Slouching Towards Gomorrah (53 page)

The world proves more resistant to public policy than regulators expect. People can be regulated but the expected results often do not appear. The regulator’s response is to demand more complete control of people and of the social process. Martin Mayer states the progression of regulation in the field of racial equality: “nondiscrimination became equal opportunity became affirmative action became goals became quotas became ‘equality of outcomes.’”
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Non-discrimination, as an ideal, was an objection to government interference in free social processes, but the results were not the expected millennium, and hence the movement, by stages, to equality of outcomes, which, as an ideal, is government objection to free social processes. The same progression may be traced in a variety of fields of regulation.

The gradual displacement of democratic government by bureaucratic government does not necessarily suggest that the relatively mild and well-intentioned, though insistent, reign of the bureaucracies will be stable. If it is true that bureaucratic egalitarianism suffocates the spirit, and weakens the morale and self-confidence of the community while it saps the strength of intermediate institutions, then it leaves society as an aggregation of individual particles ranged against the state. That kind of society—anxious, insecure, irritated, bored, the people an undifferentiated mass—may perhaps more easily be swept by mass movements joined to populist rhetoric and transcendental principles. Such movements create excitement and a sense of purpose; they
promise the restoration of the lost but longed-for sense of community. In a word, a society so reduced is more vulnerable to one or another form of authoritarianism.

The intellectual class contributes heavily to social guilt, insecurity, and egalitarian policies. It is impossible in short compass to give an adequate impression of the amount of intellectual energy, in both teaching and writing, that is devoted to attempts to prove free economic and social processes so defective that legal intervention is required. Much of the literature is itself so deficient, so palpably illogical and at variance with observable fact, that one must conclude it is the rationalization of prejudice rather than the explanation of positions arrived at by a process of intellection. The weight of this intellectual product upon legislative opinion in the middle and upper middle classes is enormous. The effect of it upon the disseminators of popular information and upon policy-makers in government is profound. That is why the alliance or, perhaps more accurately, the congruence of intellectual opinion with populist politics has such a profound impact upon the direction of our society.

Perversely enough, the spread of secondary and higher education, along with the extension of the suffrage, has reinforced these trends. The complexity of institutions and relationships in our society was never well understood, and the freedom and power of those institutions and relationships rested in no small measure on an unreasoned, awed acceptance of them. The spread of education, particularly university education, has served to decrease that awe without increasing, in the same proportions, the reality of understanding. We are left unhappily in between. Respect founded in ignorance is lost but is not fully replaced with respect founded in sophistication.

Democratic government requires something that democratic government has badly damaged in the past half century and continues to damage today—civil society. By that is meant the institutions that serve public (as well as private) purposes but are not government—neighborhoods, families, churches, and voluntary associations, to name the ones discussed by Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus in their influential pamphlet
To Empower People.
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What we are talking about are institutions that shape and maintain values; the bridge club is not on the list. These are also
institutions that assist people who need assistance, giving charity or advice or consolation or companionship.

One of the most important aspects of these institutions—Berger and Neuhaus call them “mediating structures”; Nisbet calls them “intermediate associations”—is that they stand as buffers between the individual and the state. They do that, in part, by performing functions for individuals that the state would otherwise perform. The difficulty is that, ever since the New Deal, the state has increasingly ousted the institutions of civil society and taken over their functions or controlled them.

It is proposed to attempt to restore these intermediate institutions, but it may be quite difficult to do so. In the first place, if government attempts the restoration, the result is likely to be more bureaucratic interference and hence damage to civil society. In the second place, churches are among the most important of the intermediate institutions and should lead in the restoration of other institutions and in value maintenance. The difficulty is that if government were to try to cooperate with or assist churches in their efforts, the courts, which have made a mess of the religion clauses of the Constitution, might well intervene to stop the effort.

In the end, however, all of these threats to the survival of democratic government derive from modern liberalism, which has now turned classical liberalism upside down with respect to both liberty and equality. “Traditional liberalism called for economic freedom within a framework of emotional and expressive restraint. The new liberalism discards expressive restraints but adds economic controls.”
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Rothman adds that the failure of Soviet-style economies has had little impact on this ideology. Nor have the obvious failures of American cultural libertinism and coerced equality had any impact on modern liberalism.

Modern liberalism, moreover, changes the nature of legislative opinion in the public at large. Decades of government delivery of favors have induced the belief that we are entitled to big government that coddles us. Thus it happens that the same persons who object to the cost of government and the ubiquity of bureaucratic regulation also frequently insist that government deal with still more problems. Much of the public demands of government the very programs whose implementation irritates them. We may, therefore, be creating conditions in which public policy is bound
to be perceived as consistently failing. Institutions are thought to be incompetent because they have been assigned tasks in which competence is not possible. The failure to understand that our demands are the source of our dissatisfactions thus generates a public mood that is not favorable to the survival of democratic government.

Modern liberals will continue to try to govern through the judiciary and the bureaucracies. To the degree they have already succeeded, democratic government has not survived. As the behavior of modern liberal politicians, the courts, and the bureaucrats demonstrates, they have no intention of relinquishing any of their power to the popular will.

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T
here is ample room for pessimism, but there may be room for hope as well. Analysis demonstrates that we continue slouching towards Gomorrah. We are well along the road to the moral chaos that is the end of radical individualism and the tyranny that is the goal of radical egalitarianism. Modern liberalism has corrupted our culture across the board.

The imperative question is whether there is any possibility of avoiding the condition of Gomorrah. What can halt or reverse the march of modern liberalism? What can keep us from reaching a servile condition punctuated by spasms of violence and eroticism?

The answer, if there is to be an answer, lies in the thought expressed by the French novelist Romain Rolland. He spoke of the pessimism of the intellect, but the optimism of the will. Our trends may not move inexorably to their logical conclusion in squalor. What mistaken, and sometimes ill-intentioned, people have done can perhaps be undone. Americans, having seen what modern liberalism has wrought, seem more likely than they were in the Sixties and early Seventies to mount an effective resistance and restore much of what has been lost. The issue is our will.

The outlook may seem unpromising when one considers that individualism was the distinctive mark of Western civilization
from the beginning. It enabled the West to surpass other civilizations in freedom and wealth. But individualism is valuable only when it is balanced by opposing forces. Now those forces—religion and morality, primarily—have been so weakened that individualism is breaking loose and becoming radical and destructive. Egalitarianism is more difficult to trace. It appears to be the product of envy. While envy is known to all cultures, it has often been held in check by repressive caste systems or social pressures that confine people to particular ranks in society. Individualism releases us from those bonds so that we can make our envy effective.

We are, furthermore, encumbered, perhaps permanently but certainly for the foreseeable future, with culturally powerful intellectual and artistic classes, who are well to the left of center and who press the culture always in that direction. They attack the existing order and their hostility cannot be placated even by the changes they demand. Appeasement leads only to further attacks. The problem, of course, is not merely the inclination of the intellectual classes, nor even the attitude of courts that increasingly accept nihilism as a constitutional value. Much of the general public must be brought back to the virtues we practiced not long ago. Many Americans, after all, have grown up and lived in a powerfully corrupting culture for thirty years.

We must, then, take seriously the possibility that perhaps nothing will be done to reverse the direction of our culture, that the degeneracy we see about us will only become worse. The impetus is now with modern liberalism. Writing well before the Sixties revealed the full power and the pathologies of today’s liberalism, Friedrich Hayek said that the decisive objection to any true conservatism is that “by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving…. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.”
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The task of conservatism, so understood, is merely to hold on as long as possible to the institutions and beliefs that liberalism attacks. In the contest between the two, just as in the contest between waves and rocks, there is no doubt which will ultimately prevail. In the 1960s, under the moral
assault of modern liberalism, what we had thought to be rocks turned out to be papier-mâché.

The passive conservatism that Hayek described is characteristic of those Republicans the press loves to describe as “moderates.” As former Senator Malcolm Wallop put it: “If the Democrats were to suggest burning down every building on Capitol Hill, the Republican moderates would say, ‘That’s too radical. Let’s do it one building at a time and stretch it out over three years.’” There is, however, a more aggressive conservatism, or traditionalism, and it is there that our salvation must be found, if it is to be found at all.

In our time, the opposing forces are ill-named. Conservatism does not merely conserve and liberalism has become illiberal. But the labels are so firmly attached that there is no point in trying to create new ones. We may examine the possibility that liberalism will decline of itself, a victim of its own incoherence, or whether it must be actively attacked and defeated by conservatism.

There are optimistic suggestions that modern liberalism may die a natural death. Professor Paul Hollander, for example, suggests that political correctness, almost a synonym for modern liberalism, is fading as the Sixties generation ages and begins to pass on to its reward.
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He notes that there are almost no prominent radicals under the age of fifty. There may, however, be an explanation of that fact that is not so cheerful. Radicals whose names we know today achieved celebrity status in the late Sixties and early Seventies by being conspicuously, and usually outrageously, opposed to traditional American values and institutions. Younger radicals today are less likely to achieve celebrity because they run the institutions they formerly tried to burn down. It may not be that radicalism is dying with the Sixties generation but that the Sixties generation has so completely triumphed that there are no longer occasions for acts of defiance or destruction that confer celebrity.