Seven Habits of Truly Liberal People
It is this conviction that explains the connection between liberalism and an optimistic commitment to politics. When Wolfe discusses the taste for governance in the penultimate chapter, he delineates liberalism's attitude by contrasting it once more with the opinions of its enemies, who believe that politics is, at best, a necessary chore. Anti-liberals think that we should have as little government as we can get away with because the real achievements of humanity come from the self-organized activity of the economy and of private life. This conviction is to be found both to liberalism's left—Marx, after all, hoped the state would wither away—and to its right, among those modern conservatives who believe, as Ronald Reagan put it, that government is the problem. For liberals, the problem is bad government, and there is a vast range of government that, when done well, is as creative and important as anything human beings do.
The last of Wolfe's most original trio of temperaments—the taste for realism—can also be traced back to Kant. We have just lived through an anti-liberal administration hostile to science, one that fantasized we could load the atmosphere with carbon while keeping the Earth's ecology in balance and asserted, against all the evidence, that urging sexual abstinence would stop the spread of AIDS. Wolfe argues that it is liberals, not conservatives, who dare to know.
