The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (10 page)

Hence, the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek’s is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey’s
was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue, “We’re All Individuals!”

If asked, I could offer a rousing indictment of Dewey’s political ideology. He didn’t like America very much, and his writings often have a whiff of anti-Americanism to them. He often seemed to think everyone was doing things better “over there,” and over there could mean just about anywhere not here. He was certainly convinced that America was backward because it remained embarrassingly committed to what he called “ragged individualism.” Indeed, as much as any one man could, he popularized the notion that “rights” are a fiction. “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology,” he insisted. Rights can only be properly understood as tools of “organized social control” via a “socialized economy.” Heck,
humans
are “nothing in themselves,” according to Dewey. Experts under the authority of the state must be tasked with
creating
worthwhile men.

He was both impressed and flattered by the Soviet Union’s great experiment, particularly the Soviets’ fondness for his educational philosophy. And while his views on Soviet Marxism were, uh, nuanced, he was constantly looking for an indigenous socialist (nonviolent) revolution in America. This gave him a soft spot for self-proclaimed visionaries, revolutionaries, and rabble-rousers. He never voted for FDR when Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party of America candidate, was on the ballot. He found himself on the same side of many debates with Father Charles Coughlin (who we will see again later). He wandered from one fad to another, each time convinced that he’d simply applied the clearest, most empirical intelligence to the latest, most pressing problem. “I seem to be unstable,” Dewey admitted in his old age, “chameleon-like, yielding one after another to many diverse and even incompatible influences; struggling to assimilate something from each and yet striving to carry it forward.”
²⁸
In other words, rather than bringing order to the blooming buzzing confusion of the universe, he was carried away by it like a bit of flotsam in the tide.

Which brings me to my primary objection to Dewey. It is not his ideology but his profoundly successful campaign to claim that he, along with his disciples and colleagues, had no ideology at all. He was an intellectual
con man. Over the course of a very long, hugely influential career in education, philosophy, and political journalism, in which he served as a weather vane for leftist fads of all sorts, he always pretended to be free of cant, dogma, and ideology, when in fact he was weighted down by all three. He railed against “isms” and mocked the “stupidity of habit bound minds” in his opponents. All the while he did everything he could to advance a thoroughly socialist agenda—in kindergarten classrooms and college lecture halls—that was violently at odds with the American tradition. “Dewey,” writes Tiffany Miller Jones, “arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding.”
²⁹

Part of his trick was being an absolutely terrible writer (a trick countless postmodern academics figured out and emulated). With considerable effort he could manage to be merely dry and boring. But his more substantial philosophical prose reads like a bunch of German words were dipped in maple syrup and dragged across a linty floor before being badly translated back into English by someone with a less firm grasp of idiom. Oddly, the denseness of his prose gave the impression of seriousness. Odder still, given that pragmatism seeks to make ideas “clear,” and yet a lead-lined bucket of mud is more transparent than most of Dewey’s work. Fortunately for him he didn’t always go by the pragmatic label. He kept a lot of fake IDs in his philosophical wallet: naturalism, instrumentalism, functualism, and of course, empiricism.

And it worked. Dewey and his cohorts pulled off one of the great intellectual cons of the twentieth—and now the twenty-first—century. Like the old saw about how the greatest trick the devil played is convincing the world he didn’t exist, American liberalism from the time of Dewey until the early 1960s managed to convince vast swaths of America that there was nothing ideological whatsoever to their worldview.

Cool Pragmatism

The 1960s, before the wackiness started, was the decade of John F. Kennedy’s “cool pragmatism.” JFK and his “whiz kids” were going to apply the latest scientific methods to settling political questions. They had punch cards and slide rules and everything! John Kenneth Galbraith’s
1958 book,
The Affluent Society
, convinced policy makers that there was plenty of money to fix America; all it would take would be the right policies. In his 1962 Yale commencement address President Kennedy explained that “political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution” of today’s challenges. “Most of the problems… that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems,” Kennedy insisted at a press conference the previous March. These problems “deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.”

The American public has soured on liberalism’s claims of pragmatism since the 1960s. People understand that it is an ideological approach, even if many liberal ideologues deny it. But they still play this game. They’re still convinced that their agenda is nonideological, focused simply on what works. This has put liberals in a terrible box. They desperately want to argue for ideological principles, but they’ve cut themselves off from the authority of those very same principles. Herbert Croly, founder of the flagship liberal journal
The New Republic
and author of the progressive bible,
The Promise of American Life
, responded to attacks that he and his magazine were supporting Mussolini too ardently by noting that
The
New Republic
was “not an exponent of liberal principles.” Indeed, “[i]f there are any abstract liberal principles, we do not know how to formulate them. Nor if they are formulated by others do we recognize their authority. Liberalism, as we understand it, is an activity.”
³⁰

In other words, Croly was saying, we liberals are just so smart we can figure out everything from scratch. This is what pragmatism has bequeathed liberalism: intellectual deracination. Liberalism has become bookless, in the words of the longtime publisher of
The New Republic
, Martin Peretz. E. J. Dionne writes that “liberals and Democrats tend not to view themselves as the inheritors of a grand tradition. Almost on principle, they are suspicious of such traditions, of too much theorizing, of linking themselves too much to the past.” Sure, they like to throw around words like “new progressive era” and “new New Deal,” but they are utterly unwilling—and unable—to be bound by the inconvenient baggage of those precedents.

The steel spine of progressivism, with its calls for “social control” and “economic dictatorship” has given way to the invertebrateness of contemporary liberalism, which stands for nothing but empirically driven
but unbounded do-goodery. Writers such as Michael Tomasky are forced to concede the amnesia of his fellow liberals while still insisting that liberalism is never wrong.
³¹
Why? Because according to Tomasky whenever liberalism goes off the tracks and turns into something bad or despotic, it’s because real liberals have abandoned the project.

The result is an ideology that doesn’t know why it upholds and cherishes its ideas. And if you don’t know why you cherish your ideas, you’re going to have a hard time recognizing when it’s time to move on to something else. As William Voegeli puts it in his penetrating book
Never Enough,
contemporary liberalism is plagued by a lack of a limiting principle. By pragmatism’s own metaphors, their philosophy is like an acid that dissolves dogmas. The problem with acid is that it never knows when to stop burning. That’s why liberals are constantly discovering new crises that require more government solutions. Suggesting to activist liberals that maybe some day they could just go home and get a real job elicits nothing but bewilderment or rage when you bring it up.

Some early progressives foresaw the danger of “China Syndrome” pragmatism—where the acid just keeps burning. “These people are talking the relativism which will ruin liberalism yet,” Charles Beard lamented of New Deal–era liberals. “Don’t they know that the means can make the ends? Don’t they realize that their method of arguing can justify anything? I wish we could find some way of getting rid of conservative morality without having these youngsters drop all morality.” Nearly twenty years earlier the progressive J. Allen Smith complained of Wilson-era progressives: “The real trouble with us reformers is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left.”

In fairness, today’s liberalism does have standards. But they all bend to the ultimate need, which is to justify the authority of liberalism.

3

NO LABELS

I
n 2010, a group of self-proclaimed freethinkers and raging moderates founded an organization called No Labels. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was the guiding personality behind the enterprise. While the group was new, the idea was old. As we’ve seen, it goes all the way back to another famously short egomaniac, Napoleon.

The official motto of No Labels is “Put the Labels Aside. Do What’s Best for America.” Or at least that’s one of them. For a group that doesn’t like labels, they sure have a lot of mottoes. Anyway, their mission statement goes on: “We are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America.” Elsewhere on their Web site the organization likens itself to the Korean Demilitarized Zone
(DMZ), which it describes as an area designed by North and South Koreans alike for “cool heads” to craft “elegant solutions.” Likewise, No Labels wants to be a “Depoliticized Zone” that achieves the same purpose.

It’s a metaphor that does not speak well of the No Labelers. The Korean DMZ is one of the most heavily mined and dangerous places in the world, with soldiers waiting for the slightest provocation to launch a devastating war, and where nothing fruitful in the affairs of men has happened for half a century.
^*
Moreover, the DMZ is the demarcation point between the fundamentally decent, prosperous, and democratic nation of South Korea and the fundamentally evil, impoverished, and totalitarian criminal regime of the Kims. But other than that it’s a boffo metaphor.

The No Labelers believe that labels get in the way of problem solving. Taken at its plainest meaning, this argument is incandescently stupid. “Label” is another word for “word(s).” And without words—i.e., language, communication, the sharing of complex ideas—we are back in the trees. I love people who say, “I don’t believe in labels,” as if labels are like unicorns or the tooth fairy or good flan.
Everything
we associate with civilization, decency, and progress depends on labels. If we cannot label something poisonous, people will die. When we label evil behavior with the word evil, we signal to the world that that is something you should not do. If a criminal rejects the label “murderer,” that doesn’t make him any less of one. But if we accept that murder is just a meaningless label we go a long way toward being a party to murder. If you cannot understand why having a blanket policy against labels is such a terrible idea, I urge you to march into your kitchen and peel the wrappers off all of your cleaning supplies, prescription drugs, and canned goods. Natural selection will take care of the rest in due time.

Now of course this is not what Bloomberg and his allies mean when they say they are against labels. What they mean is something supposedly much more sophisticated. The labels they oppose are things like socialist or Nazi or left wing and right wing. What they don’t like about these terms is that they get in the way of pragmatic problem-solving.

And, to be sure, they have a point. Hurling undeserved epithets at people is not all that helpful or constructive. As William Galston and
David Frum, two in-house intellectuals of the No Labels “movement,” write in the
Washington Post
: “[T]he political system doesn’t work if politicians treat members of the other party as enemies to be destroyed. Labeling legitimate policy differences as ‘socialist’ or ‘racist’ undermines democratic discourse.”
¹

Here we get closer to the heart of things. The No Labelers’ real problem, it seems, is not with labels per se, but with lying, or more specifically, with defamation. If I call you a racist for opposing reparations for slavery or for opposing statehood for Washington, D.C., my offense is not in using the word racist but for using it inaccurately. Similarly, my sins may be numerous if I call you a Nazi for wanting to take away the perks of public employee unions, but the fact that I used the word is of no great import. The fact that I used it unfairly is. However, if you propose restoring slavery because blacks are unworthy of citizenship and I call you a racist, I’ve done nothing wrong at all. Indeed, I should be applauded for committing the simple yet noble act of telling the truth. And if you spend your days extolling Adolf Hitler and waxing lyrical about the benefits of rounding up and liquidating the Jews, what decent person will object if I call you a Nazi?