Wolfgang von Skeptik

THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM AND THE NEW MISERLINESS: WELCOME TO ENRON NATION

HERE IS THE ESSAY I have been promising for the past several days. When I began it, its original conclusion was that – despite the death of liberalism – the American social-conscience liberalism had formerly represented was now being reborn in myriad new forms public and private. But then the work I am doing forced me to take (another) hard look at the implications of how taxpayer selfishness has radically shrunken governmental services – this in combination with the infuriating reality of bureaucrats who legally inflate their own paychecks by denying services to the very people they are hired to serve. And when I realized the dismal extent to which these miserly tendencies have become universally American (even here in the allegedly “leftist” realm of the Puget Sound region), it forced me to conclude our national social conscience was probably never anything more than an artificial construct: a cultural anomaly forced on us in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the threats of fascism and Soviet Communism. But the America of the New Miserliness was not an America I was eager to acknowledge: hence the minor personal intellectual crisis – and spiritual crisis too – that is real reason this piece has taken me so long to finish.

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THE PROBABILITY IS THIS era that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union will go down in history as one of our nation’s most cruel, at least as measured by its attitudes toward those who have fallen by the American economic wayside. What is said or not said by presidential candidates is always a mirror of United States values – especially now when all such presentations are so carefully shaped by focus-groups – and the speech-content of this last presidential campaign makes it undeniably clear that indifference to the poor is now one of our national characteristics. If the numbers of the impoverished were shrinking, our dwindling concern could be written off as merely an expression of good times, but in fact the opposite is true: by every statistical yardstick you can find, the underclass is getting bigger, which casts our national response – or rather the lack thereof – in an especially damning light. And as I discovered during a recent freelance assignment, whole communities – not just the archetypical poor – are feeling the pangs inflicted by America’s New Miserliness.

While the New Miserliness can be attributed to many factors – not the least of which is an uncertain economy – I believe its ultimate cause is the death of liberalism: the fact that in the wake of liberalism’s demise, we have become a nation without a domestic social conscience. Say what you like about liberalism, from the time of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt until liberalism’s destruction by forces mostly beyond its control, it was the true social conscience of America. And whether you were a Democrat or Republican, it made little difference in your acceptance of the basic notion that providing some level of social services was at least partly the responsibility of the government and thus ultimately the individual taxpayer: the ensuing debate focused on what and how much, not whether.

But before I say more, let me make it unmistakably clear what I am talking about: the liberalism I am lamenting is the old-time, John Fitzgerald Kennedy liberalism, the Dwight Eisenhower liberalism, the liberalism of Harry Truman and FDR and LBJ and Gerald Ford and yes even the begrudging liberalism of Richard Nixon, the kind of liberalism once defined by Webster: “ideals of individual esp. economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives.” This was the liberalism that re-unified America after the most fiercely contested political campaigns – the liberalism that gave every man, woman and child a sense of owning stock in the United States even if they did not own a single share in one of America’s corporations.

The liberalism for which this essay has become a eulogy thus bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pathology today’s mass media labels “liberalism”: the feces-hurling, GOP-office-trashing, war-monument-vandalizing hatefulness of the self-proclaimed “progressive” Left – a Left that in its pre-election frenzies reflected its cold indifference to America’s lower-income working families by proposing an expansion of health insurance that would have been available only if you as head-of-household were willing to submit self, mate and offspring to the ultimate humiliation of enslavement by the welfare bureaucracy. Not that I was especially surprised: the Left has dismissed the poor and near-poor as “hopelessly reactionary” ever since welfare mothers rejected women’s-liberation organizing efforts in the early 1970s. The Left’s ideological hostility to the American underclass was in fact one of the earliest symptoms of the New Miserliness.

But to see the New Miserliness in all its disturbing ugliness, we have to look at Enron – the Big Business equivalent of a consortium of economic Ted Bundys run amok. Enron, the victims of which are inescapably ruined, typifies the harshly divided society of exploiters and exploited that is arising in the wake of liberalism’s demise. And the Enron ethos is apparent everywhere: in an economy ever more propped up by the scab labor of illegal immigrants, in the ranks of the homeless that increase daily, and most of all in the climate of despair that now spreads even to seniors who suddenly find themselves deprived of the hard-earned comforts of retirement. All across the land it is Enron writ large: the workplace ever more 19th-Century-sweat-shop oppressive, the workforce ever more terrified and submissive, the whole people – all save the independently wealthy – ever more cowed by fears of outsourcing, downsizing, cutbacks and closures. Indeed we have become Enron Nation.

Contrary to rightist myth, it was not excessive tolerance that brought about liberalism’s terminal crisis of confidence, but rather its loss of faith in its own principles. Feminism, victim-identity cultism in general, self-hatred portrayed as humanistic moral equivalence, craven cowardice disguised as pacifism, pathologically greedy careerism – these are the forces that subverted liberalism inside the very Democratic Party that was once its primary home, the forces that eventually discredited liberalism in the streets of America’s cities, maimed it via welfare fraud and murdered it in the classrooms of America’s schools and colleges. Apart from feminism’s original (and once legitimate) claim of being the sole vehicle by which women might achieve equality before the law, none of these doctrines – especially the female-supremacist brand of fascism that eventually suppressed all of feminism’s originally libertarian impulses – would have prevailed if liberals had not abjectly surrendered their own beliefs during their post-Vietnam penance. That the liberals were needlessly contrite – that their rightful Southeast Asian cause had been undermined by the same bureaucratic intransigence that has crippled American foreign policy since the end of the Marshall Plan – makes their fate all the more ironic.

What sprang up to challenge liberalism’s place on the Left was an utterly bogus “progressivism” of false “diversity” that demanded not the keen critical thinking that had kept the variously named American liberal impulse alive since the time of Thomas Jefferson, but rather an absolute intellectual conformity and lockstep ideological discipline that, beyond the lunatic fringes, had hitherto been utterly alien to American political thinking. Apart from a compelling label stolen from the liberal Theodore Roosevelt, today’s “progressivism” is nothing more than a new brand of victim-identity fascism, with something promised everyone (save Caucasian males) by its self-centered ideology of “the personal is political”: an affirmative-action car in every garage and a quota-mongered chicken in every pot. In fact it is merely another form of Enron-ism, the exact equivalent of the Enron plutocracy’s sneering kleptomania: arrogant greed repackaged as “progressive” demands for “reparations.” As the ancient Greeks recognized, unlimited license for self-bribery does not ever further the cause of democracy or even public well-being.

But old-time liberalism sought no such license, which is precisely why it scored its notable triumphs. One of these was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which lifted the entire South out of devastating post-Civil-War impoverishment, turned it into a new El Dorado of economic development and did so without costing American taxpayers a single penny. But other liberal remedies were sometimes worse than the diseases they sought to cure – the deliberate transmogrification of welfare recipients into a vast permanent underclass of dependents is a classic example. Though this was not the failure of liberal ideals and ideas per se, but rather the inability of the enacting (upper-middle) class to transcend its own class-bred prejudice and greed. The greed-and-prejudice syndrome – and not some hypothetical unworkability of the liberal impulse to charity – is what created the entire welfare crisis. The welfare system became nothing more than a jobs program for a whole generation of parasitic feminists who in truth despised the very people they claimed to serve. The proof of this statement is in its associated numbers: from 1970 through 1990, welfare administrative costs skyrocketed by 5,390 percent – not a typo, and a sum based on the federal government's own data. Thus were the pretend-revolutionary bureaucrats feathering their own nests even as they slashed the value of welfare stipends and services by fully two-thirds. The real welfare queens weren't mythical Black Mammies living in crack hovels; they were ideologically arrogant matrifascist social-work bureaucrats ensconced in air-conditioned offices decorated with anti-male slogans. By claiming “the personal is political,” you can rationalize anything, including the depredations of the powerful against the powerless. Once again, Enron Nation.

A less-deliberate and thus somewhat more forgivable version of the selfsame blind greed has destroyed our labor unions. Unions are not irrelevant or unnecessary – far from it, given the epicentral kleptomania of Enron Nation – but in too many industries, the workers now totally identify with their Enron oppressors and thus fail to see that, via outsourcing, salary-reductions, pension give-backs and health-insurance cuts, their standard of living is being methodically reduced to the post-industrial equivalent of serfdom. Trickle-down economics work fine for people of the upper middle class and above, but for the poor nameless stiff just thrown off a production line (the same day his wife was ousted from her receptionist's job), the future is inexorably grim. Meanwhile, as we witnessed during the recent presidential election campaign, the victors speak of poverty as if it were nothing more than a repugnant statistic (the sort of distasteful thing one refrains from discussing in polite company), while the losers passionately lament the accelerating division of the United States into “two nations” even as they demonstrate their ultimate indifference to the poor by their failure to propose any solutions whatsoever, their pseudo-passion but a Shakespearean idiot’s tale, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Were liberalism the expression of some underlying collective American social conscience, as had I believed it to be when I began this work, it would surely have survived the double crises of Vietnam and the hostile advent of a venomously anti-intellectual New Left. In fact for a time liberalism did survive: witness the increasingly angry confrontations between the New Left’s ever-more-emotional agitators (“the personal is political”) and the meticulously intellectual Old Left leadership (“the function of government is to help people do collectively what they cannot do as individuals”). Such clashes were a major characteristic of leftist politics in the 1970s and the 1980s, and they set off conflicts that linger ephemerally even today. But what finally killed the Old Left (and thus destroyed American liberalism) was the death of the Soviet Union. Capitalism is like any other entrenched economic system: the only way to humanize it comes (just as Mao Zee Dong said) from the barrel of a gun. Liberalism's gun was the Red Army, and the secret but all-consuming paranoia of the Establishment that – unless proper concessions were made – America would someday rise up in a replay of Petrograd and Ten Days That Shook the World. Indeed it would not be unfair to say that it was the Red Army that made America what it was during most of the second half of the 20th Century. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of the Red Army vanished, and with it died any inclination of the politicians to listen to the liberal intellectuals’ pleas for meaningful reforms, much less any imperative for the private sector to allow their enactment. Predictably, soon afterward the liberal will toward reform died also – the Old Left silencing itself in despair (“why bother; no one cares”), the New Left abandoning any pretense of commitment to classically liberal ideals and quickly thereafter deteriorating into a miasma of self-centered totalitarian cults.

In truth the death of liberalism is a tragedy the dimensions of which will probably not be fully apparent for at least another decade or two – a profound loss not only for America but for the entire world.

In this context it is instructive to examine the evidence that is be gleaned from President Bill Clinton’s program of welfare reform. Here we see the real reason Democrat Clinton was able to throw millions off welfare, condemning them to what by all indications was a certain doom of Charles-Dickens-class poverty – lifetime minimum-wage employment without any fringe benefits and not one scintilla of hope for ever advancing out of the eventually lethal cesspool of poverty. That the reality of welfare reform proved to be far less deadly than the original projections is an aside: the point is that once the USSR was beaten, there was no threat of incipient revolution to reinforce liberal demands and proposals, much less prompt a receptive attitude toward them. Thus liberalism lost its imperative as a national-defense mechanism , became useless, and was shoved (by Clinton himself) into its grave. Like it or not, it is proof of Clinton’s Enron-Nation brilliance he recognized the post-USSR circumstances and acted upon them. Clinton understood that without the Red Army, America as we knew it – the America that at least pretended to care for its have-nots even as it provided lavishly for its have-plenties – is dead.

And the have-nots (like all rank-and-file Enron employees), have ever since been intimidated to silence. Nor is there anyone left who is willing to speak for them. What we are witnessing now, in the form of the Left’s endless post-election tantrums and hissies and its burgeoning threat of radical violence, is not at all what the Left and leftist-dominated mass media would have us believe – a predictable expression of post-John-Kerry proletarian anger. It is rather the rage of a disenfranchised elite: an elite that rode to power on liberal coat-tails without ever understanding what liberalism meant, squandered its inheritance on politicizing the personal, and now faces the same obsolescence that toppled its Old Left forebears. Victim-identity cults – a throwback to Naziism – are ultimately even less American than social-welfare programs. Welcome to Enron Nation, where the ubermenschen routinely sneer at those of us who live below the salt. All that distinguishes the Left’s contempt of the electorate from Enron’s contempt toward its customers is that Enron had something to sell – something the public desperately needed.

Of course the ideals of liberalism cannot die; they are at least as old as Rome. And in places like Cleveland, where outsourcing has left 35 percent of the workforce chronically unemployed, nothing but old-fashioned FDR-type liberalism can save the day; private industry simply does not have the resources. But even with needfulness of the Cleveland caliber, I can see nothing on the horizon that is likely to force liberalism back into public policy as a counterbalance to the bitter realities of Enron Nation – realities of which Cleveland is another prime example. This is because the Islamic enemy – unlike the enemies we faced during the most of the 20th Century – does not promise the boons of economic security (fascism) or political empowerment via the workplace (Marxism) to which we as a nation had no choice but to respond with betterment-pledges of our own. Instead the Islamic enemy offers only submission and extermination – realities that are literally too awful to contemplate – plus the likelihood of untold centuries of war. Hence there is no compulsion at all for America to concern herself with domestic socioeconomic betterment. Indeed, from a purely Darwinian perspective, the only logical national response to the Islamic threat is the creation of an ever-more-stratified, ever-more-unforgiving society – to which the increasingly feudal realities of Enron Nation are probably but the historical gateway. Our golden age is ended. Next will be the decades and perhaps centuries of Fortress America, like Roman Britain in the years of Arthur or perhaps like Ireland during the Norse Invasions: a harsh realm – but nevertheless an island of civilization in a raging sea of barbarism.

Posted by Loren at November 23, 2004 06:37 AM