Democide: Death by Liberalism

We’ve always admitted that many liberal ideas sound good, in a religious pie-in-the-sky utopian sort of way. The problem is that, in almost every case, they simply don’t work in the real world, and some are actually dangerous or, in some cases, even deadly.

A couple of week ago, the American Thinker featured an article that highlighted a new book by JR Dunn entitled Death by Liberalism - The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies. In the book, Mr Dunn highlights several liberal ideas going back to our country’s founding and describes their deadly impact on people and society. Relying on well-established facts, Mr Dunn details the liberal’s approach to fuel-efficient cars, crime, abortion, environmentalism, banning of DDT, and others, then traces their disastrous and deadly results.

This is not the first publication that has attempted to itemize some of these tragedies. Among others, John Hawkins wrote in a 2007 Townhall article entitled Liberal emotion vs. Conservative logic:

Why don't they learn anything from failed liberal policies? Because there is nothing underpinning them other than feelings and so even when they don't work, their good intentions are treated, by other liberals at least, as more important than the results of their actions.

Just to name one example of many, look at Vietnam. South Vietnam was policing its own country and holding off aggression from the North with the help of the United States. But, people get hurt in wars, so wars are bad. As a result of thinking that went no deeper than that, liberals in Congress cut off the aid and air support we promised the South Vietnamese. The result?

The conquest of South Vietnam, a holocaust in Cambodia, millions dead and in prison camps, another million boat people, a crisis of confidence in America, and our country's reputation around the world was left in tatters, which led to a revolution in Nicaragua, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a lack of faith in the U.S. military which wasn't truly restored until Operation Desert Storm.

So, we're talking about one of the most shameful and damaging mistakes in American history. Yet, the left is pushing to do the same thing in Iraq, despite the fact that catastrophic consequences would surely also follow a U.S. retreat in that country.

But, this isn't just about foreign policy. Look at Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty," which did nothing to reduce the poverty rate despite the trillions that were spent; however, it did help drive the illegitimacy rate among black Americans from 22 percent in 1960 to 70% in 2005.

You could go on and on with these sort of examples -- rent control, which causes housing shortages, the minimum wage, which costs poor people jobs, the liberal insistence on putting “making nice at the U.N.” above looking out for American interests. That's what happens when you make decisions based on emotion and wanting people to like you, rather than using logic and doing the right thing.

This coming Wednesday will mark the eighth anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, when the shuttle broke apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard. To this day, a primary cause has been virtually ignored by the media. As reported in Front Page Magazine (August 2003):

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, said in July that it had found the "smoking gun" that caused the space shuttle Columbia to break apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1: a piece of foam that had peeled off the external fuel tank and struck the shuttle's wing 1 minute and 22 seconds after liftoff.

But many experts looking at the tragedy that killed seven astronauts say there is a deeper cause. They say that the metaphorical smoking gun should be painted green.

Because of demands that the agency help to front for environmentalism, and under pressure from the Clinton-Gore administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) led by Carol Browner, NASA had stopped using Freon, a fluorocarbon that greens claim damages the ozone layer, in its thermal-insulating foam. NASA found in 1997 after the first launch with the politically correct substitute that the Freon-free foam had destroyed nearly 11 times as many of the shuttle's ceramic tiles as had the foam containing Freon. The politicized foam was less sticky and more brittle under extreme temperatures. But apparently little or nothing was done to resist the environmentalist politicians.

"It was at least a contributing factor, if not a major factor," says Hannes Hacker, an aerospace engineer and former flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston who is affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. Hacker tells Insight: "The risk of a piece of debris falling off and causing significant damage to the space shuttle's thermal-protection system was [more than] 10 times greater with the new material than with the old material."

The ditch alongside the road throughout history is littered with failed liberal ideas. While many liberals subscribe to the eugenics movement, many others are actually well-meaning with their ideas. Unfortunately, very few actually gauge the results of their ideas. One of their favorite themes is “We must look to the future, not to the past”, and herein is one of their greatest failures. We must look to the future, but we must not forget the lessons of the past. Otherwise, we continue to repeat the same unsuccessful and often deadly ideas.