"Liberal and Smart" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Liberal and Smart

There is a good reason why liberals are the new commies, the scapegoat for all that ails us. Most healthy liberal notions were born of a balance of heart and head, but after a massive, compressed victory on the major issues of our time, liberalism has lost its luster.

The liberals staged a series of revolutions in the Sixties, liberating women and non-whites from millennia of oppression. They stood up to the war-mongers. They launched the environmental and consumer movements.

But they went overboard, and in their zeal, squandered public support and jeopardized much of what they had accomplished. Their problem was that they lacked the self-discipline and awareness to mitigate progress with the natural intransigence of the less conscious. They outran the general populace who might have been more likely to follow if the movements for change had been more meticulously sold to them. Instead, they were ignored, and even scorned, and the resentment built up to the unhealthy levels we have today.

Here are a couple of examples of liberal excess. First, to address our guilt and sense of obligation regarding how atrociously our forebears treated the Indians, we have set them up with casinos, which scalp the ignorant poor, feeding addictions, driving thousands of people into poverty, ruining lives and increasing crime. Hardly a brilliant solution, but you won’t hear a mea culpa from the liberals.

Second, consider the National Endowment of the Arts. American taxpayers will spend $130 million this year supporting the arts, a much smaller percentage of our public funds than are allocated by most other developed countries. In part that number is low because of some of the regrettably-celebrated recipients of NEA grants in the past who include among them people who urinated on stage and called it art.

Call me a prude or say my tastes are narrow but that ain’t nearly art. Free expression in and of itself is not art, and the public has a right to say no to spending their hard-earned on such nonsense. The fact that liberals tried to defend such funding tarred the very idea of public funding of the arts. Instead of arguing the point, they should have sighed and said, let’s enhance the arts in this country by spending the money on crayons and musical instruments and books and other implements of creativity and putting such in front of the nation’s children to explore beyond the horizons of their unique creativity.

That would have been both liberal and smart.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.