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The
problem with Democrats
Liberals may be well-meaning, but that is about all they are
by PAUL D. MILLER
Opinions Editor
I am rabid environmentalist and care passionately about the
poor. Yet
I would sooner pull out a constitutionally protected handgun
and
shoot myself while chain smoking, eating red meat, and
conducting a
painful experiment on a cute bunny rabbit than become a
Democrat.
Here is why I am not a liberal:
Liberalism is simplistic. Whenever there is a problem,
liberals
define it as a tragedy of the commons or an example of the
private
sector under providing public goods, or make it an issue of
rights.
The solution, of course, is to make it government's job to
provide
the good or protect the newly minted right.
No doubt a President Gore would soon grace us with a right
to the
internet or make self-confidence a public good which needs
to be
provided by federal education standards.
The Left is short-sighted. It wants to fund a behemoth
welfare state
at home while crusading and gallivanting about the globe in
defense
of American ideology abroad. The ever-increasing financial
demands of
their utopian vision will suck up all the surplus from our
miracle
market, increase the yearly interest payments on the debt,
and
necessitate more taxes.
In the long term, the liberal vision is only sustainable if
they
succeed in raising the already immorally large tax burden.
Yes,
immoral. Coercively appropriating the fruits of up to a
third or even
a half of someone's labor is alienating and dehumanizes the
process
of work and the worker. Especially when done to fund
programs that
deliberately benefit someone else. Especially when justified
as our
obligation to helping our community; as if the national,
rather than
the local community was the locus of our communal
obligation.
Liberal rhetoric is too shrill. If liberalism has an answer
to
poverty and you have a different one, you are labeled
`anti-poor
people'. If liberalism wants to tax pollution but you think
the rate
is too high, you are personally responsible for the deaths
of 6,484
small children somehow directly attributable to that
specific
pollutant. "It's like you pulled the trigger yourself, man."
Liberalism defines every issue around saving lives and
enhancing
liberty: it isn't dramatic or activist enough to say that we
are
simply reducing risks and preserving stability.
Liberalism is hypersensitive, waging an unwinnable eternal
revolution
against the smallest evil. Liberal causes these days are
puny: let us
make sure we use `she' for a hypothetical person instead of
always
using `he'; let us narrow the income gap between the richest
country's rich people and the richest country's poor people
(the
richest poor in the world); let us give everyone a right not
to be
subject to a certain level of pollution (lowering my risk of
cancer
from one in a million to one in two million).
Liberals will never believe that America is doing okay; they
are the
modern day muckrakers who insist on spoiling the party for
everyone
because one person doesn't like the music.
The left is naïve. Liberals act indignantly shocked to find
injustice, poverty, hypocrisy, or oppression. There is
really nothing
new about those evils at all. "It is the 20th Century, for
crying out
loud!" The most barbaric century yet, they seem to forget.
"This
isn't the Middle Ages!" As if that was the only or the worst
age of
ignorance, vice, and malice.
Instead of heeding the historical truth that humans and
their
institutions in every age will always find ways to
perpetuate evil,
liberals blindly listen to the music of political
scientists,
economists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists
who lie
and say they have discovered the laws of human behavior, and
that
with the right institutional manipulation we can cancel out
our vices
and live in harmony forever.
Which brings us to the worst crime of liberal ideology. The
left
behaves as if the human spirit did not exist. Liberals and
their
social scientists treat humans like object of the scientific
method:
predictable, responding to stimuli like animals, obeying
laws.
Liberals believe that hard circumstances like poverty,
discrimination, or oppression cause people to believe and
behave in
certain ways, with little or no choice of their own. They do
not
expect people to rise above their circumstances or live
above their
material reality.
The tragic consequence is that liberal programs treat people
like
products of their material reality: and when you treat a
person a
certain way, over time they begin to believe that is all
they are.
Liberals turn a blind eye to the system of power and
domination that
their programs often unintentionally create.
The conservative belief that people should participate in
helping
themselves is founded on the belief that they can help
themselves. If
you treat people like they have the capacity to change, they
will
begin to believe they can do so. Conservatism is
fundamentally more
respectful of the dignity of human beings. Liberals do not
believe
people have the ability to chose their response to their
environment.
Conservatism, not liberalism, is the ideology of choice.
I believe liberals are sincere and earnest (which is more
than most
conservatives will concede). Indeed, that earnestness is
what gives
them their strength over conservatives: they really are more
ready
and willing to attack injustice and oppression. Their
problem is that
they act so fast that they cause so many unintended
consequences
which could bring down the whole social project and which
offend most
everyone else in the meantime.
Their victories are pyrrhic and their zeal is
fundamentalist, two
very undesirable traits in an ideology.
Let me know your thoughts.
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