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Cultural Socialism
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 Conservatives
spent the Reagan years
congratulating themselves on having vanquished liberalism. I was
there.  I
joined in all the victory parties, swilling
champagne and rejoicing that socialism was on the skids.
I call it socialism because
that’s what liberalism boils down to. Most liberals don’t like to
be called socialists; they think it’s some sort of
“McCarthyism.” Then again, half of them think Joseph Stalin
was a victim of McCarthyism.
Since I don’t want to use
the word socialism as loosely as liberals use the word
McCarthyism, I should explain. Though few liberals think of
themselves as espousing socialism, they have socialist reflexes. At nearly
every practical juncture, they take the left turn toward centralized
government. Their pragmatic response to every problem is more and bigger
government. They are what might be called retail socialists, as opposed to
their European cousins, who are, or were, wholesale socialists.
Now we are told that Bill Clinton
and his ideological cousin, Tony Blair of the British Labor Party, have
“moved to the right.” Just as Mr. Clinton has assured us that
“the era of big government is over,” Mr. Blair has assured
British voters that Labor no longer aspires to control the economy. The
interesting development is that the European Left is starting to imitate the
pragmatic approach of the American Left.
With good reason: the old
socialism has been a flop. It could run concentration camps when the need
arose, but it spectacularly mismanaged railroads and steel mills.
Today the socialist impulse has
shifted ground. It has moved from industry to culture: the family, sex,
abortion.
As we have just seen, President
Clinton’s conception of “voluntarism” means
“partnership” between big government and private charity.
Federalism now means the federal government subsidizing state and
local governments. A “pro-family” policy means, of course,
federal legislation mandating benefits for children, parents, and
“domestic partners.”
![[Breaker quote for Cultural Socialism: The senior partner]](2005breakers/050714.gif) It
doesn’t take a genius to see that in every case, the
federal government is the senior partner in these partnerships, dictating the
terms of formerly private or local arrangements. No doubt
libertarianism will soon come to mean federally subsidized liberty.
Far from being vanquished,
liberalism still has a stubborn grip on the minds of educated people.
I’m not using educated as an honorific term; I simply mean
that the more time people have spent in classrooms, the more likely they are
to hold certain embedded assumptions.
Chief among these assumptions is
that the “solution” to any dissatisfaction that is defined as a
“problem” (especially if it’s a “national”
problem) is a federal program. The problems are usually given new names to
signify their politicization: Sexual pressure on the job is now “sexual
harassment,” wife-beating is “spousal abuse,” cruelty to
children is “child abuse,” abortion is “reproductive
freedom,” and so on. And of course all education, formerly local and
private, is coming under federal supervision.
Another underlying assumption of
the new liberalism is that all rights come not from God, but from
government, and that only the federal government can really protect them.
So we are getting new rights, with such names as gay rights, which, unlike
the old Lockean rights, are not limitations on government, but just the
opposite: authorizations for new areas of government control. The more
“rights” the government itself stipulates, the more government
is needed to enforce them and to protect new categories of
“victims.”
Newly created
“rights” may even drive out traditional rights. Formerly private
freedoms of association may now be stigmatized and banned as
“discrimination.” The unborn child’s right to live is
trumped by the mother’s right to abort. Parental control of education
is displaced by the child’s right to “sex education.”
So even as the classical socialist
vision of a state-managed economy, with five-year plans and promises of a
“workers’ paradise,” has fallen into disrepute, a
state-managed morality is coming into being. We are moving from industrial
socialism to cultural socialism.
Though it uses the idiom of
“rights,” cultural socialism has its own totalitarian potential. In
fact, since culture is more pervasive than economics, cultural socialism may
prove at least as lethal as the Stalinist version. If tens of millions of
abortions count for anything, it’s already catching up fast.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 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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