Mendacity, the Mark of Decline

Remember the good old days when Tennessee Williams wrote about the mendacity of the white South?  In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the corrupted South had to lie.  They lied about the shameful homosexuality of Brick, the star college athlete and heir.  They had to lie about Big Daddy’s cancer.  And they made a virtue of it.  As Big Daddy tells Brick:

Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?

That was back in the high noon of American liberalism when the idealistic New Dealers could sneer at the corrupt racists and bigots all around them.  Liberals were idealistic and ethical; they would never lie.  They would never need to.

But now the vortex of mendacity centers around a corrupt liberalism in terminal decline, and nowhere more so than in the university, writes Michael Barone.

Barone fingers the lie about race for starting the rot.  Colleges started admitting minorities to campus who didn’t “meet ordinary standards.”  Of course, the colleges couldn’t admit that.  And to compound the lie, they decided that nobody else on campus could tell the truth either.  Hence the speech codes t“which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others.”

They were instituted, it seems, to prevent [the minority] students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment.

But it was still a lie, and the lie deepens and corrupts all the more as it gets entangled in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Then there’s the cheap mendacity of partisan attack dogs like Media Matters.  Never mind about whether they are fair and honest when they ruthlessly take comments out of context.  They can’t even be straightforward about their very identity. 

Is Media Matters an “avowedly political institution,” as Byron York suggests?  Or is it “a nonpartisan, progressive nonprofit that is unaffiliated with any political party or candidate” as Media Matters insists?

And is it worth insisting on the distinction just for the sake of a stinking non-profit designation?

It really is beside the point to take pleasure in the decline of liberalism or even to mourn it.  Everything in this world begins with soaring hope and high ideals and ends in shame and rotting cancer.

But for those of us who yearn for the moderation of a Burkean world of ordinary life and modest reform, the decline of liberalism does come as a relief.