Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Liberal Interpretation
Michael Knox Beran on how liberal revisionists vilify all things distinctly American:
In the view of those who subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history, the philosophy of the Declaration[Of Independence] is antiquated. According to the liberal interpretation, all men are created equal, except for blacks, Native Americans, Alaskan natives, Hispanics, and Asian and Pacific Islanders, who are racially challenged and must be classed apart from everyone else. (Native Hawaiians will be added to the list if the Akaka Bill becomes law.) All are entitled to life, except for those whose hearts beat in the womb; to liberty, except for those who require the supervision of the nanny state; to the fruits of their industry, except for those who have made a certain amount of money and are obligated to hand a disproportionate chunk of it over to the government each year.
Central to the liberal interpretation of history is the belief that a country founded on so flawed a philosophy cannot, as a rule, be a force for good in the world. Accordingly, when the United States acts in the world it most often acts not for good, but for evil.
Viewed in the light of such an interpretation of history, Congressman Stark’s comments become comprehensible, even predictable. President Bush adheres to the Freevangelical faith of President Lincoln, who argued that the United States has a decisive role to play in advancing the cause of freedom in the world. President Bush adheres, as well, to the belief that all human beings are entitled to liberty and the fruits of their industry: he therefore opposes the enlargement of nanny-state measures like S-CHIP when alternative measures (such as tax cuts) would promote the general welfare in a better and less intrusive way.
From the point of view of those who subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history, such heterodoxy cannot be explained rationally; the President must be not merely intellectually primitive, but morally depraved, as Congressman Stark suggested when he condemned the president for defending freedom abroad while resisting S-HIP expansion at home.
...The liberal interpretation of history, by contrast, asserts that the belief in a “new beginning” is one of those national “illusions” (in the words of liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr) that must be punctured. Americans’ faith in freedom, Niebuhr contended, is rooted in a naïvely self-righteous conception of the country’s pre-eminent virtue.
Niebuhr was wrong. None of the great exponents of America’s faith in freedom had a naïve faith in American virtue. As Niebuhr himself conceded (in a contradiction to his own argument), the founders retained enough of the old Calvinism to know that no human soul is wholly pure. Lincoln agreed: he said that American complicity in slavery must be expiated in suffering. But both Lincoln and the founders rejected the idea that simply because men are imperfect, they are incapable of governing themselves, and must be ruled by paternal guardians.
Those who, like Congressman Stark and his supporters, subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history vilify President Bush for a reason. They are much closer than he is to the paternalist philosophy that America’s greatest champions of freedom have always repudiated.
