Attack by subversion

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views September 17, 2001]

In America the liberal strategy was not to seize the means of production, but to blame capitalism for everything liberals chose to call a "failure," chiefly the unequal distribution of wealth. Liberals couldn't destroy the institution of property, but they learned to sap it--through taxation, redistribution, regulation, "civil-rights" legislation, and other devices.

Having vitiated its success, they accused it of failing. They deliberately confused relative poverty--which is inevitable--with utter destitution, which, in America, had ceased to exist. The most ingenious rhetorical strategy was that of the socialist Michael Harrington, who invented the idea of "invisible" poverty. Unable to impose wholesale socialism, liberalism settled for a retail version, at every step moving toward the socialist paradigm without acknowledging its ultimate goal. At every step liberals pushed for increasing the power of the state over property and commerce. . . .

As the Russian dissident Igor Shafarevich noted, socialism, under the guise of promoting equality, has always attacked the triad of property, family, and church. Property, because it affords economic independence from the state; family, because it provides a loyalty prior to the state; and church, because it represents a higher authority than the state. Communism, when it took power, attacked these institutions frontally. American liberalism attacks them by subversion, while pretending to accept and respect them. But the driving impulse is the same.

-- Joseph Sobran, excerpt from "The Cultural War," Sobran's newsletter, September 2001. For the most candid insights on culture, government and society, subscribe to Sobran's.

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