The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (23 page)

Of course, this opens up Hayek (and me by extension) to an obvious rejoinder. Hayek was working from the assumption that we do, and more important, should live in a free society, in the classical, free-market, limited government sense. That is the ideological prior conclusion, as it were, from which he launches his attack on the stupidity of social justice. I will stipulate that it is my ideological foundation as well (a shocking revelation, I know). So if you’re a progressive activist for social change and social justice, or of just plain “goodness,” in the Smailsian sense, you are free to respond that the concept of social justice is worthwhile
only
if you look at it from an equally specific ideological perspective—one that affirms the vast role the State must play in bringing about the just society.

And that’s the point. Social justice is not a nonideological concept that simply draws on ethics or morality or the overall need for goodness in society. No, it is a deeply ideological set of assumptions that most practitioners of social justice refuse to openly and sincerely acknowledge.

The funny thing is, liberals used to acknowledge the point frankly. Here’s our friend Herbert Croly, the founding father of modern liberalism:

The idea of individual justice is being supplemented by the idea of social justice. When our constitutions were written, the traditions of English law, the contemporary political philosophy and the economic situation of the American democracy all conspired to embody in them
and their interpretation an extremely individualistic conception of justice—a conception which practically confided social welfare to the free expression of individual interests and good intentions. Now the tendency is to conceive the social welfare not as an end which cannot be left to the happy harmonizing of individual interests, but as an end which must be consciously willed by society and efficiently realized. Society, that is, has become a moral ideal, not independent of the individual but supplementary to him, an ideal which must be pursued less by regulating individual excesses than by the active conscious encouragement of socializing tendencies and purposes.
²³

The fundamental problem with social justice is that there are no limiting principles to it. It is an open-ended license for the forces of goodness to do what they think is right
forever
. It is an empowering principle for the high moral ground in all political debates. There are no boundaries, no internal checks, no definitional roadblocks. It’s social justice for as far as the eye can see. And the forces of social justice can see way past the arbitrary borders of the United States, or any state.

No wonder then that the Crolyite vision of replacing individual justice with social justice has found a home at the United Nations. In November 2007, the UN General Assembly declared that starting in 2009, February 20 would be celebrated annually as the World Day of Social Justice (shop early for those hard-to-find social justice gifts!). The intellectual lodestone inspiring this new holiday was a 157-page report produced by their Division for Social Policy and Development entitled: “Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations.”

“Social Justice,” the authors of this page-turner declare, “is not possible without strong and coherent redistributive policies conceived and implemented by public agencies.” But that’s downright Jeffersonian compared to the more concentrated and pernicious asininity to follow. They warn: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.”
²⁴
Translation: If you actually believe in the antiquated notion that rights exist outside the schemes of governments and social planners, if you
think that the concept of justice endures beyond the relativistic standards of whatever the forces of goodness say this week, then you cannot be seen as an ally of the great, wise, and noble global social justice coalition.

In one sense, this is all just very funny. It’s a bit like that scene in
Miracle on 34th Street
when the judge declares that Santa Claus must exist because the U.S. Postal Service says so. The United Nations—that insufferable nest of crapweasels and kleptocrats—holds that if you believe in “an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice” then you are no friend of the cause of social justice. Which, I suppose, is true.

What is infuriating, however, is that if social justice simply means goodness, then anybody who disagrees with the UN or its affiliated cadres of social justice seekers, must of necessity be a champion of badness. Not only that, but we subscribe to an ideology of badness while the forces of social change just want to do what’s right.

Ultimately, social justice is about empire building. The Roman Empire was sustained by “the idea of Rome,” which always fell far short of the reality. Nonetheless, it sought to create hierarchies of thought and virtue, define what was acceptable and civilized and what was barbarian and backward. Of course, anyone looking with an objective eye at what Rome countenanced could find much that was backward and barbaric. But the idea of Rome somehow sanitized and elevated it all. It gave the advancing Roman soldiers the aura of superiority and sophistication. At least the Romans brought material improvements with them (or as John Cleese says in
The Life of Brian
, “apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?)”

Meanwhile, what does social justice bring with it? On virtually every front where social justice claims the high ground, it does so by appealing to the authority of a mirage and grounding its arguments in nothing firmer than an ill-defined sentiment. Intellectually, it has no more weight than a gesture, no more substance than a wish. Yet those who fight for it do not care; indeed, they like it that way, because it prepares the battlefield for them. They promise to deliver a better world but haven’t the foggiest idea how to provide it. The Romans knew how to build roads and toilets; all
the centurions of social justice know how to provide is someone else’s money. It’s imperialism fueled by guilt and sustained by smugness.

But it is successful. These centurions and citizens of social justice run our schools, our charities, our newspapers, and, if they have their way, our world.

12

COMMUNITY

G
overnment is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” This adorable pseudoinsight, widely attributed to former representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, has become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly among those who voted for Barack Obama on the grounds that they are the ones they’ve been waiting for.

Government isn’t an abstraction, they insist. It’s not a theoretical construct. Those blowhards on cable and talk radio? They’re nuts when they talk about “the state,” “tyranny,” “fascism.” They just don’t understand. Government is about us. It
is
us. In other words, government doesn’t just
help other people; it makes you, Joe and Jane Taxpayer, feel good about yourselves for supporting ever larger government.

Logically, the idea that “government is simply the word for those things we choose to do together” is an obvious fallacy. We do many things together, some of them involve the government, most don’t. An estimated 111 million people watched the 2011 Super Bowl. Weren’t we as “together” for that as we are for, say, an OSHA hearing on the efficacy of toilet flush regulations?

Even if you allow for poetic license, this idea is a mess. We aren’t all employees of the government, and so we don’t all do what the government does together. We do all benefit together from a few things—a very few things—the government does, such as: ensuring the health of the water supply, enforcing the rule of law (broadly understood), and defending America from foreign enemies. But we don’t really do those things together, do we? Consider the military, one of the few national institutions truly intended to serve all Americans equally. Military service clearly is not fulfilled by everyone, even if everyone pays for it. Indeed, one of the reasons we honor the fallen on Memorial Day and those who served on Veterans Day is precisely because we don’t all do it together. Those who wear the uniform carry the extra load so the rest of us don’t have to. The Korean War Memorial that reads “Freedom isn’t Free” might be more accurate if it said “This Freedom brought to you by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines”—but it’s too hard to make that rhyme in a Toby Keith song.

And even when considering those very few things that benefit everybody, or nearly everybody, it’s a misunderstanding of our form of government to suggest that they are good or worthwhile because everybody agrees on their merits. We do not have a system of government that depends on the consent of everybody. In fact, no system ever has the consent of everybody, but plenty of systems have claimed they have support from everybody and have tried to prove it by killing anybody who disagreed.

We have a system of government that depends on the
consent
of the
majority
of citizens. And even then, majorities do not always win the day—nor should they. We have a Bill of Rights and a Supreme Court precisely so that the majority cannot always win. At least theoretically, the majority cannot revoke my freedom of religion, speech, or association. It
cannot take away my property nor rescind my right to bear arms. Now, obviously, in practice the majority can sometimes do these things, but only for reasons that pass various constitutional tests. But those tests are invariably applied when at least someone disagrees enough to go to court to complain.

More to the point, when Barack Obama or Barney Frank say that government is just a word we use for those things we all do together, they’re doing so inevitably to make the case for spending money on things: entitlements, high-speed rail, Head Start, windmills, teacher salaries, mohair subsidies, whatever. And it is hardly the case that we’re “all in it together” when it comes to paying for these things. The average person on Medicare gets three times more out of it than they paid in.
¹
The rest is carried by other taxpayers, living and unborn. Sixty percent of households get more from the U.S. government than they pay into it.

But even if all of us paid for government equally, what would that mean? When you cut a check for your share of the Department of Sanitation’s budget, do you pump your fist in the air afterward, brimming with a sense of accomplishment? Or do you feel like you cut a check for a necessary service? Does knowing that you paid for the Fire Department make you feel the same way it would if you joined a bucket brigade and helped put out a fire yourself? The simple fact is there is no such transitive property to paying taxes.

Consider some snippets from MSNBC’s “Lean Forward” ad campaign. In one installment we see Rachel Maddow standing in front of the Hoover Dam. She begins midsentence, tearing into a straw man like Michael Moore into a bowl of Fiddle Faddle: “When people tell us no,
no, no we’re not going to build it. No, no, no, America doesn’t have any greatness in its future. America has small things in its future. Other countries have great things in their future. China can afford it. We can’t. You’re wrong, and it doesn’t feel right to us, and it doesn’t sound right to us, because that’s not what America is.”

It’s not clear which of the infinite parallel universes Ms. Maddow is living in, but in our corner of the multiverse, if you wanted to build the Hoover Dam today it would not be conservatives shouting “No, no, no” (assuming such a project made economic sense). Meanwhile, you can be sure that liberals like Maddow and her fans would not only be saying “no, no, no,” they’d be throwing in some, “Hey hey, ho ho, this damn dam has got to go”s for good measure, as they handcuffed themselves to trees and proclaimed the sanctity of some endangered grasshopper or rare moss.
²

In another clip she testifies: “I feel like we have sort of an amazing inheritance in terms of what our grandparents and our great-grandparents thought to leave us. When they were building the infrastructure that is the spine of this country, they knew that the benefit of it would redound to us; they knew it. What are we doing?”

It’s telling that she speaks to a
feeling
about what our grandparents and great-grandparents left us. Feelings rank high in the hierarchy of rhetorical authority, precisely because they cannot be easily refuted with reason. But let us take this feeling seriously.

Yes, it is certainly nice that our forefathers paid for the interstate highway system (critical infrastructure nevertheless reviled by many environmentalists), but is that really the inheritance that makes America great? This is the sort of thing any Communist peasant could say about Stalin or Ceaus¸escu who, after all, built some awfully impressive public-works projects. It is the sort of thing Romans said about the aqueducts and Egyptians about the pyramids, in order to wave away complaints about conquest, tyranny, and slavery. What separates our great projects from those of other civilizations are the values—moral, legal, constitutional—of those who produced them. It is the difference between inheriting a mansion from your father or grandfather and inheriting the values that enabled your grandfather to afford one.