Letters to the Editor

A perfect world? Hardly.

I was surprised to learn from Jay Augsburger ["Then Levin said, `Let there be cake,'" YH 10/27/00] that we inhabit a "close to perfect world." I can but hope that news of the world's near-perfection quickly reaches the inhabitants of Bosnia, China, Columbia, India, Israel, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and all of those other lovely paradises of prosperity and peace which I cannot call to mind.

There is much in Augsburger's article that merits assent. Yale certainly isn't meant to be a democracy, though why Augsburger is so averse to our deference toward the Administration's being balanced by even limited student input is not clear to me. And our current discontents are much less serious than those of three or four decades ago—a point that not even my craziest activist friends have disputed. His assertions are thus correct, if unoriginal. But the overall tone of his article is so flip, so dismissive about those "unfortunate situations" involving exploitation and brutalization of people around the world who are so unfortunate as to not share in our "near perfection," that any intelligent critique of activist hysteria is drowned out.

As for any positive message, Augsburger seems to have outdone even Marie Antoinette's callous response to the starving populace of Paris: rather than saying "Let them eat cake," his message boils down to "Let me eat my own cake, and leave me alone." A noble sentiment, to be sure. But he— and we—might at least have the decency to not complacently assure the beggars on our doorsteps that they are living in the best of all possible worlds.

On the other hand, I could be missing the point entirely. As a self-conscious parody of the sunny self-congratulation that we, glutted in the midst of our prosperity and others' misery, are prone to, Augsburger's article may well be a satirical masterpiece. In which case, my apologies for mistaking Voltaire for Dr. Pangloss.

—Joshua Cherniss, SY '02

George W. Bush was this election's true liberal candidate

I should not be surprised at such editorials as Cassandra Porsch's ["Nader: almost as destructive to liberalism as Bush" YH 11/03/00] in Yale's finest publications. However, the persistent confusion of the term "liberal" with "leftist" on this campus forces me to clarify the point.

Porsch describes Vice President Gore as the defender of liberalism in America and Texas Governor George W. Bush, DC '68, as its enemy. If she uses the term "liberal" to mean government coercion, high levels of taxation, and the curtailing of rights necessary for the defense of liberty, then her characterization of the two presidential candidates is accurate. However, this usage of "liberalism" would be no different from the word "leftist," a confusion that should never be made, for it is this nation's left that has truly destroyed America's liberal tradition.

Liberalism, as espoused by its greatest proponents in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, refers to a minimal state, respect for individual freedom, and government respect for society's traditions. This may be news to many at Yale, but F.A. Hayek, Lord John Acton, Henry Hazlitt, and other such libertarian thinkers are liberals. What may be even more surprising is that people like Marx and Rawls are not.

The founders of this great country were liberals in the truest sense. So given the Democrats' supposed long-standing tradition of liberalism, why is the Democratic, and to a great extent the Republican, Party so quick to trample on the words in the original Constitution? Gore wants to ban many types of guns and impose governmental restrictions and registration on the rest, trampling on the need for protection against government interference in our lives. He wants to regulate individual businesses and private enterprises to do what the government wants. And, he wants to keep the same coercive systems of taxation and Social Security as before. Bush is not perfect, but he has at least expressed sympathy for the defense of gun rights, reduction in tax rates (which benefit the poor more than the rich, for after his tax plan the rich will pay a higher share of taxes than before), reform of Social Security to allow for more individual control, and respect for free enterprise and capitalism. Which do you think true liberals like the founders would have supported? Well, probably someone with views similar to those of Bush. Which would Marx and Rawls have endorsed? Well, they would have had a difficult choice between Ralph Nader and Gore.

So, the next time Yale's leftists wrap themselves in a cloak of liberalism and scream for Democratic or Green Party rule, why don't they read some works by true liberals and not leftist authoritarians like Marx?

—Yevgeny Vilensky, TC '03

Back to Opinion...