Death by Liberalism: The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies

By J. R. Dunn

Center-right conservative author J. R. Dunn offers a cogent analysis of how liberalism has not only failed as an ideology but has proven fatal to citizens and societies around the world. Dunn’s piercing analysis of the Obama administration’s perilous public policy agenda is a provocative, must-read rallying cry for Tea Party adherents, fans of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg, or anyone concerned about the left’s deadly impact on the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062010391

Book preview

DEATH BY

LIBERALISM

The Fatal Outcome of

Well-Meaning Liberal Policies

J. R. DUNN

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

—Thomas Jefferson to the Maryland Republicans, 1809

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Prometheus in Gray Flannel

Chapter 2 - American Noir

Chapter 3 - The Darker Side of Green

Chapter 4 - Roe v. The People

Chapter 5 - Gaia’s Children

Chapter 6 - Death’s Pavement

Chapter 7 - Short Takes

Chapter 8 - Kiss Tomorrow Good-bye

Chapter 9 - Let Me Be Clear

Chapter 10 - On a Cold, Dark Corner of History

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Liberalism kills.

If any two-word phrase ever demanded an explanation, it’s that one. Those words simply do not belong together. They defy all logic, all sense, everything we have ever been taught concerning politics, everything we think we know about how our society functions, everything we understand about America’s civic culture.

To claim that liberalism kills is to say that water burns, that up is down, that ignorance is strength. It is a statement beyond good taste, beyond acceptable argument, almost beyond sanity itself. Whatever its failings and faults, its errors and misjudgments, the high moral stature of liberalism has remained beyond dispute. Liberalism stands as the political expression of humanism, a doctrine epitomizing justice and mercy, the embodiment of human decency in the public sphere. To rank it with killer political dogmas such as communism, Nazism, and fascism is an absurdity, an effort to turn the world inside out.

Liberalism kills . . . What can that be other than a cry from the political twilight, an expression of terminal hysteria, the last desperate words of someone with nothing left to say? A pure example of the big lie, vicious and feral, fit only to be passed over in silence.

But it is no such thing. It is a statement of fact, derived from the record, easily demonstrated and impossible to refute. It is no metaphor and no mistake. No twists of meaning or redefinition or conceptual gymnastics are required.

Liberalism kills. It’s as simple as that. Liberalism destroys lives, and destroys them in large numbers. It kills blatantly, and in ways that can scarcely be traced. It kills both directly and by proxy. Liberalism kills by commission—through the promotion of programs and policies that violate the safety and security of the public. Liberalism also kills by omission—by denying citizens the protection they are owed by their government and institutions.

Liberalism kills without respect for class, origins, sex, race, education, or any other factor. Death by liberalism is not limited by any set of personal, social, or political characteristics. Not even adherents of the ideology itself remain immune. Liberalism has eaten its own on numberless occasions, without the victims having any idea how or why they were being destroyed.

Death by liberalism occurs in all fields and at all levels of society. Motorists on the roads, workers at their jobs, women in their homes, children taken under the state’s protection—all have fallen victim at one time or another. It is implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in this country, while overseas it has contributed to the deaths of millions. It is one of the largest-scale killers active in our time, easily outdoing most deadly diseases, and exceeding terrorism by several orders of magnitude. It has been killing for decades and will continue to kill as long as we allow it.

Liberalism kills for the most part through policy, through courses of action adapted to achieve certain political and social goals. The consequent mortality is neither deliberate nor intentional—barbed wire and the pistol form no part of liberal methodology. The lethality of liberalism is a malignant example of unintended consequences, a by-product of the doctrine’s virtues, a result of attempts by its adherents to perfect society and benefit their fellow citizens.

An intractable social or political problem or threat is targeted. It has either gone unaddressed or has defied all previous attempts to solve it. Crime, child abuse, and mental illness can serve as examples. Liberal politicians promise a solution, either through novel technical means, the application of some form of political voodoo not easily comprehensible to the uninitiated, or by otherwise unexplained methods labeled sanity or common sense.

These solutions generally involve the outlay of multiple billions of dollars (read trillions as of 2009), along with the establishment of a mammoth bureaucracy to oversee the process. After years spent in preparation in the form of studies, meetings, consultations, and planning sessions, all of which require trainloads of cash, a solution at last is put into effect. But then . . .

Then things start going wrong. The new knowledge turns out to be in error, the magic no more than empty ritual, liberal sanity not quite as balanced as was claimed. Soon enough, the problem is worse than it ever was. It’s as if it was feeding on the attempts to confront it, gaining strength from all that money and effort being thrown into the battle against it. In response, the departments are enlarged, the budgets expanded, and the effort redoubled. But the problem continues growing, in direct symbiosis with the civil establishment created to overcome it.

In a certain number of cases, people start dying. Dying in larger numbers than they did before government interference started. Dying, often as not, as much due to the effects of that interference as to anything directly associated with the problem itself. These deaths are unplanned and unintended, a form of mass negligent homicide, a kind of soft governmental lethality.

The number of fatalities varies. A few dozen in the case of biodiversity programs, a few thousand in the case of child protection agencies, hundreds of thousands in the case of federal fuel standards and criminal justice reform, and truly celestial numbers when the action is transferred to the international stage.

Almost without exception, so much time has passed that those responsible have moved on. The lethal outcome is disassociated from any form of accountability or guilt. To an onlooker, the catastrophe appears to be the result of accident or bad luck. (This is a major reason why the process has occurred unnoticed. To most people, a society’s political system is what it is, to be accepted in the same sense as climate or geology. The effects of many of these policies are of such magnitude as to be difficult to comprehend as the end product of human action.)

Horribly enough, the bureaucratic structures established to oversee these policies continue generating mortality long after failure has become manifest, even after the problem itself has faded from significance. Some of them continue killing to this day.

By this process, mass mortality has become a core element of modern liberalism, a product of its most deep-rooted beliefs and ideas, probably inseparable from the doctrine as it exists, and unlikely ever to be eradicated. To accept liberalism, in its current form, is to accept death on a massive scale.

How did this happen? How did liberalism fall so low? It’s not as if it started out as a destructive force, like fascism, communism, and similar ideologies. Liberalism began as an attempt to solve the problem of self-government, an effort to establish a successful democratic system where the ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians had failed. And to succeed on a much higher level—in the modern context, in societies in which change was the only constant, and not merely as involved city-states, but in polities stretching across entire continents.

The liberalism formulated by Edmund Burke and adapted by our country’s founders was the liberalism of individual rights, economic freedom, and the rule of law.

It had distinct and limited aims: to establish a stable government, to minimize corruption and faction, to secure the governmental succession (a trivial problem to us, but one that stymied previous civilizations for millennia), to assure fair representation, and to protect individual rights, including economic and property rights.

These challenges were addressed with astonishing swiftness and at little social cost. The American Revolution, the world’s first—and, James Fazy’s Genevan coup aside, perhaps the only—liberal revolution, was one of the least brutal on record. So encouraging were the results of the first epoch of American governance (nearly matched by Great Britain, which learned a lot from its former colony), that the goals of liberalism were continually expanded throughout the nineteenth century, the definitions of rights broadened, the franchise given ever-wider expression.

If liberalism represented an ideal, it was an ideal based on practice and experience. The precepts of liberalism were continually reworked across decades and generations by some of the greatest minds of the modern era. Jefferson set down the principles of liberal administration. Madison and Hamilton worked out the practical applications. Tocqueville examined the social and political results of the first generations of liberal governance. Acton strove to set the allowable limits of liberal use of power.

Many still believe that today’s liberalism is the same thing as the realistic liberalism of the nineteenth century. Modern proponents like to trace their doctrine back to the founders (and some of them back to Socrates, or for that matter Jesus Christ). But no such claim can be made. What operates under the label today is something utterly different, something scarcely in the same category. Classical liberalism, the liberalism of Burke and Madison, was a doctrine. Modern liberalism, whatever modifier might be added, is an ideology.

Rationalism was the snake in the liberal Eden. Rationalism can be simply defined as the conviction that all problems can be solved by means of unsupported reason, without the aid of traditional beliefs, insight, intuition, or God forbid, faith. In the nineteenth century, rationalism expressed itself in the contention that everything under the sun, including social and political affairs, was susceptible to scientific analysis, to being broken down to its constituent elements and subject to any number and variety of manipulations. When politics met rationalism, the result was ideology.

Ideology was the fruit of attempts to turn politics, that most human of activities, into a scientific discipline. Ideologies were intellectual constructs in which elements of human society were factored (always in grossly simplified form) and processed to match a fixed set of concepts. The world in all its complexity was viewed as a machine in which certain inputs would always and invariably lead to the same results. Human individuals, in this conception, were no more than parts.

By means of ideology, political thinkers hoped to gain overall control of society in order to direct it along the paths they chose—always, needless to say, in the service of justice and humanity.

Ideological thinking was rampant in the nineteenth century. The early (and truly bizarre) systems of Claude Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte set the basis for later figures such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who in turn laid the foundations for the mass ideologies—fascism, Nazism, and communism—that left such a mark on the twentieth century.

At first, liberalism was in no way influenced by these new systems. Why should it be? The doctrine was going from strength to strength in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Defusing sectarian and ethnic conflicts, establishing new standards of political equality, humanizing the harsher aspects of industrial capitalism. But as the century turned, social and economic problems increased in complexity and immediacy. No longer were the answers simple and straightforward. Many observers declared that the Age of Liberalism—and with it democracy and capitalism—had reached the end of its string. They called for new ideas and new methods. Liberals throughout the West were deeply impressed by the apparent achievements of the ideological states—Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The brute techniques of the ideologies, their policies, planning, and social engineering, seemed to be a workable alternative.

Unacknowledged among these techniques was that of democide, the murder of citizens by their government. When a part goes wrong in a machine, the part is removed and discarded. So it was with the human beings making up the new ideological states. An individual who did not fit in, who was an irritant to the state, or who simply failed to meet specifications, was dealt with in the same fashion as a broken part. In time, such treatment was extended to families, groups, and entire peoples. Democide became a key technique of the ideological states, with their Gulag, their death camps, their artificial famines, and their massacres.

Killing became a common practice of twentieth-century government, democide a characteristic government activity. The number of deaths brought about by government during the period has been estimated at over 260 million. Democide was one of the major causes of death in the century past, second only to natural causes.

Liberalism never reconciled itself to democide. No greater affront to its basic philosophy can be imagined. But the internal logic of ideology compels its adherents toward lethality whether they desire it or not. In the end, American liberals merely demonstrated that malice and bloody-mindedness were not necessary to democide. Ineptness, carelessness, and arrogance were enough.

In adapting ideology, American liberals violated the basic premises of the democratic system. Democracy became less democratic, liberalism became less liberal. And as it abandoned its core principles, liberalism became an ideology of failure.

The planners and policy-makers bit off more than they could chew. They became deluded as to their abilities and, like the dictators who served as their models, began to plan on a level beyond the merely human.

It is no surprise that they failed. The response to their early failures was to intensify their efforts, to continue down the same road with even fiercer determination. But the failures simply grew greater, more costly, more difficult to ignore or explain. They covered the entire range of the American social and political landscape: race relations, social welfare, educational reform, affirmative action, urban renewal, industrial regulation, judicial reform, environmentalism.

Some of these efforts failed catastrophically, at a terrifying price in human lives. In this, too, American liberals were following the example of their totalitarian models. Ideological systems without exception leave vast numbers of corpses in their wake. While there were no death camps in the U.S., no Gulag, no killing fields, ideology creates its own pressures leading to lethality. Those who died as a result of policy, and planning, of techniques and concepts borrowed from the most repellent states on earth, of attempts to change the world and society through mass directed effort, differ in no real sense from those who died in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Maoist China. It is no exaggeration to call it the American democide.

Those are the facts, and no amount of protest, denial, or indignation is ever going to make them go away. Liberalism has a secret history. In these pages we will uncover it. We will trace how liberalism went astray, how a doctrine based on the noblest of intentions became an ideology that causes unnecessary, large-scale, premature mortality among American citizens and other innocents across the globe. We will demonstrate how water came to burn, how ignorance became strength. We will discover how liberalism learned to kill.

Chapter 1

Prometheus in Gray Flannel

How Liberalism Went Wrong

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.

—José Ortega y Gasset

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

—Thomas Sowell

The twentieth century was not supposed to turn out the way it did. It was supposed to be liberalism’s great age, the epoch in which liberal ideas and practice would spread across the globe. All the ancient dreams—of justice, egalitarianism, internationalism, and progress—would come to pass. Problems that had withstood the efforts of ages would disperse like fog. All errors would be corrected, all promises fulfilled, all visions would become reality.

It didn’t quite happen that way. The liberal dream hit an obstacle right out of the gate: the ideological dictators, the bandit rulers who rose like specters out of the ruins left by WWI, extended their control across Eurasia, and finally moved against the Western democracies themselves. Far from embodying any liberal utopia, the twentieth century became, in the words of historian Jacob Burckhardt, the epoch of the booted commandoes.

The booted commandoes—the gangster rulers who transformed the twentieth century into the Age of Massacre. They were far from unique in history—their kind can be found in any era. The Roman military emperors, the Caesars and Severans, the medieval Carolingian kings, the Renaissance mercenary condottierre looting and subverting the republics of Italy. But never before were they so numerous, widespread, or powerful as in the century just ended.

They started as minor figures on the fringes, Mussolini as the nail-hard ruler the Italians deserved, Lenin the café revolutionary, Hitler the lunatic who attempted a coup with an army dispatched from a beer hall. But within a decade, they dominated the world stage. A few years later they were threatening to take control of the globe itself.

It required the most ferocious war in history to destroy the Axis. Another forty years of semi-warfare accounted for communism. Today little remains of the mid-twentieth century dictatorships beyond a few isolated pea patches on the margins of third-millennial civilization—Cuba, North Korea, Burma. But behind that victory lie shattered nations, the numberless and unpitied dead, and somewhere amid the ruins, the dream of a liberal world.

Ideology and Tyranny

The jackboot dictators had advantages that previous tyrants lacked. They had technology, the tank replacing the warhorse, the dive bomber replacing the trebuchet, modern communications replacing horse-borne messengers. They had managerial innovations to assist in the control of their societies, their armies and secret police, and their camp networks.

But they also possessed one particular tool denied the ancient dictators. Alexander had his phalanx, Genghis Khan his horsemen—the men in jackboots had ideology.

Ideology is one of the great instrumentalities of the modern era, and one of the least understood. Like many obnoxious developments, it originated with the French Revolution. (Its progenitor, the philosopher A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, coined the term as a catchy name for his science of ideas. Rarely has an individual of such lasting influence been so thoroughly forgotten.) Ideologies comprise total intellectual systems, complete descriptions of the world along with complex social and political programs for manipulating it.

Ideology provided the dictators with a means of mobilizing support and instilling revolutionary zeal. For the bureaucracy (almost always kept intact by revolutionary upstarts), it provided an easily applied system of control. For intellectuals, it offered an alternative to despised bourgeois values. For the masses, it provided a pseudo-religious substitute for traditional creeds.

Ideology in power gave rise to a new type of political entity, the totalitarian state, in which the state controlled not only the political sphere, but all other aspects of public life. In Mussolini’s words, All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. In politics, all that existed was the party, usually devoted to the semidivine figure of the führer or duce. In the economic sphere, totalitarianism was expressed through centralization, planning, and rationalization of national economies. The intellectual world, including the arts and education, was thoroughly regimented through the procedure termed thought control. By mid-twentieth century, nearly half the world’s population was living under some kind of totalitarian government.

Ideology and Democide

At the time, many predicted universal victory for the ideological states, more organized, more efficient, and more aggressive than the democracies. But in the end, the irresistible force of totalitarianism broke on the immovable object of human nature. The new tyrannies required hive insects. They had to settle for human beings.

The new dictators did their best to assure compliance. Technical and managerial advances provided unprecedented capabilities for detecting dissent, ensuring obedience, and annihilating internal enemies. The totalitarian states utilized the new tools to the utmost, in the process generating a new class of crime: democide, mass murder instigated by government.

We are all familiar with one form of democide: genocide, the willful annihilation of an ethnic group or race. But genocide is only a single aspect of the democidal spectrum, which includes the mass murder of dissidents; mass mortality due to slave labor; mass starvation due to seizure or withholding of food supplies; and deaths caused by ill-planned or ineptly executed government policy (this last is sometimes identified as morticide, a term that lacks the force of the original coinage).

According to democide’s sole scholar, Dr. R. J. Rummel (you’d think that a topic of such importance to the health and future of civilization would be of interest to more than one individual), democide accounted for up to 262,000,000 deaths over the past century. The number of human beings murdered by governments is on the order of six times greater than those killed in all the wars fought during the same period.

Individual instances of democide mark the century’s greatest episodes of mass mortality, far outweighing any natural disaster (excepting only the Spanish influenza of 1918–19). Examples include the Ukrainian famine of 1932–34 (also known as the Holodomor, or Hunger Death), which killed upwards of 7 million people; the Soviet purges of 1937–39, which accounted for perhaps 10 million Soviet citizens; the Holocaust, with its tally of 6 million Jews (the Nazis also murdered at least 5 million others, including gypsies, Poles, and Slavs—Rummel puts the total even higher, suggesting that Hitler is answerable for up to 20,946,000 murders, when POWs, slave laborers, homosexuals, and victims of euthanasia are figured in); the Chinese Great Leap Forward of 1959–61, which may account for up to 45 million dead; and the Cambodian Year Zero, which killed 2.5–3 million people between 1975 and 1978.

Democide was almost completely a product of the ideological states. The U.S.S.R., the People’s Republic of China, and Nazi Germany are by themselves guilty of half of all democidal murders. When associated nations such as Japan, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, along with imitators such as Franco’s Spain or the Mexico of Cárdenas are added, the share of the ideological dictatorships becomes overwhelming. Few incidents involving conventional states even begin to match these atrocities—the million killed in the Indian partition massacres of 1947 is the single exception.

Acting almost alone, the ideological dictators transformed the century into an abattoir. Mass murder attained the level of policy. Ideological tyranny became the typical form of government, and democide the typical expression of that form.

The ideological tyrants may have vanished, but their influence remains. The dictators set the standard for governance in the twentieth century. They became what we would call change agents, a transformative force acting above and beyond their own desires or intentions. The transformation they wrought was convoluted and obscure, in some ways a return to medievalism, in others a leap into an unheralded future. In Churchill’s words, a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Ideology was tyranny’s poisoned gift to modern civilization. Its influence has spread throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Without exception, the results in nations as varied as Argentina, Uganda, the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, and Venezuela have been catastrophic.

But fringe states were not the only nations to fall for ideological enchantment. Not even the democracies remained untouched. Not even the United States proved immune.

Liberalism Meets Ideology

Ideology entered American politics with the New Deal. The Great Depression was an event all but unique in history. There have been deeper depressions, and depressions that lasted longer (such as the century-and-a-half medieval depression following the Black Death), but none had greater impact or caused more damage. The Great Depression was an economic crisis with the effects of a natural disaster.

The stock market crash triggered a slide of an intensity unseen before or since.¹ Between 1929 and 1933, the U.S. GNP was nearly halved, dropping from $103,828,000,000 to $55,760,000,000. Exports fell by more than 60 percent. Thirteen million people, a quarter of the labor force, were thrown out of work.

Governmental response on the part of both Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt was a tangle of traditional methods of amelioration, flat-out error, and ideology, derived in equal part from fascist and communist models.

Roosevelt himself was no ideologue but a practical politician willing to accept solutions no matter where on the spectrum they originated. But he surrounded himself with ideologues, from the sentimental leftist Eleanor down to Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf Berle, core members of his Brain Trust responsible for formulating economic policy.

Tugwell and Berle were open admirers of the U.S.S.R. and Fascist Italy. It’s the cleanest . . . most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen, Tugwell said of Mussolini’s fascist utopia. It makes me envious. This attitude was fully reflected in the Brain Trust’s policy objectives. The New Deal involved a wholesale adaptation of European ideology, emphasizing centralization, government control, and collectivization.

The keystone of the New Deal program—and the first imposition of ideology on American society—was the National Recovery Administration, the NRA. An attempt to rationalize the national economy from the largest corporations to the smallest corner stores, the NRA was based on corporatism, the economic system of Mussolini’s Italy. The NRA revealed its fascist roots in more ways than one. It was run by a generalissimo (Hugh Johnson, a businessman and ex-army officer); it featured a prominent propaganda component (including the famous blue eagle); and it boasted a secret police force to root out violators.²

It was also a disaster. Participating companies used NRA regulations to ruin competition through price-fixing, product standardization, and exclusion of outsiders, effectively cartelizing their industries. In 1934 an investigating committee chaired by Clarence Darrow condemned the NRA as monopolistic, irresponsible, grotesque, and other choice adjectives. Finally, on May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court stepped in, deciding in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States that the NRA was an unconstitutional attempted delegation of legislative power by Congress to the president.

Another Tugwell brainstorm, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), attempted to do for farmers what the NRA had done for business. The AAA adapted a Soviet-inspired policy of confiscation, destroying excess production in order to drive up prices.

For two years, in a country where hunger was a serious problem and starvation an actual possibility, the federal government at a cost of over $700 million plowed under fields of grain, slaughtered and condemned over 6 million pigs, and burned the entire Southern cotton crop, sending masses of destitute blacks fleeing north in search of simple survival.

The Supreme Court shut down the AAA on much the same grounds as the NRA. The administration’s farm support program became a major symbol of New Deal failures. (Some elements remain in effect a lifetime later—farmers and agribusinesses are annually paid large amounts for not planting crops.)

So it went. New Deal programs materialized based on one alien methodology after another. Population resettlement by the Resettlement Administration (RA), which planned to send urban unemployed to rural areas. (The program was canceled before the worst possibilities came to pass.) Mobilization of labor in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and so on through the alphabet. Even a full-bore government propaganda program in Federal One, the WPA’s arts section, which relentlessly pushed the glories of the New Deal through theater, art, radio, and music.

It all failed in the end. All the frenetic activity and titanic expense accomplished nothing. Through 1935 and ’36, the economy seemed to