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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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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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