The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (6 page)

As for our life expectancy, by any measure it’s not really low. You always hear these phrases like “at the bottom” or “near the bottom” or “dead last” when talking about life expectancy, but the caveat is that we’re talking about rates among advanced industrialized countries. Our life expectancy is just three years and four months lower than number one–ranked Japan’s. Moreover, if you factor out things like murder, car crashes and other fatal accidents, etc.—problems that have little to nothing to do with our health-care system—guess what happens? America has the highest life expectancy in the world. Indeed, in America, the longer you live, the longer you’re likely to live (at least until you die).

Moreover there’s a deep statist bias to the whole discussion. Who says life expectancy is the government’s business? Don’t get me wrong: It is the government’s business if people are dying at a young age from murder or epidemic diseases or outbreaks of zombism. But many things that influence life expectancy are personal choices, from drinking alcohol and eating red meat to riding motorcycles and BASE jumping.

Cultural choices and genetic nonchoices play a role, too. Here are some interesting statistics: According to the 2006 study
Eight Americas
, Asian American women have a life expectancy of 87 years (in Bergen County, New Jersey, Asian American women live on average to 91 years). Asian Americans as a group—i.e., men and women—have a life expectancy of 84.9 years. This isn’t because they’re rich. Their per capita income according to the study: $21,556. Second-generation Asian American women live three years longer than women in Japan—the longest-living national group in the world. Meanwhile, American Indians in South Dakota have an average life expectancy of only 58 years (and they already have access to the federal government–run Indian Health Service). Black inner-city men do almost as badly, living to only 66.7 years. White folks
in the Northern Plains live longer than most other whites, especially whites from Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley.
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Are you really going to tell me that implementing ObamaCare will smooth all that out? If we really want to improve life expectancy for black men, we could put them all in jail, because their life expectancy in prison is higher than it is outside of it (which, for the record, is just a monumentally depressing statistic).
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The point here isn’t to relitigate the debate over our health-care system or to claim that our system was great before Obama got his mitts on it. Rather, it is simply to note that saying you’re being empirical, and wielding numbers like so many stage props, doesn’t make you empirical, any more than me wielding a giant hammer and speaking Norwegian makes me Thor. More important, even if all of the numbers and statistics being thrown around were accurate and compiled in good faith, the weight we give these numbers is ultimately a question of ideology or, if you prefer, principle.

And that raises the core problem with arguments like Chait’s. It’s not just that he denies his own ideological biases; he makes it sound like there’s something wrong, dangerously wrong, with
having
ideological biases. Chait mocks Milton Friedman for saying, “[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.” That crazy bastard! (And we all know that the Nobel Prize–winning economist never concerned himself with things like data and facts!)

The upshot is that Chait believes that economic freedom is
not
an end in itself. And of course he’s hardly alone. As we’ll see, this is a core tenet of progressives like Chait going back a century. And countless liberal intellectuals and politicians think it is just crazy that conservatives oppose the individual mandate under ObamaCare because they think the government can’t force people to buy things they don’t want to buy. But surely progressives would agree that it’s wrong (we’ll leave out whether they think it’s constitutional for another time) for the government to force Americans to buy copies of Sarah Palin’s latest book or a gun or a subscription to
National Review
. In other words, they too agree that at some point economic freedom is a real freedom, albeit maybe not all that important. They surely believe that freedom of speech is an “end in itself,” right? I mean, if Congress passed a law saying that people may only say
things that have empirical value—as determined by a government board or commission—they’d have a problem with that, at least in principle. (Let’s leave aside their fondness for reimposing the Fairness Doctrine.) Certainly prochoice feminists believe that reproductive freedom is an end in itself. Surely feminists don’t want the government empirically deciding which babies should be allowed to live and which shouldn’t (though this too is a surprisingly recent liberal principle).

Liberal commitment to these principles may be weaker than I would like or they would claim, but we should all be willing to concede that they’re in liberalism’s philosophy somewhere. We can even witness them popping up from time to time. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries ABC’s Charlie Gibson asked Obama if he would continue to favor raising capital gains taxes even if he knew—not believed, but knew—that lowering them would raise more revenues. He said he’d still consider raising them out of “fairness.” How, exactly, is that not an ideological position?

Ideology Misunderstood

What is ideology? Academics have an infinite capacity to make this a profoundly complicated question. How could it be otherwise for a profession that has managed to make the films of Keanu Reeves into a realm of serious inquiry? But there’s really no need for that. As we’ll see in a bit, the word ideology is a relatively recent immigrant to the English language, and it brought an enormous amount of baggage with it. For the moment, consider instead the German synonym
Weltanschauung
, which means a “worldview” or “an orientation to how you see the world.” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (to whom I am indebted) once remarked: “I know conservatives who say yes to
Weltanschauung
and no to ideology, but they seem incapable of distinguishing between them (not surprisingly, because there is no distinction).”
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Look up ideology and
Weltanschauung
in various dictionaries and often the most pronounced difference is in the spelling.

In the past, demonizing ideology was a bipartisan sport. For decades conservative intellectuals treated ideology as if it was some kind of mental zombie virus that escaped a German lab, mutated in France, and then came to the United States, where it incubates on college campuses.
Others, including many liberals and self-proclaimed moderates, have treated ideology as simply a clever rationalization for prejudice, bigotry and small-mindedness (where have we heard that before?).

These criticisms have been entirely accurate when aimed at specific ideologies (I’m looking at you Klansmen and Frankfurt School Marxists), but it’s silly to confuse the substance with the category. Knives fall under the category of lethal weapons, but we don’t automatically treat all knives as murder weapons. Or take the various clichéd indictments of hate. Hate is not a family value, we’re often told. But my guess is that the bulk of people who say hate is not a family value also teach their kids to hate Nazis and other bigots.

An ideology, at the most fundamental level, is simply a checklist of ideas you have about the world. Having an ideology doesn’t mean you’ve been brainwashed, it means you’ve come to conclusions about how the world works at some basic level. Just as there are good ideologies and bad ideologies, there can be good ideas and bad ideas, but no one would simply say that ideas in and of themselves are bad. Jesus had the idea that we should all love each other. Hitler had the idea of a thousand-year
reich
. Steven Bochco had the idea that
Cop Rock
would be a hit. Clearly we can distinguish between the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that the confused antipathy to ideology is an Anglo-American phenomenon stemming from the Protestant revolution, whereas on the European continent the idea that ideology is simply a fact of life has long been a given. As Friedrich Hayek said: “every social order rests on an ideology.” Ludwig von Mises concurred, arguing that the choice isn’t between ideology and no ideology but between good ideology and bad: “If they prefer bad doctrines, nothing can prevent disaster.” Like “the air we breathe,” observed the German writer Eugen Lemberg, ideologies “are indispensible presuppositions for the preservation of our life and our species as well as for the functioning of our society.”
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In Defense of Conservative Ideology, or How I Learned to Love Book Learning

Given that modern conservatism was born as a reaction to various utopian ideologies, starting with the French Revolution, it’s not surprising that the first opponents of ideology were on the political right.
Edmund Burke, the founding father of modern conservatism, was a famous anti-ideologue who derided the Jacobin madness that was sweeping the continent.

But it’s vital to understand that what the original conservatives denounced as ideology was in fact only a certain kind of ideology, one that was both utopian and characterized by what Friedrich Hayek called “intellectual hubris.” What Burke objected to was the effort of radicals to denounce the past, to deride the “wisdom of the ancients,” to believe that a small clique of visionary experts could impose a whole new system of living on society without taking into account the gravity of culture or the immutability of human nature. Burke saw the French revolutionaries as overcome with a Rousseauian madness that says we are all born noble, pure, and free, and it is only through the corruptness of society that we become enslaved. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously wrote, “but everywhere he is in chains.” All that was required to solve this sorry state of affairs was to come up with a better system, a more rational plan, a blueprint for creating the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. It was this kind of utopian madness that Edmund Burke and his heirs stood athwart, yelling, “Stop.”

He saw the bloody excesses of the French Revolution as confirmation of his hostility toward too much abstraction. Meanwhile, he sympathized with, and ultimately supported, the American revolutionaries on the grounds that they were British subjects who were merely pressing their rights under British law. Indeed, he did not see them as revolutionaries at all but as combatants in a civil war within the British Empire, and the Americans were “purely on the defensive.”

But to say Burke was opposed to certain ideologies does not mean that Burkeanism is not an ideology all its own. Although it took roughly two centuries for the Burkean conservative worldview—i.e. traditional conservative ideology—to become the recognizable system of thought we have today. Burke’s successors and champions, Russell Kirk chief among them, subscribed to the notion that “conservatism is the negation of ideology.”
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He defined ideology very narrowly, as “political fanaticism, a body of beliefs alleged to point the way to a perfect society.” Other philosophers of the right have long offered similar critiques, led by Michael Oakeshott and Eric Voegelin. All of these thinkers share an understanding of
ideology as a utopian “political religion,” a fallacious faith in the perfectibility of man and the possibility of creating a heaven on earth. And they were all correct if by ideology you mean the various utopian totalitarianisms that sprung forth from the Pandora’s box of the French Revolution. But they were all wrong if by ideology you simply mean your worldview, your set of principles, your checklist by which you measure and judge events and actions. The latter is how I define ideology.

Anti-ideology polemics enjoyed a comeback during the roughest years of the Bush administration. The argument took various forms, but the core indictment was that conservatism had become a kind of ideological madness. Liberal sociologist Alan Wolfe took to the pages of
The New Republic
to revive the discredited pseudoscience of Marxist psychologist Theodor Adorno in an effort to cast conservatives as nuts. Samuel Tanenhaus, the editor of
The New York Times Book Review
and author of a valuable biography of Whitaker Chambers, wrote an essay for
The New Republic
, “The Death of Conservatism,” which eventually became a book by the same name. Unfortunately, when the book came out in the fall of 2009, it was already clear that the rumors of conservatism’s death had been greatly exaggerated. “Today’s conservatives” proclaimed Tanenhaus, “resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.”
¹⁵
Moments later those figures came to life for the tea parties and delivered the Republicans a historic midterm election victory.

This defunct ideology business was taken to absurd extremes by Andrew Sullivan, a blogger and author who at times seemed driven to a kind of nonclinical dementia by his irrational hatred for George W. Bush and conservatism generally. A self-proclaimed disciple of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, Sullivan testified for a gnawing need for a new or renewed “conservatism of doubt.” “As a politics,” Sullivan writes in his
The Conservative Soul
,

its essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgment of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for the here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge. It
is an anti-ideology, a non-program, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism.
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I find the words enticing and admirable. But as anyone who has read Sullivan’s work knows well, the sermon has no relationship to the man preaching it. It’s all very well and good to decry certainty and extol empiricism, but it’s quite another to live by such values. The reality is that Sullivan is using the Trojan Horse of conservative empiricism to deliver an army of theoretical, theological, and ideological certainties fighting under the banner of humility and doubt. Boiled down, Sullivan’s crusade amounts to the exact same shtick I’ve been describing: Defend your own “way of looking at the world”—i.e., your
Weltanschauung
—as coolly pragmatic and empirical while describing your opponents’ as blindly and dangerously ideological. Those who disagree with the excitable Sullivan are immediately cast as ideologues, “Christianists,” fundamentalists, bigots, and fools.