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More Progress, Anyone?
 My
favorite liberal writer, Michael Kinsley, has
made another of the witty arguments that always make me look forward to his
columns.  Only
this time I don’t think his reasoning leads us where he wants it to. He has
unwittingly exposed liberalism’s mortal weakness.
Kinsley recalls that in 1989,
The New Republic, of which he was then editor, ran a cover
article titled “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage,” by
Andrew Sullivan. [Andrew Sullivan’s article can be read at www.andrewsullivan.com/homosexuality.php under the
title “Here Comes the Groom.” — website ed.] It was
intended less as a serious proposal than as a “thought
experiment” to provoke reflection. “Gay marriage
itself,” says Kinsley, “seemed so far-out and unlikely to
happen that whether you were actually for it was beside the point.”
Since then, however, “gay
marriage” has become a serious possibility. “Take a moment
to consider how amazing this is,” Kinsley writes. “Just 15
years after that New Republic essay, marriage is the
defining goal of the gay rights movement.... Gay marriage is on the verge of
joining abortion rights on the very short list of litmus tests that any
Democratic candidate for national office must support.” And today,
“even the most homophobic religious-right demagogue feels obliged
to spout — and may well actually believe — bromides about
God’s love of gay people.”
Furthermore,
“Today’s near-universal and minimally respectable attitude
— the rock-bottom, nonnegotiable price of admission to polite
society and the political debate — is an acceptance of gay people and
of open, unapologetic homosexuality as part of American life that would
have shocked, if not offended, great liberals of a few decades ago such as
Hubert Humphrey....
“This development is not
just amazing, it is inspiring.... It took African American civil rights a
century and feminism a half-century to travel the distance gay rights have
moved in a decade and a half.”
Then the kicker: “This is
also scary, of course, because there is no reason to think that gay rights
are the end of the line. And it’s even scarier because these are all
revolutions of perception as well as politics. This means that all of us
who consider ourselves good-hearted, well-meaning, empathetic
Americans — but don’t claim to be great visionaries —
are probably staring right now at an injustice that will soon seem obvious
— and we just don’t see it. Somewhere in this country a gay
black woman, grateful beneficiary of past and present perceptual
transformations, has said something today in all innocence that will
strike her just a few years from now as unbelievably callous, cruel, and
wrong.”
![[Breaker quote: What next from liberalism?]](2004breakers/041214.gif) Wow!
It’s one thing to celebrate the familiar liberal fads
of the past and present, which we can evaluate separately on their merits.
It’s another thing to prostrate ourselves before the liberal fads of
the future, before we even know what they are. Yet this is just what
Kinsley is urging on us. He’s not appealing to any stable standard of
right and wrong, just to unspecified “revolutions of
perception” and “perceptual transformations.”
And what will these be?
That’s anyone’s guess. A less fancy name for them is
“political correctness,” the wind whereof bloweth where it
listeth, but always in the general direction of more sexual license backed
by a more powerful secularist state.
These “revolutions of
perception” will seem a lot less random, mysterious, and
unpredictable to Christians than they will to liberals like Kinsley, who
assumes they are predestined. They’ll surely include, for example,
more tolerance for pedophiles. (Why shouldn’t they enjoy the same
rights as the rest of us? Iron logic.) And most of these revelations
won’t be legislated; they’ll be brought down from Sinai by
the judiciary.
Kinsley is offering a sort of
mystical liberalism that he thinks transcends politics, when it actually
depends on the kind of arbitrary power the courts have been allowed to
exercise for nearly three generations. There are signs that this is finally
changing, and that liberals won’t be able to enjoy that kind and
degree of rule by judicial fiat much longer.
Liberalism’s fatal flaw,
as Kinsley’s argument shows, is that it has no permanent norms,
only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets. Each of
these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and
destructive extremes.
Liberalism has no vision of a
final, settled social order; it’s always waiting for the next
“revolution of perception” to overturn everything.
What’s “progressive” today may be embarrassingly
“reactionary” tomorrow. Kinsley may find this kaleidoscopic
idea of endless and indefinable progress inspiring; the rest of us may find
it merely exhausting.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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