The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (14 page)

Regardless, the point is that Obama believes the bible tells him to push
his agenda. Is that not an imposition of his faith? In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 2008, he artfully replaced the idea of the American dream—individual opportunity, the pursuit of happiness—with the century-old progressive nostrum of “America’s promise.” At times, his rhetoric seems lifted straight out of the pages of Herbert Croly’s
Promise of American Life
.

But to his credit, Herbert Croly was honest about the fact that the two visions are in fundamental opposition. The idea behind Croly’s
Promise of American Life
was to move the country beyond the outdated nineteenth-century notions of rugged individualism in pursuit of the American dream. And it was an explicitly Christian enterprise. It was certainly the mission of the social gospel ministers, like Walter Rauschenbusch, but more revealingly, it was the mission of the technocratic progressive economists as well. Richard Ely, the leader of the University of Wisconsin progressives during their heyday and the founder of the American Economic Association—still the leading professional organization for American economists—was also the foremost lay leader of what was called the “Christian socialism” or “Christian sociology” movement.
⁷

Ely believed and taught that every aspect of life should have Christianity injected into it. He held that Christians made a fundamental error by holding that salvation lies in the next life. When Jesus says that his kingdom is “not of this world,” the correct translation, according to Ely, is “not of this age.” And it was Ely’s core conviction that the age of salvation could be reached through the judicious application of welfare-state policies. He wrote, in
Social Aspects of Christianity
, “I take this as my thesis: Christianity is primarily concerned with this world, and it is the mission of Christianity to bring to pass here a kingdom of righteousness and to rescue from the evil one and redeem all our social relations.”
⁸
Woodrow Wilson shared this vision. “There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together,” Wilson told a YMCA conference. “It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world.”
⁹

While there were some secular progressives, as a social movement it’s almost impossible to speak of progressivism as anything other than a fundamentally Christian movement. And it sought to smash what we today would call the wall between church and state. Ely, for instance, hated
the practice of seeing the world as “divided into things sacred and things secular” and asserted that “to a Christian all things must be sacred—his business as well as his church.”
¹⁰
The American Economic Association (which initially brimmed with over sixty ministers as members) was to be a fundamentally religious organization that imbued all of its analysis and recommendations with a Christian vision that rejected laissez-faire economics as sinful and cruel. “God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution,” Ely wrote. It “is religious in its essence” and “a mighty force in furthering God’s kingdom and establishing righteous relations.”
¹¹

So profound was the progressive insistence that there should be no demarcation between religion and politics that social gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch proclaimed that if God couldn’t be a liberal progressive then we needed a new god entirely. “[U]nless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order,” Rauschenbusch warned in his 1912 treatise
Christianizing the Social Crisis
, “back we shall go to Capitalism.” Therefore, “[t]he God that answereth by low food prices,” he proclaimed, “let him be God.”

Taken seriously, this remains the essence of liberal political theology. Unfortunately, liberalism can no longer say so clearly. Bookless, liberalism lacks the vocabulary and the faith to connect these dots any longer. The god of lower food prices may not be the god of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, nor that of the Jews or Muhammad, but the Jedi-like force of All Good Things is a liberal, and violating that faith is a sin.

Or as Senator Obama put it when he was asked “What is sin?”

Sin, he explained, is “[b]eing out of alignment with my values.”
¹²

Just so.

6

POWER CORRUPTS

I
n 1887, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton—Lord Acton for short—penned his famous line, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
¹

Of all the truisms found in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, this one may be the most revered as sheer genius among campus
philosophes
, op-ed Jeremiahs, and the carnival-stall barkers of cable news.

With very few exceptions, Acton’s axiom is almost invariably aimed at anyone whom the speaker thinks cannot be trusted with power, but never at the ranks of those whom the speaker would very much like to see made ever more powerful. Republicans lament that power corrupts Democrats, and vice versa. But it is a rare day that we condemn the corruption of one of our own. Acton’s Axiom is a cudgel to use on the other team.

However, the phrase is the engine of particularly acute hypocrisy among left-wing intellectuals. The same people who promise to “speak truth to power,” will go to great lengths to explain why Castro isn’t a dictator, why Stalin needs to be seen “in context,” and why Yasser Arafat was an authentic champion of the powerless. Conservatives, meanwhile, own up to their corruption a bit more, recognizing that we are all cut from the crooked timber of humanity. The Right may allow for compromises with sons-of-bitches, but it usually concedes that they are in fact sons-of-bitches.

But more to the point, use of the phrase “power corrupts” is often a sign of the speaker’s own corruption—and this is really what Acton had in mind in the first place.

Acton penned the line in a letter to his friend the Anglican bishop and historian Mandell Creighton. In 1887, Creighton had asked Acton to take a look at a history book he was working on. Acton chastised Creighton for his too sympathetic treatment of the Reformation era popes (i.e., the bad popes). Acton wrote:

While many know about this letter as the source of “power corrupts,” the context of Acton’s letter is forgotten—or, more likely, was never known—by the
vast majority of people who invoke it. Acton, a devout if unorthodox Catholic, was responding specifically to the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility put forth in 1870. Acton risked excommunication for his long battle against the doctrine of infallibility.

His objections were twofold, one theological, the other historical. It is the latter that is relevant for our purposes. Acton, a passionate liberal in the classic, British, sense of the word, feared that such a doctrine would erase the crimes committed by the Church. For Acton, history was a science, though not in the sense that we use the term today. He was not a positivist or a materialist, believing that the science of history was amoral or value-free. Rather, he believed that historical discipline required the application of judgment on the past, judgment informed by a permanent and immutable moral code.

We—and I mean everybody, liberals and conservatives alike— violate Acton’s principles all the time. Conservatives make apologies for benevolent dictators. Liberals forgive totalitarian movements because of the principles to be found somewhere beneath an ocean of blood. The most obvious example of this tendency today is the liberal compulsion to forgive or simply ignore the cruel authoritarianism of the Chinese regime because they envy the efficiency of authoritarian rule. It is amazing how forgivable tyranny is when it implements the preferred policies of liberalism. Cuba’s police state is a mere distraction from their stunning “success” at providing free health care!

But we also violate Acton’s maxim closer to home as well. When Edward Moore Kennedy died from a brain tumor in 2009 at the age of seventy-seven, the collective reaction from the establishment, including not just partisan liberals but the vast bulk of the media, historians, and politicians, violated Acton’s real message. James Fallows spoke for the crowd, calling Kennedy, “A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life—the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick—but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul.”
³

But Fallows’s passive reference to “everything involved with Chappaquiddick” is a rhetorical leap over a yawning moral chasm. There’s no room here to
sift through the farrago of lies and corruption that led to Kennedy’s legal absolution for Mary Jo Kopechne’s death. Still, some basic facts, not in dispute, are in order. Kennedy and some male friends—all, like Kennedy, married—spent a weekend at the Kennedy compound at Martha’s Vineyard with the “boiler room girls”: young single women who liked to have a good time, so to speak. After much drinking, Kennedy took Kopechne for a drive. Kennedy claimed to be driving Kopechne to the ferry, though the record doesn’t support this. On the way to their destination, a drunk Kennedy drove his 1967 Oldsmobile off Dike Bridge and into Poucha Pond. Kennedy escaped from the vehicle, and after allegedly trying to save her, simply gave up and walked to the cottage where his friends were staying. He passed no less than four houses and a firehouse—all had phones.

Kennedy told his compatriots not to tell the other women about the accident; allegedly because he was concerned they might risk their lives needlessly to save their friend. Kennedy spent the rest of the night at an inn in Edgartown, making small talk about sailing with another guest. At 7:30 A.M. his compatriots asked whom he called to report the accident, and he said he hadn’t called anyone. At 9:00 A.M. Kennedy formally called the police.

What followed after that were a series of public lies and subterfuges by Kennedy and the Kennedy machine in order to cover up the truth of the incident and preserve Kennedy’s political viability. The judge who gave Kennedy the minimum possible punishment—a two-month suspended sentence—retired two days after the decision. The Kopechne family never sued, opting to be done with the matter as quickly as possible.

At his death it was reported that Kennedy often liked to ask people, “Have you heard any good Mary Jo Kopechne jokes?” Apparently this usually got a laugh from people who would be disgusted by such a question should it stem from an anonymous gas station attendant or schoolteacher.

According to many, it was thanks to the tragedy at Chappaquiddick that Ted Kennedy had such a long and fruitful career in the Senate. Mary Jo Kopechne’s death ruined his chances to win the presidency. Some in their admiration of power find this a worthwhile trade-off. A writer for the Huffington Post
wondered what Mary Jo Kopechne “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history… Who knows—maybe she’d feel it was worth it.”
⁴

As a senator, Kennedy did many admirable things, and even more things his ideological compatriots found admirable. He was also a lout, a womanizer, and a drunk. His exploits were usually overlooked and forgiven because he was also a Kennedy, and Kennedys are powerful in every sense of the word. They do not merely wield power through elected positions and great wealth; they have a greater power: the power to corrupt others in their cause.

7

DIVERSITY

T
here are highlights in everyone’s career. For me the greatest moments are fairly easy to recollect: My first cover story for
National Review
, getting picked up as a syndicated columnist, various breakout moments during my stint as founder and editor of
National Review Online
, returning to the American Enterprise Institute (where I started my career in Washington as an intern) as a scholar, reaching number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list, becoming a regular panelist on Fox News’s
Special Report,
and so on.