Secular Right

Rather than a coldly elucidated set of principles in a Benthamite fashion modern social liberalism is fundamentally a movement of justice rooted in feeling. That everyone get a fair-go, that everyone can engage in their own personal project of self-actualization. But at some point this universal principle is going to hit diminishing marginal returns. In the 19th and early 20th century progressives argued for women’s suffrage. About half of the population. In the 1960s in the USA they argued for civil rights for racial minorities, and blacks in particular. On the order of 10 percent of the population of the day in the United States. Over the past generation they have argued for civil rights for homosexuals who identify as gay or lesbian. Being generous, this is probably on the order of 5 percent of the population (I am willing to accept the proposition that the self-identified ~2 percent value may be an underestimate).

Last year the center Left publication The New Republic published a story, Transitions, which had the cover lead “America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle.” As a matter of numbers this is farcical on the face of it. Transgender people do face a great deal of discrimination and are the objects of hate, to the point of violence. But the reality is that they are far less than 1 percent of the population. As a matter of numbers it seems that modern social liberalism is running out of victims to uplift if it has to target such a small segment of the population.

More to the point, “transgender rights” are qualitatively different from previous civil rights issues. This is true for all the enumerated groups above. Women’s rights are not the same as racial minority rights, which are not the same as gay rights. Right or wrong modern social liberalism has secured the rights of gays by pushing for a strong hereditarian/biological position on the origin and expression of homosexuality. To some extent transgender individuals turn this argument on its head, arguably severing the connection between biology and sexual identity, which was such an important part of the ultimate victory of gay rights.

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It is depressing to see Fox News so desperately flogging the Benghazi attack in the last moments of the election.  Is that really the best that Romney and the Republicans have at this point?  It is a sideshow to the real problems facing the country, and the idea that the State Department under Obama is less concerned than heretofore about the safety of its personnel, or that our intelligence agencies are systemically less focused on preventing terror attacks, is fanciful.  This should have been a campaign fanatically focused on the unsustainable growth in entitlement obligations, government spending, and debt, all of which are drags on the economy, and yet, astoundingly, even after the promising selection of one of the most eloquent analysts of the federal budget as VP nominee, the Romney campaign avoided any serious discussion of entitlement reform.  Perhaps it is naïve to expect otherwise in a democracy, but I think that there is real value in an electoral  mandate.  If Romney didn’t have the guts to speak forcefully and honestly about the hard budget choices that will need to be made, and assuming that that reluctance stemmed from his pollsters accurately reading the national will, we’re in big trouble. 

Hard to tell if the seeming conviction of virtually the entire Republican punditocracy in a Romney victory is sincere or mere cynical strategy to try to convince the undecideds to vote for a winner.   If the pundits really do believe that Romney will win (and I know at least one who seems utterly confident that he will), they seem to be following the logic of so many matters of faith: It would be nice if it were so, therefore it must be so.