Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Their Religion, Cont'd   [Jonah Goldberg]

In the same post yesterday I wrote:

As someone who subscribes to the view that liberalism is a secular religion, it is very frustrating that liberal politicians do not offer up a paper trail for people to scrutinize the way conservatives do. Liberalism has a dogma as rich and serious as conservatism, but you can't go to a liberal politician and ask: Are you loyal to John Dewey? Richard Rorty? John Rawls? You can't ask what their bible is because they are acolytes of the bookless faith of good deeds, the cult of do-goodery. So when they argue for keeping "religion" out of politics they are saying "keep your religion out of politics." When they say that we need to "get past ideology" they are saying we need to get past your ideology. This means that conservatives must constantly defend their own territory rather than demand a similar accounting from liberals.

Unfortunately, our political culture is ill-equipped with dealing with this fact. This wasn't true before Woodrow Wilson and the New Deal cemented a new conception of the primacy of government in our lives. The assumption that the state should be an all-purpose problem solver is a deeply ideological — I would argue religious — position. But we have been trained not to see it that way. And so we don't ask the right questions.

Me: A bunch of readers wrote in and asked, "Okay, so what are the right questions?" I can think of a bunch. But I think that doing so doesn't get the core of my point. We live in an unconscious civilization, as John Ralston Saul might put it, where premises are assumed at the most fundamental level. I am reminded of some scenes from Brian Doherty's authoritative history of libertarianism, Radicals for Capitalism, Writing about the Circle Bastiat, a bunch of libertarian ideological shock troops, Doherty recounts how they would show up at meetings or speeches in large numbers so that they'd be the majority. And then, while pretending they didn't know each other, they'd make others feel like they were the ideological minority.

In their most famous stunt, they showed up at a television studio for a televised talk by the governor of New Jersey. They peppered him with questions, in Doherty's words, "as if their ideological universe was the norm and his some sort of aberration."

"What, governor? You are for public schools? Where did you get such strange ideas? Can you recommend any books on this subject?"

I wish we had more of that sort of thing.

11/28 09:29 AMShare