Liberal Condescension Isnt The Problem - Road to the Middle Class

WE ALL KNOW liberal condescension. “Why are Americans so anti-intellectual?” your liberal friend might ask. But Gerard Alexander has written about it—in the Washington Post. “Why are liberals so condescending?” he asks. Why indeed?

Your average liberal exhibits four kinds of condescension, according to Alexander. There’s the notion that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because of the power of ideas but “because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics.” Obviously this leads into the second notion that “if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst.” This idea has won Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a weekly column at The Wall Street Journal.

Then there’s the conservatives-are-racists meme. “It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants. “ This one started with Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to win votes in the Old South.

Finally, liberals believe that “conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic.”

You know what this is? It is Scion City. It is the whine of the fortunate son who cannot understand why he is running the family firm into the ground. The competition is cheating! The customers are stupid! It is the bleat of a political movement grown accustomed to its ascendancy, blind to its corruption, and softened by its comfortable sinecures.

This liberal snobbery also serves another purpose. It helps liberals hide from their shame. If liberals are so devoted to “evidence and logic” how come Social Security and Medicare sport unfunded liabilities two or three times GDP? If liberals are so shocked by racism, how come they condone the antics of the Justice Brothers, Reverends Jackson and Sharpton? If liberals are so appalled by sinister campaign tactics, then how come they spent 2009, the year the locusts ate, writing 2,000-page bills in secret after concluding corrupt bargains with special interest lobbies?

Shall I tell you what your real problem is, liberals? It is your unjust and oppressive administrative state. The French and the German absolute monarchs invented the administrative state back in th 1700s. They needed to smash the civil society of guilds and local lords that so they could increase taxes to fund their armies and build their palaces. Today liberals use the administrative state to smash families and civil society to buy votes and fund public sector pensions. Then and now, the administrative state has one overriding purpose: to increase the power of the center and force people to look to the state for all their needs.

The real problem for liberals when it comes to conservatism is ignorance. An alert reader recently emailed me about an interview on C-SPAN. Brian Lamb asked a famous liberal professor for his thoughts on Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The response was “I’m sorry I haven’t read that. I don’t know that author.”

How anti-intellectual can you get? F.A. Hayek is the standout intellectual critic of the administrative state. Leaving aside his critique of the personal failings of liberals in The Fatal Conceit, he made the unanswerable charge that the administrative state is bound to fail in delivering prosperity because it doesn’t have the bandwidth to run everything, for

decentralized control over resources, control through several property [i.e. capitalism], leads to the generation and use of more information than is possible under central direction.

The science is settled on that, even if liberals “don’t know that author.”

The man in Washington, or the czar in the White House, cannot begin to know what a million consumers and producers know out in the real world. In fact, he does not want to. He does not want to know what a million consumers or ten thousand producers know; he merely wishes to control them.

We can elevate this concept into a universal principle. Anyone setting up an administrative structure, especially in government, is trying to oppress and control people. Condescending? He ought to be ashamed.

Honesty must admit that liberal condescension has a reflection in conservatism. If liberals worry about sinister campaign tactics, conservatives worry about ACORN. If liberals wonder what’s the matter with Kansas, conservatives agonize about the problem with Berkeley and Cambridge. If liberals think conservatives are racists, conservatives accuse liberals of playing the race card.

And just like liberals, conservatives are convinced that the other guys are “driven by emotion” whereas we are swayed only by logic and reason.

The difference is that conservatives don’t condescend towards liberals. But give us half a century of political and cultural power and we could learn.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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