Exclusive: Securing the Ideological Home Field Advantage
December 30, 2009 - Robert Weissberg
For decades I have closely observed battles between liberals and conservatives, and though hardly a disinterested observer, I keep an accurate score. To summarize a long accounting, conservatives are losing. Across the board, from unrelenting state expansion to the spread of mind-killing multiculturalism in our schools – conservatives only fight rear-guard actions. That we probably out-number our enemies only deepens the frustration. More exasperating is that conservatives misdirect their energies. We see the struggle as if it were WW I – battles of million-man armies where victory entails out-mobilizing the enemy. Defeating liberalism, our leaders tell us, means more angry letters, more demonstrations, louder raving and ranting, more condemnations of the liberal mass media, hundreds of think tanks to issue a thousand policy reports and, lastly, make sure you vote for patriotic, sensible candidates. Sorry, my dear, wrong war. The battle is about ideas, who controls the dominant Weltanschauung (German for “worldview”), not who can organize the largest Washington rally.
Let me draw a familiar sport parallel: the home field advantage. Avid sports fans understand how a small built-in difference provides the home team a slight advantage that will separate making the play-offs versus going home early. In politics the home field advantage is even more important since, unlike athletics, its possession is seldom even noticed so the “visiting team” just inexplicably keeps loosing.
The political home field advantage entails advancing ideas that “everybody knows to be true” - ideas that are so axiomatic that doubters are automatically deemed foolish, out of touch with reality and, critically, just plain “factually” wrong. This is about owning ideological legitimacy or, better yet, controlling all the argument-ending clichés. Imagine a 14th century debate over monarchy versus electoral democracy. It would end before it began since “everybody knew” that Kings and Queens were divinely ordained, that hoi polloi were naturally inclined to unthinking subservience, mass elections were administratively impractical, that a kingless society would be ungovernable, and challenging monarchy risked chaos. This mind-controlling orthodoxy was hardly left to chance: doubters were publicly tortured and then gruesomely executed.
What is the liberal home field advantage in today’s political struggles? Let me briefly highlight just three of many, all of which debilitate conservatives well before the battle begins.
Environmental Determinism
This is the belief that people are born virtuous, are corrupted by “bad” influences but since humans are malleable, they can be rescued by fixing the environment. Though traceable to Rousseau (“man is born free but is everywhere in chains”) it was popularized by the academic left in the 1960s – “don’t blame the victim.” It is now mainstream orthodoxy. Like Marxism, it rejects genetic predispositions, hard-to-change habits or even free will. Policy-making is just one fix-up-the-environment project after another.
This way of thinking is evident when educators bewail how “bad schools” impede learning as if broken desks and peeling paint condemn hapless, knowledge-hungry students to illiteracy. The “solution,” then is to fix “bad schools” with better teachers, new furniture, modern technology, more social services and the like. Equally popular is attributing poverty to “the culture of poverty” as if one slips into penury just as one grows up Norwegian and acquires an appetite for herring. People are thus sponges unable to decide what to absorb, so progress merely requires altering the environment.
This progress-by-osmosis mentality has proven disastrous. Want to cure slum dwellers of criminality, no problem – just move them into clean, well-designed, well-equipped public housing. Better yet, make them “middle class” by helping them acquire a residence with a $400,000 mortgage. Want to eradicate the mayhem plaguing Thomas Hobbes Middle School? Just organize museum trips to uplift the miscreants. Perhaps the all-time champion is early childhood intervention, from Head Start to Sesame Street, as the Mother of all environmental-based cures. Utopia is just around the corner when toddlers hear Mozart and watch Big Bird. We should only be so lucky.
The conservative default option: people create their environments, not vice versa, and unless otherwise demonstrated, human behavior is intractable, not infinitely malleable.
Problems to be Solved Everywhere
Not every fact of life can be classified as a problem requiring a solution but liberals often disagree. Perhaps they have a compulsion to find “curable problems.” Consider, for example, the extinction of species, a daily natural inevitability consistent with Darwinian evolution. Why must humans suffer to save a particular species, typically one lacking any economic value or centrality to human existence? One answer, according to a scientist I once met, is that only creatures that are cute stuffed animal or stars in a Disney movie will elicit rescue efforts (that Toys-R-Us may determine environmental policy is truly mind-boggling). Similarly, what makes income inequality “a problem” as opposed to a fact of life, a variation comparable to group differences in average height, propensity for obesity, ambition, athletic ability and thousands of other traits?
Liberals are incredibly clever in discovering “a pressing problem,” then brainwashing conservatives, and, rest assured, this uncovered tribulation will soon become “a problem to be solved by government.” When liberals announce that millions of Americans lack health insurance and government must provide it, conservatives happily buy into this newly manufactured “problem” and only differ in their solution. Why has this suddenly become a crisis requiring an immediate solution? The far better rejoinder is to insist that this is a condition, not a 911 emergency. If people wanted “affordable” health insurance they can already buy it though, to be sure, people disagree over definitions of affordability. Conservatives should marshal data about what these uninsured folk spend monthly on cell phone plans, electronic gadget upgrades, pet food, cable TV, beauty treatments and similar non-essential items. What liberals really mean – but are too embarrassed to say – is the uninsured want benefits priced below cost all the while keeping the other stuff. A rejoinder should be something like, “To me the lack of affordable BMWs is more pressing, and I’m sure that if you give many young people a choice, they will prefer $10,000 330i’s over a cheap insurance policy, and we can fund this by taxing those who already own Beemers.”
The conservative default option: converting a “condition” to “a problem” and then to “a problem to be solved by government action” requires a high standard of proof, and given frequent failures, the burden of proof is on liberals.
An Idyllic Vision of Human Nature
James Madison, the Constitution’s architect, saw humans as inherently depraved, forever lusting after their neighbor’s property, eternally seeking power to tyrannize others and otherwise inclined to do harm. A well-designed government could never expunge this ingrained evil; only the government’s organization (e.g., checks and balances) could prevent tyranny. That this arrangement reflecting a dim view of human nature has survived 223 years suggests that Madison might have been on to something. Keep in mind that everybody alive today had ancestors who survived 100,000 years of dog-eat-dog conflict, often lying, cheating and killing to arrive in the 21st century, and these inclinations are undoubtedly hard-wired into our DNA. Goodie-goodies, those naturally virtuous, were pushed out of the gene pool eons ago.
Liberals have, obviously, forgotten Madison, let alone our vicious biological legacy and have instead embraced a fanciful concept of human nature. It is suicidal to believe that reason and kindness can defeat evil or that bad people can readily be reformed. It is no accident that their reflexive solution to nearly every problem is more education as if millennia of evolution can be reversed by a few lectures. This misguided idealism is a horrific basis for policy, and conservatives should say so from the very beginning.
Combating terrorism? No problem for liberals – just build spiffy schools, create a functioning economic infrastructure, be their friends and evil will be driven from the hearts of men. George Orwell once said that some ideas are so preposterous that only intellectuals could believe them, but only today’s liberal will insist that billions handed over to some Third World tyrant to prevent famine, global warming, child prostitution, or some similar self-inflicted misfortune will not be stolen. Once this mistaken idyllic version of humanity becomes axiomatic, conservatives have lost the battle.
The conservative default option: unless evidence is conclusive, always assume the worst about human beings and organize society accordingly; better to be called a misanthrope than lose sleep that career criminals received a “get out of jail free” card.
What Can Be Done?
Our analysis is, as we said, just a beginning, but the plan is clear. In military parlance, the attack should be directed below the waterline – demolish all the assumptions, truths-by-proclamation, wooly-headed clichés and all the other unstated propositions that guide the liberal onslaught: take back the ideological home field advantage. Policy battles are important but in the long run secondary. Step by step, expose and thereby de-legitimize the underlying cosmology. Let liberals argue on behalf of the malleability of human nature, the inherent goodness of all people, the pressing need to save the cute gay whales or that evil-doers can become genuine friends after receiving free Dell computers. And all the rest. Actually, this is not especially difficult. History and cold hard experience are on our side. Again: the aim is not to out-mobilize the enemy; it is to show that their guiding ideas rest on foolishness, and who wants to be associated with nonsense? Victory will have arrived when some Woody Allen-like figure appears on Saturday Night Live, announces, “Hi, I’m a liberal,” and the audience roars with laughter.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Robert Weissberg is emeritus professor of political science, University of Illinois-Urbana and currently an adjunct instructor at New York University Department of Politics (graduate). He has written many books, the most recent include The Limits of Civic Activism, Pernicious Tolerance: How teaching to "accept differences" undermines civil society and the forthcoming, Bad Students, Not Bad Schools: How both the Right and the Left have American education wrong (early 2010). Besides writing for professional journals, he has also written for magazines like the Weekly Standard and currently contributes to various blogs.
Mr. Weissberg's thoughts are intriguing and I largely agree with his assertions, untested though they may be.
I personally see the problem and challenge to be much greater.
The political "left" and its philosophies are based in lies. Even the term "liberal" is a lie in that the true, dyed-in-the-wool "liberals" demonstrate the most egregious fascism known to mankind. In this is their aversion, if not outright hostility, to facts and history.
I agree more closely with Dr. Peter Breggin and Dr. Michael Savage, PhD that this willingness to believe lies and accept illusions leads to mental disorder.
The only cure for this that I have known to work is Truth. Not merely facts and datum but Biblical Truth.
posted by : Philip
Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 02:05 PM
I see the situation slightly differently. The conservative hopefully comes to a conclusion based upon the facts as presently obtainable, which implies that new facts might yield a new conclusion. Underneath this, is, or should be, the greater Biblical Truth, which makes manifest that mankind may be king/queen of the little temporal mountain but not of the big eternal mountain. People, such as our Founding Fathers, who understand that--George Washington didn't sink to his knee at Valley Forge to pray to Darwin--don't have the ego problems of those who live totally in a secular world. For that reason, secular progressives resent others whose lives and observed beliefs acknowledge a power greater than themselves.
And what could cause even more resentment, even outrage? Those pesky facts that can't be controlled. So the liberals developed and pushed in our laughably called "public education" system the idea of feelings as being of overarching importance. Questions at the end of a short story or poem in any school accredited literature anthology have an unnerving tendency to begin, "How do you feel about ...?" Is there any way to posit an incorrect answer even with those pesky facts in the actual work buzzing around the student's head? So, students are trained (not taught) that their feelings are always going to be correct regardless of facts. And, of course, their egos ride their feelings as if riding fine stallions.
This is why not agreeing with a liberal's feeling/ideology is perceived as a direct personal attack, such that the liberal responds with the standard "ad hominem" attacks. And, therefore. facts which don't match the feelings/ideology can be disregarded so cavalierly. That is how liberals can conspire and destroy data and careers until Climategate unmasks them. Their feelings about something trump facts, so "sentence first, trial later" is the order of the ideological day.
posted by : Chuck Moody
Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 01:08 AM
