The misguided historicism of liberals

By Kerry W. and Peggy McCarthy

Conservatives wonder at liberals’ audacity in the face of fierce resistance to President Barack Obama’s socialist health care bill. Rush Limbaugh characterizes liberalism as “appealing to emotion, not thinking rationally.” Michael Savage wrote a book entitled, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder. Liberals are rational—their actions may be partly explained by their tendency to view the world through the prism of historicism.

Historicism is a conviction that human nature and human thought are evolutionary; they change as history progresses, and so ideas are more or less bound to the historical times in which they appear. In short, a historicist believes that what was true before is not necessarily true now.

Historicist revisionism questions commonly-held perceptions of past events. President Abraham Lincoln is a magnet for historicists. Those who say Lincoln was wrong—that there is no justifiable reason for war—use historicist thinking selectively, excusing slave-holders as products of their time while faulting Lincoln for “whipping up war frenzy.” This selective use of historicism makes it a very powerful tool.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who collaborated in writing The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, employed historicism, declaring: “We reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable ethical law.” Engels denied “that the moral world has…permanent principles that stand above history.”

Liberals employ historicism to deny evidence of the failures and negative consequences of their policy preferences and to convince casual thinkers to accept and support positive-sounding policies. For example, historicism has been applied to the current debate on  health care. Since not many American citizens know precisely whether state-run health systems have improved peoples’ lives in other nations, they can believe that it will work here through use of a liberal form of American Exceptionalism that claims if anyone can make it work, we can.

To be fair, it is easy to be persuaded that a universal health-care system might work in America, because the successes of such systems in other nations are amplified by its champions and their failures disregarded as irrelevant. Recently in England, a frustrated hospital administrator was quoted as saying that her job “is to see to it that the government is re-elected. In return the government sees to it that I remain an administrator.” In France, doctors and nurses have waged strikes, demanding fewer hours and more pay. Canadian Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams recognized that he would receive better care in the United States and elected to travel to Florida for heart treatment. But historicism allows champions of state-run health care to disregard this evidence.

Uncanny similarities exist between the new health-care bill and Prohibition, which was made law by progressives who imagined that the time was right to outlaw the drinking of alcohol. Advocates of both these restrictive mandates persuaded casual thinkers to overlook their inherent problems. Historicism allows people in charge to declare an idea is “in its prime,” while obstacles to its accomplishment (like the fact that it is unconstitutional for our government to force its citizens to purchase health insurance or that people will not quit drinking because they are ordered to) are disregarded as important in the past but now irrelevant.

Liberals, viewing foreign policy through the prism of historicism, often advocate appeasement. It matters little that appeasement has failed time and again for liberals tend to believe that under their guidance, the panacea of negotiation will solve major conflicts. Their faith in historicism allows liberals to believe that there is no such thing as an irreconcilable difference, that all problems can be talked out—if only they are in charge.

Mr. Obama has lamented that the Constitution “does not do enough; it is a document of negative rights to government and does not tell us what we can do for you but instead tells what we can’t do for you." Mr. Obama correctly identifies the intent of the Constitution to limit government. Historicists view the Constitution as a “living, breathing document.” Any living, breathing entity can sicken and die. Mr. Obama’s assumption of responsibility, power and authority for the federal government has crossed the line into direct violation of individual liberty and threatens the “life” of our constitution.

“Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled—the successful establishment and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it,” said Lincoln in a July 4th message to a special session of Congress in 1861. Lincoln, of course, referred to the internal rebellion attempted by secessionists. One-hundred-and-fifty years later, our government of the people faces another formidable internal attempted overthrow—this time by people occupying powerful positions within.

-Kerry W. and Peggy McCarthy are writers living in Indiana.