Attacks on Liberalism

Liberalism with its principles of free inquiry and discourse, individual liberty, tolerance, economic freedom, reliance on reason and science,  and strict limits on the state has always had its enemies.  The hard leftists have never accepted its ideas.  Their objectives have always been authoritarian or totalitarian. However in this country with the exception of overt communists, they usually have tended to dissemble their real desires.  The Catholic Church historically condemned and opposed liberalism, though less in America than in Europe and less in the years after World War II than before.  Advocates of  tribalism whether in the form of populist nationalism , racial identity politics,  or both (as in the case of the Nazis) have generally been antagonistic to liberal ideas  - though again more carefully and less overtly in America than in some other places.  

The 20^th Century provided such obvious examples of the dangers and failures of illiberal attitudes and politics and the success and benefits of liberal ones  that  around the turn of the millennium many thought the point had been made so clearly that the controversies were effectively over. Almost two decades later we can see that was completely wrong.

In the United States leftist authoritarians are behaving more boldly and having more success at colleges and universities than at any time since at least the 1970s.  Beyond the campuses it is now commonplace for leftists to oppose free speech and claim the First Amendment does not apply to expressions of opinions or ideas they dislike.  Socialism, or at least a vaguely imagined something  (often a fascist something) resembling it, is now so popular among some people that one might think that  the 20^th Century never happened or that present day examples such as Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea do not exist.

While  the Catholic church never completely abandoned its hostility to liberalism, attacks whether  from the pope, other clergy, or  the laity  seem more common and less hedged than one would have seen a few years ago. The political opinions of the present pope are well known.  There is a lively discussion at present among some Catholic writers over whether the entire liberal enterprise of the last two hundred and fifty years was a mistake, and whether it is time for the church to abandon any pretense of getting along with it and return vigorously to its forthrightly authoritarian past. In an extreme example one can read about a  serious, contemporary  debate among  priests and other Catholics over whether kidnapping Jewish children someone had  baptized without the knowledge of  their parents  - as a pope did as recently as in the 19^th Century -  was and is a proper or even necessary practice.  None of this says anything about   any particular American Catholic,  but it is there.

The tribalism in American politics seems to be getting worse.   Donald Trump based much of his campaign for the nomination of his party on a populist appeal blaming foreigners, competition from foreigners, and immigration by foreigners for much of what was wrong in the country. It worked well enough to help him get the nomination over several more qualified  and experienced opponents. (I think it mattered less in the general election where there were many differences between the candidates in policies and desires and where he faced a very unlikable opponent.)   On the other side Democrats have increased the amount of their crude  identity politicking  with its resentment based,  populist appeals to black and Hispanic Americans, Muslims  and various others with whom they think it might work.  

There is a cliché about sharks being drawn to blood in water.  It seems that a lot of liberalism’s various enemies think they are smelling blood these days.  That makes it a particularly good time for people to stand up for it.

Communist Governments and the American Media

People make wrong or foolish honest mistakes in judgement all the time. Accepting this fact can go a long way to help one from being drawn  into believing improbable or crazy conspiracy theories. Journalists and broadcasters in the traditional media deserve the same benefits of the doubt as others. However when the same people and organizations do the same things repeatedly and consistently over multiple decades, it is fair to consider that something besides coincidence or honest error is at work.

In the 1930’s while Stalin’s government was murdering millions of  Russians and other residents of the Soviet Union, starving millions of Ukrainians to death in a government created famine, carrying out  bloody purges throughout the country, and  conducting show trials where victims were tortured into confessing to often absurdly improbable or impossible crimes and then murdered, Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer prize for reporting that all was well in the workers’ paradise.  Duranty’s actions were far from unusual.  Whitewashing and even praising  the Soviet tyranny was commonplace among  even mildly leftist writers and journalists of the time.  A  good many agreed with the famous statement  that in seeing the Soviet Union, one had seen the future, and it worked. During  World War II journalists generally ignored both the nature  of the Soviet government and its de facto alliance with Nazi Germany  during the period of the nonaggression pact and presented the Soviets as firm allies of the United States in the struggle of free people against Nazism, when in fact they were more co-belligerents fighting the Nazis for their own reasons (which had nothing to do with anyone’s freedom) and did not participate in joint operations with American  and British forces.

In the immediate postwar years journalists routinely presented Mao and the Chinese Communists as harmless reformers who were to be preferred to the Chinese nationalists and certainly nothing to worry about.  Mao’s  later attacking American forces in Korea and killing and enslaving millions of Chinese did not prevent American journalists from treating him and his little red book as something cool and admirable in the 1960s.  The 1950s saw a media infatuated with Fidel Castro  who was also labeled as a benign reformer, and the sixties gave us the same with Ho Chi Minh. In both of these cases the natures of the regime was misrepresented, and the victims were ignored.  In the 1970s many in the media  promoted various communist or pro-Soviet dictators and governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and ignored or excused their crimes   - including even the atrocities of Pol Pot’s government in Cambodia which some in the press blamed on the United States because of its participation in the war in Vietnam .  During all this time there were continuing efforts to establish a false moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union and to sell the notion that the Soviet empire was prosperous,  successful, well managed, and invincible.

A good percentage of the people in the traditional media either were AWOL or sided at least partially with the Soviets against Reagan in the last phase of the Cold War in the 1980s. It was common to present Reagan as a dangerous warmonger or unrealistic dreamer who did not understand that the Soviets could not be beaten and to give laudatory coverage to advocates for unilateral disarmament  - meaning at that  time advocates for Soviet victory.  When the Cold War was won, Eastern Europe liberated, and the Soviet Empire and the  threat of nuclear war gone,  the line was that Reagan’s policies had nothing to do with it,  that Gorbachev just decided to give up and surrender because he was a nice guy, and the whole thing was not a big deal anyway and certainly nothing to feel “triumphant” about.  

In more recent  times, after a brief and perhaps embarrassed hiatus in the early 1990s, many in the traditional media renewed their affectionate interest in Castro’s government in Cuba and found much to admire and excuse in Chavez’s government in Venezuela and other leftist despotisms around the world.  This sort of  thing along with a revisionism on  and willful forgetting of the failures and crimes of communism in the 20^th Century continued throughout the Bush and Obama years.  Now in the last few days we have seen people from CNN, the New York Times and other outfits fawning over a representative of North Korea’s monstrous communist dictatorship.

There may not be a conspiracy  here, but there clearly is a pattern, one of a fondness or soft spot for communist ideas and tyrannies.   It happens too consistently to dismiss as accidental without considering that it might be something else.  

Seeing Threats from the Wrong Direction

A while back I saw an article about something called the Benedictine option and learned it was a topic of fairly wide discussion. As I understand it, the option is the notion that  Christians are or will be at risk in an increasingly secular world and should form or retreat into tight local communities patterned at least somewhat after the monasticism of the Middle Ages to protect themselves and survive.  That strikes me as at least odd if not  paranoid and perhaps  a result of the  thread of  sadomasochistic fascination with or even yen for persecution and abuse that runs through the history and legends of Christianity in general and the Catholic church in particular. 

There is evidence people overall in  America are becoming more secular in their viewpoints. However that does not put  Christianity or Christians  in danger.  Secular people can  disagree with or disapprove of Christian doctrine and dogmas without being threatening or hostile  to Christians.  (Some American  leftists are vigorously hostile to American  Christians, but this is less an attack on the religion as such than an instance of a general hostility to things seen as typically American – whether free speech, cool cars and trucks,  hamburgers and cokes, pioneers and cowboys,  George Washington, suburban homes,  the Declaration and the Constitution, self-reliance,  SUVs, Thomas Edison, displaying the flag, can-do and go-getter attitudes, guns for self defense, ornery and defiant skepticism about officials and politicians, or something else too American for them. The crush on Islam many on the left have developed  is evidence for this.  It seems likely that if a majority of the citizens of the country they despise practiced Buddhism, they would  be attacking  Buddhists while ignoring Christians.)

In this country people with different opinions on religion have been and are able to  get along tolerantly with each other. Many secular people see benefits in religion. Some agree with Benjamin Franklin that while the idea of an individual providence is false, it serves a useful purpose in leading people without the interest or ability for serious thinking on matters of ethics to behave better than they would otherwise.  Many appreciate the teachings of the churches on things such as respecting the lives and property of others and taking care of one’s family.  Most, as far as I can tell, are content to mind their own business and  have no interest in forcing their opinions on others or harming Christians.  An increasingly secular society  is no reason for Christians to be frightened and certainly no reason for them to head for the hills.

There is a threat  facing Americans, but it is political rather than religious in nature. The hard leftists are a threat to the lives and liberty of all of us - Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, or whatever. They have made that clear explicitly, and they should be taken seriously.  In response,  to return to Franklin,  we  should all hang together –whatever our ideas on religion - to avoid being hanged separately.