Suicide of the West. James Burnham
reach of mankind—a world marked by mutual respect, and by peace.”
There is a double aspect to this historical optimism. The peaceful, just, free, virtuous, prosperous and so on society is, on the one hand, the desirable goal for mankind. But in addition, the good society is to be the actual outcome of historical development: either inevitably, as Condorcet and many other pre-liberals and liberals have believed and even tried to prove, or scheduled to come about on the condition that human beings behave rationally—that is, accept the liberal ideology, program and leadership.
It is the second, predictive aspect that is the more distinctive attribute of liberalism. There are others who agree with liberals about the specifications of the good society—though not everyone; there are some persons who have favored, some who still do favor, quite different social arrangements, and still others who do not have any goal at all for secular society, either because their goal is not of this world or because they think that a general social goal is silly. But even among those non-liberals who do share the liberal goal, many would look on it not as an attainable target but merely as a somewhat obscure ideal that can sometimes provide rough guidance for social conduct or inspiration for social effort.
That is to say: it is characteristic of liberals—and perhaps of all ideologues—to believe that there are solutions to social problems. Most liberals, and nearly all their intellectual forebears, have believed that there is a general solution to the social problem: that “the good society” or a reasonable facsimile thereof can actually be realized in this world. “The twentieth-century liberal, like his eighteenth-century forebears . . . believes that free men have the intellectual capacity and moral resources to overcome the forces of injustice and tyranny,” was the way Hubert Humphrey restated the tradition in 1959.11
More sophisticated liberal intellectuals of our day—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for example, Sidney Hook or Charles Frankel—usually keep the old-fashioned optimism out of sight when company is present. They drop most of the eighteenth-century metaphysics and concede that progress may not be “automatic” or “inevitable.” But in the end, by the back door if not the front, they return to their heritage. “To hold the liberal view of history,” Professor Frankel writes as if passing impersonal judgment on the naive beliefs of yesteryear, “meant to believe in ‘progress.’ It meant to believe that man could better his condition indefinitely by the application of his intelligence to his affairs.” But five pages later he is recommitted: “Can we, amidst the collapse of our hopes, still maintain the essential elements of the liberal outlook on history? I think we can.” 12
If they reduce the odds (Professor Frankel quotes them as “a fighting chance”) on mankind’s realizing the good society in general, they continue to believe that there is indeed a solution to every particular social problem, even to the large and difficult problems: the problems—liberals are prone to speak in terms of “problems” 13—of war, unemployment, poverty, hunger, prejudice, discrimination, crime, disease, racial conflict, automation, the population explosion, urban renewal, recreation, underdeveloped nations, unwed mothers, care of the aged, Latin America, world communism and what not. “The vision behind liberalism,” Professor Frankel sums up from this perspective, though why “behind” is somewhat obscure, “is the vision of a world progressively redeemed by human power from its classic ailments of poverty, disease, and ignorance.”
“ADA’s most fundamental tenet,” proclaimed a 1962 Statement issued by Americans for Democratic Action, echoing therein its philosophes, many of whom are also members, “is faith in the democratic process. Faith in its capacity to find solutions to the problems that challenge twentieth-century society. We have faith that [their italics], with major efforts, we can find solutions to the old but continuing problems of . . .” and then comes a sample list of the usual problems. ADA is cited here much as a medical textbook seeking to define schizophrenia would refer in the first instance to well-developed clinical cases rather than to the incipient or partial schizoid behavior common to so many of us. As a liberal fundamentalist group, ADA often puts these matters in conscious, explicit and unequivocal terms. But this faith in the existence of solutions to social problems is present right across the entire liberal spectrum, overlapping in fact a large segment of the band that names itself “conservative” but actually shares many of the underlying liberal axioms. Few indeed are the editorial writers, columnists, professors, speakers, elected or appointed officials in the United States14 who flatly declare of a pending political, economic or social problem that it is not going to be solved, that it is just plain insoluble. Professor Oakeshott comments on this feature of liberalism (“rationalism,” in his terminology). The liberal, he writes, “is not devoid of humility; he can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason. But what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems, or a political problem of which there is no ‘rational’ solution at all. Such a problem must be counterfeit. And the ‘rational’ solution of any problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution. . . . Of course, the Rationalist is not always a perfectionist in general, his mind governed in each occasion by a comprehensive Utopia; but invariably he is a perfectionist in detail.”15
5. The ignorance and bad social conditions that cause the world’s evils and block progress are the legacy of the past; “the product,” Professor Schapiro puts it, “of the errors and injustices of the past.”16 There is therefore no reason to favor ideas, institutions or modes of conduct merely because they have been long established, because our ancestors accepted them; their ancient lineage is, if anything, a ground for suspicion. We should, rather, be ready to undertake prompt, and even drastic and extensive, innovations, if these recommend themselves from a rational and utilitarian standpoint. Thus liberalism is anti-traditional.
I rather think that the attitude toward tradition furnishes the most accurate single shibboleth for distinguishing liberals from conservatives; and still more broadly, the Left from the Right, since with respect to change the revolutionary and the reactionary are merely pushing the respective attitudes of liberal and conservative toward their limits. In the New York Times Magazine article on the definition of “liberalism,” to which I have already referred, Senator Humphrey particularly insists on “change” as the key: “It is this emphasis on changes of chosen ends and means which most sharply distinguishes the liberal from a conservative in a democratic community. The dictionary defines a liberal as ‘favorable to change and reform tending in the direction of democracy.’ . . . In the political lexicon of 1959, liberals recognize change as the inescapable law of society, and action in response to change as the first duty of politics.”
We may put the question this way: does the fact that a particular idea, institution or mode of conduct has been established for some while create a presumption in favor of continuing it? To this question a conservative will answer with a definite Yes; and a liberal, with No, or “very little.” This does not mean that a conservative never, and a liberal always, wants to change what is. It is the revolutionary nihilist, not the liberal, who thinks everything to be wrong; and the reactionary, not the conservative, who wants nothing altered (unless, perhaps, in order to return to the past). For the conservative there might be some new circumstance cogent enough to call for a change in the prevailing ways, in spite of his presumption in their favor; and the liberal is on occasion content to let well enough alone. But the difference in presumption, bias, trend, remains.
The innovations favored by the liberal he usually calls “reforms,” and liberals may be described in general as “reformists.” “Belief in progress,” writes Professor Schapiro, “has inspired liberals to become the ardent advocates of reforms of all kinds in order to create the good society of the future. Reform has been the passion of liberalism.”17 In situations where both conservatives and liberals agree that reforms are in order, the conservative will want the reforming to be less extensive and more gradual than what the liberal will believe to be necessary, desirable and possible. This difference is plainly illustrated by the present “racial problem” in the United States. Nearly all conservatives agree with all liberals that there ought to be reforms in existing race relations. But the conservatives, as compared to the liberals, wish the reform program to be more piecemeal, involving at any given stage less sharp a break with existing