Liberal's Deep Freeze

As an ideological liberal since I first voted for John Kennedy in 1960, and until I absent mindedly voted for Al Gore in 2000 (mea maxima culpa), I have spent a good deal of time trying to understand how I could have been so wrong for so long.

In a Tech Central Station piece called “Stuck on 1968” Arnold Kling examined the “stuck on stupid” phenomenon that has afflicted most liberals and Democrats since their golden age of the 1960s. Kling posits that the Conventional Wisdom among well-educated liberals in 1968 included the following beliefs:

1. Anti-Communism was a greater menace than Communism.

2. The planet could not possibly support the population increases that would take place by the end of the twentieth century.

3. Conservatives stood in the way of progress for minorities.

4. Government programs were the best way to lift people out of poverty.

5. What underdeveloped countries needed were large capital investments, financed by foreign aid from the rich countries.

6. Inflation was a cost-push phenomenon, requiring government intervention in wage and price setting.

Liberal’s confidence in these beliefs at that time was so strong that they sincerely believed that Anyone who is not a liberal must be incorrigibly stupid.

Given the state of the world in the 1960s, it is understandable that an intelligent person might have believed in the Conventional Wisdom at that time. Since then, however, we have seen every one of these tenets of liberal faith dashed on the anvil of history. Yet we find that elements of the liberal myth persist in the Democratic Party to this day and amount to an irrational denial of reality.

Since the 1960s, we have seen:

A. The collapse of Soviet Communism, revealing that the system did much broader and deeper damage than most people realized. (eg. note the huge gap between the two Koreas)

B. The mass starvation predicted by Erlich and other liberal thinkers did not occur and instead it is now believed that population is The Ultimate Resource.

C. After fighting to pass Civil Rights legislation, liberals now oppose policies that might really help minorities, such as school vouchers to release them from the obligation to attend failed public schools.

D. Foreign aid has been found to be a tool used by tyrants to entrench their corrupt governments.

E. Paul Samuelson’s liberal ideas that the economy could be fine tuned by government to reduce the unemployment rate, with a trade-off of higher inflation, in turn curbed by government action to control prices and wages, have been completely abandoned by all the free world economies.

Liberals seem to be stuck in a 1960s ideological deep freeze pessimistic about the well being of Americans and the environment; opposed to corporations and free markets; and against trusting people to make their own decisions on schools, health care and retirement.

Perhaps the problem is that liberals are “godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts” as Dave Barry put it. Perhaps.

Or perhaps they just need to grow up.