Things That Liberals Are Getting Wrong

In his Anatomy of Revolution Crane Brinton argues that the Reign of Terror episode in many revolutions arises because the revolution is failing.

Of course, this is not surprising. Revolutions tend to have an over-optimistic view of the wonders that will ensue when the revolution succeeds. It is terribly disappointing when the millennium fails to show up on cue. So it must be the evil people that are not down with the revolutionaries! À la lanterne, as my mother used to say. In jest.

The current cultural and political situation in the West is that much of the cultural and political agenda of the Left is failing.

1. The Administrative State. The problem with all government programs is that it is almost impossible to reform them. That's because almost all government programs involve a subsidy of some behavior. And once a subsidy is in place, humans will fight to preserve that free stuff.  Plus, all government/administrative programs violate the principle of Ludwig von Mises, that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.
2. Attack on Bourgeois Culture. You can rail against the patriarchy, against heteronormality, against female modesty, against sex roles, against sexual freedom all you like. But the bourgeois culture of the nuclear family, children after marriage, women mothering their children, men with careers, has a lot going for it, not least that it is a pretty good blueprint for wiving and thriving in the city. But the worst thing is to make it hard for the immigrants to the city to learn the bourgeois code. Put it this way: bourgeois means burgher or city person. So bourgeois culture means city culture, the culture that grew up in cities over the centuries. You wanna  do well in the city? Learn the bourgeois code. When in Rome, etc.
3. Equality under the Law. No doubt non-white non-male non-hetero people suffer under some disabilities. But any political culture that excuses its supporters from the application of the law, as the left proposes as a principle in, e.g., immigration, diversity and inclusion, sex on campus, the homeless, political protest, is experienced by its victims as injustice, straight up. The point of equality under the law is to rectify the problem that political partisans tend to excuse the excesses of their side, and that infuriates the opposition. So the law must apply equally to prince and pauper, otherwise there is no reason to obey the law.
4. Conceding Elections. I remember reading Time, or maybe Newsweek, a decade or so ago in the month after a presidential election, and I think the Republican won. What struck me was that the liberal reporters of that era were writing stories about the peaceful transfer of power and what a wonderful thing that was. Well, the last two change elections where Republicans won were not conceded by the losers and their bribed apologists in the media, not the 2000 election, when Al Gore failed to concede and, even after the Supreme Court ruled for Bush, did not concede gracefully. Then there is Hillary Clinton in 2016, who started the whole post-election "we wus robbed" meme. Sorry, libs and Dems and deep staters. If you do one thing, and one thing only, you concede the election when you lose, and wish the winner well, and say "we are all Americans because we come back together after the divisions of the election campaign." This is important, because the whole point of the peaceful transfer of power, and the alternation of power between the major parties is that it removes the excuse for civil war. With the conceding of elections and the peaceful transfer of power you can say "wait until next time" and actually believe that there will be a next time. So you don't need to prepare for civil war, as must be the case in Venezuela right now.

It is said that President Obama said to Ben Rhodes shortly after the 2016 election:

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe...”

"Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

This demonstrates the fundamental contradiction at the center of the liberal and the lefty world view. First of all, these people think they are the avant-garde leading humans to a glorious future. Second, they do not understand that the path they have chosen is in fact a neo-tribalism. In other words, they actually believe that their identity politics, that defines and organizes everyone by their tribe, is leading us to a future without identity and tribe! And it demonstrates a fundamental self-ignorance. Do you not understand, President Obama, that your affirmative action, followed by diversity and inclusion, is experienced by people like me as racism, straight up? No, you don't. Because at the center of your belief system is that you and yours are the educated, evolved ones, and other people are the racist sexist homophobes, period.

See, Mr. Obama, people like me never doubted that America was ready for its First Black President. I was shocked when a liberal friend said to me in December 2016: isn't it wonderful we elected the first black president! I thought, but did not say: Racism! If anything Obama's election was the gate to liberation from the vile accusation of racism, to be able to say: OK, we elected a black president; now let us stop the divisive and destructive identity politics that has poisoned the culture for the last 50 years. But no. What we learned, after you got elected, was that this was just the beginning. Echoing George Wallace, you and your chaps were saying: Diversity today, diversity tomorrow, diversity forever.

Oh, and by the way, it's one thing for a vile bigoted Christian baker to decline a custom commission to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but quite another for a highly evolved cousin of Meryl Streep to decline service to the woman press secretary of President Trump. How does that work, Mr. President?

The one saving truth of left-wing politics is that the recent immigrant to the city is not yet ready for full immersion in bourgeois culture and it is unjust to chuck them in at the deep end. So it makes sense to provide neo-feudal institutions like the labor union and government insurance to provide safe spaces for people not yet ready to take the bourgeois oath of surrender to the market.

The trouble is that the understandable temporary notion of providing a refuge from the bourgeois responsibility culture has become a war against the bourgeois culture, and the educated, evolved ruling class everywhere teaches children and adults to resist it.

This war on the middle class culture of responsibility is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.