President Obama wept while announcing his new executive actions that will supposedly protect Americans from guns, demonstrating that honest emotion is often the poorest of guides to both good politics and good policy, a lesson that today’s liberals are notably loath to learn.
There was a time when liberals were smart about gun control. They recognized that trying to pass any form of gun control was self-defeating. Not only did you lose the battle, you lost the Congress. But the Sandy Hook massacre made liberals stop thinking with their heads and start thinking with their hearts once more.
In their hearts, liberals think that guns are sick and that anyone who wants a gun is sick. Thus, if we prevent sick people from getting guns, no one will have them, and there were be no more slaughter. Repeated defeats at the polls eventually taught liberals to sit on their convictions, but Sandy Hook made them ashamed of their cowardice and now they are quite determined to throw all caution to the winds. The sickos be damned, we’re going to do what’s right!
My impression at the time was that President Obama, acting largely out of compassion, wanted to do “something” following Sandy Hook as a gesture to the grieving parents, to tell them that their children did not die in vain, that reform would follow in the wake of tragedy. I strongly suspect that he intended it to be only a gesture, which is why he doubly resented the NRA’s attitude: “Gee, I’m so sorry for your fucking kid! Now keep your damn hands off my fucking 12.7 mm sniper’s rifle!” Look, NRA! It was a totally meaningless gesture! So why are you pissing all over me?
Well, Republicans hate Obama so much that they couldn’t—or, anyway, didn’t—resist going out of their way to humiliate him, and the left in general, on this issue. The result is that most liberals are wildly supportive of anything that can be labeled gun control, regardless of how useless it is. Simply fighting the “war on guns” has become emotionally satisfying in itself for liberals. What happens in the real world is entirely beside the point.1
The current obsession with gun control is symptomatic of today’s liberals, who are embarrassingly disconnected from the concerns of the American middle class, which they profess to love so much. The other great “heart” issue on the left is environmentalism, particularly unattractive because while global warming is a real issue, and a global one at that, liberals compulsively pass up remedies that minimize government intrusion, and costs, in order to embrace those that maximize them, because what would be more wonderful than telling the world what to do in the name of good!2 Thus, good liberals oppose both fracking and nuclear energy, because they work, and chase after solar and wind power, which don’t, but hold promise of endless bureaucratic intrusion.3
I’ve previously complained that Hillary Clinton has turned her back on the neoliberalism of both her husband and Barack Obama, which recognized that world free trade benefits, you know, the world and that teachers unions only benefit teachers, to embrace a “Solidary Forever” riff that looks backwards to a time when Americans, though poorer than they are today, felt less threatened. Clinton is responding both to pressure from Bernie Sanders, whose passion scarcely makes up for the fact that he’s wrong on virtually every economic issue, and the nation’s current xenophobic mood. The Democrats, of course, are embracing immigrants rather than demonizing them, and that’s greatly to their credit, but their hostility to free trade, and to free choice in education is deeply retrograde, and deeply harmful.
How did Mr. de Blasio get in my headline? As the first liberal mayor in the country’s most liberal city since, well, since forever, de Blasio has made a mediocre showing at best, striving as much as possible to reverse the educational reforms achieved during the Bloomberg Administration, though, fortunately, public pressure forced him to reverse his plans for virtually eliminating charter schools.4 De Blasio seems to have no real goal except to put an actual majority of the city’s voters on the public payroll. That way we can’t lose! And we’ll tax the super rich to pay our union dues! Of course, what New York really needs is a smaller public pay roll, but to de Blasio that would be not merely heresy but insanity.
Contemporary liberalism does have much to offer America, on “reproductive” issues, immigration, gay marriage, voting rights (now under attack from conservatives who can’t help wishing that black people wouldn’t vote so much), sentencing reform, and a host of other issues. But Democrats are leading with their chin on gun control, and, with their opposition to free trade and their passion for environmental excess, they are heading exactly the wrong way on the economy. With incomes flat for many Americans for the past decade, strong economic growth is what the U.S. needs most. Shutting down free trade, and chasing after “clean” energy, is exactly the wrong way to go.
Afterwords
The continuing decline in oil prices may help to save the Democrats from themselves. Does no one ever notice that periods of low energy prices, and periods of high economic growth, tend to coincide?
- For the record, I don’t like guns and have never owned one, but I think Democrats had it right pre-Sandy Hook. I think gun control legislation is both politically inadvisable and entirely useless in actually preventing gun violence. Furthermore, the worst proposals are grossly unconstitutional and reflect liberals’ virtually unquenchable thirst for big government. ↩︎
- Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jim Mazio is one of the few who take the media via on global warming. You can read a recent article here. Other moderate voices include Reason’s Ron Bailey, author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century, and Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. ↩︎
- Of course, liberals only support such installations as long as they aren’t located near their vacation homes, because what liberals are really concerned about is not the environment but rather their environment—and their property values. ↩︎
- It’s only fair to point out that as of 2015 there was little evidence of a decline in student performance in New York City. There’s been a drastic change in tone in the educational leadership in New York City, but so far it hasn’t had an impact on student performance. ↩︎
