Punitive Liberalism

The core of the American creed involves the “ideals of the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice and fair opportunity.” (Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1944) The gap between these ideals and American reality was gradually closed over the nearly two centuries from the founding until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - that finally guaranteed equal rights for all Americans.

Yet, no sooner had the ink dried, than black leaders stopped demanding equal rights and began demanding government programs to provide material benefits to blacks as a distinct racial group. And before long the courts overrode the explicit text of the Civil Rights Act (that it is unlawful for an employer “to discriminate against any individual … because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex or national origin”) in order to allow preferences in hiring and promotion for blacks and women.

In my recent posts on the Civil Rights Movement (3/4/06 – 3/7/06) it was evident that the rise of the welfare state was accompanied by a decline in social morality that Robert Bork called Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Why did the American government, the courts, and social institutions enable the betrayal of equality demanded in the American creed and the Civil Rights Act, coupled with the deleterious effects of the ensuing welfare state?

In his eye-opening book Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel P. Huntington points to a pervasive effort by elites in government, academia, the media and the professions to promote measures consciously designed to weaken America’s cultural and creedal identities. “These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.” Huntington sees many causes for this perverse behavior, among the most important being a liberal feeling of “sympathy and guilt concerning those whom they saw as the victims of exclusion, discrimination and oppression.”

The history of the Democratic Party since the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King illustrates the effects of guilty feelings. “The Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called ‘Punitive Liberalism.’ According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. The Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future… and that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.”

“In many ways, Jimmy Carter and his leading appointees were the perfect exemplars of Punitive Liberalism. Given their sour outlook, it is no wonder that their leadership generated a sense of malaise among the American people. During the 1970s an impressive network of interest groups was developed to promote and take advantage of this sense of historical guilt. These included the various feminist and civil rights groups who pressed for affirmative action, quotas, and other policies to compensate women and minorities for past mistreatment; the welfare rights organizations who claimed that welfare and various poverty programs were entitlements or, even better, reparations that were owed to the poor as compensation for similar mistreatment; the environmental groups who pressed for ever more stringent regulations on business; and the various human rights and disarmament groups who pressed the government to punish or disassociate the United States from allies who were said to violate human rights.” (James Piereson, “Punitive Liberalism: What Reagan Vanquished,” The Weekly Standard, 6/28/04)

The special interest groups shunned the competitive business world and instead took up residence in the educational system, from the elite universities to the grade schools, in government bureaucracies and the media. And these groups took up influential roles in the Democratic Party and in the Congress, from which outposts they “promoted and elaborated upon the finer points of Punitive Liberalism.” How shall we overcome?