Hold it there slugger...

In this column for the Washington Post, veteran "conservative" columnist George Will, perhaps feeling a need to reestablish conservative streed cred after assailing both Intelligent Design and the Republican congress, savagely goes after opponents of ANWR oil drilling.

Those who oppose ANWR drilling, Will claims, are using the specific issue only as an excuse to push their wider political agenda. And what is that wider agenda? It's "collectivism," Will says. And collectivism he describes thus:

The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.

Hmm...enlarging government supervision of individuals' lives is the primary goal of American liberalism? Did I read that right? Apparently I did, because Mr. Will goes on to declare:

People [under collectivism] are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources. Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy.

So, if I'm reading this right (and if I'm not, it must be way past my bedtime), George Will believes that environmentalists' main goal is to cause artificial energy shortages in order to assert the utter social supremacy of the government. In other words, he thinks environmentalism is just a front for Stalinism.

I blink my eyes in stupefied wonder. Does George Will actually believe that American liberalism = Stalinism? That the defining quest of American liberalism is to create some sort of totalitarian state? And that environmentalism is a way to produce artificial shortages in order to do this?

I'm sorry to say this, but that's out of the realm of reasonable political discourse and into the realm of conspiracy theory. I doubt there are many (if any) columnists at The National Review, for example, who would agree with the idea that liberals really want Stalinism. And, while many people (including me!) can believe that environmentalists sometimes overblow unimportant issues simply to demonstrate the primacy of environmental over business interests, how many people would seriously suspect that the Sierra Club or Greenpeace wants to derail modern society and establish totalitarianism?

Yes, I believe American liberals must generally work to disabuse Americans of the notion that liberalism is equivalent to wanting "bigger government" (after all, look who passed the Patriot Act). But against such looniness as this George Will column, there's really nothing anyone can say in reasonable response. Unbelievable. Hope you got your street cred back, George, but you won't need it in the little rubber room where you're headed...


BONUS READING GUIDE:
Check out this lengthy article on new anti-prostitution laws. Especially note where it says that the campaign is the result of "an unlikely coalition of evangelicals, feminists, liberal activists and conservative human rights advocates". I remember saying that I thought this is one of the issues conservatives and liberals can cooperate on...