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The Fadsters
 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.”
![[Breaker quote for The Fadsters: Progress or amnesia?]](2007breakers/070423.gif) 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.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 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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