There's no doubt that, with the battle over airline security, partisanship is back in a big way. But who would have ever thought a right-wing commentator would stoop to accusing liberals of killing people who haven't died yet through a smallpox outbreak that hasn't yet happened?
That's the gist of the latest Marvin Olasky column, outrageously titled "Cause of death: liberalism" and posted on the right wing clearinghouse website Townhall.com.
Olasky, an academic at the University of Texas, is generally credited as the intellectual father of George W. Bush's "faith-based" thinking, and tends to be a relatively cautious columnist (i.e., he's no Ann Coulter). But consider what he has to say about the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate smallpox:
Conservatives tend to have a tragic sense of history, liberals a faith in man's ability to move us toward utopia. Because liberalism dominates American and European culture, we stopped inoculating against smallpox, and now we are more vulnerable to it than at any time over the past two centuries. Now, what British historian Macaulay called "the most terrible of all the ministers of death" may soon be ministering at a neighborhood near you. WHO and CDC leaders showed knowledge of physical illness but ignorance of spiritual sickness.
For a professor and intellectual, the embarrassing reductionism of this either-or explanation is simply staggering. I, for example, am a liberal who despises utopianism. I'd also like to think I have a pretty good sense of history -- indeed, a better sense of the history of religious wars and persecution than those, like Olasky, who would commingle church and state in this country. And then there's the really obvious question raised by Olasky's spouting off about smallpox risks now: if he really has such a "tragic sense of history," how come his smallpox fretting comes long after we've given up inoculation and are "more vulnerable to it" than ever? Does writing this column expose Olasky as a liberal by his own definition?
I'm joking, but the point should be clear: There are multiple axes along which one can measure ideological divergence besides the left/right spectrum. Virginia Postrel, for example, has argued persuasively that a potentially more significant divide is that between "dynamists" and "stasists," those who embrace progress and future and those who fear it. From all indications, what Olasky is really talking about here -- utopianism vs. non-utopianism -- has much more relationship to the divide identified by Postrel than to any simplistic liberal/conservative split.
The conspiratorial thinking evident in Olasky's column is also astounding. He describes liberalism as some sort of sweeping ideological monolith that dominates the West. And for all a reader can tell from the expansive and absolutely undefinable way in which Olasky uses the word, maybe that's accurate -- but it's hard to see what it has to do with smallpox. Such an analysis tells us more about the paranoid mindset of the person who's written it than about the actual world we live in.
In the end, of course, Olasky wants to introduce a religious analysis -- wants us to understand that we live in a world where "evil men will turn good accomplishments into evil." This fatalistic way of thinking, too, divides the world up into simplistic halves, and inevitably leads Olasky into more meaningless assertions: "In assessing future threats, we should remember to expect bad behavior as conservatives do, and not to follow the path of liberalism by assuming the best." Undressed, all this says is, "be careful."
Some wit once said: "There are two types of people in the world -- those who divide the world into two types of people and those that do not. I prefer the latter." Reading Marvin Olasky's latest column, so do I.
