Machan's Musings - For the Liberals, No One's Evil
by Tibor R. Machan
What those who despise Bush - and there are many, judging by this last election and by all the post mortems in which liberals lament not that they screwed up but that Americans just lack brains - don't get is that any philosophy or political vision that lacks the idea of evil will not fly with a great many folks in America.
Liberals tend to excuse all evil with stories about bad luck and disease and a bunch of other impersonal forces that make people do bad things. Terrorists, for example, must be suffering from something - it cannot be that they are morally evil men and women. Sure, there are a few areas in which even liberals cannot resist moralizing - when it comes to sexism or racism or economic inequality. But assault, battery, robbery, burglary, theft, laziness, recklessness and the like, these are all due to sad circumstances. That is one reason they believe that all the poor are deserving poor, because they deny that poverty is ever the result of vice, of irresponsibility. It's just bad luck - bad upbringing, bad weather, bad genes or bad something else.
The basic philosophical thesis behind the liberal mentality - the modern liberal, not the original kind that championed liberty - is the denial of free will. Not that they can hold on to it in all matters in which they take an interest - environmentalists clearly assume that those they bad-mouth can make bad choices for which they are responsible and should pay. The same goes for the liberals intent upon punishing hate, with their proposal of hate crimes. And, as noted already, there are the sexists and racists who all have the free choice to be something else.
But apart from these rare cases, it is always something else. It's always in the stars, not in ourselves that the fault lies. This is why when President Bush had the gall to use the phrase "axis of evil," and when earlier Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire," liberals smugly dismissed it all as shallow moralizing, unworthy of sophisticated folks everywhere. Their deterministic worldview has no room for such ideas.
When in the recent elections Senator John Kerry tried to sound a bit like he did believe there were evil folks out there who needed to be stopped somehow, I bet the bulk of Americans didn't believe he meant it because they are so used to liberals whitewashing all those doing bad things as merely sick. There are no drunks, only alcoholics, there are no lechers, only sex addicts, there are no junkies either, only people who have a drug addiction. Nor are there students who lag - they must have a disease. (Nor does it occur to most liberals that perhaps the one-size-fits-all education system has a bit to do with many students lacking motivation in school. No, it has to be a disease because, of course, public schools are always wonderful since public school teachers - NEA members - are always wonderful.)
I have no great sympathy with many of President George W. Bush's political and economic philosophy, his "compassionate conservatism," and indeed many of his specific moral beliefs. But I am convinced that a main reason he won is that many Americans simply cannot abide by the crowd behind Senator John Kerry, all those academic and other intellectuals who scoff at anyone who believes there are morally right and wrong actions people engage in throughout the world. These Americans, who refuse to buy into such sophistry, may lack the erudition of the Kerry crowd but they have more wisdom than he and his cohorts do, by far, and thus hang in there with someone who at least appears to acknowledge an elementary fact about human life: some folks act badly and are responsible for this; others act decently and should get credit for this.
Not until liberals produce a philosophical-political vision that makes room for this, will they stop being at odds with the bulk of Americans. Unless they toss their derisive attitude toward the rest of us who think it is perfectly sensible to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong - never mind now just exactly how we ultimately make sense of it all - the sophisticated ones will be seen for what they are: essentially lacking a serious understanding of our distinctive human nature.
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