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In the liberal dismissal of conservative thought as mass superstition, there is a swaggering arrogance unbefitting an intellectually confident movement. Rebutting and dismantling your opponents’ argument is a sign of strength; dismissing it ad hominem is a tactic best retired in the schoolyard.
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| For most of this decade, conservatives have suffered the slings and arrows of a liberal establishment hell-bent on proving that conservatives are out of touch with reality. At every turn, the left has criticized the right for privileging “ideology” over “pragmatism.”
Liberals decried a “Republican war on science” because of the GOP’s positions on issues like climate change and stem cell research, though the former is an issue of legitimate empirical debate and the latter is controversial for moral reasons, not scientific ones.
They resurrected claims of “voodoo economics” to attack believers in the free market as overly credulous adherents to the notion that tax cuts were a magical economic elixir.
They criticized advocates of spreading democracy for failing to realize that popular government could only develop “organically” – a revelation that would certainly come as a surprise to the people of Germany and Japan.
And they demonized supporters of the War on Terror as “fearmongers” – apparently believing that the appropriate reaction to 9/11 was to look the other way and pretend you didn’t see anything.
Honest disagreements rooted in partisan allegiances are to be expected in a vigorous democracy. And despite all the rhapsodic prose about “unity” in recent months, the continuing conflict is almost certainly a good thing. A polity contentious enough to have heated – and even at times uncivil – debate is one where the electorate is intellectually engaged.
But in the liberal dismissal of conservative thought as mass superstition, there is a swaggering arrogance unbefitting an intellectually confident movement. Rebutting and dismantling your opponents’ argument is a sign of strength; dismissing it ad hominem is a tactic best retired in the schoolyard.
Yet for all their crowing, it is remarkable that the left has never held its own ideology up to the cold light of reason, nor imbibed the tonic of evidence.
Liberals consistently dismiss free markets and limited government as vehicles of corporate exploitation and economic elitism. Yet throughout the world, the evidence points in the other direction. If there is a conservative model, it’s Hong Kong, the former British colony that boasts the world’s freest economy and – not coincidentally – has become a bastion of growth despite having little in the way of natural resources. Meanwhile, the social democracies of Europe – the regimes that cling most tightly to the liberal fetish for expansive welfare states, high taxes, and big government – slowly wither economically, militarily and demographically.
On social issues, the track record is little better. The left continues to push for increased union power, despite the fact that organized labor’s disproportionate sway nearly destroyed the British economy in the years prior to Margaret Thatcher (and is currently doing the same to states like California). On health care, liberals push for a system as close to single-payer as they can get, despite the myriad evidence of inefficiency and injustice resulting from similar structures in Canada and the United Kingdom. And on education, they continue to push for a static, union-driven, multicultural miasma rather than the demanding, outcomes-oriented model that is rocketing China and India to the forefront of global leadership.
Finally, there is foreign policy. Since the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party became ascendant with the 1972 election, liberals have beat a path of retreat from the global stage. And when their views were made flesh in the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the results were unmistakable. Abandoning the supposedly intemperate Shah of Iran birthed a radical Islamic regime that has been at war with the rest of the world ever since. An emphasis on détente and overcoming “our inordinate fear of communism” led an ascendant Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan unafraid of consequences. And a botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran left the U.S. looking to all the world like a paper tiger.
With the weight of historical evidence against them, modern liberals can only hope – like so many doomsday cults – that this time it will finally work. But before they next decry the conservative assault on reason, they should remember Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. |
