The new-time religion: liberalism and its problems

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.

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.

Liberals succeeded in jettisoning the historical baggage of liberalism by wielding the razor of Pragmatism, a "philosophy and a psychology perfectly tailored to progressive needs," writes Eric Goldman in his classic Rendezvous with Destiny. William James described his philosophy as an attitude of "looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts." Croly, the founder of The New Republic, insisted that his journal was "not an exponent of liberal principles." Indeed, "[i]f there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity." By 1935, John Dewey could write in Liberalism and Social Action that activist government in the name of the economically disadvantaged had "virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith." Other New Republic Pragmatists, such as James protege Horace Kallen, often sounded like the later critical legal theorists, insisting that "philosophy" was simply invented by men to protect the status quo.

Some liberals understood the dangers of this approach early on. "The real trouble with us reformers," lamented J. Allen Smith, a leading progressive intellectual, "is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left." But the antidogmatism of the Pragmatists won out and became unquestioned dogma for generations of liberals. When Anthony Lewis--whom the New York Times described as its "most consistently liberal voice"--retired, he said the one "big conclusion" he had come to was that "certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft."

Of course, an ideology of antidogmatism isn't less ideological than other worldviews; it's merely harder to defend consistently, which is why many liberals choose not to try. Ever since Michael Dukakis insisted that voters should value his "competence" over Republican "ideology," Democratic politicians have been saying they don't believe in "labels"--never mind extolling anything like a coherent political philosophy. But, as Bertrand Russell warned, the Pragmatic approach leaves its adherents no easily articulated principles for action other than power, preferences, and irrational "feelings." It should be no surprise that Hillary Clinton justified her Senate candidacy on the claim that she was more "concerned" about the issues than her opponent. And of course her husband won the presidency by arguing he was better at "feeling" pain.

It's also not surprising that George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, with a foreword by Howard Dean, has been received as a lifeline for liberals convinced that their ideology is a non-issue. Lakoff, whom Dean describes as "one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement," argues that the liberal product is just fine, it's the marketing operation that has fallen apart. If liberals simply called trial lawyers "public-protection attorneys" and pitched "environmental protection" as an effort to maintain "poison-free communities," everything would click into place. In other words, it is an article of faith for liberals that they are right, they just need to update the evangelization effort by speaking in the vernacular a bit more. Robert Reich makes essentially the same argument in a recent issue of The New Republic, contending that if Democrats can win back the "narrative" of politics, liberals will triumph.

Whatever the merits of these "ideas," liberals would surely be better served if they understood that this is an old project indeed. Thurman Arnold, FDR's antitrust czar and a titan of liberal legal philosophy, made a much more serious attempt at the same point in The Folklore of Capitalism and Symbols of Government 70 years ago. He too believed that politics was ultimately about narratives and frames. Where he differed was that he understood he was in the dogma-manufacturing business while Lakoff, Reich, et al. take it as a metaphysical given that the liberal approach is the correct one.

And this is where the Janus faces of liberalism meet. William James invented Pragmatism to accommodate the belief that Darwin killed God; with it, religious truth became whatever believers willed. Liberalism therefore puts government in God's throne to the extent that it believes that, as a matter of principle, no challenge is beyond the reach of Leviathan. From Woodrow Wilson on, central to the new liberals' project was to create, in Arnold's words, a "religion of government," where the old dogma of a limited state with defined powers would be rendered obsolete in favor of an "organic" state and an oracular "living constitution." Perhaps Howard Dean should purchase some "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton!" buttons with the "Don't" crossed out.

COPYRIGHT 2005 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning