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Middle Class Family Values Middle Class Self-Government

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What Liberals Know That Isn't So

by Christopher Chantrill
March 28, 2004 at 3:00 am

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WHEN LIBERALS put down The New York Times on Sunday afternoon or turn off Morning Edition as they arrive at work they sigh with satisfaction in the knowledge they are better educated and informed than other people.  And so they are.  But then there’s the stuff they know that isn’t so.  And if liberals are pretty good in the education department, they are also pretty strong in the self-delusion department.  Let us count the ways.

First of all there is economics.  Seventy years ago when Keynes published his General Theory to teach politicians how to fight the Great Depression, liberals felt they had died and gone to heaven.  For Keynes had proposed that the economy could not function successfully unless disinterested experts could manipulate aggregate demand and short-circuit the middle class’s excessive propensity to save.  Disinterested experts, liberals exclaimed?  That’s us!  And they plunged into a fifty year love affair with targeted tax cuts and stimulus plans that all ended in tears in the Carter malaise of 1979.  Ever since, liberals have steadfastly refused to believe that the Reagan tax rate cuts and strong dollar had anything to do with the twenty year boom that followed the bankruptcy of Keynesian economics. 

Then there is religion.  Liberals believe with Nietzsche that God is Dead, and that “fundamentalist” religion will soon die out, a superstition no longer relevant to the modern world, if indeed it ever was.  The sooner that religion dies out, the sooner we can say good-bye for ever to religious wars, inquisitions, witch hunts, and the marginalization of women.  This splendid sentiment rather overlooks the fact, reported by Finke and Stark in The Churching of America, that religious adherence has increased in the United States over the years from about 15 percent in 1776 to about 60 percent today.  And it also refuses to notice the elephant in the living room: the most successful, most militant, most inquisitorial, most bloody religion in history is socialism.  It also ignores the gathering evidence that religion, particularly enthusiastic Protestant Christianity, is exploding worldwide in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in China—in fact, everywhere except Eurabia and Manhattan. 

Then there is the complementary of the sexes.  Second Wave feminists believed, nay demanded, that women could and should leave domestic life and live a public life just like men.  From time immemorial women had wanted to participate in politics, in the university, and in business, but men had prevented them.  If only women could take control of their own bodies and escape from the boredom of suburban domesticity, well, then you’d see.  Well, yes, we do see, only too well.  We know now that there’s a cost to it all.  There’s the cost of the nanny for the kids; there’s the cost in divorce and ruined childhoods; there’s the cost of the 40 million abortions; there’s the cost of the guilt.  We have learned that women can live like men, but what’s the point?  Why would they want to?  Years ago, Playboy stumbled on the truth when they had a young woman writer crank up her testosterone level to male levels with a testosterone patch.  She found that she was thinking about sex all the time, and even lusting after her best friend’s husband when sitting next to him at dinner.  And she didn’t like it.  Women and men are different, and the differences are complementary.

Why do liberals insist on knowing things that ain’t so?  The answer is: Power.  Ever since the North German burghers discovered that they were perfectly capable of governing themselves without elite assistance, the equestrian classes have been frantically trying to justify their power.  It could not be, they kept telling themselves, that the middle class with its businesses, its churches, its associations, and its nuclear family really could govern itself without their help.  So they decided that the new corporations were a dreadful threat to civilization.  But corporate giants like Rockefeller and Carnegie had no interest in political power and submitted gracefully to political regulation.  J.P. Morgan?  He just wanted the trains to run on time.  Then they decided that the middle class was exploiting the poor.  But the middle class wanted the poor to thrive as much as anyone, and to prove its bona fides submitted to the yoke of income tax.  Then they decided that the middle class was oppressing its women.  Tell that to Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, or Joanna Schopenhauer, girls.

Liberals cling to their myths for good reason.  Without them, they’d go out of business as national nags and nannies.  That would never do, for what would the robin do then, poor thing?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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 TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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