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Stephen B. Young
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Published August 3, 2003
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SYEC03
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The Star Tribune's July 26 editorial "Cost of driving," which portrays a personal automobile culture as publicly subsidized in a betrayal of conservative values, gets its fundamental political nomenclature all wrong.
If we don't name things correctly, our thinking goes off in dysfunctional directions, followed in logical course by inappropriate actions.
Like many self-defining "progressive" Americans the Star Tribune misrepresents what "conservative" means in our culture.
Today's conservatives are really "liberals" and today's liberals are really "authoritarians."
Liberalism is the middle-class social philosophy that combines free-market capitalism with political democracy under the Rule of Law. That 18th-and early-19th-century philosophy of John Locke and Adam Smith is advocated by those who today call themselves conservative.
Franklin Roosevelt appropriated the label "liberal" for his New Deal programs seeking to fix a deeply troubled free market capitalism during the Great Depression.
Those opposed to Roosevelt's use of federal government power in place of markets and local autonomy began to call themselves "conservatives" in that they were trying to conserve true liberalism against the growing power of government regulation.
Now, 70 years later, the names are all mixed up. Conservatives stand for freedom of individual decisionmaking, which implies innovation and change, while liberals demand government imposition of certain "progressive" values regardless of majority views.
Today's conservatives passionately support a culture of personal autonomy including the ownership of automobiles and houses in suburbia (also a vital part of that middle-class lifestyle), because that is what the people want. Tolerantly following the people is to be "liberal" in the true sense of the word.
Correspondingly, our contemporary so-called "liberals" do not want what the people want. Rather, they prefer a culture of regulation where their progressive ideals are imposed on the public by the power of the state. Under the authoritarian premises of today's "liberalism," taxes should be imposed to transfer financial power to selected client constituencies or to discourage distasteful consumption. Law should be used through the courts under the banner of "human rights" when legislatures are not cooperative on the social issues of affirmative action, abortion, the environment, smoking, obesity, gun ownership, etc.
But if the people want to own their own cars and to spend a high percentage of their income on these objects, why can't the Star Tribune leave them in peace?
Stephen B. Young is a lawyer who lives in St. Paul.
Pretty amazing stuff, coming from the Red Star Tribune.
On the other hand, this is an Opinion piece, so it is probably just tokenism.