Liberalism is intellectually bankrupt

By Tim Dunkin

Liberalism is full of conceits, none greater than its pretensions to intellect. Indeed, the very term that they so often apply to themselves – "progressive" – carries with it the intrinsic claim to being those who advance knowledge, who solve problems, who come up with innovative solutions. Anyone who's ever dealt with liberals for very long knows that they love to pat themselves on the back for being the side that comes up with new ideas, while conservatives are the stupid ol' sticks-in-the-mud who want to hang onto failed ideas from the past because of our inability to look ahead.

Yet practical experience and common sense both tell us that this is diametrically the opposite of the way liberals actually are.

If you think about it, what new ideas have liberals really come up with in, say, the last several decades? The answer to that is "none." The answers they give to the "problems" we face today are the same ones they've always promoted – tax more, spend more, multiply social programs, restrict freedom more and more. Every idea they have is something that they've already been trying for almost a century before. Even in Obama's recent State of the Union address, it was just more of the same ol' Communist same ol' – class warfare rhetoric, social division-making, and promises of yet more government programs that will fail to solve the problems that the previous government programs also failed to solve. The American people are frankly getting tired of it all (as evidenced by the fact that his speech on Tuesday had the lowest viewership of any since 2000). Having seen high-octane, unadulterated liberalism in action for the last six years, it's no surprise that the American people have studiously kept the House of Representatives in Republican hands (and no, lefties, it isn't because of gerrymandering).

Which explains why Chairman Bow has to promise to circumvent Congress to force his will upon the American people.

It's time for the people of this country to face facts – liberalism is a failed ideology. It doesn't work. Wherever modern liberalism (i.e. post-1913 welfare-statism, not the classical liberalism to which conservatives and liberty-lovers hold), socialism, communism have been tried, they have failed. They have brought misery to the masses. They have concentrated wealth and power into the hands of a very small cadre of politically-connected revolutionaries, as well as their Outer Party hangers-on (which is exactly what we're seeing now between Washington DC and the rest of the country). The only thing the left wing is good for is spreading misery and enriching itself at our expense.

It certainly isn't good at coming up with rational public policy that actually helps, rather than hurts, the people.

The "liberal answer" to just about everything is failure. Gun violence? Don't punish criminals – instead, treat law-abiding citizens like criminals and punish them by restricting their freedom. Health care costs? Let's nationalize health care (which is what liberals want to do when ObamaCare's corporatistic public-private "partnership" inevitably fails) – which has worked so poorly in the United Kingdom and Canada that Canadians routinely come to the US for our expensive health care and old British people die on gurneys in their hospitals after going 48 hours without treatment. Problems with crime? Don't do anything to actually discourage criminals from recidivism, just coddle them and tell them it's all society's fault. Poverty? Let's just keep paying people not to work, keeping them right on the razor's edge of dependency. Failing schools? Let's just keep throwing money at them so they can fail more expensively. On and on and on goes the parade of liberal failures when it comes to trying to intellectually and rationally grapple with public policy issues.

So why are liberals unable to comprehend these failures, and why do they continue to cling so bitterly to the laughable notion that they're "intellectual" and "smart" because of their ideology? The reason for this is the bubble in which liberals live. Because many liberals do not actually interact with normal people on a day-to-day basis, they find themselves both insulated from any opposing arguments that might be articulated against what they believe, as well as being able to invent caricatures of their ideological opponents which they then mistake for reality. After all, it's a lot easier to "defeat conservative arguments" when the arguments you think you're defeating are simplified, hollowed-out straw men that barely resemble at all what conservatives actually believe.

Liberals judge a person's intelligence and ability by how closely they hold to left-wing orthodoxy on the issues. It's really that simple. A politician can be a complete moron by the standards of normal people, yet if he or she matches the Democrat talking points checklist, they are suddenly a "statesman" whose mindboggling brainpower will surely solve all the country's problems. How do you think Obama – who is demonstrably not very intelligent in any objective sense – nevertheless maintains his reputation with other liberals and the media as some sort of Spock-like human supercomputer?

The problem with this – as with any other cadre throughout history that has walled itself in behind the iron curtain of ideological insularity – is that liberals are nothing more than a hidebound, rigid, staid, mindless political orthodoxy of the type they would profess to want to tear down. Like the Legalists in ancient China who couldn't adapt to the intellectual challenges of their day, like the Babylonian priesthood in ancient Mesopotamia still clinging to a language and set of traditions that had been bypassed for half a millennium, so do liberals cling to tired old canards that still do not work and have been shown as failures.

If we want to see genuine forward progress in this country – which must be define as "restoring liberty to the American people" – then we need to get serious about putting, and continuing to put, conservative ideas into place whenever and wherever we can, and tossing the liberal ones out onto the scrapheap of history where they belong.

Now, in some superficial ways, the liberal critique of conservatives as not coming up with "new ideas" is true. It is accurate that we are not jumping from one ridiculous new-wave notion to the next. But the thing is, the old ideas that we hold to, we do so because they work. And that ought to be the measure of whether an idea should be put into policy. The evaluation of whether an idea is "smart" or not ought to depend on whether it works, not whether it falls in line with an approved political orthodoxy. I would rather reuse one idea from days gone by that actually works and brings peace, prosperity, and freedom to our people than to chase after a thousand pie-in-the-sky ideas invented by "progressive" political science professors who have no idea how the real world works and how real people act.

So the difference between conservatives and liberals is not that the former holds to "crusty old" ideas while the latter comes up with "innovative new" ideas. The difference is that our "old" ideas work and produce results, while theirs do not.

And our ideas – when actually put into practice – have and do work. When taxes are cut, the economy grows and prospers. When Kennedy cut taxes, we saw a decade of prosperity during the 1960s. When Reagan cut taxes, we saw prosperity that lasted all the way through the next decade. When Bush cut taxes, it brought us out of the post-911 recession. When the Republicans forced Clinton to sign off on welfare reform, our welfare rolls were reduced and the workforce participation rate increased because people were getting jobs. Here in North Carolina, Gov. McCrory and the Republicans in the state house made the unpopular but necessary decision to refuse to extend unemployment benefits – and what has happened? Unemployment in the state is plummeting because we're no longer paying people not to work: the jobs are there, if people are willing to look for them instead of depending on a government check.

Yet, it is incorrect to say that many of our conservative ideas are not innovative. Conservatives for decades have proposed inventive ideas that are rooted in our timeless traditions, but which are adapted to meet present circumstances. What were enterprise zones but an effort to reintroduce the free market and entrepreneurship – two of those timeless traditions – back into urban areas in our nation where these have been almost completely extinguished? Conservatives have pushed for alternative school choice options that have allowed thousands of kids to escape failing schools and better themselves, and could allow millions more to do so if liberals were not standing in the way. We could lower the cost of medical care while maintain its world class quality – without nationalizing or corporatizing it – through means of needed free-market reforms such as tort reform, forcing insurance companies to compete by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, and other ideas that have been advanced that would remove the strictures that government has put on the free market and which have distorted the market and driven up costs.

Liberals try to argue that none of these would work – but how would they know? Because of left-wing obstructionism, there's never really been the chance to put these into effect to see. Instead of school choice, liberals just seek to keep kids in failing schools and refuse all efforts at reform. Instead of trying to get people back to work by cutting taxes, growing the economy, and making welfare an unfavorable option compared to working, liberals prefer to continue to destroy the ability of business owners to expand, create jobs, and put more people back to work, while paying people to not work. Instead of actually doing things that would bring down the cost of health care, liberals saddled us with a monstrosity that is jacking up the cost of insurance (for those who still have it) while reducing access to doctors, hospitals, and needed care. Conservatives try to increase worker access to the job market by freeing labor from the chains of forced unionism, while liberals try to keep workers in bondage to a 60+ year old system that is completely unsuited to the modern economy.

The reason conservative ideas work, and will continue to work, is that they are based on an understanding of how the real world actually works. We understand how human nature operates, and try to use it to maximize benefit to as many as possible. That is what qualifies as "smart." Coming up with ideas that make things better instead of making things worse – that is what is "intellectual." Liberals can never really be these things because they cannot see outside the box of their own self-imposed mental limitations. The true obstructionists are the left-wingers like Obama and his misadministration, as well as congressional Democrats, who have worked for decades to prevent genuine reforms that would help the American people by making us freer and more prosperous. If there are obstructionists who need to be bypassed, they're the liberals. It's time for us to get serious about bypassing them.

© Tim Dunkin