In the battle going on now in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the liberals and the conservatives are operating not only on opposite principles, but in two different times. The Democrats seem caught in 1911, in an age of sweat shops, exploitation, and of child labor, when endangered and underpaid workers valiantly struggled to wrest living wages out of “The Man.” One would never know from their speech this is 2011, that these union workers are well-off clerks and teachers; that The Man has been replaced by a less-well-off public, and that their early and well-funded retirements are driving state governments into a ditch.
To admit this would blur the clarity that prevailed way back then, when only one side of the argument held the moral high ground. As Roger L. Simon writes of a similar syndrome, “The left has a kind of nostalgia for racism, for a simpler time when it was a lot easier to define right and wrong.”
Of course, the left is nostalgic for racism, too. It is so nostalgic that in recent years, it has labored unstintingly to make the right’s objections to the stimulus, debt, and the health care reform bill seem to be all about race.
The day of the final House vote on health care, Democrats cast it as the bridge scene at Selma, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., with a fixed grin and a gavel the size of a sapling, marched across the Capitol grounds between rows of black caucus members, apparently hoping that one of the protesters would toss them an epithet. (Nobody did, but they said they did anyhow.)
The one vouched-for slur was flung at gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., which wasn’t nice, but was surely not racist. Even the Tea Party’s bigots were colorblind! Can we say this is progress, or what?
If unions and racism aren’t what they used to be, neither is the once widely held faith in the government, which also has seen better days.
In 1933, people saw that with no safety net, no regulations, and no transfers of wealth, an industrialized culture could run into trouble. But by the 1970s, they had realized that with too much of these, the country could run off the rails in the other direction, and new ways of doing things had to be found.
The country hadn’t run out of problems, simply the kind that could be fixed by the liberals’ remedies. If too many young black men are now in prison, it’s because too many grow up without fathers and miss the socialization that young boys require.
It’s hard to imagine the protests, programs, or infusions of money that could make an impression on that.
So the search goes on for the moral authority that the left once commanded, and lost. Long ago, it was on the “right” side of most issues: Workers deserved to not be exploited, nonwhites deserved to be treated as equals, the state had to adapt to a complex society, in which large private interests controlled a great many matters, and economic misfortune was not always one’s fault. But with success came complexity, and with that came the fall.
Some union leaders were as greedy and vicious as some captains of industry. Identity politics eroded the claims of the civil rights movement. Welfare done wrong was a perverse incentive that locked many people in poverty.
As a result, liberals long for a earlier day, when life was more simple. But wishing will not make it so.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
