By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, February 11, 2019
It is important to try to engage the arguments of those
with different political views on their
own terms, which requires taking the time to understand those arguments and
their intellectual bases. This is one of the reasons (besides reading pleasure)
that Jonah Goldberg’s books are so valuable: He probably has done more to
illuminate the intellectual origins of progressivism than any progressive writer working today. It is
poetic — and it is illustrative of the intellectual flabbiness of contemporary
progressivism, with its supra-ideological pretense — that the tendency running
through Woodrow Wilson and “war socialism” to the Affordable Care Act and the
Green New Deal has been revived as a subject of public interest mainly by
Jonah’s books and Glenn Beck’s television programs.
One of the challenges of understanding contemporary
progressivism and its ideas is the aforementioned insistence among many
progressives that they have no ideas, that they are only empiricists and
pragmatists following, as Barack Obama liked to put it, “what works.” This
posture is both amplified and distorted by American progressives’ nearly
pristine ignorance of what the conservative alternatives are and what the world
looks like beyond Chicago. For example, the U.S.-centric parochialism so often
attributed to conservatives and their heartland-dwelling political base is at
least as prevalent among populist progressives, who talk about “European”
health-care as though Europe did not consist of countries with distinct
domestic policies that are, on the matter of health care, quite different from
one another. National single-payer, for example, exists almost nowhere in
Continental Europe, its most notable practitioners being the United Kingdom,
Canada, and Japan.
Here is something from the comments on my recent column
on the “Green New Deal.” Yes, it’s easy to find dumb things in the comments;
no, I do not think that pulling one out and highlighting it discredits an
entire political view; this is only a useful example.
If you keep calling the people who
are in favor of this, “socialists” you are going to be surprised to learn most
Republican voters will start to call themselves, “socialists.”
Fox News hype: VENUZUELA!
AHHHHHHH!!!!”
Reality: “SWITZERLAND!
AHHHHHHHH!!!”
The writer seems to confuse Switzerland with Sweden, as
some people do, which is amusing in itself: Sweden is one of the most statist
of Europe’s nations (both in its political assumptions and in the sheer size of
its public sector), while Switzerland is Europe’s most libertarian country,
with a public sector considerably smaller than that of the United States.
(Total government spending as a share of GDP is 51 percent in Sweden, 42
percent in the United States, and 34 percent in Switzerland as the Heritage Foundation
and the Wall Street Journal run the
numbers.) While it is the case that I am considerably more pro-European than
many conservative writers, many conservatives have found much to admire in the
Swiss way of doing things — and more to admire than you might initially expect
in the Swedish way of doing things. Here is me making the case for learning
from the Swiss
health-insurance model in National
Review less than a week ago, and here is me in National Review arguing — in a cover story — that Switzerland
is the best-governed country in the world. And here is my interview with
Johan Norberg on the complicated
reality of Swedish government and what conservatives might learn from its
successes. One would assume that readers commenting on stories at National Review have some familiarity
with the magazine, its writers, and their views — but that obviously is not the
case, even setting aside the obvious full-time trolls. Increasingly, it is not
even the case for professional and semi-professional writers and commentators.
Read the New York Times op-ed pages
if you doubt me.
Psephologists have articulated a “median-voter theorem”
of majoritarian politics in action, which is of limited applicability; in
discourse, our progressive friends have created a kind of similar creature with
even less value — call it the “median-Republican theorem” — which holds that it
isn’t really necessary to understand, even trivially, what a right-leaning
person actually believes; it is enough to respond to what they believe (almost always
wrongly) to be the views of the “typical” conservative or Republican, which is
in this model an amalgamation of the worst vices of whichever Fox News and
talk-radio figures they happen to have heard of. And while there is much that
is in need of reform on the Right, this isn’t really a case of “both sides do
it,” inasmuch as conservatives, as noted above, have made a much more energetic
attempt to understand progressivism on
its own terms. Progressives, on the other hand, have invested a great deal
of effort cultivating various occult
theories of conservatism, that, irrespective of what conservatives actually
argue, what they “really believe” is . . . racism, sexism, homophobia,
biblioplangistical Christian fundamentalism, etc.
Political discourse as properly understood is being
quickly supplanted by a kind of antidiscourse
based on memes, ad hominem elevated
to the level of a creed, and the exchange of argument for indictment, i.e.
“Republicans must be wrong about taxes because Mike Pence’s wife teaches at a
school with religious affiliations I don’t like.”
The defining characteristic of our political discourse in
2019 is not that it is polarized, but
that it is illiterate.
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