More on the Religion of Liberal Fundamentalism

Jonah Goldberg, in The New-Time Religion: Liberalism and its problems (available for a fee) offers this commentary:

Liberalism today has two maladies...The first...American liberalism is intellectually exhausted, or “bookless,” as New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz recently called it. The second...Modern liberalism has taken on the trappings of a religion.

This second diagnosis runs counter to the reigning clichés about the GOP’s becoming the party of theocracy. While it’s true that the Republican party and the conservative movement are invested in the agenda of religious groups, conservatism maintains a far clearer separation of religious and political impulses than liberalism, which often conflates the two into a single ideology. Like many spiritual movements, liberalism emphasizes deeds and ideals over ideas. As a result, when liberals gather there’s a revivalist spirit in the air, with plenty of talk about fighting the forces of evil and testifying about good deeds done...

It was the philosopher Eric Voegelin who...decried the liberal impulse as an attempt to...create a heaven on earth. The often spiritual nature of the environmental movement; the quasi-messianic treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bill Clinton’s invocation of "covenants" with the American people; Hillary Clinton’s hibernating "politics of meaning,"...all of these are examples of what Voegelin would describe as the neo-Gnostic effort to make the hereafter simply here.

This is all the inevitable consequence of a political movement that deliberately turned its back on philosophy and its own intellectual history. A movement without ideas must be driven by something, and if ideas and principles aren’t it, what’s left is a stew of emotional and quasi-religious notions about "doing good."...

Liberals tend to deride conservatism for its faith in dogma. But the reality is that liberal dogma is settled while conservative dogma remains a work in progress. Indeed, the great debate of modern conservatism — crudely described as libertarianism versus conservatism, or freedom versus virtue — remains as unsettled today as it was when Frank Meyer coined the term "fusionism."...

Liberals had their own fusionist debate during the first three decades of the 20th century. American reformers envied Europe’s statist solutions to the "social problem."...

Liberals succeeded in jettisoning the historical baggage of liberalism by wielding the razor of Pragmatism, a "philosophy and a psychology perfectly tailored to progressive needs," writes Eric Goldman in his classic Rendezvous with Destiny. William James described his philosophy as an attitude of "looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts."...

Some liberals understood the dangers of this approach early on. "The real trouble with us reformers," lamented J. Allen Smith, a leading progressive intellectual, "is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left." But the anti-dogmatism of the Pragmatists won out and became unquestioned dogma for generations of liberals...

Of course, an ideology of anti-dogmatism isn’t less ideological than other worldviews; it’s merely harder to defend consistently, which is why many liberals choose not to try. Ever since Michael Dukakis insisted that voters should value his "competence" over Republican "ideology," Democratic politicians have been saying they don’t believe in "labels" — never mind extolling anything like a coherent political philosophy. But, as Bertrand Russell warned, the Pragmatic approach leaves its adherents no easily articulated principles for action other than power, preferences, and irrational "feelings."...

...it is an article of faith for liberals that they are right, they just need to update the evangelization effort by speaking in the vernacular a bit more...

And this is where the Janus faces of liberalism meet. William James invented Pragmatism to accommodate the belief that Darwin killed God; with it, religious truth became whatever believers willed. Liberalism therefore puts government in God’s throne to the extent that it believes that, as a matter of principle, no challenge is beyond the reach of Leviathan. From Woodrow Wilson on, central to the new liberals’ project was to create, in Arnold’s words, a "religion of government," where the old dogma of a limited state with defined powers would be rendered obsolete in favor of an "organic" state and an oracular "living constitution."...

Here are three related postings:

"It Is Liberalism That Is Now Bookless And Dying"
Liberal Fundamentalism, Revisited
Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse