MODERATING BETWEEN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

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Tiny Tim and Patrick Mirucki
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MODERATING BETWEEN LIBERALS (Tiny Tim) AND CONSERVATIVES (Scrooge):

Regarding excerpts from http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/vital-center.html :

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. THE VITAL CENTER: THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM

The Soviet experience, on top of the rise of fascism, reminded my generation rather forcibly that man was, indeed, imperfect, and that the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world. We discovered a new dimension of experience - the dimension of anxiety, guilt and corruption. (Or it may well be, as Reinhold Niebuhr has brilliantly suggested, that we were simply rediscovering ancient truths which we should never have forgotten.)

….

The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism and a reassertion of the ULTIMATE INTEGRITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL. [Caps added.]

[COMMENTS: I DISAGREE! To promote every individual above society would sanction boundless perversions --- pretending, corruptly, that each individual is equal or superior to “God” (or whatever label by which reference may be made to one’s highest standard of moral evaluation)!

While I agree that totalitarianism must be rejected, I consider that a MODERATE approach is best: To inspire and reassert shared respect for an ideal of how best to lead civilizations towards free societies that are stable, sustainable, and inspiring towards fulfilling surpassage.]

….

I am persuaded that the restoration of business to political power in this country would have the calamitous results that have generally accompanied business control of the government; that this time we might be delivered through the incompetence of the right into the hands of the totalitarians of the left. But I am persuaded too that liberals have values in common with most members of the business community--in particular, a belief in free society--which they do not have in common with the totalitarians.

[COMMENTS: I agree that we must not drink political kool-aid, but I think such kool-aid is served up by all present formal political parties, including Democrats and Republicans alike. Instead of drinking political kool-aid, we need, in common, to develop beliefs for leading us towards free societies that are stable, sustainable, and inspiring towards fulfilling surpassage.

This will not be accomplished until pride in individual RIGHTS is moderated by humility in respect of worthwhile, higher, civilizing DUTIES.

Individual freedom must be respected, but such freedom must also be derivative of respect for civilizing law. Property and capital (Capitalism) must be respected and encouraged, yet regulated --- ONLY as necessary to redeem vital social (Socialism) interests.]

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The corruptions of power--the desire to exercise it, the desire to increase it, the desire for prostration before it--had no place in the progressive calculations. As a result, progressivism became politically inadequate: it could neither persuade nor control the emotions of man. And it became intellectually inadequate: it could not anticipate nor explain the tragic movements of history in the twentieth century. Ideologies which exploited the darker passions captured men by appeals unknown to the armory of progressivism.

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Problems are much simpler when viewed from the office of a liberal weekly than when viewed in terms of what will actually happen when certain ideologically attractive steps are taken.

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Ask a progressive what he thinks of the Mexican War, or of our national policy toward the Indians, and he will probably say that these outbursts of American imperialism are black marks on our history. Ask him whether he then regrets that California, Texas and the West are today part of the United States. And was there perhaps some way of taking lands from the Indians or from Mexico without violating rights in the process? Pushed to it, the progressive probably thinks that there is some solution hidden in the back of his fantasy; but ordinarily he never has to push the question that far back, because he never dreams of facing a question in terms of responsibility for the decision.

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Its appeal lies partly in the progressive intellectual's sense of guilt over living pleasantly by his skills instead of unpleasantly by his hands, partly in the intellectual's somewhat feminine fascination with the rude and muscular power of the proletariat, partly in the intellectual's desire to compensate for his own sense of alienation by immersing himself in the broad maternal expanse of the masses. Worship of the proletariat becomes a perfect fulfillment for the frustrations of the progressive.

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But, contrary to Marx's prediction of increasing proletarian misery, capitalism, once it has had the chance, has vastly increased the wealth and freedom of the ordinary worker. It has reduced the size of the working class and deradicalized the worker.

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Marx recognized that many workers were not Marxists and so invented a classification called the Lumpenproletariat in which were dumped those who did not live up to theory. Lenin recognized this too and so invented a disciplined party which announced itself as the only true representative of the proletariat, reducing non-Communist workers to political non-existence.

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A working-class organization will soon stand, not for the working class, but for the working class plus the organization's own instincts for survival plus the special bureaucratic interests of the organization's top leadership. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oligarchy.

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Each success of the Soviet Union has conferred new delights on those possessed of the need for prostration and frightened of the responsibilities of decision. In a world which makes very little sense, these emotions are natural enough. But surrender to them destroys the capacity for clear intellectual leadership which ought to be the progressive s function in the world. In an exact sense, Soviet Russia has become the opiate of the progressives.

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"The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished," writes Proust; "as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician."

The Soviet Union can do very little any more to disenchant its believers; it has done about everything in the book already. I remember in the summer of 1939 asking a fellow traveler what the USSR could possibly do which would make him lose faith. He said, "Sign a pact with Hitler." But two months later he had absorbed the pact with Hitler; and so the hunger to believe, the anxiety and the guilt, continue to triumph over the evidence.

Conservatism in its crisis of despair turns to fascism: so progressivism in its crisis of despair turns to Communism. Each in a sober mood has a great contribution to make to free society: the conservative in his emphasis on law and liberty, the progressive in his emphasis on mass welfare. But neither is capable of saving free society. Both, faced by problems they cannot understand and fear to meet, tend to compound their own failure by delivering free society to its totalitarian foe. To avoid this fate, we must understand as clearly as possible the reasons for the appeal of totalitarianism.

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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_M._Schlesinger_Jr. : Schlesinger was a prolific contributor to liberal theory and was a passionate and articulate voice for Kennedy-style liberalism. He was admired for his wit, scholarship, and devotion to delineating the history and nature of liberalism. Since 1990 he had been a critic of multiculturalism.

*****

COMMENTS:

To resolve that nothing is more important than sustenance of one’s own bodily pleasures is to expose oneself to falling for everything, leading one towards a “less than zero” donkeyland, where residents mutually rationalize one another’s degradation.

Piping personal pleasure primus condemns pursuit of fulfillment to mirage. It is not natural physics that foreshadows fulfillment, but supernatural faith. To look for spiritual fulfillment in physical pleasure is to lose sight of it’s light.

Capacity to reach towards spiritual, civilizing aspirations beyond mere physical or pleasurable sustenance of body is the only thing that can lift us above base nature.

....

“FASCISM” — ABOUT ISOLATION, INDIVIDUALISM, “BORG,” HERD-MIND, AND COLLECTIVISM:

See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/opinion/12brooks.html?th&emc=th.
Some folks seem wired to want checks and balances for protecting individual freedom and privacy, while others seem wired to want collectivism and organized central control with clear lines of authority.

Individualists tend towards skills for jolting paradigms, by thinking creatively (outside the contextual box), while collectivists tend towards skills for harnessing group oriented creativity in respect of contexts. When they try to play nice together, each may see the other as “fascist.”