Socialism’s first triumph was a public fraud. Socialists managed to pull off the grandest identity theft of modern times: Taking up, for themselves, the mantle of liberalism by transforming their doctrine into mere dirigisme.

Herbert Spencer was on the spot, early in this trend, when he called the new liberals of his day “Tories of a new type.” Dirigisme is an old policy, rooted in the limited-access orders of ancient times, the kind of order that Tories made a point to defend. In ancient times, tyrants and emperors rarely expressed more hesitancy at the thought of regulating a market than at executing a political competitor. The command-and-control model of “overseeing” markets was de rigeur when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, excoriating the dirigistic doctrine of his day, mercantilism. It was liberalism that beat back the power of the state, and sought to limit the scope of government action. The principle of the limit was liberty.

They were, alas, only partly successful, and could not withstand the new backlash.

As Spencer noted with increasing alarm, those who identified themselves with liberalism increasingly sided with the aims and methods of the socialists. They abandoned their critique of government intervention into the workings of markets for a plethora of dirigistic controls. The age of constitutional limitations had ended; the age of over-legislation had begun.

What Spencer called “New Tories,” in England, were called “Progressives” in America. And while Spencer and other old-fashioned liberals believed that progress was best maintained by a rather hands-off attitude from the State, these people pooh-poohed such attitudes as “old-fashioned.” They believed themselves smart enough to directly control the vast workings of the market. And, as Spencer indicated, they made much of the military mindset. It was one of these so-called Progressives who coined the phrase “the moral equivalent of war.” They saw the workings of military organization as the ideal to follow. And it is no wonder that a stark and harrowing dirigisme bordering on socialism was embarked upon, in America, first in World War I. When the Great Depression hit, and old orders weakened, Roosevelt’s Brain Trust sought to revive World War I war socialism with the New Deal.

The funny thing about modern-day “progressives” is how much they hate the word “progress.” Anything that smacks of success in the private sector they yearn to trounce on at the faintest whiff. The hatred of profit is one of the most obvious of these traits.

Whereas most Americans would probably side with Spencer in seeing the widespread growth of personal resources that come from a diverse market economy as a great indicator of progress, they do not. They hate this with so much energy that it sometimes boggles my mind.

“Progressives” have abandoned so much of the cultural legacy of classical liberalism that I often wonder how they can bear even to shout their slogans in public. They think of themselves as liberals fighting evil conservatives . . . and yet they do not retain any consistent support for liberty.

But these are generalizations. As I was recently remonstrated on Facebook, the actions of one misguided, disgusting liberal should not (and must not be allowed to) malign the whole group.

And yet individual experience with “liberals” and “progressives” have done little to dispel my judgments.

A few months ago I was debating a friend on the nature of free speech in relationship to lobbying. The Supreme Court had just decided that regulating political speech by corporations was an abridgment of the First Amendment. He and a friend of his were much exercised by the “stupidity” and “dangerousness” of this ruling. They trotted out the old canard that “corporations are not individuals, and thus cannot have rights.” His friend blathered on about how evil and narrowly profit-seeking corporations are. And I engaged in a short debate.

But I saw that we were at an impasse. So I set them a trap. I said that I detected a whiff of ideology about their position, and that it was probably not profitable to debate the issue. This was incendiary, of course. But I trotted this out for a reason. It was a test. And my friend failed.

He said that if anyone was ideological, it was me. He, on the other hand, was only advocating a practical solution to a big problem.

This repeated an old canard I have encountered hundreds of times with “progressives” and “liberals,” and which is now my touchstone test. If the person repeats it, he’s not worth arguing with, because he’s placed himself beyond reason.

The simple truth of the matter, of course, is that I am ideological on this issue (and many others) and so are my opponents. Pretending to put aside “ideology” to “solve” a political problem is just that: a pretense. And it is the characteristic conceit of the progressive.

I met a neighbor recently, and we spent hours talking. Early in the conversation he made a few forays into maligning libertarians. So I kindly stopped him and introduced myself. “I am a libertarian.” (Close enough, right?)

And there began a fascinating conversation.

One of the most amazing things about this conversation was how every one of my basic and dark ideas about “the left” in general and socialism, progressivism, and dirigisme in particular, were verified by his discourse. He mocked Constitutional principles as old superstitions. He said that he based his political ideas on what he’s learned of tribes. He thought humanity was “a cancer on the planet,” and insisted that no democracy can survive such large numbers of people on the planet (and our continent, to be particular) as were now growing. He repeatedly expressed a genuine and deep revulsion to extravagant wealth gained from any means. (Indeed, this seemed his bedrock position regarding standards of society: Extreme wealth disparity must not be tolerated. We must start from there.) But most of all was his amazing partisanship:

1. Liberals really want to do good in society; conservatives are nasty liars. I really believe that FDR and his New Deal were honestly set out to do good by America . . . and that’s in short supply, today. It’s all about money now.
   

I asked him if he really thought that conservatives were just liars. Doesn’t his side lie, too? He admitted as much in modern politics, since so much of it had been corrupted by conservatism. But his ideas were “reality-based” while those of “the right” were based on bigotry.

But, I asked, don’t you think that we all have some purchase on a part of reality, mixed with error about that reality, plus different values on top of all that?

No, he replied. Conservatives are just bigots. Ideologues. My side has all the facts. We’re both honest and practical

I am not making this up. This was an intelligent man. I have reconstructed our discourse, yes, but only the specifics of some of my wordings differ from what he said. He really did insist that he wasn’t an ideologue, and that his political enemies were evil bigots who lied about reality.

Ah, the axiological conjugation! I am a philosopher, you are an ideologue, he is a bigot.

Ha!

The naivety, here, is astounding. The lack of self-reflection, amazing. The sheer bigotry, also a thing to be marveled at.

The truth must be, of course, that we all emphasize some elements of the real world at the expense of others. Some of what we regard as factual is; the rest is error. All are prone to error, and all selectively retain those data as important that which helps make our basic positions appear more rational.

The question becomes, not who is selective in dealing with facts, but whose selection is nearest the truth. Then it is: Can we take the truth in this position, and that position, and those positions around the bend, and combine the truths while ridding ourselves of the errors?

Not as easy as we might think. In part because of our values and our loyalties.

And as long as we think that our enemies are wholly beyond reason, are just so many bigots, we will make no headway.

Further, we must all acknowledge the different values that we impute to the various facts we choose. My interlocutor believes that gross inequality is not merely destabilizing (and it might be, at that), he believes it indecent. Immoral. Not to be tolerated. I consider this attitude of his to be a mere instance of envy. A moral failing.

We have to accept that there do exist differing moral perspectives, and we must understand that these are not merely constable ideas on the grounds of “reality,” but on grounds of preference. And dealing with preferences is a rather different matter than dealing with beliefs about the attributes of the world we share.

I grew up taking a sharp dislike to conservatism, largely because conservatives tended to exhibit so little tolerance for differences. They seemed so bigoted, to me.

But as I’ve grown older, their arch-enemies — the progressives, the liberals, the “socialistic” advocates of hyper-dirigisme — now strike me as just as bigoted, if not more so.

And the standard, old-fashioned opposition to socialism, “on practical grounds,” finds its mirror-image bigotry in the progressive conceit, the implausible idea that it is the progressives who are “practical” and it is their enemies who are “ideological.”

We are all ideological, of course. We must begin from there. Then we must challenge each others’ “facts” and each others’ values.

So long as we honestly debate, we have some hope for settling a few issues peacefully. But if we each dismiss the other as bigoted liars, then we’ll get nowhere.

The trouble is, I know that in both conservative and progressive camps, there are plenty of bigots, unthinking folks who will not let their ideas open up for true debate.

In a sense, both sides are right . . . about each other. And that’s the sorriest thing one can say about ideological debate in America today. Most partisan Americans, today, can say, honestly, “We are all bigots now.”