The Permanent Problem of Liberalism

Posted on | September 12, 2026 | No Comments

Every time I use the word liberalism — as it has been commonly used in the United States for decades, describing the belief system associated with the Democratic Party — some pedant will invariably show up in the comments to scold me with a lecture about “classical liberalism” as if I’m an ignorant schoolboy in need of their tutelage, which I am not. Nobody needs to teach me about John Locke, Adam Smith, et al., whose books have been on my shelves for 30 years. Nor am I ignorant of the fact that most young left-wingers nowadays make a point of scorning liberals, instead referring to themselves as progressives or socialists.

Yes, I know that Friedrich Hayek, among others, did not call himself a “conservative,” and that when Bill Buckley started out in the long career that would make him the de facto intellectual leader of the conservative movement in America, he saw his role in the conflict as a defense of “individualism” against “collectivism.” Petty quarrels over labels, however, are a waste of mental energy, and if you have nothing better to do, you really need to reassess your priorities. We march onward.

Nearly all public commentary Friday was devoted to the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Shane Hachey is a particular type of conservative, a Midwesterner who enlisted in the Army, then went to college, eventually getting a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University before adding a law degree from Harvard. His 9/11 anniversary column was remarkable:

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was starting my second semester at Columbia University. I had transferred from a state school in Minnesota at the start of the year, and was embarking on my own little slice of life New York adventure.
The aftermath of Sept. 11 was my first real-world collision with moral relativism. I honestly don’t know if I had ever thought consciously about it before then. But I encountered it everywhere in the months and years afterwards.
But before the relativism came cowardice.
Days after the attack, I was sitting on the steps at Columbia, talking to a sophomore I knew. We were ruminating over what had happened and what may happen, and he said something that jarred me: “If there’s a draft, I’m moving to Canada.” . . .
As odious as that sentiment was, the more common feeling I encountered was one of resigned relativism, perhaps mixed with or used as an excuse for cowardice. For example, someone once asked me at a student party, “What do you expect when you build towers to the sky…? Someone’s going to try to knock them down.” As if we brought it on ourselves, with our own Babylonian hubris. In one of my classes that semester, another student said that he was “really disturbed by all the flag-waving” that had been happening since the attack. . . .
I soon learned that Columbia students, like other New York intellectuals, were too smart for simple-minded concepts like patriotism. . . .
When I talk to normal people in the rest of America about coastal elites, relativism, and intellectual snobbery, I often tell these stories, and I end with this: however depraved, nihilistic, and relativistic you think these people are, they are far worse than that. You have no idea. Only by seeing their immediate, instinctive reaction mere miles from where the World Trade Center collapsed, in the city they call home, can you see the fruits of their philosophy in full bloom.

You can read the whole thing. What struck me was how, 25 years later, we’re still stuck with the same problem — the decadent elites haven’t changed, except insofar as they’ve gotten worse. And, in point of fact, the problem hasn’t really changed since before I was born.

In 1959, Buckley published Up From Liberalism, in which he recounted an early controversy of his career involving Eleanor Roosevelt. FDR’s widow was more or less the living symbol of liberalism in the 1950s, viewed as the guardian of her late husband’s legacy. During the uproar over Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a column “likening McCarthyism to Hitlerism,” as Buckley explained and, during a television appearance, Buckley suggested that, if Mrs. Roosevelt encountered McCarthy at a cocktail party, she would refuse to shake his hand, whereas she would have no such compunction about shaking hands with Andrey Vyshinsky, who was at the time the Soviet Union’s representative at the United Nations.

Buckley’s point was that Vyshinsky had infamously presided over the show trials during Stalin’s “Great Purge” in the 1930s, and certainly was guilty of sending many men to their deaths on false charges (the total executed during the “Great Purge” was nearly 700,000, it has been calculated). Obviously, Vyshinsky’s actions were far worse than anything that Joe McCarthy was ever accused of doing and, it should be noted, McCarthy was an American trying to protect his country from the deadly evils of Communism. Yet liberals like Mrs. Roosevelt could not accept that Communism was an evil worth fighting, and the fact that McCarthy was investigating Communist subversion made him a veritable Hitler.

This attitude (“anti-anti-Communism,” as it was sometimes called) foreshadowed the similar attitude toward Islamic terrorism that Shane Hachey encountered at Columbia University after 9/11. If liberalism means anything, it means a commitment to equality — or Equality, with a capital “E,” denoting its quasi-religious status in the liberal mind. The liberal is unable to say that Islam (or Communism) is wrong and bad, because the Muslim or the Communist must be treated as an equal. The fact that an avowed enemy seeks to kill us — well, who are we to say that he is wrong for this? Instead, the liberal believes, we must critically examine ourselves to see what we have done to provoke the enemy’s murderous rage. Of course, it’s lunacy to think like this, but the liberal never breaks down his arguments into the form of a syllogism, with the premises clearly delineated and the structure of the argument made evident. Instead, his fanatical commitment to Equality is an unexamined prejudice from which every error of his belief emerges.

Up From Liberalism was published the same year I was born, and America today faces the same basic problem that Buckley encountered when dealing with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. Liberals are so certain of their moral and intellectual superiority that, even when their errors are pointed out with the utmost precision — as Buckley did — they refuse to acknowledge they have been proven wrong. No matter how skillfully you deploy facts and logic to contradict them, nothing can persuade them to admit their mistake or change their policy, because this would be tantamount to confessing that they are not actually so superior.

Andrey Vyshinsky was a despicable monster, but Eleanor Roosevelt could not bring herself to say this, in the same way that liberals (or “progressives,” or whatever else they may call themselves) nowadays cannot bring themselves to denounce Hamas terrorists or the murderous regime in Iran. No, because to do so would be to agree with Republicans, and admitting that Republicans are right about something — anything — is simply unthinkable to them. Republicans are always the villains in the soap opera melodrama scripted by liberals, whether it’s Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Donald Trump.

You see the point of this narrative — the emotional payoff of the melodrama — is that the liberal is always the hero, deserving praise and admiration for his courage in opposing the Republican villain. Once you recognize this, you realize why there is no point arguing with the liberal. He cannot be persuaded by facts or logic, because facts and logic are not the basis of his belief system. And this is why I say that liberalism is a permanent problem. If we could not vanquish liberalism in 70 years, during which time we had such brilliant minds as Buckley advocating for the conservative cause, isn’t it the height of folly to imagine we’ll be able to declare a final victory anytime in the foreseeable future?

Keep marching, boys. We’ve still got a long way to go.

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