On Liberal Misanthropy

After the 2004 election there was a brief fad for apologies. One liberal entrepreneur started an ‘American Apology’ T-shirt, while a website apologizing to the rest of the world received more than 27 million hits in the first few days after the election. One of the worst things about Bush is the way his regime has become an excuse for these outward expressions of liberal misanthropy. Consider the following two contributions, one from Anatol Lieven in the New York Times, and the other from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Review of Books.

First, Lieven, who concludes a book review on American intervention with the following:

“I must confess that I put down this fine book with a feeling of deep disheartenment. For what, after all, is the point of such meticulously reported studies if the American public is repeatedly going to wipe such episodes from its collective consciousness, and the American establishment is going to make similar mistakes over and over again, first in the cold war and now in the "war on terror" — each time covering its actions with the same rhetoric of spreading "freedom" and combating "evil"?...As Kinzer writes of the Iranian hostage crisis, "because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called 'the great Satan.' " They still don't.”

Not to be outdone, Schlesinger out and out blames Bush’s existence on American stupidity. This is from a meandering essay whose only reason for being published seems to be that it was authored by the eminence gris of the liberal establishment:

“Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity – the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat – fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which he knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests at stake. Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity.”

It is easier for liberals to blame their abysmal failures on ‘the stupidity of our culture’ and national ignorance, than to accept the fact that they don’t come much closer to representing the interests of the majority than conservatives. Liberals have never been that comfortable with democracy in America, preferring popular sovereignty at a distance. They have preferred to see the people as a political resource, led by a highly educated, technocratic elite. These outbursts of liberal misanthropy express their discomfort with the fact that to rule at all they have to call on the public for support. Always mystified at why Americans ‘act stupidly’ or vote against their interests, they forget the fact that politics is about winning arguments with people, not just organizing stage armies and keeping the base in line.