Cognitive dissonance: It's the same old liberal song

A few years back, I made a few random observations about the misleading use of the term "progressive" by those of the liberal persuasion.

Is it a sign of "progress" to embrace behaviors, practices, and worldviews which the civilized world has rejected for some two millennia? In ancient times, the Christians were the true "progressives." They looked upon a world awash in decadence and licentiousness and boldly declared there was a better way than the way of temple prostitution and drunken debauchery. A world which embraced such godless misbehavior was a world that was passing away. A new world was coming into being in which the holiness of God would be the order of the day and those who would be a part of it were called to turn away from the temporal pleasures of the flesh and begin living here and now as though this world had passed away and the new world had already begun.

Whenever present-day liberals embrace the term "progressive," they are simply following an age old formula for deceiving weak-minded people into thinking they are the ones with a forward-looking vision. But there is nothing "progressive" about celebrating sin and pretending there is no God or, if there is, he's somehow open to diverse opinions about right and wrong. What was true in ancient times is no less true today. The way of progress is the way of Christ and the cross, for there is no other way to the blessing of eternal life.

It is both amusing and disgusting (not to mention, downright despicable) to see and hear the predictable reaction of left-wing pundits and political hacks to the tragic events in Arizona this past weekend. It is a reminder of another sort of just how backward the so-called "progressives" are. The general template being followed is nearly a half century old. In his excellent book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, James Piereson recounts the almost instantaneous effort by liberal elites to recast the slain president as a martyr for liberal causes instead of a casualty of the Cold War.

The reaction in liberal circles to Kennedy's assassination brings to mind the well-known theory of "cognitive dissonance" that was developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger and his colleagues at Stanford University. The theory was devised to account for the ways in which people reconcile deeply held beliefs with evidence that clearly contradicts those beliefs. "Cognitive dissonance" is simply an academic way of describing an intense conflict among beliefs that generates psychological tension. In order to eliminate the tension, or the dissonance, people search for ways of making their beliefs consistent, either by denying or ignoring key facts or by reinterpreting facts in such a way as to make them consistent with deeply held convictions. Festinger cited numerous examples of such stratagems, though he found the most powerful illustrations in millenarian religious movements whose leaders have identified a particular date for the destruction of the world or the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Such prophecies, some inspired by end-of-days themes in the book of Revelation, are not all that uncommon in the history of religious movements. The intriguing question is: What is the reaction of cult followers to the inevitable failure of those prophecies in which they have placed such faith and confidence? Believers must in this circumstance find some way to reconcile their religious beliefs with the reality of a world that continues on as before. Festinger observed that they are likely to do so in various ways, some acting more or less rationally by renouncing the cults, others denying or ignoring the plain evidence before them, and still others reinterpreting the facts such that they are made compatible with the prophecies. In the latter case, followers will often recast the prophecy to some future date or suggest that God or some other force has intervened to save the world or to postpone its destruction. It seems ever to be true that people are prepared to go to great lengths to preserve deeply held convictions despite their being contradicted by the facts.

The liberal leaders cited above--Chief Justice Warren, James Reston, Senator Mansfield, Lyndon Johnson--dismissed as irrelevant the fact that President Kennedy was shot by a communist. They, like many Americans, reinterpreted the event so that it was made consistent with liberal assumptions, which held that threats to the nation were most likely to come from the irrational conduct of the radical right. Thus President Kennedy was said to be a victim of intolerance and bigotry which had infected the bloodstream of the nation (as the chief justice had put it). In many quarters, it was said that President Kennedy was a victim of the nation itself, with its violent culture where people are allowed to buy and carry firearms as if they were toys. This perverse conviction filtered into the popular culture in the 1960's, so much so that it was expressed in songs by famous rock-and-roll groups (the analog in the 1960s to Walt Whitman in Lincoln's time). "Sympathy for the Devil," a popular song written in 1968 by the Rolling Stones following the assassination of Robert Kennedy, contains the verse, "I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?' When after all, it was you and me." Another popular song from the same year, titled "Abraham, Martin, and John," was crafted to link the three men (Lincoln, King, and Kennedy) together as martyrs to the cause of civil rights.

The public did not hear in that dark time the explanation that President Kennedy had been killed for his advocacy of liberty in the face of communist tyranny in Cuba and elsewhere, or that he was a casualty of "the long twilight struggle" to defend and promote freedom in the world. Few linked his death with the bold themes articulated in his Inaugural Address that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty." No one linked the fallen president to others who had died in the battle against communist tyranny. Few suggested that there may have been a connection between the assassination and the tense confrontation the year before over nuclear missiles in Cuba. Such accounts of the assassination would have been consistent with the facts and entirely compatible with Kennedy's forceful and idealistic leadership. It was true, as will be acknowledged later, that pertinent information that would shed light on the assassination was not known either to the public or to some (not all) leaders at the time. Still, enough information was available in 1963 and 1964 to suggest that Kennedy's assassination was more a consequence of the Cold War than of the civil rights crusade. Such an account might have been advanced in a responsible way without inciting calls for war against the Soviet Union or Cuba. (pp. 103-105)

The parallels between the reaction of the liberal leadership then and their more radical successors now (Piereson's book is a chronicle of mainstream liberalism's collapse into radicalism following the Kennedy assassination) are too numerous to mention here. For those who fancy themselves "progressives," it seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same.