Misguided Liberals, Two Book Reviews

[From review]
“Liberalism,” Fawcett argues, “is about improving people’s lives while treating them alike and shielding them from undue power.” But Fawcett’s assertions don’t apply to liberalism’s contemporary incarnations. Take his point about treating people alike: the faculty senate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, long one of the flagships of American liberalism, has, with barely a dissent, proposed a new plan for increasing diversity on campus by distributing grades on an ethnic and racial basis. As John Leo has reported, the plan calls for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.”
As for improving people’s lives, the “billionaire boys club” of radical environmentalists central to the Democratic Party’s finances is dedicated to a stratified America, in which the masses are kept in their properly subordinate place. Opponents of economic growth—billionaires such as Tom Steyer and George Soros, as well as the Rockefeller and Page Foundations—seek to curtail the expansion of the natural gas industry in the name of climate change. On both sides of the Atlantic, a liberalism dedicated to heading off the supposedly imminent threat of environmental catastrophe has scant concern for the declining middle class.
[. . .] In de facto one-party “blue” states, like New York and California, issues such as the imminent danger of climate change are deemed “settled” by leading liberals. Rather than distrusting power, Obama liberals, assuming they have a permanent lock on the presidency, have been happy to expand their power through a neo-imperial presidency and a Senate shorn of the rules that curbed majority abuses. The discovery of vast new sources of natural gas, which liberals once might have seen as progress, is denounced by today’s “progressives,”who decry carbon-based energy. They’re willing to block energy exploration, even at the cost of increasing poverty. Finally, public figures holding traditional views on, say, gay marriage have been excoriated and their companies threatened with boycotts. So much for respecting people, “whatever they think.” Fawcett misses all this because he tunes out liberalism’s intolerant tendencies, which first took hold on campuses and are now spreading to the broader culture. [. . .] plutocrats such as Steyer, Soros, and the Rockefellers have formed a top-bottom political alliance with entities like the Service Workers International Union, which organizes janitors, fast-food workers, and, through what was once known as Acorn, the unemployed. This alliance is central to the Obama administration’s goal of making low-wage workers and the poor comfortable in their relative poverty.

[. . .] Obama liberals, concludes Rubin [. . .] are “motivated by something that blends deliberate suicide with incompetence . . . and they will never get better because they are uninterested in learning what works.”

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0808fs.html

FRED SIEGEL
Liberalism on the Rocks
Two recent books appraise the contemporary Left, with varying results.
8 August 2014

Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by Edmund Fawcett (Princeton University Press, 468 pp., $35)

Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, by Barry Rubin (Broadside Books, 332 pp., $25.99)