The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (11 page)

But this isn’t what the No Labelers are actually pushing. It is merely the argument they are using to sell what they really want. And what is that? To clear away principled objections to what they want to do. They proclaim that they are against ideology—and sometimes they are even sincere—but what they fail to take into account is that they too are ideologues, objectively and on their own terms. When you hear politicians proclaim that we must get “beyond” ideology, that we must lay down labels, what they are really saying is that you must unilaterally put aside all of your philosophical and principled objections and get with
their program
. You never hear a politician proclaim that we must “put aside labels,” “get past the partisan divide,” and “stop the ideological squabbling” and then say, with equal passion, “That’s why I am abandoning all of my principled positions and agreeing with you.”

When people say, “We all need to put away our labels,” what they really mean is, you must put away yours so that I may continue with my program unimpeded. It’s like Rosie O’Donnell’s gun control policy: Maybe you shouldn’t have a gun, but her kid’s bodyguard should.
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This is an ancient grift, a venerable con, a time-honored ruse used by ideologues to clear the field of opposition. Let us put aside all of our ideological priorities and accept my ideological priorities as fact and wisdom. Sometimes, as with John Dewey, this feint is carried out with impressive philosophical light shows. And sometimes it is pulled off with the sort of brazen effrontery (or plain old obtuseness) that is only possible when you take it for granted that your biggest fans are idiots.

In these cases I have in mind such creatures as Arianna Huffington, an intellectual huckster of the first order. Huffington has been playing this game for several years now. Whenever confronted with the fact that what she is spewing is little more than boilerplate leftism, she responds with a long-canned answer about how the left-right paradigm has outlived its usefulness. Here she is on CNN: “This whole framing as a right versus left debate—a liberal versus conservative debate—is completely flawed. It’s obsolete. It’s making it much harder for us to solve our problems as a country.”
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And here is Huffington ranting in one of the books with her name on it: “Someone please alert the media: not every issue fits into your cherished right/left paradigm. Indeed, that way of looking at the world is becoming less and less relevant—and more and more obsolete. And more and more dangerous.”

This might have been a teeny-weeny bit more compelling an argument if it didn’t appear in a left-wing screed of a book titled
Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness).
For Huffington the anti-ideologue, only one ideological perspective is too ideological.

What makes this a quintessential scam is that it uses the classic psychological trick mastered by all con men: making people feel dumb for being smart. Anyone who’s been hoodwinked knows what I’m talking about. Jack buys the magic beans because he’s beaten over the head with his own skepticism. The used-car salesman gets us to consider buying the special undercoating by making us feel dumb for being skeptical. “I can’t believe you’re falling for the whole ‘don’t get the extended warranty’ myth,” says the guy at the electronics store. The trick is to make you feel like you’re in that old
Saturday Night Live
“Bad Ideas Jeans” commercial.

The same goes for this refrain to get people to give up labels of
things they understand for ideas they disagree with. If we just call trial lawyers “community protection attorneys,” they’ll suddenly think they’re not ambulance chasers anymore. If we call taxes the “dues” we pay for the privilege of living in America, they won’t care how high we hike them. News flash: A nonrefundable deposit is not a deposit; it’s a fee. If I mug you, do I get to stay out of jail if I explain that all of your money was simply a mandatory nonrefundable deposit? Airlines do the same thing. The ticket’s only $100, but there’s a $750 one-time seating fee.

Since politicians—liberal, and all too often, conservative alike—are certain that their policies are correct, they figure voters have to be either too stupid to see the truth or they have to be tricked into accepting what they don’t believe. John Dewey begged the Socialist Party leadership to change their name but keep their policies. “The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer,” Dewey declared,

is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism. The prejudice against the name may be a regrettable prejudice but its influence is so powerful that it is much more reasonable to imagine all but the most dogmatic Socialists joining a new party than to imagine any considerable part of the American people going over to them.
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One person who took this advice, at least figuratively, is Van Jones, President Obama’s erstwhile “green jobs czar.” Jones explained in a 2005 interview that he was going to give up openly proselytizing Marxist-Leninism while still pursuing the ends: “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.” As historian Ronald Radosh notes, this was simply the latest effort of rebranding radical socialism so that it would be palatable to Americans, starting with Earl Browder and his claim that communism was simply “20th Century Americanism.”
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A great many liberals believe in the “special measures favored by the Socialists,” to borrow Dewey’s phrase. Indeed, in their own publications and conferences they routinely say they favor socialism, or “social democracy,” which is socialism. But the moment critics say liberals are socialists, it’s considered a slander. But remember, these liberals don’t
dislike
socialism. Even the ones who don’t embrace it fully themselves admire the social democracies of Europe and want to emulate, say, the Labor Party in Britain. What they object to is anyone who doesn’t like socialism calling them socialists.

When you ask them about this you get two answers. One is of the Deweyan variety. It goes something like this: “Labeling us socialists is just a scare tactic to frighten people from our agenda.” In other words, the people are too stupid. The other argument is that conservatives understand socialism to be synonymous with Stalinism or Maoism. (It most emphatically is not. Mao and Stalin were socialists. Not all socialists are Maoists or Stalinists.) In other words, liberals are smart enough to use the word socialist intelligently but conservatives aren’t.

Even if there were a lot of truth to the claim that conservatives don’t understand what socialism is (I think it’s a little true of some conservatives), both responses betray not only a staggering smugness but also a remarkable degree of insecurity. If liberals are so afraid of labels that they can’t take their eye off them for one minute, what does that say about their ideology? If socialists want to improve the status of socialism in America, I think they’ll have a tough road ahead of them. But the first place to start would be to own the label.

The same goes for the fake nonideologues of the No Labels crowd. Michael Bloomberg is a nannying, statist bully who, much like Napoleon, hurls around charges of ideological ensorcellment as a way to delegitimize political opponents he cannot defeat in open debate. He, like so many self-hating liberals, is convinced that there are millions upon millions of “socially liberal fiscal conservatives” out there in America for him to scoop up. The only problem is, they don’t exist. They’re the “jackalopes of American politics,” in the words of my friend Kate O’Beirne. The press keeps telling us they exist out there in huge numbers, but when you go looking for them, they refuse to emerge from the bushes. In fairness, a great many people do describe themselves as social liberals but fiscal conservatives. But social scientists identify these people by a pithier label: Democrats.

And yet we’re constantly told that if the Republicans could just give up their labels and their ideological obstreperousness, the jackalopes will rush to the GOP’s big tent. The truth is that a handful of rich lawyers in Priuses (
or is it Prii?) will drive up to the front of the tent along with a few hundred Andrew Sullivan knockoffs, and forty million social and economic conservatives will head for the exits.

But why do they even bother with the social liberal, fiscal conservative talk in the first place? Because liberals are embarrassed by their own label. That’s why they don’t believe in labels—because the labels describe them accurately.

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Though, ironically, the DMZ has been a boon for animals and wildlife.

4

DOGMA

T
he dawn of the Enlightenment, it was assured, spelled the end of the long night of dogma. Generations of superstition, tradition, and myth had accumulated like piles carpeting the Augean stables, proclaimed the
philosophes
. All that was necessary to liberate man was to clean out the muck and excrement. The war on dogma was intended to be both a collective endeavor and a personal one. Descartes, for instance, attempted to purge his mind of any and all notions, and then only to readmit those that he could personally verify with the tools of reason and logic. On a much broader landscape, the forces of Enlightenment set about to pry off the dead hand of the past so that mankind could escape the clutches of history and take flight on the wings of their ideals. As we’ve seen, perhaps even belabored, the pragmatists considered delegitimizing the authority of the past to be among their noblest endeavors.

Dogmas are ideals broken in by time and consecrated by experience. As such, what dogma lacks in inspiration it makes up for in sober reliability. But
before anyone can suggest a dogma be tossed into the dustbin of history as an unnecessary relic of the ways things once were, it must first be born as an ideal—new, exciting, revolutionary.

As ideals, they are intoxicating. They can be, as Dostoyevsky put it, the “fire in the minds of men.”
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The Russian revolutionaries, disciples of their Jacobin forebears, insisted that the latticework of dogma supporting czarism institutionalized arbitrary abuses of power, torture, and cruelty. And they were right! And the defenders of the regime responded that overthrowing the status quo would usher in an age of cruelty and barbarism the likes of which humanity had never seen. And they were right, too! The dogma of the czars killed thousands. But the dogmas of Marxism, dressed in the uniform of science and reason, slaughtered and enslaved hundreds of millions.

Hitler was obsessed with the need to throw off the dogmas of Christianity’s slave morality. “Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity,” Hitler insisted in 1941. “And that’s why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.” Der Führer was interested in scrubbing away old dogmas to replace them with ideals and “truth”:

Of course not all, or even remotely most, sworn enemies of dogma embrace genocidal ideals. But that is because they uncritically embrace an equally dogmatic aversion to mass murder. We create dogmas so that we may understand what is good and right in our everyday lives; hence the Greek root
of the word “dogma”: “seems good.” When the academics proclaim we must cleanse humanity of its dogmas, what they are in effect arguing is that we must shed humanity of its humanity.

“Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense… becoming more and more human,” writes G. K. Chesterton, the greatest defender of dogma properly understood in the English language. He continues:

When [man] drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
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Alas, this point has been lost on generations of brilliant turnips.

“Am I a criminal?” asked the late Jack Kevorkian. “The world knows I’m not a criminal. What are they trying to put me in jail for? You’ve lost common sense in this society because of religious fanaticism and dogma.”
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Franz Boas explained that the roots of his genius stemmed from the fact that his “parents had broken through the shackles of dogma.”
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“When people are the least sure,” John Kenneth Galbraith assured us, “they are often the most dogmatic.”
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“Nothing is more dangerous,” warned Stephen Jay Gould, “than a dogmatic worldview—nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”
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When longtime
New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis sought to sum up the lessons of his career he explained that the greatest enemy we face is “certainty”: “[C]ertainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft.”
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