By Victor Davis
Hanson
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
A classical liberal was characteristically guided by
disinterested logic and reason. He was open to gradual changes in society that
were frowned upon by traditionalists in lockstep adherence to custom and
protocol. The eight-hour work day, civil rights, and food- and drug-safety laws
all grew out of classically liberal views. Government could press for moderate
changes in the way society worked, within a conservative framework of revering
the past, in order to pave the way for equality of opportunity in a safe and
sane environment.
Among elite liberals today, all too few are of this
classical mold — guided by reason and empirical observation. By far the
majority are medieval and reactionary. By medieval I mean that they adhere to
accepted doctrine — in this case, the progressive doctrine of always finding
solutions in larger government and more taxes — despite all the evidence to the
contrary. The irony is that they project just such ideological blinkers onto
their conservative opponents.
Reactionary is a good adjective as well, since notions of
wealth and poverty are frozen in amber around 1965, as if the technological
revolution never took place and the federal welfare state hadn’t been erected —
as if today’s poor were the emaciated Joads, rather than struggling with inordinate
rates of obesity and diabetes, in air-conditioned apartments replete with
big-screen TVs, and owning cell phones with more computing power than was
available to the wealthy as recently as the 1980s. Flash-mobbing sneaker stores
is more common than storming Costcos for bags of rice and flour.
In the medieval-liberal worldview, gun control stops
violence like that in Chicago or Detroit. Solar panels are the energy way of
the immediate future; fracking is not. Voting fraud is almost nonexistent and
mostly a right-wing conspiracy trope. High-speed rail is an efficient and
economical means of transportation. The problem with public assistance is that
there is too little of it, not too much. Affirmative action ensures fairness.
Climate change is proven; further debate is counterproductive, and disturbing
data to the contrary are little more than propaganda of the ignorant.
Like a medieval bishop, the new medievalists also seek to
avoid the ramifications of their own ideologies. Like residents of a walled medieval
city or religious order, they prefer enclaves and cloisters filled with others
of their kind.
In California, the medieval liberal thinks it is terrible
that the state’s public schools test near rock bottom in science and math.
Cannot such testing be postponed? Are multiple-choice tests sufficiently
sensitive to the contours of class, race, and gender? He senses that teachers’
unions and politicized mandates from the state may have something to do with
the decline. Perhaps privately he is fearful that the vast migration of illegal
aliens from Latin America, coupled with the inability of many African-Americans
to achieve social parity, might be a contributing factor to the implosion in
public schools, as well as the degeneration of the nuclear family across class
and racial lines. Yet, in his projection, he accuses others of such blasphemous
thoughts, even while he is usually guided by them in decisions he makes for his
own progeny. For now, ensuring that the transgendered can use either
public-school restroom is about all that he can offer to raise test scores and
create a safe high-school campus.
The medieval-minded progressive clings to all sorts of
calcified bromides for educational chaos — higher taxes, more mandates and
regulation, more entitlements, and always more money. Charter schools,
deunionization, a back-to-basics curriculum, or restored standards of
discipline and behavior just rub the medieval liberal the wrong way.
He is more interested in spreading doctrine and saving
souls than in the concrete welfare of his flock. The result is that medieval
liberals talk grandly while adroitly navigating their own children’s way
through the school system, preferably through a top charter or public school in
a good coastal enclave, or, if need be, through a high-priced prep school.
Unlike the East Coast, in California the elite were once almost universally
publicly educated. The introduction of our versions of Andover and St. Paul’s
into the coastal strip is a relatively new phenomenon brought to us by medieval
liberals. In our best new private schools, diversity is praised as much as the
methods of avoiding its consequences are institutionalized — or it is de facto
defined as elite gays, women, and affluent Asians, rather than the products of
the inner city and the barrio.
The medieval liberal of California either makes good
money or inherited it — enough of it, at least, that he is not particularly
worried that he pays the highest gas, income, and sales taxes in the nation and
gets in return the country’s near-worst schools and infrastructure, with high
poverty levels to boot. That others cannot afford what he takes for granted is
regrettable, but can be offset, at least psychologically, by the medieval idea
of penance or exemption. For the administrative assistant who lives in a
one-bedroom apartment in San Jose, the Atherton tech lord offers something far
better than an economic plan that would lead to better jobs, lower taxes,
cheaper homes and energy, good schools, and affordable fuel.
Villeins of the manor can suffer nobly in apartments and
part-time jobs, nourished spiritually through the faith that their state is
going green, with the proliferation of new high-priced solar panels and
windmills. Would the part-time administrative assistant really rather pay $150
per month to power his rental through combustion of cheap, though hot-burning,
natural gas, when he could pay $400 knowing that wind and solar do not create
carbon emissions? We surely can borrow $300 billion for high-speed rail, on the
idea that the best way to fix those distant decrepit freeways — the dinosaurs
of our parents’ age that “they” use daily — is to force millions onto rail.
In this regard, Al Gore is the medieval liberal par
excellence, whose own life is not lived in accordance with his ideology, and
who is more interested in becoming wealthier than in leading a modest but principled
life. Like the worst of medieval clerics, Gore is an elitist who spouts pieties
to save his soul, as compensation for selling it to the highest bidder for
fossil-fuel-generated dollars.
Wood is to be imported for fine floors in a few tasteful
and elegant vintage homes, not to be harvested in our Sierras for 2 x 6s to
build thousands of new, tasteless tract homes. “Diversity” is the Chilean
professor’s only child or the Chinese national’s wonder kid at the local
Montessori, not something like the Madera or Porterville schools, where half
the students do not speak native English. A “gorgeous mosaic” is what you see
when you walk across the Stanford campus appreciating the diversity of the
children of the world’s elite, not what you would find a few miles away in
sometimes dangerous East Palo Alto or Redwood City among the much praised and
more avoided other.
For the medieval liberal who has created two classes out
of the old three, he knows that such places as Bakersfield, Mendota, Inglewood,
and Los Banos exist, but he knows few of the unfortunates who actually live
there. These areas can be safely driven by on the way to the John Muir Trail.
If he is a Silicon Valley magnate, he praises high taxes and regulations, and
then does his best to outsource production abroad and keep his capital
offshore.
The medieval liberal is certainly self-righteous and
pious. Suggest to him that more timber could be harvested in our forests rather
than left to burn, and he may become irate: You are a tree killer who would
slash the wilderness. Politely point out that fracking and horizontal drilling
might lower power and fuel costs, provide millions of new jobs, and jump-start
the economy, and you are subverting all that the environmental movement has
worked for. Inquire whether cutting taxes and regulation might entice
job-creating firms back to California, and he sneers that you are a Rick Perry
smokestack Neanderthal. Ask whether we could close the border and work with
aliens already here through classical modes of integration, assimilation, and
intermarriage, and he snickers that you are too white, too old, and too few, as
if uttering that statement provides exemption and ensures that he is not and
will never be too anything.
He is worried that banks and businesses are not
sufficiently racially diverse, rarely that progressive magazines and the White
House staff are mostly white and male, apparently because they are the good
white and male — a sort of self-determined affirmative-action category.
The medieval liberal could not imagine himself the
materialist and reactionary that he most certainly is, wedded to Detroit and
Chicago nostrums of big government, high taxes, increased entitlements,
tyrannical unions, racial condescension, and apartheid — and in pursuance of the
metrosexual good life.
As recompense, he is not just liberal, but liberally hip
and cool. The zillionaire wears jeans to his Mountain View work cockpit; at
Starbucks, who can distinguish the scruffy billionaire from the unemployed? The
high priest of the educational technocracy has $10,000 worth of cutting-edge
hiking boots, tents, sleeping bags, and camping appurtenances. The muckraking
journalist can nonetheless write a thesis on the comparative advantages of
iPhones and their epigones, and in his 50s he listens to Jay-Z and Beyoncé as
well as Springsteen and the Dead. Cool and privilege are the two hallmarks of
the contemporary medieval liberal, sort of like the obese friar with a neat
tonsure.
Cool is Barack Obama, not necessarily what Barack Obama has
done. He symbolizes the medieval liberal’s view of the underclass, arising from
the privileged Choom Gang at Punahou. Platitudes and ritual dominate —
late-term abortion regrettable but a necessary evil; gay marriage somehow
vital, while civil unions just won’t do; no IDs for voting, though they’re
still needed at Bloomingdale’s; irrigation water for the noble three-inch
smelt, and a bit higher food prices at Whole Foods with fewer jobs for some
losers somewhere; Obamacare for most, exemptions from it for us; illegals
trimming bushes outside, but their kids not beside mine in fifth-grade
geometry; private profiling is proof of racism, but should we really go tonight
to that hip new bistro that borders a sort of iffy transitional neighborhood?
The medieval world of two classes, lord and peasant,
continued for centuries. What was hated, then and now, was the newcomer, the
upstart, the man without contractual obligations, neither rich nor poor,
neither dependent nor surrounded by dependents, the skeptic who Tocqueville
thought would keep America from becoming what it is becoming.
The non-medieval mind always fails to perceive the
romance of the poor, and fails to hanker after the tastes and culture of the
lord. Translated, that means he is the uncouth ignoramus who has no clue what
Sidwell Friends or the Menlo School is, no grand strategy of how to get Junior
into Princeton or Stanford, no idea what a Hobie or Cannondale is, but maybe
knowledge of a handgun, a jet ski, a camper, or any other of the many
superfluous appurtenances that are proof that the tax rate is too low.
I think America is becoming sick and tired of being
lectured by some young pompadour who made a billion dollars in Silicon Valley
and therefore deems himself Socrates; by some ossified Washington Sixties-era
careerist who believes the laws that he passes simply cannot apply to himself
and his kind; and by some crusading hip talking-head whose self-absorbed
material aspirations and values make the 1950s suburbanite seem bohemian in
comparison.
We need a cultural Reformation, a Renaissance in
classical thinking, a return to true diversity and real intellectual tolerance
that rejects the medieval reactionary’s mind, exposes his hypocrisy, and
recreates three classes from his two.
No comments:
Post a Comment