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The Decline of the Liberal Faith (Tom Bethell, 3/23/2005, The Spectator)

LIBERALISM, AMERICAN-STYLE, is dying on the vine. I refer to the faith of liberalism -- the belief in "the redemptive transformation of human society through political means," as William Pfaff puts it in his new book, The Bullet's Song. Programmatic liberalism -- Social Security, Medicare, government schooling, government science, and the like -- will continue, and on an expansionist path. But as a faith, liberalism is set to decline in the years ahead. It is already doing so, perhaps more swiftly than we know. What is left of it is filled with darkness and pessimism: sex, abortion, euthanasia, and death.

Like Communism, liberalism was put into practice. Better for the idealists if it had remained a dream. But as anyone who has lived within a mile of a government-housing project will know, real-life liberalism is a menacing thing -- anti-utopia. Neighborhoods menaced by young men without fathers, their mothers financed by the state, should by now have disillusioned even the most progressive minded. So should inner-city state schools, where parents play little or no role, and perhaps don't even know where the school is.

Although its adherents don't like to discuss the point, the liberal faith has much in common with Communism, including shared roots in the Enlightenment. Human nature, philosophers once believed, could be remade in the classroom. People could be improved by "legislation alone," to quote the 18th-century philosophe Claude Helvetius. Influenced by John Locke, he was in turn studied by the founder of Russian Marxism, G.V. Plekhanov, who befriended Lenin in Zurich.

Liberalism and Communism both regarded egalitarianism as an ideal and both were godless; Communism openly so, liberalism more obscurely. Democracy admittedly distinguished between them, but the liberal admiration for an ideological judiciary shows that they, too, would like nothing more than a government that is free to impose its will by fiat (provided it is run by the right people).

The liberal faith fell with Communism. Both were based on extravagant optimism -- admittedly an unwarranted optimism. Human nature was on the verge of transformation. Nineteenth-century thinkers really believed that people would soon be so good that the boundaries of property would no longer be required. [...]

LIBERALISM IS DYING OF OLD AGE. It has gone on for too long and the world is changing. At its core, it was based on the idea that religious belief would give way to Enlightenment values. Faith would succumb to reason. Shorn of superstition, the human race would make its stately progress toward a brighter future. Well, that hasn't worked out.

You can hardly blame the Left for its apparent brain death--they put all their eggs in the basket of Reason and it hatched nought but monstrosities. It'll take them awhile to recover.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 19, 2005 12:00 AM