Tragedy of Freedom: An Indictment of Liberal Democracy and a Call for Patriotic Resistance

West, Jonathan, Tragedy of Freedom: An Indictment of Liberal Democracy and a Call for Patriotic Resistance, (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006.) $14.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

An Indictment of Liberal Democracy

Author Jonathan West grew up in liberal family, attended college in Washington, DC, during the tumultuous Vietnam era. There he witnessed the subversion of America by New Left radicals who made heroes of our nation’s communist enemies. During this time, West underwent an epiphany and became convinced that the democratic system itself, which coddles subversives, is the culprit. West laments, "Liberals recreated the American soul, first in the media and then in the teachings and textbooks of America’s schools. By the time the Viet Nam war was underway, the real battle was already over." The liberal intelligentsia succeeded in sapping "America’s children" "of their national character, their cohesion and vision. In place of these stood attributes of ethnic pluralism, leftist self-hate, and alienation" (p. 90.)

It should be no surprise, that the Tragedy of Freedom is very much an indictment of contemporary liberalism in America—and a call for patriotic resistance to this insidious creed:

Liberalism is a media-induced judgment disorder, not an ideological doctrine. Liberals have been conditioned to rely on their feelings and to judge people and events, not on some moral or logical basis, but on how they gratify their own emotions. Liberals use a non-objectivist kind of decision making with no relation to future impact. Their politics serves only as an emotional tonic for unhappy reality, the sole purpose of which is to feel good. With such morally and mentally perverse people in charge of our opinion-forming institutions is it any wonder our society also seems to lurch toward madness and self destruction? (p. 117)

"Liberals are not concerned with outcomes or even with how policies work. They are only concerned with how policies FEEL," notes West. "Thus, they often embrace false and unworkable principles (like equality) simply because they are emotionally irresistible" (p. 117).

The United States of America, as author Jonathan West postulates, is in a state of serious cultural, economic, political and social decline. The tragedy of freedom is that we tolerate the endless expansion of rights to the detriment of ethereal concepts like moral responsibility. But unfortunately America has no real statesmanship. Our nation's collective political leadership are corrupt pawns of special interests, and not surprisingly, imprudent in their political decisions. They cannot envision anything beyond the next election. They enslave us with indebtedness from their slavish and wasteful overspending; and they neglect things that need to be done like enforcing our immigration laws. They naïvely subsidize poverty and failure, and profess astonishment that we end up with more of it with every passing year. The social pathologies attendant to the political elite’s mind-numbing egalitarian ideology of political correctness is never addressed. The bitter fruits are runaway immigration and welfare entitlements perceived as an inviolable right. Social policies effectuating the continued deterioration of our culture, economy and body politic are exacerbating the decline. Social pathologies abound. Our politicians are crooked, crime is on the rise, and degeneracy and sexual immorality are fast becoming the norm. The indolent and irresponsible are rewarded by this spoils system. These unproductive members of society are encouraged to procreate at astronomical rates far in excess of the numbers of the most able, productive and intelligent citizens. We have a façade of prosperity, as the middle class wanes, and isolated pockets of affluence wall themselves off from the mire of our blighted urban landscapes.

Liberalism stresses individual greed and personal freedom at the expense of social solidarity with one's community. The result is a materialist society in which people are blind to the need to perpetuate themselves and their country. People are too busy making money and flaunting their wealth on videos and fancy cars, to bear and raise children. They are too repelled by their senses to clean their own homes or streets, pick their own oranges and maintain their homeland and community. The problem is, how does one convince comfortable, educated European people of their imminent physical demise without playing into the hands of liberals who equate anything pro-white or pro-American with bigotry? Liberals have saddled us with a guilt-ridden double standard that racial and cultural pride are right for colored peoples but are wrong for whites. For us to be conscious of our collective being is called ‘exclusivist’ (which is correct) and ‘racist’ which is incorrect" (p. 56.)

Self-indulgence compels many of the most intelligent and productive to forgo procreation and the attendant burdens of childrearing, and instead pursue self-gratification and materialism.

Instead of pursuing truth, goodness, or righteousness, individual Americans have been induced to place their own instantaneous gratification and happiness at the top of the billet faire. ¶The result is a double barreled blast at traditional American society: (1) The spoiled children of the white, middle class refuse to bother with childrearing and raising because it stifles their individual freedom and careers. (2) The primitives of the world both here and abroad, pursue THEIR version of individualism: they copulate madly without regard to the consequences; they produce millions of unwanted children; they demand that society take care of the problems which they create. The result is all around us today: cities and countryside teeming with uneducated embittered colored youth glaring at us and hounding us on radio, television, and even in the streets as we, remnant white geriatrics totter along into uncertain retirement. ¶The condition did not just come about spontaneously. It is the result of fifty years of private interest control, of open immigration, of high taxation, of welfare, and of indiscipline in the name of freedom. We have not merely permitted our own replacement, we have paid for it and assured it by idealizing the primitive and encouraging our poor to be as they are rather to strive for betterment. Even worse, we have allowed our youth to be seduced by the Hollywood 'kulcha' and to mimic the antics of primitives as in the Woodstock example (p. 81.)

Offering a broadside against pluralism which saps a nation’s cultural vitality, Jonathan West defends the historic conception of the nation-state with clarity:

It is no coincidence that mostly mono-racial (usually white) nation states are the only ones that practice democracy…The reason nation states evolved was because such groupings gave their members a common purpose to defend collectively. Nationhood was a survival strategy which worked. Out of nation states grew agreement and cooperation, precisely the prerequisites of democracy. After all, democratic procedures depend on the shared views and similar interests of a united people. Feuding factions are not likely prospects for sacrifice and compromise. It is a sad irony that by ramming third world immigration, cultural pluralism, and private interest morality down our people’s throats, liberals have torn apart the social fabric upon which democracy depends (p. 91.)

Experience shows that the more diverse our society becomes, the less our people recognize anything of themselves in it, and the less harmonious and cooperative it becomes.

Rather than developing strong, cohesive nation states which exemplified European culture, liberals and conservatives followed another route. They catered to their own individual needs. They imported millions of aliens into their societies to do their dirty work. They made their industries dependent on cheap labor (rather than automate.) They cut back their birth rate so as to avoid parental responsibilities… Thus they hand over their nation to aliens and allow themselves to be overwhelmed. If that is not a death wish, what is? (p. 57.)

Democracy is not the solution; it’s part of the problem…

One American Founder Fisher Ames once opined, "The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty." Taking issue with founding fathers like James Madison, West postulates that our system of government was founded on absurdity — juxtaposing special interests against one another, which in reality has only allowed them to collude in subversion of any real articulable, viable national interest. West laments,

Private interest democracy is the political formula for the corruption, subversion, and overthrow of civilized peoples. Under its social welfare programs, the least responsible, least educated, least cultured people reproduce the most, and eventually predominate. Democracy grants them power over civilized people purely on the basis of numbers (p. 98.)

Democracy is extolled as a talisman for all of our political ails. What passes for democracy is little more than the aggregation of special interest peddlers vying for corrupt influence and patronage. Journalist H.L. Mencken echoed this tongue-in-cheek quip: "Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." No revered moral teacher in history from Moses to Jesus has ever taught that moral principle is to be sought in the tumultuous passions of majority opinion. Its core principles of egalitarianism and social justice are unrealistic, naïve and self-destructive. Jonathan West dares to suggest that many of the core ideological values of Americans are predicated upon mendacity, naïve sentimentalism and well-wishing. These sentiments are neither compatible with experience or reality. Thus, we must dispense with trifling ideological clichés like equality and social justice. Year by year, we have only seen the political discourse brought down to the lowest-common denominator in the midst of such feel-good politically correct ideological mindlessness. West makes a call not for dictatorship—but rather for a spirited civic republicanism to supplant the status quo of political palsy.

We Americans have been conditioned to think of freedom in terms of unfettered access to the ballot and the right of universal suffrage, and yet are surprised to see the world falling apart around us when criminals, miscreants, and vagabonds elect demagogues who subsidize their degeneracy and idleness. If we Americans were not so sacrosanct about treating access to the ballot as a universal birthright at age eighteen, but rather something to be earned by attaining property, higher education, or rendering military service—then such a reform could go a long way in advancing civil society. If we strive for a more affluent, informed and responsible electorate, then the quality of statesmanship in public affairs could be elevated and the quality of political discourse substantially improved.

The Tragedy of Freedom

The Tragedy of Freedom is that freedom is so abused; lives are lived so aimlessly, materialistically and selfishly. Self-indulgence is fast becoming the norm in what was once a nation imbued by civility, decency and patriotism.

The public is suddenly free of all the cultural, political and religious strictures which once directed it to progress. Nowadays, people are extolled to ‘do their own thing.’ That is precisely what they do. They avoid work. The disparage education. They shirk responsibility. Breeding is no longer an act of love and dedication. It is either avoided entirely by those who should do it, or engaged in recklessly by those who should not. From one end of America to another great hordes of people pursue the Wall Street Journal’s version of the American dream: self-gratification and money. The supposedly successful may be driving in the fast lane but they are on the road to extinction. Duty, righteousness, cooperation, all for the sake of perpetuating our nation, are ignored" (p. 58.)

West laments his hometown Anaheim, and surrouding environs as a microcosm of the tragedy of freedom afflicting America today:

Still, one could not find a more concentrated dose of insanity than Orange County, California. The place consists largely of cultureless whites living above their means. The houses there are usually of shabby, stucco construction, and are poorly maintained. Their outrageous prices reflect inflation and immigration demand (mostly from Asia and Mexico) rather than the equivalent value in some other part of the country. The children of such homes are cultureless primitives. Their parents’ aimless boredom and obsession with amusement translate into alienated, undisciplined, reckless youth. Possessing no values, they see no difference between good and bad, between creative and destructive, between clean and dirty, between honor and perfidy. They idle away their hours mimicking lower class blacks with rap, break dancing, drugs, or some other version of anti-culture. They spend their lives attempting to muster an illusive style, through surfing, partying and cars. They speak in prepackaged, borrowed clichés, usually combined with obscenities... Instead, they merely mimic someone else, trying to score as much status as possible, not by creativity, not even by conformity to time-honored traditions, not by conformity to a new perverse standard!" (p. 61)

The candor with which West speaks about social pathologies afflicting minorities in America might come across as ‘race baiting’ to more politically-correct conservatives. For others, it might be just a hard dose of reality.

Disrespect for authority has become the new norm. During the rioting which took place after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., many liberals attempted to explain and excuse the violence, vandalism and theft. They called it, ‘a reaction to the assassination,’ or ‘a display of frustration over economic deprivation.’ In other words, young blacks were supposedly justified in rioting and looting and torching properties because their individual aspirations had been frustrated! (p. 84)

Upon reading West's book, whether you agree or disagree with all of his political prescriptions, the reader is confronted with the undeniable reality that when liberty becomes license than tyranny will prevail. We Americans countenance the endless expansion of rights, from what was once a negative upon government action that has metamorphesized into positive rights for welfare entitlements and social goods. Yet, we Americans profess astonishment as to why our communities are sapped by alienation, corruption, rootlessness, social pathologies, and gripped by fear.

Liberals prefer the freedom to do wrong and the emotional satisfaction of a lie, to the security of a peaceful, disciplined, and prosperous society. They would rather protect the right of savages to outbreed us all, than the right of civilized society to exact certain minimum standards when it comes to childbearing. By refusing to judge the poor, liberals uphold the doctrine of equality. In doing so, they attempt to be humane, but wind up killing civilization (p. 125.)

Rights and Duties: The Need for Responsible Citizenship

A good Roman citizen knew that they were as much obliged to their civic duties as exercising their rights. Gradually, Rome lost her way, her sense of civility, and the republic collapsed into empire, and the empire imploded from within. The Romans tried to buy off their barbarians, and their barbarians enslaved them. Is America doomed to the same fate?

Jonathan West dares to suggest we must balance rights and responsibilities. West opines, "Human beings need a system where rights are earned and balanced by responsibility. A free and undisciplining political system like liberal democracy allows and encourages misbehavior. People then misbehave. By the very freedom which it affords, liberal democracy accommodates people’s corruption and then abandons them to it rather than encouraging them to improve" (p. 9.) I concur with West on this point. West might come across as too authoritarian and unappealing to many on the Right weaned on laissez-faire politics, as West in disapprobation proclaims, "A whole political philosophy (libertarianism) has developed around the concept of maximum individual freedom of action without any thought as to why we face more and more restrictions" (p. 18.) Having been allured by libertarian slogans and ideas myself in my intemperate youth, I have to admit many of them can be a bit naïve. To be sure, some of their ends are quite just. Libertarians want to idealize an elusive republican self-government that our founders supposedly bequeathed us, and yet we believe that we can tolerate irresponsibility and state-subsidized malfeasance all in the name of freedom. Free-market think tanks scream to liberalize the economy and cut the public sector, and yet advocate the policies of runaway immigration that all but guarantee the growth of government to contain the social pathologies attendant to it. And yet these same people profess wonder why our public sector and welfare state grows by leaps and bounds, and the U.S. has the highest number of law enforcement officers per capita in the Western industrialized world.

Our political elites mandate welfarism, procreation of the idle poor, and runaway immigration—and then libertarians bellyache when we have to pay for it. Yet the libertarians refuse to advocate the coercive policies that would counter the tide of aliens, welfarism and swelling proletarian masses. Merely voting against taxes that finance the baneful spoils system doesn’t uproot the problem. Libertarians don’t like coercion. Like many Americans, they are too enmeshed in a cosmopolitan culture of radical individualism to assail runaway immigration and demand reform. Poor immigrants are cheap labor and deemed good for the economy! As Samuel Francis lamented, "We’re too corrupt for republicanism."

West asserts that "the problem is not how to induce men to live cooperatively without imposing on their individual rights." Instead there is a need to "devise sensible, necessary and limited restraints to induce good behavior with as little trauma as possible." Thus, according to West, the liberal’s conception of freedom is unworkable. "It is judicious coercion, openly arrived at and fairly administered which will achieve this end" (p. 28.) What we need is to restore the strong social stigmatism against illegitimacy and infidelity that prevailed in early twentieth century America.

If Jonathan West’s vision is deemed coercive, it is a constrained vision of judicious authority that buttresses strong families and traditional social norms—while rewarding responsible behavior. This vision is not unlike that of Singapore’s much heralded statesman Lee Kuan Yew whose principled statesmanship bequeathed Singapore a society imbued by civility and social cohesion within capitalist lines. Yew’s government induced good behavior on the part of her citizens—by an arrangement of incentives and psychological conditioning that compelled Singaporeans to embrace a civic nationalism. (In fact, Singaporeans were taught not to so much as toss chewing gum on a sidewalk and there are sanctions for such misdeeds.) Its fruits were civility, familial stability, minimal corruption, prosperity and steady socio-economic improvement. In 1994, liberal Americans greeted the Singapore experiment with contempt when they found out one of their criminal expatriates Michael Fay was sentenced to jail and six strokes of the rattan cane for acts of vandalism. But for all of the outrage about human rights abuses over there, America is bewildered by runaway crime, burglary, vandalism, murder, robbery, and rape—while Singapore maintains discipline, order and civility. In America, we naively coddle the criminals, and even victimize them. In Singapore, they are stigmatized and punished for even the most minor infractions. Stronger stigmatism to criminal wrong-doing and the use of social sanctions, and judicious punishment are meaningful deterrents to crime, promiscuity and illegitimate children. Yet our popular culture today is enmeshed in criminality. West suggests, Americans "must be psychologically reenthused and reimbued with the concept of community. They must be conditioned to feel guilt whenever they place their own gratification over that of society." (p. 53.)

The problem with conservatives today…

Jonathan West is not immune from criticizing mainstream conservatives, particularly the hacks for the Republican Party who parrot the Left and care more about the expedient end of winning the next election than making the country a better place for the next generation. Though, West confronts the reality that the tragedy of freedom is an inherently conservative one, as it is only discernible to those not afflicted with the moral insanity of the liberal mindset. After all, liberals have always delighted in degeneracy. Conservatives have failed to deconstruct the core principles of liberalism, and offer a viable political alternative. As the nineteenth century writer James Fennimore Cooper opined, "A politicians thinks about the next election; a statesman thinks about the next generation." West maintains that, "It remains for conservatives to acknowledge that democracy is self-terminating, and to develop an alternative which balances rights with responsibilities."

The conservative sage Russell Kirk professed that "[t]o live within a just order is to live within a pattern that has beauty. The individual finds purpose within an order, and security – whether it is the order of the soul or the order of the community. Without order, indeed the life of man is poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Jonathan West speaks to that desire for restoring and sustaining order. The irony is that while many on the Left and Right would lament the perceived coerciveness in West’s political prescription, they are ultimately responsibly for continuing policies that degrade and imperil our freedom. They give free reign to the irresponsible and indolent to impute their moral deformity to the body politic and bury all of us in avalanche of social discord and political strife. Tolerance of this sort hurts the able and productive contributors to society. That’s the tragedy of freedom.

Towards the end of the manuscript, Jonathan West devised a hypothetical American National Charter to supplant our present constitutional system. This is where I take issue with him. There are incremental ways of reforming the present constitutional structures, and reigning in on special interests without uprooting the roots of the trunk of the constitutional order itself. I doubt it would ever yield its intended result in any case. Moreover, his proposed constitutional charter is profoundly teleocratic (i.e. ideology-based) as opposed to our present nomocratic (i.e., rule-based) charter. Such a charter would never survive when those in charge of implementing begin to question anyone of its provisos. A constitution needs to be rooted in the rich humus of a nation’s past. If anything we need to take the present United States Constitution more seriously—and reaffirm the structural principle of subsidiarity encapsulated in the Tenth Amendment. Moreover, if we are to revitalize communities, we cannot possibly dream of it in terms of "national community," but in federal or covenantal terms, so I do not have a distinct picture of the social order he envisions. But I can agree with West that America needs to eschew the liberal philosophy of rational autonomy in favor of cohesive communities. Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet offered a similar cultural critique.

Closing Salvos

Whether a reader agrees or disagrees with West’s political prognosis and prescription, in whole or in part, all readers will be challenged by his clarion call for critically reevaluating our political priorities in America, and laying hold of our future. One of the problems I find with the thesis is that the author seems to purport that Right-thinking individuals need to co-opt the managerial regime for conservative ends. One of the critiques I garnered from Robert Nisbet was the social pathologies were in no small part attendant to the homogenization as well as the centralization of political and corporate structures, so this manifesto has its limits because of its vagueness on this point.

As Swiss sociologist Wilhelm Roepke proclaimed, "We can breathe the air of liberty only to the extent that we are ready to bear the burden of moral responsibility associated with it." That is the implicit theme of Jonathan West’s provocative book, and that is a lesson lost to this indolent generation in America today. Written over twenty years ago, this book still speaks to our most pressing political issues today.