{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat dutifully completed his assignment for the week, submitting to me his report on Professor Kevin Slack’s lecture, “Liberalism’s Rejection of Progressivism”. However, implausible as this may seem, Pascal’s submission has apparently been lost—in translation, in the Cloud, or somewhere on a flash drive or a hard drive, who knows? Pascal is understandably irate and refuses to rewrite the report. He has, however, given me permission to crib from his class notes to produce a rough summary of Professor Slack’s lecture. We can only be grateful that Pascal is being so reasonable about the situation.}
As Professor Kevin Slack explains to his audience at Hillsdale College online, 20th-century Liberalism followed in the wake of Progressivism and exacerbated the damage already done by its predecessor (e.g., popular election of U.S. Senators, federal income tax, women’s suffrage, World War I, anarchist bombings, Palmer raids, etc.). The failures of Progressivism were to be corrected by Liberalism, which was simply Progressivism on steroids and with even less respect for democracy. Concocted by the likes of Walter Lippmann, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey, modern Liberalism, like ancient Gaul, was divided into three parts, which Slack identifies as Intellectual Liberalism, Quantitative Liberalism, and Qualitative Liberalism.
Intellectually, Liberalism rejected the Western philosophical tradition, abandoning the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, replacing them with the Useful, the Popular, and the Expedient. Denying the existence of “essences” and “absolutes,” Liberalism opened the door to relativism; it also doubled down on philosophical nominalism, claiming that abstractions like “Justice” and “Freedom” were merely words that signified human ideas rather than divinely crafted Platonic forms. Finally, it dismissed the wisdom of the past on the grounds that new circumstances presented new difficulties which in turn required new solutions.
Quantitative Liberalism entered the picture with the New Deal. Its adherents claimed that the new solutions needed would be provided by Experts gathered in councils, commissions, and committees through which they would structure and guide the Liberal project—that is, the aggrandizement of the central State and the corresponding diminution of the private economic sector. Bean counters uber alles! With a federal Brain Trust in charge, and with the creation of an unelected Bureaucracy which soon evolved into the Deep State, free enterprise could be dispensed with. Beginning with the New Deal, Liberalism won popular favor (and purchased votes) with housing subsidies and jobs programs; it regulated everything from prices and wages to the size of strippers’ tassels; it redistributed wealth via Social Security; it established minimum wage laws and workplace safety rules. In all, Roosevelt’s tyranny was so oppressive that hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to enlist in the military and go to war against Japan and Germany rather than submit further to New Deal totalitarianism.
After John Wayne defeated the Axis powers and Ronald Reagan liberated the German concentration camps, America could have turned from Liberalism back to the verities of Coolidge and Hoover. Instead, it handed the government over to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his Liberal cronies (e.g., Robert Oppenheimer, Dalton Trumbo, and Alan Ginsberg). Schlesinger’s The Vital Center became the blueprint for reshaping American politics; his “horseshoe theory” held that ideologies of the Right and the Left tended to meet at the extreme, with sensible Liberals holding down the ideological center. Liberalism reigned unchallenged; even President Eisenhower conceded its inevitability, thereby inventing the American RINO. Ike's idea of Conservatism was to conserve FDR's New Deal legacy, and even to extend it; for example, he had the interstate highway system built to win support from suburban voters.
Such was the heyday of Quantitative Liberalism, according to Professor Slack; from the Thirties through the Fifties, the emphasis was on expanding the reach of government and boosting the economy. The ephemeral joys of consumerism replaced the durable satisfactions of personal virtue and ordered liberty. Americans were bought off, transformed from citizens into consumers, and then lulled to sleep in front of their television sets. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers was not so much a preview as it was a documentary.
In the Sixties, unwilling to rest on its laurels and having nothing better to do, Liberalism decided to undermine its own accomplishments. Having invented consumerism, Liberalism turned against it, criticizing the “affluent society” it had created; having invented the “welfare-warfare” State, Liberalism turned against the warfare aspect, denouncing the war in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was replaced by John Kenneth Galbraith, who invented Keynesian economics; Michael Harrington (a Socialist) made middle-class Americans apologize for their prosperity; John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) invented white guilt. President Lyndon Johnson, who was insecure because he was so tall and so Texan, agreed to all of Liberalism’s demands: guns and butter, civil rights, Peace Corps, Job Corps, Community Action Organizations, Medicare, Public Broadcasting, immigration reform, housing subsidies, student loans, gunboat diplomacy, etc.
And then things got bad—really, really bad. In the mid-Sixties, a new generation of Leftist radicals emerged; American college campuses, previously known for panty raids, goldfish swallowing, and other harmless hijinks, became war zones. The Marxist New Left of the Sixties will be the subject of Professor Kevin Slack’s next lecture, and of Pascal the existential Russian blue cat’s next report. My breath is bated for sure.
{Note: since I did not attend Professor Slack’s lecture and have had to work from Pascal’s notes, my report may not be entirely accurate. However, I believe it captures the tenor of the lecture; in any case, any inaccuracies are my fault and not Pascal’s.}
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