What Liberals Know That Isnt So - Road to the Middle Class

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 www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

What Liberals Know That Isn't So

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.