Liberal Intellectualism At Its Terminus

     I have just one short piece today, as my other obligations are more pressing than usual and the “news” offers hardly anything new.

     A few short years ago, conservative commentators started calling the American Left “bookless:” a reference to the dearth of contemporary intellectual efforts (not to say achievements) by liberal thinkers and writers. The Left, the reasoning ran, had become unable to advance intellectually. Its tenets, long dubious under rational examination, had been refuted by history. Yet it was unwilling to abandon those tenets, which effectively crippled its powers of reasoning.

     This is easy to follow. Clearly, he who clings to an idea that’s been proved false will have a hard time evolving new ideas that don’t come “pre-refuted.” But that does raise a question: why would anyone cling to a provably false idea?

     The late Don LaVoie promulgated the idea that left-liberal thinking is moored to “sunk capital:” i.e., that those refuted tenets are so intimately married to other elements in the leftist psyche that they cannot be extracted. The phrase is pretty but as an answer it fails to satisfy. Why does a mind become so firmly attached to a set of ideas that they become unquestionable even as the evidence accumulates that they’re incorrect? What’s the mechanism?

     Perhaps we don’t yet know enough about the human mind to deduce a complete answer. But we do know this: when a chain of impeccably sound reasoning leads irreversibly to an incorrect conclusion, the fault lies in the premises. One or more of the premises must be wrong.

     Note that “incorrect” is not synonymous with “absurd.” To be called “absurd,” an idea need merely challenge existing preconceptions. At one time, it was deemed absurd to imagine that the Earth is any shape but flat. Many an “absurd” thesis has been demonstrated to be correct – and the preconceptions that opposed it incorrect – once the means to experiment – e.g., sailing ships that could circumnavigate the globe – became available.

     A good premise, serviceable and sturdy, must be grounded in a great deal of observation. In other words, it must arise from our common experience of the world, preferably over a long period of time. But left-liberal premises aren’t of that sort. Consider a few typical ones:

• The rich get rich at the poor’s expense.
• Under-representation indicates conscious discrimination.
• Education can be divorced from moral and ethical values.
• Benevolently intended government action cannot cause harm.

     Those propositions aren’t consistent with the evidence of history. Rather, they’re expressions of desire: wishful thinking. No matter how deeply felt those desires are – and I’m certain that many Americans who incline to the Left are wholly, benevolently sincere about their inclinations – the observable facts have always militated against them.

     There’s no small amount of substance to the contention that left-liberalism is really a species of religious faith. However, to endure over time, a religion must accommodate itself to discoveries of fact; religions that have failed to do so have been abandoned. This left-liberalism has failed to do, preferring instead to buttress its political stature with campaigns founded on envy, class division, and the fomenting of interracial and inter-ethnic distrust and hatred.

     There’s a considerable irony here. Left-liberals have made a habit of condemning the intrusion of religious convictions into public policy. Yet the religious convictions of American Christians, at least, are not disprovable, whereas the tenets of left-liberalism are demonstrably false.

     It seems inescapable that the tenets of left-liberalism, if unsound by the rules of evidence, must therefore meet some emotional need in him who cleaves doggedly to them. Perhaps they allow him to see himself as a “good person.” Or perhaps he maintains them because those he admires (and with whom he wants to associate) maintain them. Whatever the binding, it’s outside the domain of evidence and logic.

     If there’s a moral to this story, it would be the old saw – multiply attributed, including to Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Swift, and G. K. Chesterton – that “You cannot reason a man out of what he never reasoned himself into.” If left-liberalism in its entirety is founded upon already-refuted premises that left-liberals will not abandon, reasoned argument against its positions becomes pointless. Indeed, it was probably pointless a century ago...not that the pointlessness of an argument has ever deterred persons who have one to advance.

Quickies: Cart And Horse

     First, one of Bill Whittle’s very best video presentations:

     Now, a question:

Are any of those cities destroyed by decades of uninterrupted Democrat rule not majority-black?

     I think the answer is no, and I want to know which characteristic – Democrat rule or massive black influx – is the cause of the other.

     (A public-service message from the Web’s favorite racist.)

A Tale Of Two Totalitarianisms

The esteemed Ace of Spades makes a striking observation this morning:

One problem with liberalism has always been that those promoting it are, and largely have been, cowards.

The creed is not inherently cowardly; in fact, most of it is brave....But a lot of the people championing it are morally uncertain and physically weak types. This has caused liberalism to be associated in the world with vacillation, compromise, and cowardice.

I knew someone who once told me he despised liberals as cowards. So you're conservative? I asked.

"No," he replied. "Communist."

And that is the knock on liberalism. Other creeds are dark, stupid, and murderous, but they appeal to young men because they seem to be espoused by strong men, rough men, ready men.

And liberalism, meanwhile, is mostly a collection of pious platitudes mouthed by sissies.

There is some justice in this. Moreover, it helps to illuminate an important commonality between the two most important totalitarian creeds of our time: Islam and Left-liberalism.

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It’s a common observation that left-liberals, for all their pieties about “helping the poor,” do very little of it personally. They prefer to vote for politicians who will then enact programs – preferably federal programs, so that no one can escape – which will result in armies of bureaucrats spending oceans of tax dollars, the greater part of which will pay the salaries of “compassionate” types like themselves and a piddling fraction of which will become benefits to the officially recognized “poor.” That’s left-liberal “charity:” the sort that declines to dirty the left-liberal’s own hands or distract him from his enjoyment of the Chardonnay and Brie.

As anyone with three functioning brain cells knows, in practice this resolves to a program of totalitarian control of just about everything in the name of “compassion,” “social justice,” or what-have-you. My term for this is social fascism: the drive toward a totalitarian State that has first claim on all things, and regulates everything down to the smallest detail, under a rationale of “good intentions.” (Jonah Goldberg calls it Liberal Fascism, which has more immediate political application.)

Left-liberalism / social-fascism is currently on the skids with Americans, owing to their disgust with the current regime. (What we can and will do about it remains uncertain.) However, the ironclad will that animates its allegiants cannot be denied. They are determined to have their way; they will stop at nothing. They regard no strategy and no tactic as out of bounds.

I can’t cite many overt expressions of such an unbounded, absolutely determined political will. However, I can cite one:

In the Nazi leadership’s view, Rauschning (a one-time friend of Hitler’s) reports, “the more inconsistent and irrational is their doctrine, the better….[E]verything that might have gone to the making up of a systematic, logically conceived doctrine is dismissed as a trifle, with sovereign contempt.” “To all doubts and questions,” writes Rosenberg, “the new man of the first German empire has only one answer: Nevertheless, I will!” [From Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels]

Are left-liberal policies inconsistent? Irrational? Left-liberals don’t care any more than the Nazis did. They know what’s best for us, and we’re damned well going to swallow it...at the point of a gun, if need be.

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If Islam’s political culture isn’t yet plain to you, Gentle Reader, you must have skipped a few of the essays here. Islam is inseparable from its political program, and that program is totalitarian:

“Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! These are hundreds of other psalms and Hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.” – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

"The minarets are our bayonets; the domes are our helmets. Mosques are our barracks, the believers are soldiers. This holy army guards my religion. Almighty Our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom." -- Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey

The totalitarian mindset must be coupled to absolute will. People resist being ordered around, which is why the myrmidons of the State carry guns and forbid us to have them. (Note how many federal bureaucracies have armed themselves. Note how military hardware has been distributed to local police forces nationwide. And note how Obama’s Department of Justice has descended to the use of sub-legal means to throttle the supply of firearms and ammunition to private citizens. Do you really think that’s coincidence?) So to enforce a totalitarian program, the State must be willing to kill until the survivors have all submitted to its yoke: a program that requires the firmest will of all.

In that regard Islam is exactly the same:

The Qur’an contains detailed instructions and examples of how to meet unbelievers. The first instruction is that they should be called to Islam; in fact, the Qur’an says you cannot wage war against unbelievers until you have preached to them. The second instruction is that if they do not convert to Islam, then, they must be fought. The third instruction is that if they surrender, or convert, then you must stop waging war. The final instruction is that if they do not convert or surrender, then they must be killed. This is the optimum route for Islamist expansion: A tidal wave of war, subjugation and conversion.

While we were in the Mosque, the Prophet came out and said, "Let us go to the Jews" We went out till we reached Bait-ul-Midras. He said to them, "If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle, and I want to expel you from this land. So, if anyone amongst you owns some property, he is permitted to sell it, otherwise you should know that the Earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle." [ Sahih Bukhari, 53:392]

Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God's religion reigns supreme. [The Koran, Sura 2, verse 193]

The sole difference between the Islamic mindset and that of the Leftist lies in their professed intentions. Their absolute determination to rule in all things – to compel, prohibit, and expropriate without limit – is utterly the same.

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If you need a grace note for this comparison of today’s two foremost totalitarian creeds, consider how utterly ruthless both of them are toward critics. Islam decrees death for those who dare even to differ with its dictates. Left-liberals, currently without the legal authority to silence dissenters by force, use extra-legal means: vandalism, extortion, intimidation, hackery, slander, and whatever other tools are ready to hand. That they do so under a cloak of self-righteousness doesn’t alter the totalitarian will that powers their tactics.

A Christian will reject Islamic theology reflexively, as Islam denies the divinity of Jesus. Yet that same Christian might find some of the policies of left-liberalism appealing entirely on the basis of their supposed intentions. Yet should he press a left-liberal espouser of such a policy for its record in practice, or ask what evidence would cause the left-liberal to doubt the soundness of his policy, he’ll be answered with a flood vituperation likely to exceed his expectations. Given the proliferation of such tactics, is it reasonable to doubt that the left-liberal would resort to force, were he able to get away with it?

And given all the above, why would any man of good will award one iota more respect to either of these totalitarian creeds than to the other?

Quickies: The Left And Proportion

A fascinating look at the sort of “selective high dudgeon” Mr. Goska cites in the article linked in my previous post is available from this article:

The latest video [embedded above] to have caught the attention of the ranks of the constantly offended is one in which a young woman is filmed walking through areas of Manhattan. The video, filmed over a ten hour period includes various examples of men saying things ranging from "Hey, how you doin'?" to "Have a nice evening, darling". At the end of the video we are told that if we want to help those who have been affected, we should donate to "Hollaback!"

Curious as to how one helps traumatised women such as the one videoed, who apparently had endured aural and mental torture, I wondered what such money would be going towards. As expected, donations do not go towards providing counselling to women who, after receiving unsolicited comments, are plunged into PTSD nor sadly is the money funnelled into large billboards and public service announcements telling young women to get over themselves and ignore it.

Instead, Hollaback! wants a "culture shift" where unsolicited greetings are seen as taboo, and tells us that catcalling is "sexual assault" and "gender-based violence", which doesn't leave many terms to describe more serious offences. If a builder shouting, "Nice legs, love," is committing an act of sexual assault and "gender-based violence," then was Rotherham a gender Holocaust?

Despite (or perhaps as a response to) the hilarious identity politics mess it got itself into due to most of the perpetrators of these "assaults" being black or Hispanic, Hollaback!, with the sort of multicultural sensitivity which comes as standard with hand-wringing campaigns, hastens to tell us catcalling is "not a cultural thing" and that all forms of "gender-based violence" follow along the same lines no matter what the country.

Truly, it’s impossible to be a Leftist and possess a sense of proportion...or humor. (Oh, but do please remember: It’s not an unborn child; it’s just “a blob of tissue.”)

Stuff Dubya Didn’t Do

So! You’re entranced by Obama’s “firsts,” are you, you prog tranzi relativist, you?

Add your contributions below.

A Compact Insight

The esteemed CDR M at Ace of Spades' place presents us with a revealing photo and a very insightful assessment. First, the photo, of a restaurant receipt issued in Minnesota:

Now for the enveloping story:

A small cafe in Stillwater has thrown itself into the big battle over Minnesota’s minimum wage increases, inundating the cafe with dozens of phone calls and online comments this week after it tacked on a 35-cent fee to meal tabs.

Oasis Cafe owner Craig Beemer said the fee is needed to offset the 75-cent wage hike that took effect Aug. 1, the first time Minnesota’s minimum wage has increased in a decade. Even with only half a dozen servers, Beemer says it will cost him $10,000 more a year to pay servers $8 an hour instead of the federal rate of $7.25 an hour. Instead of adding it on to food prices, he added the “minimum wage fee” — the only restaurant known to do so in Minnesota so far.... “We believe that the industry is overreacting,” Wade Luneburg of the MN State Council of UNITE HERE Unions told the Star Tribune this week. “Putting [minimum wage] fees on tickets and passing the cost on to consumers directly is strange at best, and creates an ‘us against them’ mentality while ordering dinner.”

Finally, CDR M's highly valuable insight:

Democrats do hate people knowing what they're paying for and why.

Ponder that for a moment.

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When you know what you're paying for and why, and you receive the good or service into your own hands, you're capable of making the most important decisions in the marketplace:

• Is this what I need or want?
• Is it of the quality I seek?
• Is it worth what I've been asked to pay for it?

Normal, "dyadic" or two-party transactions, in which a seller and a buyer exchange goods for money without the intervention of some third party, enable the buyer to answer those questions without deflection or distortion. However, when the State gets into the act with laws that compel or constrain something about the transaction, the matter becomes murky. This is particularly the case with minimum-price laws -- and a minimum-wage law is exactly that.

Milton Friedman was especially candid about it in his book Free To Choose: "Economists may not know much, but we do know how to create shortages and surpluses." The brief disquisition that follows on maximum and minimum price laws is more illuminating than the entire text of the Congressional Record.

When the labor market is unencumbered legally, a "market-clearing" equilibrium is swiftly established, in which the entire stock of persons willing to do that labor for the prevailing wage is employed by employers who want the work performed and are willing to pay the market wage for it. Let's imagine that the equilibrium results in 100 persons employed as waiters and waitresses at the prevailing wage. Other things being kept equal, were the wage to increase, then more persons would be willing to work at those jobs; were it to decrease, fewer persons would seek such employment.

Conversely, employers will only pay a certain wage for a certain job if it's consonant with their own objectives: i.e., their ability to stay in business at an acceptable level of profit. A free market causes the prevailing wage level for a job to settle at a level determined by the stock of willing workers and the ability of employers to profit from their labor at that level. As bloodless as it sounds, it's merely what arises from enterprise in a free market.

A minimum-wage law for a particular category of labor increases the number of persons who will seek that wage, while it reduces the number who will pay it for that labor. Thus, the "market-clearing" equilibrium that had existed before the minimum-wage law is ripped asunder, leaving:

• A surplus of persons willing to perform that labor;
• A shortage of persons willing to pay to have it performed.

What's most poignant about the situation is that it literally creates unemployment, for while the number of persons willing to do those jobs will be greater than the previous number -- say, 110 rather than 100 -- the number employers are willing to hire at the new, legally-mandated wage level will be fewer: no longer 100, but 90. Thus, the law will result in the dismissal of previously employed persons.

Surpluses and shortages are always about a particular price level: what the buyer must pony up for the thing being offered versus what the seller will accept for it. The buyer's readiness, willingness, and ability to pay that price is what determines how much of it he'll buy. The most basic of economic truths tells us that as the price increases, all three of those things will decrease. There's no escape.

And all that is before we introduce yet another factor: those times when the buyer is only purchasing the good or service indirectly, as part of a package whose parts he cannot separate or discriminate.

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In a "bundled" purchase, where the parts cannot be purchased separately, the buyer might well be either indifferent to one or more components or actively hostile to them. In the former, more benign case, the component may be seen as a transaction cost, without accepting which the larger transaction cannot occur. This is definitely the case with table service. No one goes out to eat specifically to enjoy the attentions of a waiter.

Thus, when the cost of dining out rises because of an increase in waiters' wages, the ultimate purchaser -- the restaurant patron -- can easily be misled. He might not be aware that the increase derives from that source. If it's sufficiently large, it will discourage him from returning, to the detriment of the restaurateur and all his employees, the more highly compensated waiter included. Yet another route by which a supposedly benevolent law gives rise to exactly the opposite of its supposed intentions! But should the restaurant go out of business from the loss of patronage, who will be blamed?

Hint: It's seldom the proponents of the "supposedly benevolent law."

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Craig Beemer is doing his patrons an unusual service by telling them explicitly where the increase in their restaurant charges is coming from. He cannot unbundle table service; it's an unavoidable cost in the restaurant business, "cafeteria-style" restaurants excepted. He must either allow it to reduce his profits or pass the cost along to his patrons. The former case might reduce his willingness to operate his cafe below the threshold of a positive decision, if not drive him out of business entirely. The proponents of the minimum-wage increase are undoubtedly furious about Beemer's decision to disclose his increased expense so candidly. As CDR M has already noted, they don't want you to know what you're paying for, or why: a key motivation behind ObamaCare and much else. To the extent that you're aware, you'll place the blame where it belongs: the ultimate statist's nightmare.

Let's give them more such nightmares. Many more.

Outcomes

Jonah Goldberg, who seems to get better with every column, has produced a gem of insight and breadth of scope. The key to the essay:

Of course, individual liberals may be civil-libertarians. I can certainly think of plenty who are. But as an intellectual, cultural and political project, I think liberalism is better understood as a competing value system. Think of it this way. Social conservatism is very libertarian about all sorts of things, and not libertarian about other things. Constitutional considerations aside, where it believes the State shouldn’t interfere it is because non-interference advances a cultural agenda of traditional conservatism.

In attempting to distinguish libertarian ideas from the dominant "conservative" and "liberal" families of thought -- those aren't "sneer quotes," for a change, but rather an acknowledgement that the quoted terms are labels, not denotationally applicable descriptions of the postures to which they're attached -- there is no clearer nor more defensible distinction than this, which Goldberg highlights above:

Conservatives and liberals prioritize outcomes;
Libertarians prioritize principles.

Goldberg is unabashed about his stance -- "that mainstream conservatism is vastly more libertarian than liberalism for a number of reasons" -- while gently reminding us that conservatism has its own set of heavily preferred outcomes, to the attainment of which State power should be applied:

• "[W]here it believes the State shouldn’t interfere it is because non-interference advances a cultural agenda of traditional conservatism;"
• "[A] very limited positive role for the State to second guess the allocation of resources in the market place or to spend money better than the people who earn it;"
• "Conservatism, unlike liberalism, considers the family a near-sacrosanct institution."

To be fair, Goldberg's comment about the sacredness of the family is aimed mainly at the protection of the family from government intrusions, but it must be borne in mind that conservatives also favor a certain family pattern -- male husband, female wife, and dependent minor children -- to be ratified by the State.

In contrast, the libertarian approach is essentially independent of outcomes. It concedes certain outcomes as highly desirable, but it resists the use of political means to seek them, except in those cases where the inherently collective nature of the interactions at issue permits no other course. (Examples would include national defense, the control of the borders, and the protection of the helpless from exploitation or abuse.)

The thoughtful citizen, in deciding upon an alignment, must confront the demands of:

• Liberalism, with its worship of State power and the top-down imposition of its preferences;
• Modern conservatism, which has grown ever more libertarian with time;
• Libertarianism, which eschews discussion of outcomes in favor of principles and the constraints and processes that arise from them.

In all three cases, the citizen looking for a political home will gauge how well his own preferred outcomes would be served by the principles and policies of each of these families of thought.

At this time, the appeal of liberalism -- call it progressivism if you like; calling a turd a "metabolic by-product" doesn't change its aroma -- is in steep decline. That's most of the reason its promoters have striven to create an ever-larger and more luxuriant welfare state; government dependents can be relied upon to vote for more government. "Pure" libertarianism, whose appeal arises from its logical coherence and its seeming universality, is in something of a decline. Too many libertarians are unwilling to allow that there's a domain outside which the core libertarian principle, individual rights, simply doesn't apply (e.g., warfare, immigration, and abortion). However, conservatism has gained allegiants as it has moved in the direction of greater freedom, especially freedom of enterprise. (It might surprise some readers to learn that conservatism hasn't always been friendly to free-market economics; nevertheless, that is the case.)

In abstract terms of alignments and positions espoused, this appears to be the pattern of the near future. Politically, what will matter most, as always, is the cleverness and ruthlessness of those who succeed in gaining power.

However, if we attempt to peer further into the future than the next two elections, the influences to be reckoned with change considerably. Imagine, for example, that a solidly conservative governing majority, well supported in the federal courts, were to emerge after the 2016 elections. Such a government, if it were faithful to the postures delineated above and in Goldberg's article, would embark upon an ambitious program of federal retrenchment, aimed at reducing to the greatest possible extent Washington's involvement in the decisions of private Americans and their voluntary associations. Whether or not you would find that goal desirable -- I certainly do -- it would elicit enormous resistance simply because of the scope of the changes sought.

Turn that a few times on your mental spit: a conservative government faithful to its posture would call forth intense resistance to the changes it seeks: a conservative backlash. As Arthur Herzog put it in The B.S. Factor, "Change is hard, and difficulty makes people impatient." But don't imagine that liberalism would fare better. Indeed, the demonstration is already before us: the past five years of liberalism in the federal saddle have provoked considerable resistance to the government's policies and programs, some of which is founded on liberals' preferences.

Sometimes outcomes aren't everything...even when they seem attainable.