What's the matter
with liberalism?

The Feb. 28 issue of The New Republic, that venerable liberal journal of opinion, published editorials by half a dozen of its writers discussing what's the matter with liberalism. That something is the matter with it wasn't seriously disputed. Its long-time home, the Democratic Party, is virtually powerless. The Republicans, solidly controlled by the conservative movement, possess not only the White House and Congress, but almost all the major governorships and even the mayoralty of New York City. Time was, 40 or 50 years ago, when the situation was almost exactly reversed. What has gone wrong?

The writers advance a number of interesting ideas, but the prize indisputably goes to The New Republic's editor in chief, Martin Peretz. He wastes no time trying to spare his readers pain. He recalls that in the 1950s notable economist John Kenneth Galbraith contemptuously dismissed the conservatives as "bookless" – which was to say that they simply had no seminal ideas. The shoe, Peretz asserts, is now firmly on the other foot: It is the liberals who are "bookless." It has been several decades since they had a really fresh basic idea – what Richard Nixon, or more likely one of his speechwriters, felicitously called "the lift of a driving dream."

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It wouldn't be fair to say that the liberals haven't come up with any new ideas at all. But since the triumph of the civil-rights movement 40 years ago, liberalism's initiatives have all fallen short of manifest and near-universal appeal. The sound principles of feminism have been caricatured to a point where the president of Harvard is in serious danger of losing his job for hinting that the abilities of the sexes may vary slightly in some academic fields. The essential wisdom of environmentalism has been trampled by demands that the health of the global economy be sacrificed in a desperate and almost certainly futile (as well as risky) effort to maintain Earth's surface temperature at exactly the level that prevails today. And a growing tolerance of homosexuality has been endangered by grotesque demands for "gay marriage."

The truth is that liberalism's last two really big ideas – that government should micro-manage the economy to uplift the poor, and that fascism was unrelievedly evil but that communism should be appeased because its aims were noble – both lost resoundingly, in world competition, to the conservative propositions that a free market is the greatest engine of prosperity for everyone and that communism must be opposed and destroyed. The present happy condition of conservatism is simply more support for the old adage that nothing succeeds like success.

What, then, should liberals do? The Republicans' old House speaker, Joe Martin, at a comparable time in his party's fortunes, told the story of a pair of rabbits who were chased into a hole by foxes.

"What shall we do?" asked the lady rabbit. (This was before Gloria Steinem.)

"Well," answered the gentleman rabbit, "I guess we'll just have to stay here till we outnumber them."

Good advice, as far as it goes. But liberals need a deeper analysis. To be blunt, they must come to terms with reality. That means accepting the principles of the free market wholeheartedly – not simply with "mouth honor," as Macbeth put it. And it also means coming to terms with the world as it really is. Peretz warns that liberals have invested far too many hopes in the United Nations. He is absolutely right.

At a deeper level, liberals must give up the conviction, born of the Enlightenment, that humanity, by the use of reason alone, can design a happy future for itself and the planet. That will entail abandoning their long romance with atheism and accepting a more modest place and role for mankind in God's plan for His universe.