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It was a time — mid-1970s — when liberalism still encompassed Robert F. Kennedy’s conviction that “the individual … the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups and states exist for that person's benefit.” Civil rights and women’s rights stood for equal opportunity regardless of race or gender. I was proud to call myself that kind of liberal. Then the strangest thing happened: both movements turned against their core principles. The civil rights movement betrayed Rev. Martin King, Jr.’s commitment to color-blind public policy by embracing a form of reverse discrimination called affirmative action. Feminists turned against their movement’s early commitment to legal and civic equality for women by demanding special preferences and waging war against males. Amazingly, both movements started encouraging followers to view themselves as dependent “victims” rather than as resourceful individuals capable of tapping hidden reserves of energy, talent, and strength. Americans who valued initiative, self-reliance and independence were to be scorned. Still more surreal: this crusade declared itself “progressive.” Equal opportunity was suddenly so yesterday; these fierce utopians demanded guaranteed equal economic and social outcomes, regardless of an individual’s talent, training, skill, or motivation. "The ever renewing society will be a free society whose capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up. It will foster innovative, versatile, self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe." I wasn’t alone in hoping this regressive detour from mainstream American values would be short-lived. Sadly, liberalism in the 1980s-90s continued to champion group-specific rights and skin-deep diversity, as opposed to celebrating the power of determined individuals to achieve great things. Derrick Bell of Harvard Law School actually declared Clarence Thomas ineligible for the Supreme Court because he “doesn’t think like a black.” (A black man who thinks for himself as dangerous? The discredited Jim Crow culture of the Deep South believed the same thing.) But the events of September 11, 2001 made clear that the detour taken by leading left-wing intellectuals was closer to a lemming stampede of malice and moral confusion. Remember Susan Sontag clearing her throat for the "courage" of the suicide pilots? Norman Mailer snidely comparing the dead of 9/11 to ot;automobile statistics”? Gore Vidal insinuating that Bush and Cheney had advance knowledge and allowed the attack to happen? Noam Chomsky insisting that al Qaeda at its most atrocious is no worse than the United States on an average day? Appalling, yet frankly not surprising. Out of the corner of my eye I had been tracking the left’s mounting incoherence. I remembered rolling my eyes at the howling rage of liberals when President Ronald Reagan dared to describe the Soviet gulag state as “evil.” Many of them had mocked Reagan’s straightforward Cold War strategy: “We win, they lose.” I was willing to bet John F. Kennedy would have stood with Reagan, given that both men had traveled to the Berlin Wall to champion freedom for the imprisoned people of East Germany. When self-styled progressives started implementing politically correct speech codes on college campuses, I stopped trying to square the group-think conformism of contemporary liberalism (which now resembled the medieval church) with the free thinking classical liberalism of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (both men of the Enlightenment). My book Leaving the Left is a memoir of the turning points that deepened my appreciation for America as a place where individuals can be trusted to think for themselves, and to make the primary decisions that shape their lives and the lives of their children. My larger passion as a writer, also as a father, is to understand how and why some individuals and societies cease to thrive while others remain innovative, creative, and productive. I agree with the social philosopher John Gardner, in his book Self-Renewal, that "the ever renewing society will be a free society whose capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." Such a society, he continues, "will foster innovative, versatile, self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe." "Room to breathe" is a defining quality of liberty. The framers of the Constitution understood that the freedom to earn, to achieve, to create; the freedom to be left alone — ultimately the freedom to be — are threatened more often by the "gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations," in Madison's phrase. Which is why more than ever I agree with Ronald Reagan that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'" |
