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RADICAL RIGHT
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would all live in peace and amity once the human race had been
liberated from the three scourges of tyranny,
pove~y
and ignorance.
The philosophical illusion, he tells us, which unites liberal Welfare
Economics with Socialist Planning and Communist Dictatorship is the
"plastic view of human nature"-the concept of the human personality
as a wax tablet molded by education and environment. From this basic
assumption, liberals then falsely conclude that citizens will vote ration–
ally once they are liberated from ignorance and poverty, just as nations
will be less likely to make war
if
the great powers are persuaded to
disarm, colonial peoples are given their freedom, and racial inequalities
abolished.
As a generalized ideal, Mr. Burnham concedes that the liberal
vision of a free man living in a free society is acceptable enough, though
even here he rejects the kind of "provocative egalitarianism" which de–
nies the superiority of Western man over "lesser breeds within the law."
He is also willing to admit that as a nonconformist opposition within
a hierarchical society, liberalism may provide a useful stimulant. But
he believes that, consumed as a main beverage, it always becomes a
deadly poison.
Having dealt with liberal theory, he next turns to the practice
of liberalism, and attacks the role of the liberal statesman in politics–
Roosevelt at Yalta, for instance, or Mr. Kennedy faced with the Cuban
crisis. In his view, the liberal is always "morally disarmed" (and there–
fore at a grave disadvantage in handling Communists) by two tenets:
( 1) that every problem must have its solution; and (2) that change is
usually for the good. These tenets render him unable either to defend
the status quo with a good conscience, or
to
apply force in good time.
Surrounded- as Western man always will be-by injustice, poverty
and cruelty, the liberal is hamstrung by his sense of universal guilt;
and his spirit hovers uneasily between the extremes of self-deceiving ap-"
peasement and desperate recourse to force. Convinced that national–
ism is reactionary, he permits his patriotism to be replaced by a syn–
thetic internationalism which inclines him
to
decide any issue against
his own country, and to give his enemies the benefit of the doubt.
The main defect of the liberal in politics, therefore, is his "moral
asymmetry." Unable to judge objectively, he applies a double standard,
acquitting under-privileged nations of the self-same crimes for which
he condemns his own affluent society, and blinding himself
to
the faults
in Communism which he is the first to condemn when he finds them
at home. In Burnham's view, it is this "moral asymmetry" which has
made the liberal a bad security risk in the Cold War. "He cannot strike