Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, Ctd.

Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)

The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.

This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.

Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.

Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:

1. Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
2. A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:

A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.

The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on  observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.

Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)

It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)

The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.

Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***

"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)

For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?



(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.

(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)

(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought

As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.

This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."

Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?

The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"

Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.

That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.

One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.

Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.



(*) as cited in The Liberal Founding

In The Atlantic: The Limits of Free Speech

At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own. – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation

Abraham Lincoln fought not only to defend America's physical integrity (by preventing its split into two nations), but America's spiritual integrity—its soul:

Lincoln wrote of the plantation owners' denial of the principle of equality in the Declaration:

The principles of Jefferson ["all men are created equal," etc.] are the definitions and axioms of free society.  And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.  One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies."  And others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior races."

The above was from an article in this blog responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' claim, in The Atlantic, that a wish to degrade, debase, and enslave another people was the hidden essence of the Founding. We cited numerous instances in which Abraham Lincoln documented the actions the Founders took to set in motion the elimination of slavery in the United States.

In "The Limits of Free Speech," The Atlantic continues its disingenuous sabotage of the soul of America. Kent Greenfield writes (March 13):

We are told the First Amendment protects the odious because we cannot trust the government to make choices about content on our behalf. That protections of speech will inevitably be overinclusive. But that this is a cost we must bear. If we start punishing speech, advocates argue, then we will slide down the slippery slope to tyranny.
If that is what the First Amendment means, then we have a problem greater than bigoted frat boys. The problem would be the First Amendment.
No one with a frontal lobe would mistake this drunken anthem for part of an uninhibited and robust debate about race relations. The chant was a spew of hatred, a promise to discriminate, a celebration of privilege, and an assertion of the right to violence–all wrapped up in a catchy ditty. If the First Amendment has become so bloated, so ham-fisted, that it cannot distinguish between such filth and earnest public debate about race, then it is time we rethink what it means.

The sort of cowardly abandonment of liberalism represented by this thread in The Atlantic was skewered last April by a writer possessing the courage of her liberal convictions:

“Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote. “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own,” – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation.

Justice Holmes rejected Greenfield's suggestion that the First Amendment has become "bloated" more than eighty years ago, noting, in United_States_v._Schwimmer, that freedom of speech is "freedom for the thought we hate":

Surely it cannot show lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution that she [Rosika Schwimmer] thinks that it can be improved. I suppose that most intelligent people think that it might be.

Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

"As our Constitution provides," Firmin DeBrabander asserted, "liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be."

Liberal, Left, Ctd

Continuing a discussion from 2013, we note that Andrew Sullivan's Dish recently posted The Left’s Intensifying War On Liberalism, which reiterates the position that left and liberal are not at all alike. One is about groups—oppressor and oppressed—and inevitable class warfare. Liberalism, as suggested by the characteristic phrase “We the People,” is, this blog has argued, about harmony, cooperation and altruism. The left gravitates toward enmity; liberalism, toward friendship.

This groupism is suggested by a passage I once read (it may have been in Peter Shaw, The War against the Intellect: Episodes in the Decline of Discourse). As I recall, it claimed to recount a discussion at an AAUW convention.

It went something like this: A committee got to discussing the issue, Who is the oppressor? They agreed that men certainly were oppressors of women. Gay women added that straight women oppressed those of alternative sexual orientations. Socialist women present drew attention to the complicity of non-socialist women in capitalist exploitation. The minority women in the group said, Let's not forget the racist tendencies of white people. Thus the only person who was not an oppressor would be a gay, socialist, woman of color.

This possibly apocryphal story suggests the absurdities of identity politics. Sullivan's post, working from an article by Jon Chait, addresses “what the new guardians of the identity politics left are up to.” He writes, “the illiberal policing of speech, the demonizing of dissent, and extreme identity politics have now transcended the academy and arrived in social media with a vengeance.”

Sullivan cites Chait:

Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.

As mentioned in earlier posts, the left is not actually concerned with civil liberties. It is concerned with “heightened scrutiny” for protected classes. This de facto privilege for those who escape classification as oppressors clashes with basic concepts of political democracy, such as persuasion, the dignity of the single person, equality, and freedom of speech even when it is offensive.

“It seems to me,” writes Sullivan, “they are being intimidated by an ideology that utterly rejects the notion that free speech – including views with which one strongly disagrees – can actually advance social justice, and by a view of the world that sees liberal society entirely in terms of “power” rather than freedom. And if you look across the non-conservative online media, this orthodoxy is now close to absolute.”

He adds, “If reason has no chance against the homophobic patriarchy, and one side is always going to be far more powerful in numbers than the other, almost anything short of violence is justified in order to correct the imbalance. The “victim”, after all, is always right. ... The only “dialogue” much of the p.c. gay left wants with its sinners is a groveling apology for having a different point of view. There are few things in a free society more illiberal than that.” 

Perhaps the worst thing about the way of the left is that it doesn't work: “For the past twenty years, the open, free-wheeling arguments for marriage equality and military service have persuaded, yes, persuaded, Americans with remarkable speed that reform was right and necessary. Yes: the arguments. If you want to argue that no social progress can come without coercion or suppression of free speech, you have to deal with the empirical fact that old-fashioned liberalism brought gay equality to America far, far faster than identity politics leftism. It was liberalism – not leftism – that gave us this breakthrough.”

The way of the left militates against freedom of thought. Opinions not approved of are likely to cause those who dare to express them to be reclassified: “Oppressor.”

Sullivan notes, “Which reveals how dismal this kind of politics is, how bitter and rancid it so quickly becomes, how infantilizing it is. Any “success” for one minority means merely that the oppression has been shifted temporarily elsewhere. Or it means that we dissenters in a minority have internalized our own oppression (by embracing the patriarchy of civil marriage, or structural hegemonic violence in the military) and are blind to even greater oppression beyond the next curtain of social justice consciousness.”

Such an us-vs-them outlook fits perfectly with the zero sum game perception, even as liberal enlightened self-interest is harmonious with universal justice.

The Liberalism of George Orwell

In a preceding post, The Liberalism of Martin Luther King, I opened with

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

MLK's sayings map rather well to “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism.” Orwell was somewhat different. As a member of the academic left remarked, “rationalism is usually in the list.” Orwell, simply by hewing closely to honesty in observation, integrity in thought, and moral courage in presentation, became the Twentieth Century's most representative exemplar of liberal reason: fidelity to reality in service to the public good.

In “The Prevention of Literature” Orwell wrote, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Orwell represents the aspect of enlightenment liberalism which leverages humanity's working material, objective reality*, through faithful correspondence of language to what the language purports to be about. Christopher Hitchens wrote:

One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. (Emphasis added)

As he observed, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Orwell worked out what this sort of cognitive integrity means (illustrating, along the way, the darker side of collectivist solidarity):

It is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. ... Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Orwell liberalism, which amounts to nothing less than a new way of being, seems deceptively simple. Think about what you see (in front of your nose) until you get past the social tyranny of preconceptions. Have the moral courage to speak plainly about what you saw (because, it being unorthodox, it will be denounced as “anti-social selfishness.” This modern, new human type, is denied the comfort of euphemism. Denied the Noble Lie. Required to forge forward in the face of powerful taboo:

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. ... Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Historian Fritz Stern: “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.” - The Liberal Founding


-*--

(*) Note two of the Founders' emphasis on evidence and reason: “The Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused, arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal period. - John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815”

Liberalism in the 21st Century Ctd: The Left

Yesterday's post, Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century,  argued, in effect, that liberalism is The Peaceable Kingdom. As a line which appeared in rec.arts.books (USENET) years ago asserted, “Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.” No one should be subject to the will of another. Liberalism is about efficacy and optimum outcomes* rather than “power.”**

This is in direct contradiction to powerful  “intellectual” themes from the 19th Century Central European intellectual avant-garde—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—which still are surprisingly influential in the academic humanities today. (“A left intellectual ideology which is backwards in respect to liberal modernity is one of the paradoxes of western civilization.”)

The Founders could not have warned against the illiberal mind-set of the left, because the left was a reaction against the Enlightenment which came after them.

Perhaps the most important difference between liberalism and the ideology of the left is that liberalism rejects us-vs-them thinking. The most famous three words of liberalism are those which begin the Constitution: “We the People.” By contrast, for the left there is always an oppressor. The end of the Communist Manifesto issues an implied call to war for an unnamed entity which is responsible for “your chains.” The language is everywhere. For example, Multiculturalism on Campus: Theory, Models, and Practices, states:

The revolution to the left engages people to become part of a utopian vision that is liberating ... one group subjugates and dominates (i.e., the oppressor from the right) and the other group is collaborative and empowering (i.e., the oppressed from the left).

In What's So Bad about Hate? (NYT) blogger Andrew Sullivan notes some of the consequences of this polar thinking:

The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

At its extreme, us-vs-them thinking has an anti-intellectual effect. Ideas are subject to blanket rejection on ad hominem grounds if articulated by the “other.” The tendency is suggested by Stephen Carter: “There is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that all the bad guys are on the other side.”

Eventually it becomes an attempt to limit the range of thought:

Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. - Kurt Andersen

Once again, for liberalism, language is critically important.



(*) It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. - Steven Den Beste, denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Inelegance.shtml (Emphasis added)

(**) “Live dangerously!” Nietzsche taught: “Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners.” Nothing could be further from the liberal spirit.

Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century

The previous post argued the centrality of liberalism in American politics and culture. It cited the work of German-American historian Fritz Stern, one of the few intellectual thinkers who discusses liberalism as liberalism. Such great examinations of liberal political democracy as The Open Society and Its Enemies, I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the works of George Orwell, are more typical, in that they are essentially about liberal modernity, but seldom, if ever, reference liberalism directly.

The Founders, despite the fact that “the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment,” likewise did not commonly speak of liberalism as the underlying spirit of their work. But examination of their work reveals abstract truths, applicable to all men and all times*, which they implied but did not articulate.

For example, the Founders relegated rulership to the dustbin of history. The title they conferred on the leader of the new nation they created, “president,” was no stronger at the time than “facilitator” is in ours. To this day no one is legitimately called “ruler” in our political hierarchy.

To be specific, what this implies is that liberalism holds that rulership is illegitimate. Rulership is incompatible with liberty. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” In liberal societies, each member of the people is a citizen, not a subject. The difference is that the citizen is not under “direction from another.”

A corollary is that liberalism holds that no one should be subject to the will of another. If we achieve a truly liberal outlook, we do not even want to take advantage of anyone else, to “rule” or dominate or “get over on” or coerce. We should be past such behavior by the time we get out of high school.

This is a high standard. It means that we should not speak of election results as reflecting “the will of the people.” (Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”) Rather, elections reflect the people's choice, arrived at by deliberation in which personal desire is mediated by reflection on the public good.

But isn't democracy that situation where the people rule? No. They govern. The Declaration does not say, “consent of the ruled,” it says “consent of the governed.”

Have you ever heard someone argue, “that's just semantics”? For liberalism, language is critically important. (Orwell, again, “the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”) For instance, one can argue that the French Revolution segued into the Terror because of a flawed vision of liberalism. The agents of the revolution misunderstood progress as a movement from the will of the King to Rousseau's “general will,” a version of “the will of the people.” (It is also significant that of the formula “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” only the first two terms made it into the Declaration. Fraternity, or brotherhood, involves obligations “antecedent to choice,” as a passage cited by Randall Kennedy notes. The abrogation of moral choice facilitated the emergence of the Terror's murderous violence. We are constituted by the terms we use, and liberalism asks us to choose carefully. Or, as a previous post implied, Fraternity points to group identity and its vested interests.)
 (*) Lincoln, of course.

The Liberal Founding - Repost

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012. 

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” - (Vide infra)

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This, and the following, from Five Germanys I Have Known

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

A Committed Writer

"The citizen is lost in the labyrinth constructed by his country, ... It was not enough. It will not be enough. Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house." (As Doris Lessing wrote [NYT], "There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase.") 

Concerning a national magazine's resort to such revolutionary rhetoric, conservative Rod Dreher wrote:

Then TNC goes on to draw some sort of black nationalist lesson from his summer at French camp, culminating in this line: “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!

I snark, but honestly, the idea that the enormous privilege of spending a summer studying a foreign language at a verdant Vermont college should conclude with a resolution to become even more of a militant race man is depressing. Exactly whose house will TNC be burning down as a result of the tools he acquired this summer at Middlebury? François Hollande’s? I don’t get it.

Earlier, a fellow contributor to The Atlantic, struggling to decode TNC's rhetoric, thought his crusade was an appeal to to the good will of his fellow American citizens:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it. (Emphasis added.)

Yet TNC had already delivered a sweeping indictment of the very people to whom he was appealing: 

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

These articles in The Atlantic are being given a lot of slack because they play the race card. Part of our bargain with ourselves as citizens of a society which supports equality and tolerance is to subject criticism of certain subjects to heightened scrutiny. But doing so can impede reasonable debate, as in the related case:

American Jewish liberals have been intimidated or censored themselves into silence, which has only made matters worse. The reason is the need to somehow credentialize yourself as “pro-Israel”, and any criticism is immediately interpreted as being “anti-Israel”. That’s essentially a loyalty test that impedes reasonable debate – and is designed to.

I don't know if an article series which includes phrases like “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house” and “A crime that implicates the entire American people” is Communist jargon, but it crosses a line which responsible journalism should not cross (Ref. The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff).

As we saw above, a veteran journalist seemed to find it necessary to put words in TNC's mouth in order to put a positive slant on his rhetoric. Previous articles on this weblog have critiqued The Atlantic's series' "mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence." Lincoln, speaking of the advocates of slavery themselves, noted a similar rhetoric which lowers the level of public discourse:

Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union.

The sophism of The Atlantic's articles, correspondingly, is their implied proposition that everyone in America now—right now—is culpably burdened by antebellum slavery: “A crime that implicates the entire American people.” Blamed not only for their ancestors, but their descendants: “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

“To think clearly,” said Orwell, “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

“The first point: language.” Lessing explained:

It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer? 

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line. (Emphasis added)

“But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of.” Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.

The method is dishonesty and the purpose is deception.