Liberal-hatred

I've thought for a long time that liberal-hatred is one of the primary engines of contemporary politics. There seem to be a lot of people who will support (or fail to oppose) the most outlandish Republican initiatives, simply because at some turning-point in their lives they decided that, whatever they might end up becoming, they would never be liberals or Democrats. From that point on they're hard-wired, and there isn't really going to be much to talk about.

The 64-year-old citation above shows us that this has been going on for a long time. (Early in Roosevelt's first term it was even worse -- a coup d'etat was even briefly in the works). Liberal-hatred has always been there, but since 1980 it's increasingly become the dominant orthodoxy.

Gunnell's history of American political theory provides an interesting perspective on this. fter about 1930, American political theory (as well as many adjacent fields such as sociology and philosophy) was increasingly dominated by German refugees. And oddly enough, one thing that almost all of them had in common (left, right, and center) was a contempt for liberalism. This contempt was rooted in the Weimar experience, but was extended to American liberalism (and was amplified by savage critiques of the tackiness of American culture.)  Liberalism was regarded as shallow, unserious, lacking in philosophical grounding, and so on. Both from the left and the right the accusation was made that the Nazi system was simply the logical outcome of liberalism or of modernity, and that some better political philosophy would have to be found to replace it.

There are two ironies here. The first is that the refugee scholars owed their lives to the American version of the liberalism that they so despised. But the second, more serious problem is that the Weimar Republic was destroyed because too few Germans really accepted liberalism, and too few of them were really willing to defend it. Even among the centrists there was a highminded disdain for the ignoble horse-trading, backscratching. and pork that defines actual liberal politics. In 1932 the leftist illiberals let the rightist illiberals take power at the expense of the liberal center, expecting that they would be able to take power themselves later, when the Nazis predictably collapsed. (Certainly the German left of 1932 has to be tlisted among the most unsuccessful political movements of all time).

Far from being the quintessence of liberalism, Naziism is the classic rightwing political expression of liberal-hatred. Only time will tell whether we're going through a similiar phase right now or not, but there's evidence that we are. Our present ruling party has made a place for Armageddonists, neo-Confederates, World War IV advocates, and anti-tax anarchists, and all of those groups are bitterly illiberal (as are, of course, their Muslim fundamentalist ex-friends.)

One hopes that people will come to their senses and that something will be worked out, but the flood of venomous slander coming even from mainstream conservatives makes it seem unlikely that this will happen.

(NOTE: I published a rather different but closely-related piece at my more-political site, Seeing the Forest. Idiocentrism is less-political, not apolitical, and this piece fits in both places.

Internet documentation of the coup against FDR is sketchy, but there's no question that it happened: a forgotten episode of American history.)  

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All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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