The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

by Jonah Goldberg

Whining about how high unemployment is “unjust” is dangerously misleading nonsense. Justice creates a claim on others. So who is being unjust? The employers who cannot afford more workers? The consumers who refuse to create enough demand to justify more workers? The government for not taxing innocent parties to pay for labor that isn’t needed and that they did not vote for? Social justice assumes rights—social rights, economic rights, etc.—that cannot be enforced.

Robert Frost defined a liberal as someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. In their desperation not to take their own side, today’s anti-imperialists take at face value the flawed arguments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists just so they can condemn their own country for its imperialism. And, in their condescension, liberal commentators assume the West was always in the position of the aggressor, the hegemon, the empire builder, and that we have nothing to offer to the rest of the world but apologies.