Don't Know Much About... - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Don’t Know Much About…

A quote from the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson:

What is the common denominator of [President Obama’s] failed foreign policy initiatives (reset with Russia; a new, kinder, gentler Middle East; supposed breakthroughs with China; outreach to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela) and his domestic catastrophes (Obamacare, deficits, huge debts, chronic unemployment)? In a nutshell, he does not seem to know much about human nature.

Hanson, a classicist and military historian who currently holds the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, knows a thing or two about human nature. A lifetime spent studying Thucydides will do that. But while Hanson restricts his point to the current White House occupant, his claim is more broadly true of modern liberalism, of which President Obama is simply the most influential adherent. Modern liberalism does not know much about human nature.

This is a centuries-old point, but it’s one that has to be re-cognized by every generation. I’ll risk belaboring the subject, which has been discussed more eloquently elsewhere, by making a quick note or two.

Modern liberalism (as distinct from classical liberalism, the province of many of the American Founders) propounds the fallacy that human nature is infinitely malleable and, in the end—if you have enough government programs, social justice organizations, and Peace Corps volunteers—perfectible. As Jonah Goldberg laid out in his book Liberal Fascism, it shares that delusion with socialism, fascism, and communism. Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, if in some ways worlds apart, in fact shared certain core principles.

The moral vision of the great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others like him, was to articulate for our age that man is fallen, that he cannot be molded to fit preconceived designs (as was the dream of Marx and Engels), and that he must be dealt with man as he is, warts and all. Solzhenitsyn’s declaration of these ages-old truths helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

A politics that does not recognize these plain-enough facts will aim for the impossible—and in doing so will disenfranchise, disillusion, or worse.

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