One of the main criticisms made about liberalism by William F. Buckley, Jr. in the late 1950s was its fetishization of democracy. Process, not good governance, was the end sought. The corrollary by his colleague at National Review, James Burnham, was that liberalism was so committed to process that it would cheerfully grant a free hand to its assassins. What he meant was that liberalism was obsessed with rights and would have no defense against forces that did not share liberalism's values. Burnham presented a metaphorical illustration of a referree's dillemma in officiating a game where one team is biting, gouging, and just trying to break up the game. What to do? Ignore the rules and eject the team that does not give a damn about the rules? Or ignore the bad behavior?
These were observations of an old order, a time when there were liberals in both parties. These ideas about rules were not about partisanship or policy, just an American sense of fair play and the importance of the individual. Despite what you may have heard, there was plenty of partisanship in the 1950s. McCarthy's entire crusade of vicious red-baiting was about attacking liberals, not finding actual communists. And communists were the disruptive team Burnham had in mind.
It is ironic that Burnham's conservatives have morphed into using the same disruptive tactics as their rightly-reviled communist witch agents. They undermine faith in our institutions, intentionally lie about their intentions to sow chaos, all to hasten the inevitable revolution. It is not that Burnham did not understand this, in his early days he was a Trotskyist, he just could not see the enemies to his right. Burnham even titled an essay (I don't remember the original French) "no enemies to the left." Liberals, he argued, could not see communists as bad because they were on the same side of the ideological spectrum. Nonsense of course, plenty of influential liberals such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger understood that communists were antithetical to their ideas, but fascism and theocracy had been thoroughly discredited and not thought to be of any concern.
These guys... are all dead now. There are no ideas in politics anymore, just soundbites and slogans. The once proud Democratic Party... what do they stand for today? Perhaps some vague references to education and healthcare, but no continuing narrative. Those political consultants that get such big paydays for coming up with "Hope and Change" should really read Drew Westen. What is even the core constituancy for the Democratic Party? Educated professionals?
http://www.amazon.com/Pity-Billionaire-Hard-Times-Unlikely-Comeback/dp/0805093699
http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-heilemann-2012-3/
http://www.alternet.org/election2012/154242/Agenda_for_the_Dark_Ages%3A_GOP_Frontrunner_Rick_Santorum%27s_5_Most_Extremist_Themes_/?page=3
http://www.theprovocation.net/2012/02/fractured-republican-party-could-go-way.html
http://crooksandliars.com/tina-dupuy/gop-2012-pro-fiction-campaign
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/will-tea-get-cold/
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