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.
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 of 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!
E P N
·
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
