OVER the last half-century the political project of the Left has greatly changed in its particulars. Its celebration of centralized economic planning has been muted as it has become clear that statist economic intervention is more often a cause than a cure for poverty. The Left’s focus has shifted instead to the management of relations in areas where the memory of real injustices offers a better prospect for justifying the expansion of the state.
Nevertheless, the essence of modern liberalism’s agenda has remained the same, revealing the underlying ideological and psychological structure of liberal politics. Both centralized economic planning and the centralized management of relations among races and ethnic groups and between the sexes are attempts to seize power under the banner of a secular religion. Marxism and its paler socialist and social-democratic versions justified the enormous breadth of state control over the economy as the only means to realize in this world a paradise of perfect equality without alienation. Similarly, modern liberalism now defends preferences in educational institutions and the workplace as the only means to realize the underlying diversity of humanity itself.
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