Citizens for Sensible Change

The Modern Liberal or Progressive Philosophy

While some on the left like the term "liberal", others think "progressive" has a nicer ring to it. In reality neither is adequately descriptive of what they really are: welfare state socialists, who trace their lineage to Karl Marx. Liberalism, as anyone who understands the history of political theory knows, was a late 18th and early 19th century phenomenon that rejected state authority, monarchy, aristocracy, and mercantilism. It was only in the early 20th century that the term liberalism, or “social liberalism” came to be associated with state intervention.

By the time of FDR, the term acquired a meaning of opposite of its initial conception. By this time it was heavily influenced by both socialist and fascist ideas, which, in reality, are two sides of the same collectivist coin. For example, New Deal programs introduced by Roosevelt were hardly distinguishable from the core social welfare type policies being implemented under Mussolini, and Hitler, without, as in the latter case, the racist program and genocide. All three were filled with the kind of martial values that had recently been employed during WWI to mobilize their respective populations.

Of course, only a fool believes in Marxism-Leninism these days, as the state owning the means of production and attempting to make the kind of sweeping economic decisions that characterized the former Soviet Union. That was a blinding failure. Indeed, there are now probably more Marxists teaching in our American universities than exist in the former Soviet Union where the realities of Marx’s ideas were played out to devastating results and the death of more than 40 million souls.

What Marxists and democratic socialists came to appreciate, begrudgingly, was the superiority of the market economy. The task, then, was to tap the wealth produced by the market economy for redistributive and social welfare purposes. Under this prescription, wealth does not belong to those who produce it, but to the government to use as it sees fit. This is the underlying ideology which dominates the modern Democratic Party which, ultimately, views this wealth as the fuel for its socialistic agenda and as “street money” to buy off the American electorate.

It is the modern incarnation of the statement, attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, that:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years."

Under modern welfare-state Democrats, liberalism has lost both its literal and historic meaning. It once meant political and economic liberty (which, as Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, are inextricably linked). Under modern welfare-state liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism, liberty is circumscribed by state action and subject to the vicissitudes of popular majorities. Ironically, the, albeit imagined, constitutional protections which liberals apply to the rights of privacy and abortion, are absent from their calculus when wealth is confiscated.

The notion that modern welfare-state liberalism has any commonality with genuine notions of liberty as conceived of by the founding fathers, for example, is the “BIG LIE” of modern American politics. Most modern liberals (i.e. welfare state socialists) naively associate liberalism with what they think are such benign dictionary definition qualities as open-mindedness, tolerance, freedom and self-expression as opposed, for example, to conservatives, who want to control what a woman does with her own body. They are the tolerant ones, trying to save America from the theocratic ideas of the religious right. Only the seriously misinformed or deluded can believe such a narrative.

Since the New Deal, in particular, the Democratic Party has advanced a political and economic program that has steadily eroded individual liberties. The evidence is there for all to see in more than 200 volumes of the United States Code and a similarly sized Code of Federal Regulations and Federal Register, all of it ostensibly enacted for our own good, but much of it positively harmful, inordinately intrusive, or, in some cases, ineffectual and outmoded.

The modern liberal’s political and rhetorical response is to attempt to cast pro-life conservatives as a threat to the body politic as well as the freedom of choice. It is liberalism’s immature attempt at a countercharge, in order to preserve the illusion that they believe in liberty. It also conveniently ignores the scientific reality that life begins at conception and that the unborn are entitled to the same rights and liberties as those outside the womb. Yet, on the basis of their confusion and hypocrisy, liberals defend all manner of horrendous cruelty to the unborn in the form of partial-birth abortion and what amounts to infanticide.

This hypocrisy informs the entire modern feminist movement and its supporters in Congress who point to conservatives as desirous of controlling women’s bodies while they, simultaneously, champion all manner of government programs of a distinctly socialist and one-size fits all thrust. Thus, while these left wing, big government feminists resist even limited controls over the most indefensible abortion practices, they argue for socialized medicine, socialized education, socialized insurance, socialized housing (witness the recent subprime meltdown resulting from such efforts), socialized environmental policies (much of them positively harmful, unnecessary or counter-productive), and the piece de resistance, radical income redistribution. Moreover, they want to do this on a national scale so that no one can escape their grasp.

With the rise of the socialist candidate Barack Obama, the drive for increased income redistribution has again reared its ugly head. Not content with a highest marginal rate of 35%, Obama wants to raise the rate for those families earning over $250,000 ($200,000 for individuals) to 39.6% while also extending the social security tax to all income (save an intermediate segment in the $102,000 to $250,000 range). This effectively means that those families making more than $250,000 will be paying half their income to the government, not including state and local taxes. Who will benefit? Well, for starters, the welfare class already made into dependents by the Great Society whose ranks were expanded through the efforts of such groups as ACORN.

Ironically, a poll of delegates to the Democratic National Convention reveals that the vast majority of delegates do not share Obama’s taste for higher marginal tax rates. In fact, it would appear that they don’t even know what the current tax rates are. The poll of 24 delegates revealed that 50% of them thought the rich should pay 25% in taxes, while 25% thought they pay 20%. Only 12% said 35%, the current rate. Another 12% said 30%. The average response of 25.6% was about 10% less than the current highest marginal rate of 35%. The results highlight the level of elitism and ideological extremism that has captured the heart and soul of the Socialist Party.

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." Winston Churchill