The View From 1776

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The following thoughts abstracted from and engendered by “Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment,” by Walter Berns lay out the jurisprudential architecture of liberalism that leads liberal-Progressives to fight against Judge Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and against NSA wire-tapping to prevent repetitions of 9/11.

(1) Absolutely unrestricted freedom of speech, even hateful and destructive speech, is the cornerstone of liberalism.  Liberals have come to rely upon a number of Constitutional law devices, including Justice Holmes’s famous “clear and present danger” test, procedural due process, and incorporation of the 1st amendment under the 14th amendment to declare unconstitutional (or to attempt to do so) a wide range of Federal and state laws that place any restrictions at all upon free speech.  In addition, the definition of free “speech” has been steadily expanded to include some kinds of harmful actions, as well as questionable words. 

Ironically, Holmes’s “clear and present danger” test was used, not to invalidate a limitation upon free speech, but to affirm the conviction of the accused for violating a Federal statute that made it a crime to speak against or seek to impede the draft during World War I.  Nothing that President Bush has done, under the Patriot Act or NSA wire-tapping, comes even close to the result approved by Justice Holmes.

To say the least, the reflexive liberal view since then has led to some bizarre results.  For example, late Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, in declaring unconstitutional a 1930s New York state law, stated that they saw no difference between Shakespeare, the Bible, and magazines devoted to lurid stories and accounts of crimes of violence, rape, and mayhem (earlier, less powerful analogs of present-day TV and movie violence and ‘gangsta’ rap music). 

In a different Court case, these Justices also perceived no reason to permit the State of Illinois to restrict public rallies and distribution of literature by a man whose organization advocated destroying Negroes (immigrating then to Chicago from southern farms in large numbers) as a way to prevent “mongrelization” of the white race, despite the fact that the City of Chicago had been compelled to assign more than 1,000 policemen to round-the-clock duty in a public housing project into which a few black families had moved. 

Noted liberal-Progressives like the late Sidney Hook apparently believed that the literal essence of the American democratic system is the free and open exchange of ideas, subject to no restrictions on who may say what, other than in the case of active criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government.  A Communist agent may be stopped from speech involving a secret conspiracy, but he is entitled to a respectful audience if he seeks openly to persuade Americans of the virtues of Marxism, a doctrine diametrically opposed to the Lockean philosophy upon which this nation fought for its independence and upon which its Constitution is based. 

According to Mr. Hook, democracy requires only a free-speech “marketplace” in which there can be no values and no prejudgments, the assumption being that what is truth is whatever emerges as majority rule and that what emerges will in fact be good.  The liberal, however, is not permitted to make a judgment about what might be defined as “good,” because “value judgements” are unscientific. 

In short, for the liberal, American constitutional democracy can be no more than a process with no connection whatever to moral values.  Thus, were this process to result in the election of a tyrant like Adolf Hitler (who was elected with large pluralities in a completely legal fashion under the constitution of the Weimar Republic), what he represents would have to be accepted by the liberals as the “truth.” On the other hand, if, after hearing all the arguments in a free and open debate, the majority of the people vote to place some restrictions on “dangerous” free speech, liberals, by their avowed standards, will be obligated to accept that decision. 

In fact, however, it doesn’t work that way, because liberals always want to fall back on the Federal judiciary, presuming that it will block any such majority voter decision or any legislation to that effect passed by the people’s democratically chosen representatives.  This accounts for liberals’ ruthless willingness to attack the personal character and destroy the personal lives of potential conservative appointees (such as Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, or Samuel Alito) to the Federal bench.  Sacrificing any element of decency and courtesy in the conduct of public business is acceptable if keeping a liberal majority on the Supreme Court requires it.

(2) Stating the liberal credo in that context makes it clear that some sorts of values really are lurking somewhere in the background.  Clearly no one, liberals included, is going to leave his very survival to chance in a game in which he doesn’t believe he knows the certain outcome and in which he does not implicitly believe that the outcome will be to his liking.

(3) My personal hypothesis (for which Professor Berns is not responsible) is that this liberal confidence in and fixation upon absolute freedom of speech arises from an amalgam of two historical factors: (a) the Victorian era, 19th century belief in inevitable economic, scientific, and social progress, with the implication that society is ultimately perfectible; and (b) the massive, 18-million-person tidal wave of Italian and Polish-Russian Jewish immigration between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I here in 1917.

The first of these, 19th century optimism, was expressed in America in the Transcendental philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, the Pragmatic philosophy of William James and John Dewey in the 1890s, the Progressive politics of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before World War I, and in the rise of the social sciences and social engineering, epitomized in John Dewey’s views on education, from the 1890s through the present day.  What imparted sweeping power to this phenomenon was its identification with the scientific approach, the confidence that subjecting all beliefs and social customs to scientific inquiry ultimately would lead to discovery of scientific truth.  Americans, with our “can do” spirit and frontier practicality, have always been more attuned to finding new and more efficient ways to do things.  We have alway looked with suspicion upon the philosophies and religious / state orthodoxies of the Old World.

The fatal error in the whole movement was assuming that the methodologies that had produced prodigies of discovery and an avalanche of inventions in the mechanical and physical worlds were of equal validity in the realm of human social interaction.  Newton had discovered the mathematically-describable laws that govern the movement of the planets and the stars.  Could not the newly-emergent academic social sciences (sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, etc.) discover the same sorts of “laws,” enabling society to abandon old “superstitions” like religion and philosophy from ancient sources like the Bible and Aristotle?  Wouldn’t growing knowledge lead the people to reject old ideas like morality and accept social engineers as Philosopher Kings? 

John Dewey’s “Reconstruction in Philosophy” (1920) expounds the faith that all existing philosophy, religion, and social customs are no more than impediments to scientific inquiry.  Even the Constitution, presumably, is an outmoded artifact that should give way to formulations that are to evolve from inquiry by social scientists.  Dewey, though by no means all social scientists, was a strong believer in socialism and, even into the era of mass population liquidations by Joseph Stalin, remained a supporter of Lenin’s attempt to transform Soviet citizens into the “New Soviet Man” by restructuring the elements of society.

The second major historical factor, the huge influx of immigrants, produced a conservative response as skewed as the liberal view on free speech.  Having 18 million people from totally different cultures descend upon a still largely English culture in the short span of 30 years was a major disruption that produced fear and anger in the native population.  The fact that a number of the Italian and Jewish arrivals were passionate anarchists or Communists didn’t help.  Bloody labor actions like the 1894 Chicago Pullman strike, the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Square anarchist bombing, as well as anarchist assassinations of President Garfield in 1881 and President McKinley in 1901 and the deadly Wall Street bombing in front of the J. P. Morgan & Co. building in 1920, left the public in an angry and frightened mood, demanding severe measures to deal with the threat to social stability.  The situation was not unlike the public’s demand for action against Al Queda today.  Identification of immigrants in the public mind with anarchist terror led to a series of restrictive immigration laws culminating in limits by national origin in 1921 and 1927 that essentially shut the door to foreigners.

Public reaction also took forms like the eugenics movement (created by Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton as an outgrowth of the hypothesis of evolution) that declared recent Italian and Jewish immigrants to be inherently ineducable and of sub-standard intelligence (hence the explosive reaction a few years ago to “The Bell Curve” by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein).  Several states passed laws permitting forcible sterilization of persons so classified. 

At the same time the Ku Klux Klan experienced a big revival, this time mostly in the Midwest, aimed at political and even terrorist exclusion of undesirable immigrants and religions like Roman Catholicism .  It was from this cauldron of unrest that organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League arose.  The ACLU’s primary impetus was defending anarchist and socialist sabotage of World War I preparations.

By the 1930s, when the Depression put Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and the New Deal in the political saddle, public opinion had swung in the direction of the social sciences approach and against the excesses of the ultra-orthodox reaction to immigration.  Growing unease about the coincident rise of Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy in the 1920s and Hitler’s Nazis in Germany during the middle 1930s, as well as revelations of Stalin’s “trials” and executions, also militated for public support of free speech and the “open-minded” scientific approach.

(4) Because WASP cultural values and ideas of morality had been used against them, the turn-of-the-century immigrants and their heirs remain instinctively wary of any attempts toward adoption of public standards of morality.  Understandably, the possibility of prayer in schools brings shivers of fear. 

Unfortunately for them and for everyone else, no society can endure without commonly held moral principles.  In the final analysis a society is nothing more than the beliefs to which its members willingly subscribe. 

Humans’ God-given nature causes them to stick together in political societies.  As Aristotle said, man is by nature a political animal.  The human race could not survive in a hostile nature as lone individuals. 

All humans have urges to belong to a group, whence youth gangs, Yankee baseball fans, Rotarians, and political parties.  When such groups cease to represent a clearly-articulated set of beliefs or activities to which their members are prepared voluntarily to commit their emotional loyalties, those groups begin to wither.  Rational or not, it is simply a fact that all peoples everywhere exhibit and have always exhibited those traits.  No amount of Lamarckian social engineering by John Dewey or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has been able to alter our genetic makeup. 

The big question is what kind of political society engenders and supports the highest qualities of human nature and creates the strongest and most enduring society.

Western civilization, arising from the Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophical tradition, says that the best society is one that crafts laws and customs that support religion and its standards of morality.  This tradition distinguishes between true happiness and momentary sensual gratification.

True happiness arises from pursuit of moral virtue in all of life’s dealings with other humans.  Sensual gratification leaves the individual dependent upon external stimulants and focusing upon it makes people less productive.

The founding traditions of the United States were aimed at true happiness, at making the New World colonies shining beacons of righteousness to a corrupted Old World.

The essence of liberal-progressivism, in contrast, is the atheistic belief that only the material externalities of income and power are real, that the true aim of political society is to reduce all people to a homogenized mass having nearly equal income and equal access to all of society’s goods and services. 

Believing, as they do, in only material factors, liberal-progressives are altogether in favor of hedonistic license for sensual gratification, which they call liberty.  In order to remove the impediment of western civilization’s religious morality, they employ their version of free speech (that is, for liberal-progressives only) to denigrate Judeo-Christianity.

Public policies aimed at multi-cultural education and avoidance of all values ultimately, however, can have only one result, disintegration of society.  The loss of a commonly-accepted sense of morality and community standards of behavior is the explanation for much of the ill that besets the United States today.  Blind adherence to liberal theories of social welfarism and value-free expressions of free speech can only make matters worse. 

Liberals need to restudy the scientific method advocated by John Dewey and remind themselves that this scientific method also requires maintaining an open mind and a willingness to abandon social welfare and other public policies that prove to be unworkable or counter-productive. 

More importantly, social stability in a good society requires devotion to wisdom and an understanding of moral values.  Neither wisdom nor understanding is a product of a mechanical process called “diversity.” On the other hand, wisdom and moral virtue easily embrace all races, sexes, and economic classes.  As the Declaration of Independence proclaims, in a moral sense, we are all created equal by our Creator.

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