The Liberal God Delusion

7/30/2019 The Liberal God Delusion

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Dec 28, 2012

The Liberal God Delusion

by Michael Medved

Our government has been hijacked by a party obsessed with a higher power. But Imnot talking about GOP. Im talking about the left and their worship of government.

As Washington staggers into a new year, one side of the political spectrum polarizes and paralyzes all ongoing debates due to its irrational reliance on a higher power. The problem isnt religious conservatives and their abiding faith in God; its mainstream liberals and their blind confidence in government.

Consider the current dispute over the right response to gun violence. At its core, this argument comes down to a visceral disagreement between relying on self-defense or on government protection. Gun-rights enthusiasts insist that the bestsecurity for law-abiding citizens comes from placing formidable firearms into their hands; gun-control advocates believe we can protect the public far more effectively by taking guns away from as many Americans as possible. In other words,conservatives want to address the threat of gun violence by giving individuals more power while liberals seek to improve the situation by concentrating more pow

er in the hands of the government. The right preaches self-reliance while the left places its trust in the higher power of government.

The same dynamic characterizes most of todays foreign-policy and defense debates.Right-wingers passionately proclaim the ideal of peace through strength, arguingthat a powerful, self-confident America with dominant military resources remainsthe only guarantee of national security. Progressives, on the other hand, dreamof multilateral consensus, comprehensive treaties, disarmament, grand peace deals, and vastly enhanced authority for the United Nations. Once again, liberals place a touching and naive faith in the ideal of a higher powerpotential world governmentwhile conservatives insist that the United States, like any nation, must ultimately rely only on itself.

Regarding the great tax-and-spend battles presently pushing the nation ever closer toward the dreaded fiscal cliff, the right argues that the economy will perform better if money is controlled by those who earn it while the left wants to government to make better, more generous decisions on how to invest that money. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary from the failed welfare states of Western Europe, liberals maintain unwavering devotion to the notion that taking fundsout of the private sector will miraculously generate more private-sector economic growth. Republicans trust the private decisions of prosperous people to make the best use of the money that those citizens have generated; Democrats rely on the superior wisdom and broader perspective of a larger, more activist governmentto distribute rewards and plan for the future in a complex economy.

In selecting strategies for helping the poor and uplifting the downtrodden, the

opposed approaches of left and right offer an especially sharp contrast. According to Arthur Brookss important book Who Really Cares and many other studies, conservatives at every income level provide disproportionate support for private charities. On my radio show, we spent the holiday season raising nearly $50,000 forthe Salvation Army with its focus on rescuing substance abusers, the homeless,and disaster victims from their miserable circumstances. Liberals, on the otherhand, consider such private efforts insufficient and demand governmental initiatives and interventions to supplement the private armies of compassion.

This raises an uncomfortable question for true believers of the left: if organiz


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ations like the Salvation Army have indeed done a phenomenal job over many decades in turning lives around and bringing hope to the hopeless, why wouldnt government want to invest its resources in supporting these operations rather than launching their own bureaucratic efforts? If private charities arent large enough atthe moment to cope with the epic dimensions of poverty-related problems, wouldntgovernment funding to expand these proven organizations provide a better investmentreaching more people at lower costthan any costly federal start-up?

The contemptuous refusal even to consider such an approach stems from two sources: a liberal belief in totally restructuring a broken society rather than merelyrepairing the broken lives of individuals, and the related belief in the healing, transformative power of top-down, government-instituted change.

Theres also the inevitable tendency of any fanatical faith to despise and distrust all religious alternatives: liberalism can be a jealous god. Most progressiveswould therefore prefer to commit trillions to purely secular (and mostly dubious) federal and state antipoverty efforts rather than spending less money for more results if those investments involved proven charities with religious agendas.

The lefts contempt for religious conservatives stems in part from the false assumption that people of faith place irrational reliance on the role of God in solving all the worlds problems. Occasional comments by Christian right-wingerslike therightly derided suggestion that the Newtown massacre resulted from an absence of prayer in public schoolsgive some credence to this unflattering caricature.

But mainstream conservatism has never denied the importance of human effort or governmental leadership in addressing dire circumstances or everyday difficulties: after all, Republican heroes of history from Lincoln to Reagan have been powerful presidents, not merely passive and prayerful observers. Yes, most religiousconservatives hope for divine favor for the land they love but simultaneously embrace the old saw, God helps those who help themselves.

Liberals, on the other hand, place their confidence in the notion that Governmenthelps those who cant help themselvesa proposition thats questionable in both its cmponents. First, its wrong and destructive to believe that any America is truly helpless and second, its arguable whether government reliably helps more than it hurts when it expands its power into our daily lives.

Fair-minded people of all perspectives should agree that any form of uncompromising, unquestioned, illogical faith can poison public discourse and derail important debates. Theres no effective rejoinder to the declaration that God tells me that that Im right and I refuse to consider other arguments.

There is similarly no easy response to the insistence that I know that governmentcan fix this problem and dont confuse me with evidence to the contrary.

In the wake of Obamas reelection, unreasoning reliance on federal power distortsour politics far more destructively than simple-minded faith in God. At the moment, big-government fundamentalism poses more of a threat to the republic than religious absolutism.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/28/the-liberal-god-delusion.html

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Comments


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publis

The fact is, the premise of this article is flawed. Righties don't want less government - they want less Federal government, so they can push their prejudices and abuse people they don't like in the name of their g0dd@mn phony gods at the state level. They are for more government.Lefties on the other hand have no clue as to the nature of man, and everything they try to do is completely incompetent. The bigger their individual "government" gets, the wider its jurisdictions become, the more they will try to force maninto a one size fits all model - in defiance of the nature of man - which will fit nobody. Both sides are trying to build the best idiot. If you pray, pray formass extinction.

highland

In summation for Mr. Medved- "The fact that our country's profoundly high gun death totals is in direct correlation with our profoundly high gun ownership ratesis irrelevant, likewise, the fact that lower taxes has never been shown to create more jobs is irrelevant, likewise, the fact that none of the right wing's "core beliefs" has ever proven to be valid...is irrelevant".

keith

So government should not expand it's power into our daily lives? Ok, Mike, I agree with that. That means you should agree that gay marriage, abortion laws, anddrug laws should not be something that concerns the federal government but is to be overseen by the states. But that whole "peace through strength" bit just means that the government should expand it's power into the daily lives of peoplein other countries.

SCfromNY

Less government in our lives with regard to marriage would mean that the government doesn't recognize any marriages, not that government recognizes gay marriage

.

nicholasfinny

@SCfromNY exactly, that should be the true conservative position. The government should have nothing to do with love. If you want to get married in your church, do it. We just need better contract laws.

highland@SCfromNY_1 But the right wing's stance is not just to "not recognize" gay marriage, it wants a Constitutional Amendment banning it.

heemowatt

Not quite. Government could also choose to be a nation of laws in which all citizens are granted equal protection regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation.That is what Massachusetts and a number of other states have decided their Constitutions call for.


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PatrickSolomon

Relying on individuals (United States) = 11,000 firearms deaths per year. Relying on government intervention (Japan) = 11 firearms deaths per year. (But, but,but POPULATION -- fine, pedants: 10.2 deaths per 100K population versus .07 deaths per 100K population) Maybe -- just maybe -- we're actually trying to solve the problem with something other than blind faith that contradicts empirical evidence.

SCfrom@PatrickSolomon

You do understand that there's a rather sizable social and historical differencebetween the U.S. and Japan when it comes to guns, don't you?Actually, your seemingly reductionist argument suggests you don't.

PatrickSolomon

So then there's nothing that anywhere in the world can teach us, because our people are completely, utterly unique. Or maybe we could look to Australia, which also has a history of rugged individualism and individual gun use. Government intervention there, and a firearms death rate 1/10th of ours.

Benjy@NJ Yes, I much prefer the fair and balanced approach Rachel Maddow and MSNBC take with their guests. They represent the kind of balance this nation is seeking.Either that, or you need to turn down your Thorazine drip. Did you catch the irony of your post calling for Medved to solicit dissenting views on his show while asking the Newsweek leadership to purge Medved from their roster?

SharnCedar

Liberals and conservatives are like the heads and tails of a coin. They both rep

resent the nature of Americans, just different aspects of the same psychotic personality. Liberals want to spend other people's money to help people in some faraway place, while ignoring the tangible good they could do with their own timeand money in their own communities. Conservatives want to impose strict moral rules on other people in far away places, while ignoring their own behavior and it's violations of moral law. The American political approach is all about hypocrisy and blaming others. It's not about each person doing their best as a citizen.I guess the people doing good deeds are too busy to get involved in politics orargument.

heemowattMedved states "Gun-rights enthusiasts insist that the best security for law-abid

ing citizens comes from placing formidable firearms into their hands; gun-control advocates believe we can protect the public far more effectively by taking guns away from as many Americans as possible."The first part of that sentence may in fact be accurate. The second part is pureNRA propaganda intended to stoke fear among gun owners. Gun control advocates do have legitimate concerns over the 270,000,000 guns in circulation and the spiraling $10 billion dollar annual legal gun market but there is no real movement to take "guns away from as many Americans as possible". Most rational Americans recognize that safe, responsible ownership of guns has a legitimate place in ourculture. A more accurate description of the majority gun control advocates is th


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ey want to reduce the easy availability of semi-automatic military style weapons, high capacity clips, and create a better system of background checks to make straw man purchases less common and gun show sales follow the same requirements as every other sale. Medved is such a tool, he is an embarrassment.

Khadijah

@heemowatt I quite agree with your characterization of what "gun control advocates" want. However, WANTING something is one thing; the larger quesiton is "Is that POSSIBLE or not."

The first problem is this "military style" weapon thing. Actual military weaponsare already banned in the US. A "military style" weapon is either the civilianversion of a military weapon OR a regular hunting weapon with a "sexy skin" puton it. Either way, banning "military style" weapons doesn't do anything. Many of them are far less deadly than the .38 Magnum that is carried by Dianne Feinstein; very very few, if any, are MORE deadly than Senator Feinstein's piece.

The second problem is "high capacity clips". Sounds good, but we know from watching "Lara Croft" that even Angelina Jolie can drop two clips and reload in about2 seconds, and she can do it while her objectives are, in order (a) looking sexy doing it, (b) looking cool doing it, and (c) actually changing the clips. It is doubtful that any mass murder events would be averted simply because you force

d the perp to either carry (a) more clips and/or (b) more weapons.

The third issue is NOT a problem. The police can key in a VIN number and tell you who the last registered owner of a car is; they shold be able to key in a registration number and tell you who the last registered owner of a gun is, and if it's not the guy whose carrying it, BOTH should be in deep trouble (assuming thegun was not reported stolen.) That's all good, and it's not any more onerous forGrampa to go online and transfer ownership of a firearm to junior than it is todo so with a vehicle. In the process, junior can get a notification about whatclasses he needs to take by when, and if he doesn't do them and provide evidence, he can start getting nastygrams and ultimately fines.

However, the fourth element which is missing from your list is de-siloing mental

health records. Both the Newtown and Virginia Tech shooters had school psychiatric histories which never left the school. That's wrong.

joedavis

Why is it OK to worship and have faith in something that has no evidence of existence(god) while believing that an institution that is run properly can do somegood is bad?

cqyates

Since the beginning of the Social Security program, there has never been a latecheck. It is reasonably easy to apply and has been directly responsible for a dramatic drop in senior poverty from over 30 percent down to 9 percent.

Not all government programs work as well as SS, however to make a blanket statement that government is never run properly is just dumb.


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LeftLeaner

Since the beginning of the Social Security program, there has never been a latecheck." And yet Grandma spends years trying to get bogus charges removed from the phone bill.

Ted Frier

While it is not true that liberals "worship" government like some Greek god as Medved suggests, it is true that Republicans don't really care about deficits, not really, or they would do more to close them when they had a chance. Instead,Republicans double the national debt in just eight years from $5 trillion to $10trillion by cutting taxes and launching wars at the same time, raising annual deficits to record heights then attacking Democrats for "presiding over runaway spending" when they do not immediately undo all the fiscal recklessness Republicans left us with. Republicans, in short, make the deficit problem worse in hopesof manufacturing a crisis they can exploit to achieve their real revolutionary aim -- which is to dismantle the activist New Deal nation state and put billionaires in charge. And this, by the way, is why Republicans and the NRA, which is asubsidiary of the GOP just like Fox News, refuses to support limits on military-style assault weapons, because owning guns like these (useless for hunting orprotecting ones home against intruders) flatters a radical right wing mentality

that thinks of itself as being "at war" with its own "tyrannical" government

Ted Frier

The idea that liberals "worship" government as an ends in itself rather than asa means for countering the unaccountable and very powerful plutocracy that Ronald Reagan and supply side economics first began to empower 30 years ago, makes nomore sense than Charles Krauthammer's idiotic assertion that the primary reasonPresident Obama is demanding an increase in the upper end tax rate is out of asinister desire to foment civil war within a Republican Party that all on its own refuses to raise taxes on the rich for any reason -- even to defuse a fiscal time bomb of its own devising. It is easy to see how this happens. Medved and K

rauthammer are right wing ideologues who look at politics through the lens of some grand ideological struggle between right and left rather than as the everydaystruggle of fallible people trying to come up with the best solution they can find to solve problems -- what the rest of us call "governing." And so quite naturally they would assign malevolent motivations -- like worshiping the graven image of government or fomenting civil war within the Right -- to what is nothingmore than Democrats trying to raise money for government programs that help people Republicans are all too willing to abandon by the side of the road.

Mike

What hides inside the head of someone like Medved to simply make things up. Whil

e Republicans continue their quest to privatize all government programs Liberalshave seen, and in some instances helped, to hand over government work to private businesses. But when the evidence has shown that some of those moves have costthe government more for poorer service there is no going back in the Republicanmind. Honestly, when facts have shown that one side is wrong who has the worserecord of change?

Khadijah


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Mike1c To be blunt, an instance of a privatization costing the government MORE money does not prove anything other than the handoff was poorly devised.

Look, when any government function says "we're going to privatize" HOW that actually occurs is a bill subject to the same lobbying crapola as any other bill. The companies who WANT that business also want to have as little risk as possiblewhile maximizing profits, and by greasing a few palms, they can often skew things to get that to happen that way, seeing that most politicians have no businessbackground and have no idea how to write a proper contract in the private sector.

Take charter schools. In Texas, some of the best high schools in the state are now charter schools. If a charter school doesn;t deliver, they lose their charter, not as fast as some might like, but they lose it. I am told that in other states, the charter school programs are disasters, I SUSPECT because whoever wrote the law wrote it to be unduly profitable for the school all the while making it very difficult for a charter to be revoked for nonperformance. In almost all circumstances I can think of, privatization of a government service SHOULD result insavings to the taxpayer. If that doesn't happen, I'd check the way the contracts are written FIRST before impuning the free market.

Robert J.Crawford

Ah, another elaborate trope piece. The Democrats do not worship what the government can do. They just think it can help. They don't want it to take over everything, just contribute what it can. If you look at what Obama has tried to do,he is clearly an Eisenhower republican, to the RIGHT of Richard Nixon on domestic policy. The GOP is stupid to prefer confrontation rther than to negotiate with him.

Khadijah

@RobertJ.Crawford Eisenhower is dead. So are his policies, which were tailored to a post-war reality where Europe was wrapping up a major rebuilding effort where their own available vendor for manufactured goods was the US. Ergo, since that

economy is no longer reality, we will indeed confront any politician silly enough to think that those sorts of policies will work. Our current situation callsfor policies that are not Eisenhower and really not even Reagan, but Calvin Coolidge.

SharksBreath

Fair-minded people of all perspectives should agree that any form of uncompromising, unquestioned, illogical faith can poison public discourse and derail important debates. Theres no effective rejoinder to the declaration that God tells me that that Im right and I refuse to consider other arguments. President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Ira

q - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a missionfrom God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in


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Iraq ." And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get thePalestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/06/bush.shtml

Report: Bush Told French President Jacques Chirac That Iraq War Was Biblically Ordained With Story of Gog and Magog.After the recent disclosure of how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used biblical passages as part of the war briefings for President George W. Bush, GQ magazine has an even more disturbing account: Bush lobbied French President Chirac that the war in Iraq was foretold in the bible and told that it was the final struggle with Gog and Magog.

http://jonathanturley.org/2009/05/25/report-bush-told-french-president-jacques-chirac-that-iraq-war-was-biblically-ordained-with-story-of-gog-and-magog/

Documents

The Liberal God Delusion