A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on March 13th, 2008 in Progressive Faith

A man named David Mamet – a name I had never heard of until yesterday – has caused somewhat of a stir by getting the Village Voice to print what is called, rather charitably, an “essay” entitled “Why I am no longer a Brain-Dead Liberal”. It might better be described as “a very bad attempt to promote my play while throwing in a lot of exterior references that are only tangentially relevant and not really arranged in any sort of sensible order”. That’s probably too long to be a workable title. Perhaps he should simple call it “I am Brain-Dead”.

If I could summarize it, it starts with “I can change my mind if I want to.” It then explains what is wrong with liberalism as being: 1) NPR sucks; 2) Government sucks; 3) People suck; 4) The Constitution doesn’t suck; 5) JFK sucked as much as Bush; 6) Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell don’t suck.

Let’s start with Mamet’s definition of “liberal” –

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

“accepted as…faith” is translated as “I never actually thought about anything.” Whereas he will later say that he dug into conservative theory and found it warm and comfy, he never once picked up a single liberal theorist’s book. For those who have the intellectual heft for it, I’d recommend John Dewey’s Public and its Problems, followed by John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Or try Robert Hale, John Spargo, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Edwin Seligman.

Beyond this, it is incoherent to think that government and business – organizations created and staffed by people – would be bad if all people everywhere were good all the time. It’s also stupid and easily proven false. As I reported in my morning news round up, a guy here in New Jersey was just convicted of 143 charges related to having sex with children – some as young as 23 months old. If someone can explain the good in that, they need to be shot in the head before they have a chance to “help” some children in their own neighborhood.

I’ve seen this before – this contention that liberals believe people are inherently good and/or perfectable. It’s asinine. I’ve never seen a single liberal theologian or philosopher that would agree with that even a little bit. Anyone who claims that should be avoided – they are either stupid or devious (possibly both). Not even Jesus claimed such a thing, and he, we are asked to believe, loves everyone.

Anyone who claims that liberalism believes that people are inherently good and/or perfectable should immediately be denounced as either a moron or dishonest. They are simply setting up a strawman, either from ignorance or from spite. Take your pick.

He then claims:

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

There are faults with everything. That is simply reality. If you find yourself disenchanted with it; then you are simply hiding from the truth. These faults run from the rather small and unimportant to the large and vital. Most faults are going to be too small or too distant to be worth our time and energy. That doesn’t make them less faulty and it doesn’t make us bad people for not wanting to address them. But it remains reality.

There is no greater statement of being dead from the neck up than to say anything other than “faults exist with everything”, which is to rephrase “everything is always wrong”.

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day…

Yes, we are fortunate to be in the most wealthy and powerful 10% of human existence in the world today. Even those who have it badly here are better off materially than those suffering famine and deprivation throughout the world. All that means is that we ought to be thankful for what we have and perhaps a little less smug about it. We aren’t morally superior for having planes, trains, and automobiles – in fact, our abuse of our prosperity causes problems for the entire planet.

Then we have the comparison of Kennedy v. Bush:

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

This “Iraq=Vietnam” stuff is moronic. We supposedly entered Iraq to depose a dictator that was a direct and emminent threat against the United States. Whoever first entangled the US in Vietnam (Eisenhower), it was never justified to the American people as a self-defensive measure to protect ourselves against imminent physical attack.

Similarly, the outing of Valerie Plame doesn’t compare with the Bay of Pigs – even if it were true that “hundreds” of CIA agents died there. Bush’s buddies outed Plame as part of a plot to disgrace a faithful servant of the United States who happened to be able to show that the Administration’s justification for invading Iraq was not only false, but easily dismissed by anyone with critical thinking skills. As stupid as the Bay of Pigs invasion was, it was never intended to threaten any domestic political rival.

To my knowledge, Kennedy never claimed brotherhood with fellow authors because he had worked with a ghost-writer on Profiles in Courage. Similarly, to my knowledge, President Bush has never written anything and actively eschews even reading what others write for him. Do we want to compare military records of Kennedy and Bush? I mean, let’s compare apples with apples.

If Kennedy was in so deep with the Mafia, why was his brother, as his Attorney General, going after them so hard? Again, let’s go apples to apples: If Bush is “in bed with the Saudis”; then it is to enhance the profits of his oil-holdings. Is Mamet saying that Kennedy conspired with the Mafia to…I don’t know – raise the price of whiskey?

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

Oh God, what a stupid argument. “I like cheeseburgers; therefore McDonalds must be beneficial.” What goods and services could we not live without? From my memory of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there was no “need for corporations” in his discussion of biological needs. Food, clothing, shelter – yeah, we need that stuff. And it can be delivered without corporations and was delivered without corporations for thousands of years. Corporations make things more convenient for us – but we could live without TV or cars or the internet. People do, you know.

It isn’t the existence of corporations that I protest, but their ability to shield the guilty from just persecution under the law. It is the inordinate influence corporations can place upon government to enact policies that benefit them and hurt everyone else around them (telecom immunity?).

There are some extremists on the left (and on the right) who might claim that all corporations are evil. They are stupid.

And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.

Yeah, well, if you had actually read liberal theorists rather than just assuming you knew what liberals believe, then you might have that opinion. The American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II are all instances of an American army enforcing liberal ideas and protecting those who could not protect themselves. The military isn’t bad – I’m very proud of my own service as well as my father’s service and my grandfather’s service. The military is simply a tool of the government and can be used for good or evil as the government bends to the will of those elites who run it.

There are some extremists on the left (and on the right, as well) who hate the military. They are stupid.

Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view.

This is the great conservative Trojan horse. “I made it. Therefore everyone can.” Crackers. Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest, and so can a lot of other people – but there are a ton of people who can’t. Bill Gates can “reverse engineer” (also known as “stealing” or “violating copyright”) a computer interface and leverage into being one of the richest men in history, but – get real – there is simply no mathematical way everyone can be one of the ten richest men in history (hint: Only ten people can do that at any time).

Few people move up the chain, but even fewer move down – and by fewer steps. Uncommon people like Andrew Carnegie can move from absolutely nothing to the highest echelons of luxury – but you’ll find few Kennedy cousins down at the Welfare office. Children of the wealthy are rarely as rich as their parents – but that is in large part due to the fact that they have to split mom and dad’s fortune – look at the Walton family.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow

What a dumb-ass. You’ve never heard of food inspections? You know, when I was a kid, there were very few outbreaks of food-born pathogens. Why the uptick now? Dumb-ass conservatives believe that a corporation, which exists to turn a profit, is more motivated to push up costs with purity than they are to hide problems and hope no one notices. If that were true, pure food and drug laws never would have been written. Social Security has rescued millions of elders from poverty – much to everyone’s everlasting sorry, it helped extend the lifespan of everyone’s grandparents by more than a decade in my own lifetime. Oh yeah, Medicare helped, but that isn’t a government program – oh wait. It is.

Shall I go on? The Federal Reserve has staved off multiple recessions and lessened the pitfalls of those that occurred (at least when dumbass conservatives weren’t actively working against it). FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) allows utilities to operate as “natural monopolies” by regulating their prices – and an entire generation of stockholders appreciated that as well as customers who never would have had electricity otherwise. That same military you were just castigating liberals for hating is also a government program. Damn. It looks like Mr. Mamet is simply too stupid to figure out what the government does.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

Ok, let’s be clear – you live a world that is about ten times as liberal as the one most conservatives want to see. Listen to them talk about how much they’d want to repeal. You live in a world that is neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a compromise between those two ideological perspectives.

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

Funny – it’s the conservatives that always scream about “values”. And, by the way, “values” exist in a marketplace, too. You just have to have enough brain cells awake enough to notice.

White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “

Yes, and conservatism can be reduced to one word: “STOP!” It doesn’t matter what or when or why; they just want to “stand athwart history and shout”. Doesn’t do justice to conservatism? Neither does White’s stupidity do justice to liberalism.

Besides, I think the saddest of words would have to be, “My child just died.”

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

Huh. Is this a “I can’t figure out how to end this. I’ll stop now.” moment? Oh wait – he’s no longer a “brain-dead liberal” but he never said he wasn’t brain-dead.

That explains the whole thing, from start to finish. But most of all, it explains that ending, Scarecrow.

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