Say It, Evan Sayet! A Comic Gets Serious on The Modern Liberal

A Review of The KinderGarden of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, by Evan Sayet
by Terrell Clemmons, guest blogger

Evan Sayet

In March, 2007, Evan Sayet delivered a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. called "How Modern Liberals Think." It became a YouTube sensation. Andrew Breitbart called it "one of the five most important speeches ever given."

He started off his talk by saying, "I've got to imagine that just about every one of us in this room recognizes that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. Well, I'm here to propose to you that it's not just 'just about' every issue; it's quite literally every issue. And it's not just wrong; it's as wrong as wrong can be." A comic at heart, but deadly serious about the threat Modern Liberalism and its kissing cousin, Progressivism, pose to decent people everywhere, Sayet says that the Modern Liberal will at every turn side with:

• The evil over the good
• The wrong over the right
• The lesser over the better
• The ugly over the beautiful
• The vulgar over the refined, and
• The behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success.

How can he make such sweeping predictions? Sayet grew up a liberal, New York Jew, but now calls himself a 9-13 Republican. In The KinderGarden of Eden, How the Modern Liberal Thinks, the extrapolated book version of that speech, he demonstrates quite cogently (and a bit wonkishly, but it's a delightful kind of wonkish) how the Modern Liberal's actions invariably follow what he calls The Four Laws of the Unified Field Theory of Liberalism:

1. Indiscriminateness - the total rejection of the intellectual process - is an absolute moral imperative.
2. Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policies. It leads to siding only and always with the lesser over the better, the wrong over the right, and the evil over the good.
3. Modern Liberal policies occur in tandem. Each effort on behalf of the lesser is met with an equal and opposite campaign against the better.
4. The Modern Liberal will ascribe to the better the negative qualities associated with the lesser while concurrently ascribing to the lesser the positive qualities found in the better.

Sayet likens the intellectual development of the Modern Liberal to that of a kindergartner, and the credo driving him to the catchy title of Robert Fulghum's 1988 bestseller, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. While Fulghum's musings are sweet, and they do capture some of the basics of good character - share things, play fair, don't hit people … in short, Be nice - as a comprehensive ideology, they are woefully insufficient for the demands of adult self-government in a dangerous world.

Think about it: kindergarten only works if there is at least one grownup in the room capable of taking charge and handling the big problems. Picture a day in the life of a kindergarten class if the teacher never showed up. Similarly, turning America and her hard-won liberties over to Modern Liberals would be akin to turning the entire schoolhouse over to the five-year-olds.

"So long as there were a sufficient number of people of God and science [the grownups] doing things and making things, the Modern Liberals could remain forever like Adam and Eve in Eden or the child on the kindergarten playground," Sayet concludes. But that era is passing. "Today, we are at a tipping point where the people of God and science will soon be overwhelmed by the demands of taking care of the permanently infantalized. It is unsustainable. If the system collapses under the weight, the future is not merely a slightly less wonderful existence, it is … " in the words of Thomas Hobbes from Leviathan, "nasty, brutish and short."

"We're not there yet," Sayet warns, "but we're close." I think he's right. Sure, it would be nice to stay five and let someone else be responsible for the big problems of liberty and provisions. But we're fast approaching the point where that is no longer feasible. The five-year-olds outnumber the grownups and the brutes are closing in.

Related:

• "How Modern Liberals Think"
• State Purposes: Utopian Creep & the Struggle for Human Rights & Freedom
• What We Can Learn from Sasha