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The Power of the Liberal Taboos

by Christopher Chantrill
September 18, 2005 at 4:52 pm

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THE PRESIDENT’S mother, Barbara Bush, got into trouble recently for saying on NPR that the underprivileged African American refugees from hurricane Katrina were doing fine in Texas. “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary,” she said on NPR, “is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them.”

Then there is abortion. Last week the old Democratic war-horses rumbled up and down their Senate paddock snorting that Chief Justice nominee John Roberts would not discuss his thinking on Roe v. Wade. Liberal professor Erwin Chemerinsky told Hugh Hewitt that he had spoken to Democratic staffers and they reported “enormous anger right now among Democratic Senators.” As we come up to the twentieth anniversary of the borking of Robert Bork, what exactly do these politicians think conservative nominees to the Supreme Court are going to say to them?

In Germany, when the not-very Iron Lady Angela Merkel introduced a professor to her staff who advocates a move to a flat tax, Social Democratic Party leader Schroeder shamed her into distancing herself from the heretical tax, “calling it a ‘tax for millionaires’ and ‘the Merkel minus’ because it will eliminate middle-class tax benefits for education, child care and housing.” That kind of talk enabled him to demagogue the German election into a dead heat.

If conservatives are so powerful, why is it that liberals still retain the power to shame them when they break sacred liberal taboos on race, on sex, and even economic policy? Weren’t all taboos supposed to have been swept away as primitive superstitions about five minutes after the publication of Freud’s Totem and Taboo?

But taboo is not superstition. It is merely human. It expresses a sense that something is so powerful that it is dangerous even to think about it. That is why Robert Bork had to be destroyed back in 1987—not just for saying, but for thinking that Roe v. Wade was a bad idea.

In the United States in 2005 who can doubt that it is still too dangerous for educated women to think about the meaning of elevating the right not to have children into a sacrament. It is still too dangerous for liberals to think about the consequences of their bankrupt race policy: hopeless schools in minority areas and a black-on-white crime rate still six times higher than the white-on-black rate. So just as in Victorian times gentlemen are careful not to upset the delicate sensibilities of the ladies.

If we are not allowed to discuss fundamental questions in robust Anglo-Saxon, we are allowed at least to discuss them in Latinate euphemisms: Unemployment, Poverty, Diversity, Literacy, Equality, and Welfare.

Why do we talk about Unemployment instead of finding a job? And why do we talk about Literacy instead of learning to read?

Gertrude Himmelfarb in her study of nineteenth century Poverty and Compassion tells us what a neologism like “Unemployment” is for. It suggests “an impersonal condition resulting from impersonal causes.” It allows the elite to take charge of the lives of the poor. “Finding a job” is something that poor people do for themselves. “Unemployment” is something that politicians, activists, and pundits can attack with bureaucratic programs. “Literacy” is something that First Ladies work on. “Learning to read” is something that ordinary people do for themselves.

The right of the educated elite to organize and direct the lives of ordinary people derives from an Assumption of Competence. Scratch any scribbler or talking head: he clearly seems to know what he is talking about. But this assumption does not extend to ordinary people. The reverse of the medal of competence is the Presumption of Helplessness, the presumption that ordinary people need instruction and supervision in the education of their children and in the precaution against common life hazards.

The taboos of the welfare state mount a bodyguard of silence to protect a sacred principle, the Presumption of Helplessness. When Barbara Bush incautiously observes that the helpless refugees of New Orleans are doing fine in Houston, she is suggesting they might be able to shift for themselves. When John Roberts equivocates on Roe v. Wade he is genuflecting before the power of the sisters. When candidate Angela Merkel proposes a flat tax, she disturbs the tangled system that guides the German people in making life choices approved by their betters.

When the liberal taboos on race and abortion still have the power to shame, then liberals are still ahead in the culture war.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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