“For now we see through a glass darkly . . .”, Holy Bible, King James Version, 1 Corinthians 13:12
Flickr.com / David Singleton

As history has shown us over and over again,  and as anyone halfway observant can see for themselves, humanity has an unparalleled skill to delude itself. This prowess undoubtedly originates from our capability to form patterns in our heads to correlate what we see around us in the world and in the universe. Since any number of such patterns can usually be generated to explain a single set of related phenomena, clearly they can not all be correct. How do we know when they are not? When they cause us to make incorrect  predictions is how.

The Desperation of Our Country’s Political and Economic Situation

Right now we seem to be ending a very long period  of self-delusions among the ruling elites of Western nations. Hopefully the coda in this piece of music has been sounded by the election of President-Elect Trump in the United States, and by the slow unraveling of the European Union started by the Brexit election in the United Kingdom, possibly to be concluded by the prospective Frexit of France. What we are witnessing is not just an exchange of power with different parties taking control. What we are seeing is a rejection by large fractions of national electorates of intrusive government management of society, especially of national economies. The dysfunctional nature of that management is creating anger, fear, perhaps even a degree of panic among the peoples of Western countries. Further dirigiste-style government will only cause even greater economic and social catastrophe.

Dirigiste government is a very old story in Europe, whose beginnings are rather hazy. Certainly, Cardinal Richelieu as first minister of King Louis XIII in seventeenth-century France, followed by Cardinal Mazarin as first minister of Louis XIV, created a centralized dirigiste government for France. In the centuries since then, the tradition has been carried on by such worthies as Karl Marx, Otto von Bismarck, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler. In the United States the dirigiste tradition did not really begin to take off until the progressive President Woodrow Wilson’s administration beginning in 1913. The progressive program of centralizing power, particularly economic power, was accelerated by the experience of the Great Depression. That program continued apace with the Great Society programs of Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s, to be only occasionally slowed by Republican administrations such as Ronald Reagan’s. One claim that can never be made by anyone in the Western World is that dirigiste methods for managing society have never been thoroughly tried.

Although I would be more likely to nominate Barack Obama as the worst president in United States history, I would have to admit he has done the U.S. one incredibly important, inestimable service: He pushed dirigiste government as far as he could during the past eight years. In the process, he substantially discredited it intellectually and has begun to delegitimize it in the eyes of the electorate. His economic policies (just like similar policies in Europe and Japan) have led to secular stagnation of the economy, an historic reduction in the labor participation rate, an increase in poverty, the decay of the middle class, and a foreign policy in ruins that has helped create existential threats to the United States.

Rather than attempt to list the entire litany of American progressive failures, I offer the following list of links to my posts discussing their debacles.

• Is Racism the Cause of Blacks’ Problems — Or Is Government?
• The Ferguson Effect
• The Burden of Economic Regulations
• The Debilitating Effects of Obamacare
• Causes of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis
• Economic Effects of the Dodd-Frank Act
• The EPA, CO2, Mercury Emissions, and “Green” Energy
• Economic Damage Created by the Fed
• The Insuperable Problems of the Democratic Party
• The Corruption of the Democratic Party
• Progressives’ Disrespect for the US Constitution
• Big Corporations Abandoning the U.S. at an Increasing Rate
• Are We No Longer A Nation of Laws?
• The U.S. Federal Government Budget
• Dismal Economic Numbers
• The U.S. Is Drowning In Debt
• Labor Market Not Nearly As Good As People Think
• Why Isn’t the U.S. Economy Booming?
• Perspectives on Unemployment
• Are You Unconvinced Democrats Are Growing More Authoritarian?

Unfortunately, although the Republicans have a great superiority in state public offices as well as control of the presidency and of both houses of Congress, the balance between the number of progressive and conservative voters remains very close. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Clinton’s popular vote lead has increased to more than two million votes. If those of us who oppose state management of society want to continue and deepen the results of the last election, we have a lot of missionary work to do. In fact. as I wrote in a postscript to the post How Flexible Are Progressive Minds?, we have reached  a point in history that practically begs for a new paradigm in governing democratic societies. The old paradigm of democratic governments “managing” the macroeconomic health of the nation through regulation, taxation, and monetary policy is working not at all in the countries where it is being used, such as virtually all the countries of Western Civilization and Japan.

There are a number of progressive intellectuals, mostly among Keynesian economists such as Lawrence Summers, who recognize an ideological crisis is at hand. Unfortunately, their answers for our current secular stagnation look at everything but government failures as the causes. Nevertheless, it is heartening to see at least some progressives are doubtful about the applicability of their old ideology.

How can we perhaps convert them to the non-dirigiste side? One way of finding an answer is to consider how progressives were seduced by the Leftist delusion in the first place.

The Causes of Leftist Delusion

The first conclusion  to which any conservative must come to make progress is that most Leftists have the same human values most the rest of us have. Conservatives (or, as I prefer, neoliberals or classical liberals) who have progressive friends can attest to this from personal observation. Of course, many progressives are very loath to return the compliment, a measure of the weakness of their position since they feel the need to dehumanize us. In Human Values and the Dictates of Reality, I took the point of view that if we could point out to progressives they could not achieve what their values required through the means they demanded, we could advance the cause. I closed the essay with a possibly apocryphal quote from John Maynard Keynes:  “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

When I said “most Leftists” have the same human values as the rest of us, I did not have the Democratic Party ruling elites in mind. Human altruism for most of them appears primarily a ruse to advance their power, wealth, and privilege. Victor Davis Hanson, writing on the National Review website, has compiled a useful survey of elite progressive and Democratic Party hypocrisy on their professed values. Toward the end of his essay, he writes

The Democratic party leadership is no longer an alternative to corporate wealthy America, but is corporate wealthy America, albeit in a new garb of jeans and flip-flops, Silicon Valley–style. The small-business person, assembly-line worker, and non-government wage earner mostly now vote Republican. Progressivism is a pyramidal capstone of wealthy elites who have the influence and money to embrace boutique positions and the cunning to profess egalitarianism, all while they lead private lives that would otherwise be condemned as illiberal and apartheid-like. … The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it.

What we must question now is not the values of the more common progressive electorate, but just why they think they can reach the requirements of their values (social justice, fruits of the economy for all, etc.) through the coercive power of the state.

One speculation in which I have engaged lately is that progressive intellectuals have been seduced by the incredible successes of the human mind in the hard sciences. By the hard sciences I mean physics, chemistry, and biology. Because of its role as the basic language of the sciences, I would include the successes of mathematics. Since human reason has conquered so many other truly formidable intellectual problems, progressives wonder why it should not solve all important social problems at the level of the nation-state, or even better at the level of the United Nations. The historical record of astounding human intellectual accomplishments has seduced progressives and the dirigiste of the world into thinking they could assure the general welfare by technocratic regulation, an enthusiasm the progressive elites have passed on to their electoral base.

How Can We Move the Left Rightwards?

This reasoning strongly suggests  we neoliberals (i.e. conservatives) should be unrelenting in pointing out the mismatch of ultimate progressive goals with dirigiste, technocratic government control of society. This approach should be particularly fruitful among millennials, who by all reports tend to be very libertarian in their sentiments. Since dirigiste government could never be friendly with libertarianism (Gads! How could the government control all those people who actually want to control their own lives!?), we could expect the millennials to become more accepting of the neoliberal vision. Once the non-libertarian implications of dirigisme are pointed out, millennials should feel positively repelled by the  Democratic Party.

Another fruitful approach would be to remark how much progressive elites have become what they have fought so assiduously in the past. As Victor Davis Hanson noted, they have become both sides of the crony capitalist-government partnership. The old anti-monopolist progressives of the late nineteenth-century must be rolling over in their graves!

In the end, the dark, uncertain path for human intellectual advances must be illuminated by comparisons of political and economic expectations with observed reality. “For now we see through a glass darkly . . .”, as the New Testament of the Bible attests, and what seemed like explanations of what we observe can turn out later as horrible mistakes. This is what progressive Democrats are experiencing, but apparently not yet understanding. Neoliberals owe it to the unity of the country to help them comprehend what has hit both them and the rest of us.

Paraphrasing what that eminent dirigiste, Prince Otto von Bismarck, is reputed to have said, may God continue to look after fools, drunks, and the United States of America!

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