselves in recent months: American liberalism is intellectually exhausted, or "bookless," as New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz recently called it. The second is less visible but perhaps more deadly: Modern liberalism has taken on the trappings of a religion.
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This second diagnosis runs counter to the reigning cliches about the GOP's becoming the party of theocracy. While it's true that the Republican party and the conservative movement are invested in the agenda of religious groups, conservatism maintains a far clearer separation of religious and political impulses than liberalism, which often conflates the two into a single ideology. Like many spiritual movements, liberalism emphasizes deeds and ideals over ideas. As a result, when liberals gather there's a revivalist spirit in the air, with plenty of talk about fighting the forces of evil and testifying about good deeds done. Conservatives tend to behave like Star Trek conventioneers when they get together, making jokes, swapping trivia, and showing off their knowledge of arcana.
It was the philosopher Eric Voegelin who, in a phrase made famous by William F. Buckley Jr., decried the liberal impulse as an attempt to "immanentize the eschaton," or to create a heaven on earth. The often spiritual nature of the environmental movement; the quasi-messianic treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bill Clinton's invocation of "covenants" with the American people; Hillary Clinton's hibernating "politics of meaning," which claimed to redefine what it meant to be a human being in the post-modern world--all of these are examples of what Voegelin would describe as the neo-Gnostic effort to make the hereafter simply here.
This is all the inevitable consequence of a political movement that deliberately turned its back on philosophy and its own intellectual history. A movement without ideas must be driven by something, and if ideas and principles aren't it, what's left is a stew of emotional and quasi-religious notions about "doing good." Well before the current bout of liberal self-flagellation, E.J. Dionne noted in Stand Up Fight Back that "liberals and Democrats tend not to view themselves as the inheritors of a grand tradition. Almost on principle, they are suspicious of such traditions, of too much theorizing, of linking themselves too much to the past." Of course, liberalism doesn't lack intellectual giants--Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr--but, Dionne concedes, "not one of them is routinely celebrated by today's liberals."
Yesterday's liberals didn't revere them much either. Compare, for example, the gaseous, solipsistic spirit of the Port Huron Statement--which famously launched the New Left and is still revered by liberals today--to the matter-of-factness of the Sharon Statement, which signaled the beginning of conservative youth activism. The former begins, "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." It drones on like that for 50 pages. The Sharon Statement was designed to rally the budding righties of Young Americans for Freedom, who proudly wore buttons proclaiming, "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton!" It begins, "In this time of moral and political crisis, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths." The whole document runs less than 370 words. Such brevity is possible when you take it as a given that most of the important things have already been said.
Liberals tend to deride conservatism for its faith in dogma. But the reality is that liberal dogma is settled while conservative dogma remains a work in progress. Indeed, the great debate of modern conservatism--crudely described as libertarianism versus conservatism, or freedom versus virtue--remains as unsettled today as it was when Frank Meyer coined the term "fusionism." Meyer argued that virtue not freely chosen was not virtuous, and therefore that a limited, i.e. libertarian, state was the only means to the conservative end of a virtuous society. In 1964, Meyer edited What Is Conservatism?, an ideological donnybrook between such heavyweights as Russell Kirk, WFB, and Friedrich Hayek over the proper ends of government. Four decades later, the debate is eerily relevant to conservatives trying to accommodate a "compassionate conservative" president who has declared that "when somebody hurts, government has got to move."
Liberals had their own fusionist debate during the first three decades of the 20th century. American reformers envied Europe's statist solutions to the "social problem." In the Bible of progressivism, The Promise of American Life, author Herbert Croly is palpably jealous of the Bismarckian welfare state. Croly, Dewey, Charles Beard, George Soule, and other early New Republic liberals had a goal even more chimerical than Meyer's: to redefine an ideology of limited government and individual liberty into a movement for economic and political centralization.
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