By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 08, 2015
There has been a great deal of overblown talk about the
alleged “libertarian moment” that the United States is experiencing just about
now, and there is a reason that the Right, broadly speaking, has taken an
intellectual turn in the libertarian direction. The first and most important is
the ascendance of Barack Obama, whose vision of effectively unlimited
government gives conservatives the willies. But there are deeper reasons, too:
The Right believes, not without some reason, that the main reason we ended up
with a disastrous Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate government — the brief years of
which imposed damage that will take much longer to undo — had to do with the
foreign policy of George W. Bush and the fiscal incontinence of congressional
Republicans during the Bush years. While the Obama administration has not yet
produced a superior foreign-policy operating model, the Bush approach is not
really looking any better in retrospect, at least in the sense that it would be
difficult to say with a straight face that Iraq, Afghanistan, or the broader
Middle East look today like more tractable problems than they did in 2001, or
like they might become more tractable. On the domestic front, abortion has
effectively calcified into a modus vivendi (more accurately, a horrifying modus
mortis), and the new lion of the social issues, gay marriage, is a wet kitten
by comparison, in that no sensible, non-fanatical person thinks of gay marriage
as being as urgent an issue as abortion.
All of those are relevant, but consider one further,
broader dynamic at work: The Right is finally coming around to the
understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its
general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing
defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful
reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the
fight between Right and Left is about coercion.
That the Left has become much more intensively coercive
in recent years has not gone unnoticed among conservatives. In Liberal Fascism
and elsewhere, Jonah Goldberg has popularized a longstanding view of the
left-wing philosophy that in the United States calls itself “liberalism” —
though we cannot in good faith call it that — that connects it with the nakedly
coercive, antidemocratic, and anti-constitutional tendency of Woodrow Wilson
and the progressives of his era, and with the various nasty totalitarian
movements that inspired them and were inspired by them in turn. It’s not that
we expect Robert Reich to come marching up Fifth Avenue wearing jackboots (the
Pride March ain’t what it used to be) but that managerial progressivism is
fundamentally corporatist in the sense that Mussolini et al. used the term: It
conceives of formal political power and economic production as a single unit to
be kept working in harmony, like a well-tuned engine, by such experts as the
state recognizes as suited to the task. In theory, these men are to be guided
by evidence meeting scientific standards — they are to be the sort of
disinterested and dispassionate pragmatists that exist mainly within the narrow
confines of Ezra Klein’s cranium.
The problem, as various capital-”F” Fascists and National
Socialists and Communist politburos and Vox readers all discovered in their
turn, is that even if these dispassionate and disinterested managers existed —
and they don’t — bureaucracies do not have the collective cognitive firepower to
replace markets, or even to intelligently guide them. From the Soviet five-year
plans to Obamacare, all central-planning exercises begin in hubris and end in
chaos.
And when the chaos comes, the natural thing to do — the
imperative thing — is: find someone to blame. The planners and schemers are
intellectually incapable of dealing seriously with the fact that the project
that they have set for themselves — substituting their own judgment for that of
the billions of better-informed parties in the market and coming up with
superior outcomes — is an impossible one. But once you’ve accepted real limits
on what planning can do — on what government can do — then you have at some
level essentially surrendered to conservatism.
And that means that somebody, somewhere, must be a
racist.
Jonathan Chait, the sort of nice suburban liberal boy
you’d want your daughter to marry if you hated your daughter, in his recent
essay on the alleged renaissance of political correctness, bemoaned the
emergence of racial- and gender-identity politics as an ultimate rhetorical
trump card. Chait either misses or ignores the fact that this is not new;
what’s new is that the wanton application of this juvenile mode of discourse
now encompasses previously immune white liberals. But the tendency itself is
ancient, and prominent on his end of the political spectrum.
“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch
line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a
million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his
U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are
meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet
minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every
goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car
salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen
must work to purchase an entry-level car, and the Ruskie answers: “In your
country, you lynch Negroes.”
When Matt Yglesias says he wants to “lay down a marker
and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge
political success,” and that doesn’t happen, what happens next? Another chorus
of “The Tea Party Is Racist!” from Ezra Klein, or from whomever.
The Wilsonian vision of domestic governance through
expertise and fiat quickly devolved into a reality of goon squads, political
persecution, crushing of dissent with formal and informal political violence,
politicization of law enforcement, etc. The Occupy bomb-throwers and the
imbecile hooligans committing arson to prove that “black lives matter” are not
quite the American Protective League, but they’re of a piece with it. In the
Wilson years, we had politicized police; in the Obama years, we have a weaponized
IRS . . . and Justice Department, and police unions, and jailers’ unions. The
Wilson-era progressives tried to use the Sedition Act to shut down critics of
the great progressive. In our time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Harry Reid want
to throw people in prison for unpopular political activism of which they
disapprove. The grand plans of 2009 are coming unraveled, as grand plans do,
and so the Left grows ever more naked in its coercion. On the official side of
the spectrum, you have Senate Democrats voting to repeal the First Amendment so
that they can suppress political criticism. On the unofficial side — as the
perpetually late-to-the-party Jonathan Chait has suddenly noticed — you have
people such as Brendan Eich being run out of their jobs for holding unpopular
political opinions, human-rights heroes such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali run off college
campuses, and Trustafarians from suburban Boston shutting down emergency
ambulance services because they are displeased about . . . something.
The fun part for the Left is that, in Mount Holyoke as in
Pyongyang, totalitarianism is magnified by madness, and thus The Vagina
Monologues must be suppressed on the grounds that not all women have vaginas.
If you do not follow these sorts of things closely, you would not believe the
vitriol — up to and including death threats — rained down on feminist groups
who insist that while they sympathize with transsexuals they do not believe
that a penis-and-testicle-bearing person counts as a woman simply on his own
say-so.
The Left’s last big idea was Communism. When Lenin turned
out to be the god who failed, the Left undertook wide exploration for another
grand unifying idea: environmentalism, multiculturalism, economic inequality,
atheism, feminism, etc. What it ended up with was an enemies’ list.
That and a taste for brute force.
The enthusiasm for coercion and the substitution of
enemies for ideas — Christians, white men, Israel, “the 1 percent,” the Koch
brothers, take your pick — together form the basis for understanding the Left’s
current convulsions. The call to imprison people with unapproved ideas about
global warming, the Senate Democrats’ vote to repeal the First Amendment, the
Ferguson-inspired riots, the picayune political correctness and
thought-policing that annoys Jonathan Chait, the IRS’s persecution of
conservative political groups, Barack Obama’s White House enemies’ list, the
casual violence against conservatives on college campuses and the Left’s
instinctive defense of that violence — these are not separate phenomena but
part of a single phenomenon.
The difference between Elizabeth Warren’s partisans and
the Tontons Macoutes is very little more than testosterone and time.
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