Bruce Thornton reviews Peter Schweitzer’s Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, (Doubleday, 2005, 272 pp.) Excerpts:
For example, the evils of capitalism are routinely condemned, yet some of the most vocal of these critics are doing quite well exploiting the system they decry. MIT professor Noam Chomsky, arguably the most prominent and looniest of the loony left, has called capitalism a “‘grotesque catastrophe’ and a doctrine ‘crafted to induce hopelessness, resignation, and despair.’” Yet Chomsky is “himself a shrewd capitalist, worth millions, with money in the dreaded and evil stock market, and at least one tax haven to cut down on those pesky inheritance taxes that he says are so important.” Apostles of economic redistribution via the income tax like Chomsky are very clever at making sure that somebody else’s nickel will fund their utopian schemes. Chomsky has set up an irrevocable trust to shelter his money, with his tax attorney and his daughter as trustees.
[. . . many more telling examples . . .]
Of course, hypocrisy is no respecter of political persuasion, and conservatives have their own examples, from virtuecrats with gambling problems to family-values guys with mistresses –– as liberals and their shills in the press are fond of reminding us. But as Schweitzer notes, conservatives view humans as flawed creatures whose nature it is to sin and fall short. This pessimistic view of human nature means that conservatives expect people to fail to live up to their ideals. They see this failure, and the hypocrisy that often attends it, as part of the human condition, not correctible by reason or psychological technique, which is why traditional checks on human behavior like guilt and shame are so important. To liberals, on the other hand, people are basically good and fail because of their environment, things like poverty, bad neighborhoods, bad schools, inadequate nutrition, etc., conditions that could be corrected if the state would simply intervene and spend the money. The liberals Schweitzer skewers, however, are all rich and famous, so they have no excuse for not living the virtue they preach. Their failure to live up to the ideals they want to impose on everybody else is thus a repudiation of their assumptions, whereas for conservatives such failure confirms their belief in a flawed human nature. (Emphasis added)
The bolded passage addresses the fundamental and apparently unbridgeable difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives take a sober and realistic (not pessimistic!) view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. Potency is known through act and not through Lennonesque and Leninesque 'imagining.' (The allusion, of course, is to John Lennon's song "Imagine" than whose lyrics more sillier cannot be imagined.)
Liberals and leftists, by contrast, joined by many anarchists and libertarians, labor under the misapprehension that human beings are inherently good, and would achieve an optimal condition either through massive statist intervention, or the elimination of the state altogether. Strange bedfellows these, but lying together in the bed of a common illusion.