Ponder George McGovern,
Ironically Accidental Libertarian
Eric Paul Nolte
Here we are on the day of the 2018 elections, with the cultural atmosphere crackling with hate-charged electricity from the far sides of the political spectrum.
I long for more civilized discourse in the political arena.
With the polls still open for many more hours, I've been thinking about a worthy man of honor who was a politician, George McGovern, the Democratic Party's nominee for President against Richard Nixon in the 1972 campaign. He achieved notoriety among those on the right and was widely denounced for his promise to enact a universal basic income for all citizens. But whether we agree with his politics in this respect, now think about how McGovern led his life, especially the intellectual honesty and willingness to engage with his experience that he wore as a well-deserved badge of pride.
I wrote a blog piece on McGovern shortly after he died in 2012. I'm reposting it below:
George McGovern, Ironically Libertarian Hero, R.I.P.
The Associated Press and the CNN wire staff published articles on George McGovern, the day after the Senator’s death. I was disappointed to find not one syllable in recognition of what I believe is the crowning insight of this man's life.
It is well known that McGovern lived by his own lights with principled and passionate devotion to doing the right thing always and everywhere in the world.
It is not well known that long after his political life ended, he briefly entered the business world and was rudely awakened to the actual nature of government intervention. He wrote, in effect, that his life as a politician would have displayed far more wisdom, if he had been able to bring to the floor of Congress something of his experience of wrestling helplessly with the armies of regulators whose interventions contributed so much to bankrupting his little business.
In these mainstream articles on McGovern’s life, there was no mention of the outrage among liberals that McGovern caused by his 1992 letter to the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote an honest and unflattering account of his disastrous experience in trying to run his Connecticut hotel. McGovern’s account of this experience reminded me of the old saw that says a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged (and, of course, in fairness, the flip side of this cranky old chestnut is that a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.) So McGovern was the liberal who got mugged by government regulation.
In McGovern's venture into the hotel business, he sank much of his savings and lost it all, largely due to the strangling web of government regulations--federal, state, and local--layer upon layer of sometimes conflicting regulations, written as arbitrary edicts, guided by the principle that one-size fits all, and imbued with the regulators' righteous attitude that we know better than you how to run your life, and, moreover, you will comply or else you're going to pay ruinous fines and maybe even go to jail. (He stated the matter with less unflattering language, but the essence is the same as my description.)
No matter what anyone may think of the uber-liberal politics McGovern brought to his doomed presidential bid in 1972, the man stuck up for what he believed and remained true to his own evolving thought and experience, no matter how it unfolded, and no matter what anybody else thought of him.
The way I frame my opinion of McGovern's legacy is to praise him for his plain spoken and searing honesty, and for the great courage it takes to maintain such public allegiance to his own sight, especially in the face of attacks, even by his allies. He displayed the high virtues of courage, independence, and integrity.
For me, there are at least three bright lights that McGovern aimed into the darkness of this world.
Here is the Army Air Force First Lieutenant George McGovern, whose heroic actions as a B-24 bomber pilot won him the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and saved his crew and battle-damaged airplane more than once, during his 35 combat missions. His horrifying experience in war led him on the Senate floor famously to snarl his exasperation with "old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight." He was not a doctrinaire pacifist, but rather a principled citizen concerned that we not engage in war for the wrong reasons.
Here he is again, writing a deeply introspective book on the wrenching loss of his youngest child, who froze to death in a snow bank, in an alcoholic fog. Later, thinking more widely, he wrote of the central importance to any civilized society of the personal freedom we need in order to put together lives by our own lights, no matter who is offended or what anybody else thinks. He wrote again about these matters in a 1996 New York Times Op-Ed piece, "Whose Life Is It?" Here he spoke out on the crucial matter of personal choice, responsibility, and against paternalistic intervention from both the political left and right, in their attempts to control the lifestyles of individuals through "the tyranny of the majority or the outspoken minority."
And again, here is George McGovern, speaking out with the voice of hapless personal experience, writing in the Wall Street Journal of the unintended but nevertheless terrible consequences of the good intentions that created those multiple layers of paternalistic legislation that are largely to blame for bankrupting his hotel business.
I do not agree with much of McGovern's politics, but I must say that, in the end, George McGovern was a special kind of American hero. I see a man whose honest introspection and allegiance to his own mind and experience led him eventually to praise freedom and individual rights, and to caution against overweening government intervention, however ironic this may have been, coming from a man whose whole life had been devoted to making overweening statist government ever more powerful and intrusive.
This is not a view one would predict from a man whose life was otherwise devoted to hyper-liberal welfare statist and bossy bureaucratic government central planning of everything. But it is a view one would predict of a man who evinced the awe-inspiring courage, integrity, and strength of character to be so intellectually independent.
There is another crucial aspect of George McGovern's life which I have never heard anybody else mention: I believe that McGovern must have had a most unusual ability to stare down his own confimation bias, that godawful tendency all of us embody, that psychological and intellectual mechanism that turns us into our own intellectual echo chambers and thereby renders us nearly deaf and blind to anything we don't already believe to be true and right.
George McGovern, life-long Big Government Liberal statist, was a man of principle. When he became sort of an accidental tourist in the business neighborhood of the Land of Liberty, he actually changed his mind on this foundational belief on the purpose government. Because he had the integrity to look at his experience of life with unblinking honesty, and to tell the truth he saw, even when these truths were not always flattering to himself or others, he declared in public that he had come to oppose unfettered government intervention into the free market.
How ironic. But what a mensch!
How ironic. But what a mensch!
E P N
2018.1106
· CNN wire staff article on McGovern:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html …
· Here is the link to McGovern’s article, with introductory comments, as it was entered into the 102nd Congressional Record:
· Here is a link to McGovern’s piece in the NY Times:
* Here's a link to a very good piece on this part (and other important aspects) of McGovern's career, by Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason Magazine.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21/george-mcgovern-s-legacy-as-a-libertarian-hero.html
No comments:
Post a Comment