… is from page 165 of Joseph Epstein’s September 2017 essay “What’s the Story?,” as this essay is reprinted in the 2020 collection, titled Gallimaufry, of some of Epstein’s essays and reviews [bracketed remarks and link added]:
The liberal [that is, the progressive] story is an old one, in many ways a false one, but it works for them, and, as he [Shelby Steele] points out, they are adamantly sticking to it. Their story – nowadays the approved word is “narrative” – is one of impressive simplicity: They hate social injustice in any form, despise capitalism for its selfishness and blame it for the despoiling of the environment and the planet generally, and cannot find an ethnic or sexual minority they don’t wish to help. Through this program, they have, or a least they feel they have, cornered the market on virtue. To put the liberal [that is, the progressive] story in two words: They care. This has left conservatives in the unattractive position of not caring.
DBx: Yes.
Progressives – who, in fact, are highly illiberal – mistake their (sometimes lovely) intentions and wishes for knowledge and wisdom. They then mistake the juvenile schemes they concoct to achieve their goals as “scientific,” while they simultaneously accuse those of us who counsel reliance on the emergent market order as being “unscientific” – as being motivated by “faith” in the market. The intellectual – the genuinely scientific – justification for this classical-liberal “faith,” I’ll note, is explained in countless articles and books.
And I repeat for the umpteenth time: While we market liberals have a coherent and empirically sound theory of how economic decision-makers get the knowledge they need in order to act in ways that promote the general welfare, progressives – and NatCons – have no such theory. In fact, they hardly bother even to consider the question. Instead, they take it on faith that government officials will know enough to achieve the goals set by progressives.
