The Reactionary Utopian
April 23, 2007
THE FADSTERS
by Joe Sobran
Even before they'd finished mopping up the blood at
Virginia Tech, the WASHINGTON POST had some editorial
counsel for Virginia: Adopt tougher gun control laws.
Thanks for the free advice, guys! If we citizens of
Jefferson's state adopt laws as strict as Washington's,
maybe we can get our murder rate down -- possibly as low
as Washington's!
There is a danger that such editorials could feed an
unfortunate stereotype: that liberals never learn, never
take responsibility for the wreckage their policies
produce.
Liberals and their "progressive" cousins, socialists
and the unlamented Marxists, have always had one great
gift: the ability to start stampedes. A murder spree
always sets them off on gun control. In between
atrocities, they revert to their normal default panics
about global warming or nuclear winter. Whatever.
And let's not forget their furor over Don Imus's
three-word atrocity. Leave it to Barack Obama, who has
enjoyed his own liberal stampede, to liken Imus's "verbal
violence" to a madman's murder spree. Obama is often
described as "young," though he is a middle-aged man, 45
years old; and I think I know why. He reminds you of the
champion high-school orator, the bright, well-behaved boy
who knows how to intone the platitudes the grownups love.
He can see metaphorical violence everywhere except in
skull-crushing late-term abortions.
Every alleged crisis provokes the progressive-minded
fadsters to call for a massive increase in state power:
economic depression, poverty, racism, gun violence, you
name it -- such evils must be not merely contained, but
"eliminated," posthaste, along with their "root causes."
(As far as I know, there is no such thing as a crisis
that warrants hasty, or even eventual, government
reduction.)
And behold the results! Our inner cities look like
war zones -- of the endless War on Poverty. This is only
one of the myriad consequences of going progressive. The
Great Society! And old folks may recall that striking
down laws against abortion during the first trimester of
pregnancy was going to make the horrid practice "safe,
legal -- and rare." Today we have a million abortions a
year, and the progressives who used to deplore it now
insist that it's a "fundamental human and constitutional
right" -- through all nine months.
A century ago, the Catholic poet Charles Peguy made
a profound and prescient observation: "We will never know
how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the
fear of seeming not sufficiently progressive."
Even supposed conservatives now adopt the
progressive style: the first President Bush with his New
World Order and War on Drugs, his son with his War on
Terror and enormous expansion of the colossal centralized
state. The latter speaks of "eliminating tyranny from the
earth"; implanting democracy in the Middle East would be
only the beginning, spreading "freedom" (undefined)
contagiously.
Both Bushes have left Americans themselves less free
than before. And no wonder. Both look back with nostalgia
to the worst war of all time, World War II, during which
the United States fought side by side with Stalin and
created the world's most terrible weapons of mass murder.
Abortion and nuclear weapons have lost much of their
power to horrify. Like Macbeth, we "have supped full with
horrors," except that Macbeth still realizes what he has
done and knows what should horrify him.
The modern world's case is worse. When you
habitually violate your principles, you don't just harden
your conscience; you risk losing it altogether. You even
wind up forgetting what your principles used to be.
Within living memory (though just barely), nearly
all Christians agreed that contraception was immoral.
Then, in 1931, the conservative Church of England decided
that, though it was wrong in principle, exceptions could
be made, but only for (say) married couples who couldn't
afford more children than they already had.
The Anglicans tried to uphold the principle of
chastity -- but with a few exceptions. But today, few
Christians reject contraception. Only the Catholic
Church, basically, still condemns it, but few Catholic
priests dare to preach against it. That would seem "not
sufficiently progressive." Few even remember why chastity
was ever considered a virtue.
It's not that most people have changed their minds.
Most people seldom use their minds; they merely follow
fashion. We are now seeing what happens a generation or
two after a fad catches on and goes unopposed.
You can call it progress. I prefer to call it
amnesia. No wonder G.K. Chesterton said that "only the
Catholic Church can save a man from the degraded slavery
of being a child of his time."
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