Knowing much that isn’t so

Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” address was a speech that was delivered on a number of speaking occasions during the 1964 U.S. presidential election on the behalf of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. It was given many times, and Reagan altered it during his many campaign stops, so several versions of the speech exist. But perhaps the most famous version was delivered to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco as a nominating speech for Goldwater. Known by two titles, “A Time for Choosing” and “Rendezvous with Destiny”, it was such a landmark address that it also became known as simply “The Speech.” Its text is rich with well-known Reagan quotes. One of my favorites is:

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.

Liberals are not very good at checking facts. Is it because they are lazy or willful prevaricators? I’ll cut them some slack here. I believe that liberals tend to get things wrong so often because they come to believe so much in their preconceived notions that they never question the actual facts behind what they say. Why bother to look something up if it “feels right” and you “just know” that it’s so? That’s not lying; it’s just that liberal elitism at work.

This is how Hillary Clinton can claim that on her 1996 trip to a U.S. military base in Bosnia she remembers landing under sniper fire and having to run and duck bullets, when CBS news footage actually shows a much more serene scene. Mrs. Clinton can be seen walking calmly from the Air Force C-17, being greeted by a line of local dignitaries and meeting 8-year-old Emina Bicakcic, who read a poem in English for the visiting first lady. There wasn’t a stray gunshot, mortar round or exploding land mine to be see or heard. But Sen. Clinton just knows that she is the better foreign policy choice in the battle between her and Sen. Barack Obama that her conjured-up image of a more dangerous arrival in Bosnia is seared, seared in her brain.

Obama has made some claims of his own that are just as divorced from actual events. He has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he was a law professor at the University of Chicago, when he was actually an untenured senior lecturer. He has claimed credit for nuclear leak legislation that never passed. Even his fellow organizers say that Obama took too much credit for his community organizing efforts.

And so we come to E.J. Dionne. The liberal writer has been such a wealth of false information that conservative columnists never worry about finding material. If a deadline is nearing and they haven’t prepared for it, they can just pull the latest Dionne op ed up on their computer screens. They will be rewarded with any number of EJ-isms to debunk.

One of his recent efforts is no exception to the rule. Titled “The Unfinished Business of Liberalism,” the piece argues that liberalism collapsed with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis forty years ago to this day, conservatism ascended in the wake of the unrest which followed his death, and now’s the time for a renewal of liberalism. While that last part is debatable, it is one particular remarkable statement Dionne made which raised my eyebrow (the right one, if I remember correctly):

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.

Conservative criticism of big government hardly began as a response to the events of 1968. We need only return to return to the aformentioned “A Time for Choosing” speech for another Ronald Reagan quote, one which predates the turmoil of 1968 by four full years, to begin our debunking of Dionne:

The truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

Reagan was hardly the first to warn against the perils of a federal government grown too large. Barry Goldwater made this case eight years prior to the events of 1968 in his book, The Conscience of a Conservative:

Freedom was in peril in America, he said, because government had been allowed by leaders and members of both political parties to become too powerful. In so doing, they had ignored and misrepresented the single most important document in American government, the Constitution, which was an instrument above all “for limiting the functions of government.” The alarming result was “a Leviathan, a vast national authority out of touch with the people, and out of their control.”

But this idea didn’t orginate with Goldwater. It was expressed by Madison, Hamilton and Jay in The Federalist Papers and was the foundation of our nation’s Constitution.

The defense of states’ rights also was not born out of the aftermath of Dr. King’s murder. It is another constitutional principle which was explained by Madison in Federalist No. 35:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State

The founders felt so strongly about the primacy of states rights that they devoted an amendment (the tenth) to the Constitution to leave no doubt on the matter:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So we see that state’s rights’ is not just some idea fostered by racist Democrats in the 1960s to support their denial of rights to people of color, although they attempted to pervert it as such. It is a principle as old as our republic itself.

That conservative criticsm of liberal judicial activism was somehow a product of 1968 is yet another of Dionne’s misconceptions. The term “judicial activism” itself was coined by liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in a Fortune magazine article which dates back to 1947:

Schlesinger’s article profiled all nine Supreme Court justices on the Court at that time and explained the alliances and divisions among them. The article characterized Justices Black, Douglas, Murphy, and Rutledge as the “Judicial Activists” and Justices Frankfurter, Jackson, and Burton as the “Champions of Self Restraint.” Justice Reed and Chief Justice Vinson comprised a middle group.

Keenan Kmiec discusses Schlesinger’s article and traces the history of criticism of the practice back to the nineteenth century:

The idea of judicial activism has been around far longer than the term. Before the twentieth century, legal scholars squared off over the concept of judicial legislation, that is, judges making positive law. “Where Blackstone favored judicial legislation as the strongest characteristic of the common law, Bentham regarded this as an usurpation of the legislative function and a charade or ‘miserable sophistry.’” Bentham, in turn, taught John Austin, who rejected Bentham’s view and defended a form of judicial legislation in his famous lectures on jurisprudence. In the first half of the twentieth century, a flood of scholarship discussed the merits of judicial legislation, and prominent scholars took positions on either side of the debate.

Liberal do-gooders were also the subject or derision from the right well before the political upheaval of 1968. Again, returning to “The Speech” by Reagan in 1964:

Any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we’re always “against,” never “for” anything.

We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments….

We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.

We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him…. But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure….

You may think that Reagan’s reference to do gooders is a modern term, one he coined in the mid 1960s. Think again. It was used by the French libertarian Claude Frederic Bastiat in the year of our Lord 1858 in his great essay The Law, a critique of socialism:

Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

The term “liberal elitism” is listed by Dionne as a term conservatives allegedly began throwing at the left in the aftermath of 1968. Though he mentions William F. Buckley in the same article, Dionne is apparently unaware that Buckley used the term in his 1955 mission statement for the magazine the recently deceased conservative giant founded, National Review:

No superstition has more effectively bewitched America’s Liberal elite than the fashionable concepts of world government, the United Nations, internationalism, international atomic pools, etc. Perhaps the most important and readily demonstrable lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that remote government is irresponsible government. It would make greater sense to grant independence to each of our 50 states than to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a world organization.

With his reference to liberal guilt, Dionne finally hits pay dirt. Thomas Sowell writes:

Collective guilt is one of the legacies of the 1960s that is still with us. We are still seeing a guilt trip for slavery being laid on people who never owned a slave in their lives, and who would be repelled by the very idea of owning a slave.

Back in the 1960s, it was considered Deep Stuff among the intelligentsia to say that American society — all of us collectively — were somehow responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else’s fault… But, then as now, facts often came in a poor second to heady visions and sweeping rhetoric.

Though conservatives chastised liberals for their guilt trip, it was the liberals themselves who invented the concept and took on the burden. But let’s concede the point to Dionne regardless. So far he’s one for six, a batting average of .167, not good enough to make the team.

Finally, Dionne lists liberal permissiveness. Not born of 1960s unrest, but of the 1940s conservative awakening, conservatives were pointing out this liberal character trait long before Dr. Kings’ death. Walter Shapiro, in TIME magazine:

Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 heralded two decades of conservative rebellion against domestic spending programs, social activism and liberal permissiveness that culminated in Ronald Reagan.

Dionne strikes out again, and his percentage falls to .143 - time to hang ‘em up! As he has been vindicated so many times, Ronald Reagan was right on target when he said that liberals are not ignorant, they are simply sure of so many things that just aren’t so.

The core themes of contemporary conservatism were not “born in response to the events of 1968,” as Dionne would have his readers believe. They have a long and rich history, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of Dr. King, nor the unrest which followed it.

Thanks to Mr. Dionne, however, for making this post all too easy.

- JP

Cross-posted from MainstreamConservative.com