The Gathering Storm

James Hitchcock on the Transformative Election of 2016

The 2016 election is one of the most crucial in American history, its results likely to reverberate for decades and to transform the character of American society permanently. But those who look upon this prospect with dread can do little to prevent it.

The Democratic party is now committed to the final consolidation of the authority of the liberal welfare state over every aspect of human life, with "welfare" defined not merely as economic aid to the needy but as governmentally enacted "solutions" to every kind of "problem."

In theory, liberalism espouses a philosophical relativism in which there can be no certain truth and which therefore brands moral absolutists as dangerous and irrational. But in practice, liberalism has itself become a creed with infallible teachings. Liberals do not encourage robust debate but rather quickly define the orthodox position on every subject, then promote it relentlessly.

The origins of this lie in the French Revolution, which imposed tyranny for the sake of liberty, then further curtailed liberty for the sake of equality. For two centuries, Anglo-Saxon liberalism eschewed that path, but many Anglo-Saxon liberals are now ready to enact the spirit of Continental liberalism, which, among other things, was often overtly anti-religious and sought to make education a monopoly of the state.

The Goals of Today's Liberalism

Today the principal goal of the liberal agenda is the definitive ratification of the counterculture of the 1960s, especially the sexual revolution, which the welfare state promotes by such things as facilitating the use of contraceptives even by children in grade school and by rejecting sex-education programs that promote chastity.

Feminists (by no means all of them women) are perhaps the single most loyal element in the Democratic party, people for whom "reproductive rights" symbolically and psychologically outweigh every other issue; and this year the Democratic party has placed that issue squarely in the center of its platform. Abortion is no longer to be kept "safe, legal, and rare." A future Clinton administration promises to remove all restrictions of any kind.

The welfare state's understanding of both "health" and "freedom" requires undermining the authority of parents and others who are deemed to be suffering from sexual repression. It also seeks to break religious authority, both because the essence of liberalism is in some ways the liberation of the self from all authority and because it needs to obliterate any moral rival to itself.

Much of the controversy over the Affordable Care Act was precisely about that. "Faith-based institutions" are recognized as competitors to the welfare state that must either be closed or effectively transformed into agencies of that state.

For the most part, liberal religion willingly accepts the humble task of merely echoing the secular liberal agenda. The reduction of religion to ethics makes specific political programs the true expression of faith.

In advanced liberal circles, conservative religion is regarded as a malign influence that must be curtailed, and this spirit has penetrated to the heart of the Democratic party. People with no religious affiliation are now the single largest "faith group" in the party, and in 2012 the mention of God was jeered by delegates to its quadrennial convention.

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